We had come to Togo to teach
the Togolese fishing methods that would require less fishermen and
catch more fish. This was not to be a lesson in fish catching capitalism.
The Togolese suffered from a protein deficiency. It was evident
in the red hair, swollen stomachs and apple-size belly buttons of
the kids. A U.N. food and agriculture guy had written Sargent Shriver
about the problem and said fish was the answer. U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization representative Alsop showed us around when we first
arrived. He was mostly into fresh water fishing and fish farming.
He brought us to a number of villages and had the odd habit of kneeling
in front of Juju altars and performing mock obeisance while mumbling
gibberish. I remember thinking, “so this is the guy who got
us here, figures.”
I also remember that Alsop was very bright, very proper, except
maybe for that Juju thing, and a good storyteller.
I also remember he was black, a Canadian black, but he was black.
Somehow I always thought that was the key to the Juju number.
So we were in Togo, West Africa, there to teach the Togolese how
to fish.
This is what happened.
 We
hung around Lome, the capital of Togo, a couple months with nothing
to do, waiting for our gear to arrive. When it finally did we had
to wait another month for it to clear customs and other red tape
considerations.
The Peace Corps director for Togo brings no particular image to
mind, or memory, except that he was extremely upset when he heard
I had visited the Russian embassy a couple of times. He said the
Russians would use my visits for propaganda.
He left Togo after a couple months, leaving C. Payne Lucas, a Peace
Corp field rep, in charge. C. Payne was one of the nine kids in
a black family from North Carolina. He was black. It was 1961. He
was manic and it is hard to believe that he was not at least a little
insane. Some people didn’t like him. As soon as C. Payne became
acting director, he got our gear out of customs. We liked him a
lot.
This gear included a couple of twenty-two foot Nova Scotian wooden
dorys. The first thing we did was go out, get some gear, catch a
lot of fish, and capsize coming back in. Swimming ashore amongst
a lot of dead fish you’ve gone through the trouble of catching
and bringing along with you in front of a sizeable crowd, mostly
fishermen, who have come to watch you do your stuff, proves Nietzsche
wrong; that which does not kill you does not necessarily make you
stronger. Sometimes you’d rather just be dead.
You see, in New England you go out with a big boat with the smaller
dories, catch the fish, get towed back to harbor and there row ashore
with your catch. Simple. Togo, on the other hand, had no harbor.
What it did have was a sand bar that stretched the entire length
of the Togolese coast. The Togolese rowed ashore gracefully aboard
their long, sleek dugouts. Their dugouts were fashioned by hand
from trees more than 2 meters wide. They were painted with beautiful
colors. It took a dozen men and all their strength to push these
dugouts from the beach and into the water and paddle through the
surf, gliding gracefully over the sand bar sometimes only a foot
or less deep, then cutting with a roar into meters of thundering
wave. Once out of the surf a simple but efficient sail was raised.
These dugouts had a draft of only a few inches and sliding over
the sand bar for them was no problem. Our dories, on the other hand,
had a much deeper draft and would “bottom out” on the
sand bar no matter how hard we tried to stay on a wave.
It was decided that what we needed was practice getting over the
sand bar, without the weight of our catch. This gave the Togolese
roughly a week of amusement as we continued to capsize in the surf,
now several times a day. And the crowd got bigger everyday. We had
become a sort of USO show, there to entertain the troops.
I must say though that the Togolese are among the nicest people
in the world and our situation was an example of how nice they could
be. They never once ridiculed us to our face even a little, which
must have been hard, and they always helped retrieve us and our
stuff from the surf.
The Togolese fish from the shore with beach seines, large nets hauled
by hand or dragged behind commercial trawlers. You can catch a lot
of fish this way, but it takes 50 to 100 men to haul one net. The
owner gets her share and the rest is divided up amongst the haulers.
Nobody goes home with a lot of fish. Only a small part of that catch
makes it to the market.
Once a couple of us went out to observe the Togolese fishing. After
a fairly long sail we went to drifting and our guides started hand
line fishing. Hand line fishing is when you have a roll of twine
with a hook and weight at one end. Put some bait on the hook, put
it in the water, give it a yank when you feel something, and curse
when there is nothing on the hook. Togo or Finland, it’s the
same. Observe a guy hand line fishing and after a couple minutes
you pretty much got the whole picture.
We were in deep swells, gently rolling up and down, no land in sight
to focus on, hot African sun beating against our necks. Around the
time the heads from the morning catch were being boiled over a charcoal
brazier, I had reached the dry heave and bright fluorescent-green
bile stage.
 The
sail was raised in the late afternoon and we headed home. My worse
than miserable day did not affect my appreciation of the sail to
shore. The movement of the dugout was no longer unsettling but a
joy, the ride through the surf to the beach exhilarating.
As I had hoped would be the case the men chose not to go home right
away, but instead staked their sail to the sand. Imagine, the late
afternoon breeze from the sea fills and lifts the sail into the
air, forming an enormous tent. We sat on blankets on the sand, our
cloth cave open to the sea swirling with golden light. They hadn’t
caught many fish that day. Perhaps my green-bile episode had distracted
them.
We had still not been able to deal with the sand bar successfully.
I think it was Ruggiero who decided it would be a good idea to put
an outboard motor on the back of a dugout. This was not sound thinking.
The average annual income for Togolese was $120 dollars a year.
That is what we earned in a month until the Peace Corps volunteer
doctors started complaining about the price of imported cereal and
we got a $10 a month raise. It would take as many Togolese to buy
an outboard motor as it did to haul a beach seine. If this worked
that meant that even one man could go out with the right gear and
come back with a lot of fish. That is, if he could get over the
sand bar.
To this day I don’t know why I was chosen to be the pilot.
It’s not like I had demonstrated any great piloting skill.
I had already slammed the launch into the float back at La Paguera,
with a fidgety senator aboard.
The only other person on the dugout would be Teté. This made
me very nervous. Teté was the chief of the fishing village
and was everything you would expect the chief of an African fishing
village to be. Teté had a sense of humor and would unsettle
some white people by referring to them as master.
I wasn’t feeling very masterful as the outboard pushed the
heavy dugout through the surf. It didn’t feel right. Once
outside the surf we came about and rode the swells as Teté
watched from behind, waiting for the right wave. Teté squatted
near me; we waited in silence for an eternity. Suddenly Teté’s
hand left my shoulder, then returned with a whack and a command.
It was a great command and in English. He said, “Go now white
man.” But the whacking didn’t stop. He continued to
whack my shoulder in what was perhaps the same rhythm as a group
of men paddling to stay on a wave. We did, for a few seconds, then
the rhythm of Teté’s whacking changed, he started speaking
in Evé, I think, and we began to slowly swing until our swing
stopped by a wave that was rolling us. Then comes that sickening
feeling in your stomach as you see yourself being dragged for 50
yards of sand bar under a ton of capsized dugout and you try to
jam free of the rolling and find yourself running in six inches
of water far from the beach, where now you really want to be, all
in slow motion, just like in the movies.
Teté and I reached the beach together. We stood panting,
looking at each other and Teté said, “Sorry master,
got a little excited.”
Within a year all the New England fisherman had gone home. Different
reasons. One I heard got in a fight in a church on Christmas Eve.
Another came down with kidney problems. And a third got the British
ambassador’s au pare pregnant. My old partner Pat White fell
in low with Enid, a beautiful, lovely Peace Corps nurse, and went
home to start a family. Just like that.
I went north to join Jackie Theriot and Will Turner who were fish
farming and applying what they had learned from a seven page brochure
on raising carp that Alsop had given them. Jackie Theriot was a
Cajun farmer from Louisiana and Will was from North Carolina. Both
were university educated and comfortable working with their hands.
Things went a bit smoother with the fish farming end of the project.
Jackie and Will were both hard working and bright guys. By the time
we left we had renovated a couple fish stations that were difficult
to locate and had been built by the Germans before World War II.
We successfully caught and placed in fertilized ponds male and female
carp, grew fingerlings and managed to transport them alive to large
watersheds where we hoped they would flourish and multiply. It takes
fifteen years for a project like this to make a difference in the
diet and health of the surrounding population, if the placement
of fingerlings continues regularly.
I wonder if it did. I’ll have to go see some day. |
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