Five years after the official end of Sierra Leone’s long and brutal war, the country continues to struggle. The wealth of its legendary resources continues to elude its impoverished and largely unemployed population. And now, while illegal fishing increasingly undermines the lives and livelihoods of the many wholly dependent on artisanal fishing, its impact on the environment threatens more permanent devastation.

In the far south of Sierra Leone, Bonthe, a locale where the population is, and has always been, virtually entirely reliant on fishing, has been particularly badly affected by the incursion of illegal fishing and the resulting depletion of fish. The Koreans and Chinese in particular like these waters for the gwangua, considered by them a delicacy. Bonthe too is where the first liberated slaves touched land: Amistad.

TOMMY TUA, 45, MANIA VILLAGE, SHERBA ISLAND, BONTHE

“I have always been a fisherman. My father was a fisherman. His father was a fisherman. My father taught me how to fish, just as his father had taught him, and as we teach our sons. This is an island. It is only natural. Only, when I was a small boy, things were different. We had a good life. Fish were plentiful. We always had enough to eat, and as we had a lot of fish to sell, we could afford to buy what we didn’t have, we also had a good variety of food. Unlike today, going hungry, as we do today sometimes never even occurred to us, we never went hungry.

“Back when I was a small boy, we used nets with bigger holes than we do now: the fish were much bigger. We’d catch a lot of big fish back then too: catfish, ‘spanish’, barracudas and others.

“Things changed at the beginning of the rebel war. All the trawlers came right close to the shore, mostly Korean and Chinese as far as we could tell. That started it, and they have just kept on coming. They now sit right at the entrance to the Sherba estuary, just adjacent to our village, at the entrance of what we call the ‘shipping channel’ to the Sherba River. They take huge quantities of fish, and stop the fish from coming in. Now the trawler problem is so bad, I won’t even dare to go fishing in the sea: these trawlers take our fishing gear, nets, hooks, buoys. And if they don’t take them, the nets are getting ripped to shreds. We used to fish 50/50 in the sea and estuary, so not being able to fish in the sea is very serious to our lives.

“And the problem is getting worse and worse because the trawlers are coming closer and closer. They are completely disregarding the law. The surveillance is ineffective. “The Koreans in particular like to come here as a very common fish here is the gwangua (pseudolithes species) which is a Korean delicacy.

“I, we, are frightened. When the trawlers see us fishing, they come right in to get us to stop fishing. They run over our nets. Normally, when there is an encounter, if we are lucky, we will be left with half a net and a buoy, but mostly we are not lucky and they take it all. Nets cost 300 000 leone for one length. At least three sets are needed. We only seldomly go there now to fish. The problem has gotten so acute everything is being bought on credit, and then people come after them to pay up ,  but as the nets have been taken or shredded, there is no way to pay. A lot of people have taken their children out of school, and we are afraid of going to the doctor.

“But then what makes matters even worse is the fact that there just isn’t the fish there used to be. The trawlers are over-fishing, and they throw what they don’t want overboard, dead, it is dead when they throw it over, so what’s happening is that even in the estuary, there just aren’t as many fish. And people are having to use smaller and smaller nets, just desperate to catch anything, but this is bad too, as they are catching the juvenile fish and so there are not enough surviving to breed.”

Text and photos by Susan Schulman