A fish for our time

By Samantha Weinberg

As the sun was setting on August 18th 2003, the night fishermen of Hahaya village eased their wooden pirogues off the jagged lava rocks and slid into the water. The ocean off the western coast of Grande Comore was calm and as the half-moon rose, they could see the volcano of Karthala silhouetted against the darkening sky. A few hundred metres offshore, one of the fishermen, a veteran of decades of nights on the dark water, laid his paddles across the boat and prepared a line. He tied two flat black stones above a baited hook, then let the fine filament slip through his fingers until it touched the seabed, deep below.

He was waiting for the nibble and tug of a fish—a snapper or a grouper, perhaps, or if he was lucky, a marlin, which he would take the next morning to sell at the market in Moroni. But this time the tug was unfamiliar, and the old fisherman fought with the line before he managed to pull the fish to the surface.