The Five-Gallon Shuffle

For those westerners who are suspicious that Zanzibar is a real place (just a couple weeks ago I was one), you can take my word for it. Zanzibar is indeed real and alive- and a semi-autonomous island off the coast of Tanzania. Stonetown is Zanzibar’s biggest port- it’s only city- the island’s connection to the mainland and the capital of Dar Es Salaam. The population is a blend of native Africans, Arabs, and Indians; language, religion, architecture, and food all benefit from this. The richness of colors and culture here would elude the best of writers and photographers, so please excuse my amateur attempts. In my limited exposure to various parts of the world, this is without a doubt the most picturesque and visually stimulating of any social environments I’ve ever seen.

Arriving in Stonetown was refreshing, after a tiring push through Dar’s busy public spaces, where everybodseemed to be working hard to get my meager business, by hook or crook. The dock and street crowd still all give me the feet-wallet-eyes once-over before welcoming this free-range mzungo, but somehow once eyes meet the welcoming seems more genuine. Here in Stonetown, more than in the mainland capital, Muslim faith dominates life, business, and developments, and the respect granted to others, even a foreigner with different beliefs, is felt immediately. Most of the city answers the call to prayer, beautiful melodies broadcast over loudspeakers five times per day, and a siren at around 6:30pm signals dusk at the equator and curfew for small children. Handshakes are long and complex here, and are often repeated over and over throughout the course of a conversation. Also of note, shop and home doors in downtown Stonetown are ornately carved and decorated with impressive metal spikes and latches, Arabic in origin and beautifully imposing.

I set up camp just above the Malindi Fish Market, around the city’s highest concentration of stray cats (thanks to the fish guts I suppose). Here in town the two fish hubs are the Malindi and the Darajani, and the spectacle of fish auctioning would dazzle even the fish haters of the world. Let’s start in the market and work backwards to the fisherman.

Fish are sold at the busy market in stands, where an interested buyer can walk up and order a cut of whichever fish he or she desires, as is more or less conventional in many countries. For a better price though, she can walk to the tip of the market building, to the human ring which is a continuous fish auction, with middle men laying individual bigger fish or small piles of small fish, squid or octopus on the well-worn stone floor in the center of the crowd. Auctioneers keep tabs on the highest bidder, and several actions are underway at the same time. For the amount of visual commotion, the scene is mostly quiet, and most of the communication is without words. The smells of ginger, cloves, frying bread, and Arabic dates waft through once in a great while, a miracle considering that these smells are overpowering the pungent fishy odor (or is my mind anticipating an upcoming snack and tricking the nose?). Piles of fish fluctuate in size, deals are cut, and men and women walk in and out with fish in plastic buckets and reed baskets or wrapped in newspaper. On the streets middle men also sell fish, taking care to arrange the catch in neat piles, 500 Tanzanian shillings for these sardines or 1,000 shillings for that string of choles (these days, around 1,300 shillings equals $1 US).

Fish are transported throughout Stonetown and to the market by an impressive fleet of rusty bicycles, each with a reed basket bulging out behind the seat. Transport begins around 7am and seems to continue all day long, through narrow streets which continue to get me hopelessly lost. Before 7, all the bikes are parked in a mass in front of the Malindi pier, and the “five-gallon shuffle” is in full swing. Bucket after bucket of fish are lugged from fishing boats, through waist-deep water, up the cement pier, through the crowd. The crowd consists of folks already vending fish (middle men to the middle men?), locals looking to buy straight form the fishermen, and others waiting to transport. Work is hard to come by here right now it seems, and I get the sense that there is quiet but significant competition for fish transport privileges. I can’t imagine there is any profit in this line of work, but in a place where hotel workers (a very good job) make 120,000 shilling per month (around $90 US/month), and where many families can only afford to rent a decaying single-room cement cube on the edge of town, every shilling requires sweat and every shilling counts. A substantial meal on the street costs around 2,000 shillings, but most all of the workers around the Malindi market eat a watered down soup, which likely costs a tenth of this.

The mvuivi (fishermen) that base out of Stonetown mostly fish out of heavily built open boats around 10 meters long. An outboard motor, something between 20 and 40 horsepower, is mounted off-center on the stern, and between eight and twenty men hop aboard. Coming in, the appearance of the most crowded boat and her crew isn’t much different than images of overcapacity refugee boats coming towards Florida from Haiti, and I can bet that fishermen enjoy the personal space that a return to dry land affords them. Much of the fishing is done in the night, with fishermen heading out around dusk and returning in time for the morning market. It seems that many of the boats are owned by a fishing cooperative, in which the boat is also owned collectively and profits from fish sales are split. For a few boats, there is a day shift of fisherman and a night shift. The boat itself gets little rest. Fishing with handlines is the main strategy for larger fish, and so the more men aboard, the more hooks in the water. The small daga and tongay are lured in at night by dangling kerosene lantern over the gunwale and scooping the minnows up with nets, just like shishaw in the Azores. Some of the schooling medium-sized fish are also enticed with artificial light and are caught with bigger seine nets. The larger pelagics (tuna, kingfish) are found well offshore and fishermen go out for several days and freeze their catch.

I must confess that I’ve become spellbound by a Zazabarian beauty, a distraction from the straight-and-narrow fishing industry. The heavy oversized skiffs, as practical a fishing boat they are, just aren’t holding my interest. Dhows- the graceful, distinctive sailing vessels of these parts and much of the rest of the Indian Ocean, are my new love. Here, they’re mainly use for water transport- bringing charcoal and wood from the mainland to Zanzibar, moving goods between smaller islands, shuttling fish back to the mainland, and not primarily for catching fish. The generous sails seem to fill with even a gentle breeze, and carry the boat through the baby blue. These dhows are so stunningly beautiful gliding through the water that I lose much ability to speak when one is in sight. To my delight, they’re common here; I’ve drifted away from many conversations with dock rats. matter of fact, here comes a dhow now...