It was a meal to remember. I was sitting at an outside table with four fishermen. I had a whole cooked tilapia or bream in my left hand and a hunk of bread in the right. A cheetah was tethered to a pole, metres away.
It ‘s a measure of how used I am to South Sudan after five months, that I didn’t blink at the cheetah, which paced to and fro nearby.
I didn’t even ask for a knife and fork. I surreptitiously used the wet wipes I carry everywhere now; made my fingers like claws and dug into the tender white meat through the scales, shovelling it into my mouth, ignoring the glassy fish eye staring back at me.
Still, FAO’s fisheries officer, William Ushalla, looked amused as he glanced at me. He and the others at the table ate their fish – eyes, scales and all.
We were in Terekeka – a town on the west bank of the White Nile. And we’d just been to interview a fisherman, in his camp on the riverbank, about a 15 minute motorboat ride away.
I kept flashing back to a story I was researching before leaving Italy– about fishermen plying their trade on another river – in Caorle, a town near Venice.
There the fishermen belong to a cooperative that supplies them with styrofoam containers and ice. It takes their fish quickly in refrigerated trucks to markets for sale. The market in Venice has tile floors and granite slabs for tables. It too is refrigerated and is constantly sluiced out by workers.
Paul Modi and his group of fishermen on the Nile have no ice. There is no refrigerated transport. They put their fish on the bottom of rowboats and row them to Terekeka. (Our arrival created a stir, because they could borrow our motorboat to rapidly transport a Nile perch they’d caught downriver.)
The market in Terekeka is made out of rickety branches and infested with flies. Traders carry their fish back to Juba in burlap sacks on the back of motorcycles. With 40 degree temperatures, as you can imagine, a lot of the fish spoil.
Still Mr Modi and his group are eating well. He maintains seven children at school and another at a cattle camp. He’s cultivating vegetables, crops and fruit to see them all through less bountiful times. And he’s learnt processing techniques– smoking, drying and salting – to try to cut down the spoilage.
My Caorle fisherman is one of the last practising the trade. The area has been overfished. Invasive fishing methods have devastated the hatcheries. The catches are small.
In South Sudan, the environment and hatcheries are so far unspoilt. The fish are plentiful. So much so, FAO says the industry could support tens of thousands more fishermen than it does at present.
I feel like holding my breath at the potential and with fear at the dangers– hoping they learn from our mistakes – do it right and succeed.
©Jean Di Marino 2012
