Words by Philip Briggs, photograph by Ariadne van Zandbergen
THIS IS AFRICA
The largest artisanal fishing village on the Gambian coast, Tanji abuts a wide sandy beach that explodes into life upon the arrival of the daily catch. Dozens of brightly painted wooden pirogues set anchor in the shallow waves and start unloading the freshly netted fish into plastic buckets that are carried to shore on the heads of local tradeswomen. Many of the fish are taken to the beachside market and sold on to local families or to traders from nearby coastal communities. Others are sundried, or find their way to the smoking huts that line the beach, or are stored in a recently constructed ice plant. It’s all rather chaotic, and the beach quickly becomes strewn with discarded marine life, such as small fish, crabs and severed heads of hammerhead sharks, whose pungent smell attracts a flurry of whirling, scavenging gulls.