Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (16 page)

As we chugged through the mangroves, Fatou told me more about oyster harvesting and selling. The women spend hours shucking the oysters, sometimes with the help of younger men in the villages, then they roast and smoke them.
Long-term water monitoring is underway to see if it might be possible to eat them safely uncooked. Fatou eventually hopes to see the oysters on sale in local hotels and restaurants. There are two main types of holidaymakers who flock to The Gambia – wildlife seekers and cheap sun, sea and sand seekers – and hopefully they could both be persuaded to try the local seafood.

Gathering oysters is tough, physical work, but the women much prefer it to being housemaids, the only alternative they see for earning money. The oysters give them independence and a sense of identity; the women now belong to a close-knit sisterhood. Fatou explains that they are some of the poorest people in the country, living in marginalised communities that other Gambians know very little about.

‘I want these women to be recognised by society and respected,’ she told me. She is incensed that so many Gambians enjoy eating oysters but pay so little attention to where they come from or who collects them. In the short time that I spent with her, I had already seen how Fatou’s straight talking and irresistible energy inspires the women and keeps TRY going. Of course, she insisted that it is the women themselves who are strong.

We turned off the boat’s engine, and Fatou called out in a high-pitched whoop. Seconds later we heard a reply; this is how the women communicate and locate each other while they’re working in the dense forest. Down a side creek, two of them had pulled up their wooden dugout canoe and were busily gathering oysters.

It was early May and the oyster season was in full swing. Until a few years ago, oyster harvesters would leave the mangroves in June, at the start of the rainy season, and return again each December; now they don’t come back until March, to give the oysters more of a chance to grow. Being tropical species, mangrove oysters grow much faster than their cool-water cousins, and a couple of months makes a big difference. Within a year of extending the closed season, harvesters were
already finding larger oysters, which they could sell for higher prices. An added benefit is the fact that larger molluscs will leave behind more offspring for the next generation.

One of TRY’s most pioneering achievements has been an agreement giving them exclusive rights to work in Tanbi. The women of TRY, along with their advisory committee, can now decide who is allowed to collect oysters and issue fines to people who break the rules. This is the first time a group of women in Africa has been granted ownership of an important natural resource, forming the basis of their livelihoods. The wetlands are no longer a free-for-all.

Each village has been put in charge of its own community
bolong
, and there are communal areas where all TRY members can work. In addition to the extended closed season, parts of Tanbi are now set aside on rotation and left alone for much longer to give oyster stocks an even better chance of recovering and replenishing nearby areas. Anyone caught illegally cutting firewood or gathering too many oysters from the wrong place or at the wrong time of year faces a hefty penalty. The agreement also covers West African Bloody Cockles that the women gather from the riverbed. Taking undersized cockles is another finable offence.

None of this would have been possible until the oyster gatherers joined forces under the banner of TRY. The agreement was based on a complex, multi-agency co-management plan that involved departments of forestry and fisheries plus many others. This sort of negotiation is arduous and needed the women to join forces. If they were still individual people working alone, who didn’t know and talk to each other, an agreement would never have been reached. And the women haven’t simply been handed over the rights to the wetlands to do with as they please: they are committed to looking after them. They are now the official custodians of Tanbi.

The tide was falling and I climbed out of the boat, intending to make my way across the shore to where the
women were working, but straight away I got stuck. The mud was up to my knees and sucking at my toes, so I stood where I was, windmilling my arms, trying my best not to make the situation worse. One of the women saw me in trouble and came to my rescue, effortlessly plucking me free and leading me over to higher, firmer ground. I thanked her, in my one bit of Wolof, and she smiled back and continued with her work. She pulled two pairs of socks over her hands to protect her from the sharp shells and using a small knife she nimbly chipped oysters from the exposed mangrove roots. Thick crusts of oysters make the roots look like they’ve been dipped in lumpy cement porridge.

In the past, some harvesters used machetes to chop away whole roots covered in oysters, big and small; this was wiping out juvenile oysters and damaging the forest itself. Now, as well as being much more selective and careful about taking only individual oysters of the right size, the women of TRY are also trialling an aquaculture technique similar to the one used for mussels, hanging ropes to catch young oysters from the water.

With a basket full, one of the women picked her way across to the water’s edge and tipped the oysters into the canoe. I followed and once again got firmly stuck in the mud. This was all getting rather embarrassing and I noticed for the first time that the woman who kept stopping work to help me out, with her incredibly strong, reassuring grip, was at least six months pregnant.

A few days after our trip to the mangroves I got to see another side of Gambian oyster harvesting. Every year, Fatou organises an oyster festival. The idea is to raise money, raise the profile of Gambian oysters and at the same time give the members of TRY a chance to celebrate. Next to the roadside where the women shuck, smoke and sell oysters, set back in a grove of baobab trees, a sandy arena was laid out for the
festivities. I arrived just as the women started to parade in. The members of each village were carrying a banner announcing who they were and wearing outfits to match. The costumes on display were all stunning. Some villagers had dresses made from vibrant wax prints trimmed with ruffles and lace; others wore tie-dyed skirts and crisp white shirts, with strings of multi-coloured beads strung around their necks and across their shoulders. Everybody had immaculate hairdos, braided in neat rows and decorated with bright clips, or they wore colourful headscarves matching their dresses, tied into elegant bows and knots. As they promenaded around the arena, the women began to dance and sing, and they wouldn’t stop again for another two days.

The band was a troop of tireless young men, four drumming and one with a beaten-up saxophone that he blew as tunefully and incessantly as possible. There was a sound system with noisy speakers and a single microphone for people to sing into, which they were doing without a hint of bashfulness.

Everybody danced, from teenagers to grandmothers, standing in a circle and taking turns to come forward and perform for the crowd, who sang and clapped and cheered. The rhythmical drummers were accompanied by a chorus of whistles, which the women wore on colourful chains around their necks, giving the event the feel of an early nineties rave. This was the first oyster festival I’d been to, and somehow I imagine there are few in the world quite like this one.

The music and dancing paused briefly while speeches were made, mainly for the benefit of attending patrons and dignitaries who sat demurely watching proceedings from the shady marquees. Then the boisterous celebrations continued with a highly unusual performance: the members of TRY took part in a wrestling tournament.

Wrestling is a hugely popular sport in West Africa, but it is normally the preserve of boys and men. Every morning and evening along beaches in Senegal and The Gambia, young men congregate to practise their wrestling moves.
Professional wrestlers are celebrities paid as much as international soccer stars, and contests can draw enormous crowds. It was Fatou’s idea to let the women have a go.

‘The Jola tribe are known for wrestling, so why can’t women wrestle?’ she said. Girls wrestle with their siblings at home for fun, she explained, so why not put on a competition for the women of TRY? It was the first time anyone had done something like this, so she could only guess what the response would be. And as it turned out, like most things Fatou sets her mind to, the wrestling at the oyster festival was a runaway success.

Pairs of women and girls stepped up to the sandy ring, wearing wrestling loincloths over their colourful outfits. At the start of each round, the women performed taunting, stompy dances to psych their opponent. Then they locked arms and heads and tried to grapple each other to the ground, all the time marshalled by a referee. Occasionally one wrestler would successfully grab her rival between the legs and launch her into the air, and the crowd went wild. The victor was hoisted on someone’s shoulders and processed around the arena, sometimes the loser as well, and mostly I couldn’t tell which was which. None of that seemed to matter.

While all that was going on, I watched from the sidelines, happily tucking into platefuls of oysters. The oysters from the mangroves looked and tasted more like mussels than oysters to me; they are smaller than Pacific Rock Oysters, although the two do belong in the same genus,
Crassostrea
. I was busy trying to decide which recipe was the most delicious – oyster spring rolls or the zingy, mustardy oyster
yassa
, a traditional West African dish – when my feasting was interrupted.

Fatou decided it was my turn to enter the ring. I pleaded that I didn’t know the rules (and so far I hadn’t been able to fathom them out from watching the contest), but she was having none of it. Thankfully, though, she took pity on me and rather than pairing me up with one of the formidable
women from TRY or even one of their athletic teenage daughters, Fatou instead picked another clueless European visitor from the crowd.

Our war dances were a tame imitation of everybody else who had come before us. Then for a few minutes, cheered on by whoops from the crowd, we pushed and jostled each other. Rather too soon it became all too obvious that I hadn’t spent enough time wrestling with my sisters as a child. My adversary pulled a fast one on me, slipping her leg behind mine and flipping me neatly over on my back. As I lay in the sand, gazing up at the hazy sun and with an excited throng of oyster pickers rushing towards me, I decided it was time to make a hasty retreat back to the food tent to continue the important business of oyster-tasting.

Deciding which varieties of seafood are better and which are worse to eat is not a straightforward matter, either for the environment or for the people involved. It depends on which species you’re eating, where it came from, how it was caught and who caught it. Dreadful stories have recently emerged about people in Thailand being forced to work in harrowing conditions for no pay on fishing boats that dredge up ‘trash fish’. These small, infant, inedible species are scraped up from the seas, devastating ecosystems, all so they can be ground down into fishmeal and fish oils and fed to the farmed prawns, shrimp and fish that are sold in Europe and the US. Eating Gambian oysters, though, I felt reassured that this food hadn’t come at a great cost to humans or the natural world. While the women of TRY carried on wrestling, singing and dancing, it all suddenly seemed to me to be quite simple: protect crucial habitats (like mangrove forests), don’t eat the oldest, slowest growing species (like giant clams) and make sure fishers get a decent wage. Sadly, though, simple truths like this seem to be the exception when they should be the norm for all the seafood we eat.