You can call me Naffie

Today I ate lunch with Ambrose and Frank, two brothers who live in my compound as part of my landlord’s family. We ate plasas and rice – plasas is bitter leaf (sort of like spinach) cooked with fish, meat, chili peppers, bitter tomato and palm oil – and drank some red wine… my first red wine since arriving in The Gambia! They gave me my Gambian name… Naffisetou or Naffie for short. They chose it because they thought it was similar to Nat or Natty which is what everyone has been calling me.

After lunch I had a quick nap (red wine in 38 degree heat just made me sleepy!) and then was picked up by two guys from my office, Kekou and ‘King Bob’ (I still don’t know his real name!), who had arranged to take John, Aloysious and I to a place called Tanje. This is a big fish market where lots of fishing boats come in to – even bigger than the fish market in Bakau which I have some photos of and keep meaning to blog about. You could smell that we had arrived before you could see the place, but the atmosphere was great! There were hundreds of people down on the beach, either there to meet the boats and buy fish, or to sell what had been bought in.

We walked along, surrounded by thousands of sea gulls, and watched all the activity. It became obvious that it may be the men who go out to fish, but it was the women and young boys who were doing most of the work. There were so many young boys, who looked about 10 or 12, and sometimes younger, who were crouching by piles of small fish like sardines and filleting them. They were so fast and efficient, just four slices produced perfect fillets, and the central bone was neatly flicked out, without wasting a scrap. Some of the women would then come round collecting up all the discarded bones, heads and tails, and would throw the waste back in to the sea. Other women were scaling and gutting fish (the sand had a silver sheen to it from all the fish scales) or were selling them directly to customers. Some men were attending to the boats, and a few men were crafting new boats, but in general it seemed that the men were less active than everyone else.

I managed to take some photos, although they aren’t great as I was trying to be discrete. They don’t capture the bright colours – the whole beach was a sea of colour, either from the painted boats, the women’s outfits or the fish themselves. I just wish I could have videoed the young boys slicing the fish so skilfully.

The boy in the yellow top is cooking fish on a fire in the sand

Click on the photos to enlarge.