The enclosure presents the most shade one can find in the sun-drenched ÂÂvillage of Luangwa Boma in Zambia. Two Baobab trees ÂÂnestle together, offering relief to the fishermen who come out of the river.
Squatting around the base of the trees are a group of women counting money and swatting flies off the ÂÂbundles of fish at their feet.
”These women here are ÂÂtraders. They give the fishermen money for fish … they then catch the bus to Lusaka to sell the fish and make money for themselves,” my guide, Philip, says.
One trader keeps her eyes on the task at hand as she hurriedly washes sand and hay off the fresh haul she’s just purchased. Several women begin the walk from the banks of the Zambezi to a cool storage facility with their wares. Noting that the blanket she is putting the cleaned fish on is covered with sand, the trader dusts it and begins the cleaning process again.
Her name is Celia Themba and though she hails from Luangwa Boma, she spends several days in the capital of Lusaka selling her fish before returning home for more. She will look to double what she paid. ”You see here I have some cichlids and some tiger,” she says. ”I bought these off some of the [fishermen] here for 84 000 Kwacha [R148].”
Fishing is possibly the most important industry to the hundreds of communities sharing the Zambezi River system.
Blackson Daka from Simunguo village used to work as a subsistence farm labourer more than 100km inland before he set up a small tent of stick and cloth on the side of the river to earn a living fishing. With his previous income Daka could not afford to send his two children to school. ”I had to come out here, to fish, so I can pay the school fees and give them what they need.”
Daka says he rarely buys food, opting to save money by eating any catch he cannot sell.
Increased competition for the precious resource is a problem for fishermen. The Zambezi is shared not only by communities in the area, but by three nations that treat the river as a common border: Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia.
”Over-fishing is a definite problem here. We fight with the crocodiles and hippos, we can’t fight with one another,” says Bornface Tenepa, who hails from Banda in Luangwa.
Tenepa typically spends 14 hours a day in a mokoro boat (a thin hollowed out tree trunk), casting nets and hoping to catch as many fish as possible, seemingly oblivious to any government-imposed quota limit. He looks pointedly at me when he says: ”We were so happy to see you now, we thought you were here to help us, we thought you were one of the wildlife people.”
The ”wildlife people” he refers to are from the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) which, with the Southern Africa Trust, staged an intervention in the area to try to halt the abuse of the fishing resource.
Picking up on Tenepa’s excitement, I ask him what he hoped the wildlife people would do for him. ”We need to be able to catch more fish and travel into other areas of the river,” he says. ”I was also hoping you would come shoot some of the crocodiles.”
From December 1 2007 fishermen cannot operate in the Zambezi and rely on fish in the river’s tributaries to survive. This period until the end of February each year is a closed season during which fish go through their ”breeding runs”. Closure allows the fishery to recover through population regeneration.
Ashley Green Thompson from the Southern Africa Trust says the project was initiated to give the poor a better say in shaping policy to overcome poverty. ”Natural resources, in this instance fisheries resources, are a vital part of mitigating the worst effect of poverty, but are often overexploited by communities affected by extreme poverty.” There is always tension between the survival of poor communities and the government to maintain natural resources.
The foundation, with the support of the trust, staged workshops and dialogues between community leaders and government to develop a better way of implementing protocols for the management of the resource. ”The impact is that communities have more control over their fisheries and they manage to yield more sustainable rewards.”
Tenepa, a Zambian citizen, says it is because of the project that he doesn’t pay for a visa to fish from Mozambique or Zimbabwe. The waived visa fees are part of the international cooperation the project seeks to encourage.
The culture of trans-boundary collaboration in the management of shared natural resources is novel in most rural settings. Regional director of the AWF Jimmiel Mandima says despite sectoral protocols that seek to harmonise the management of shared resources, the tradition of national sovereignty — and reliance on national legal and policy frameworks — still dominates.
”This is the most critical hurdle AWF and the trust have to deal with. Luckily the local communities from all three countries are proud of their shared historical, cultural and traditional heritage … and this ethnic unity provides common ground for collaboration,” he says. ”The local populations from this ‘border region’ identify with the river, the shared resources, and exchange their cultural ceremonies. Cross-border intermarriages are a norm.”
Mandima emphasises that success lies in the acceptance of resource ownerÂÂship by local communities and a rethinking of the top-down, government-to-grassroots approach to managing resources.
”We need to work to win in training and capacity-building, awareness raising and sensitising government to provide needed basic infrastructure, things like roads and markets,” he says.