Mouazamou Ahmadou and Sarah Laborde’s short film about canal fishermen in the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon illustrates both the ingenuity of this particular fishing technique and the social tensions that can develop around it. During the dry season, people work strenuously to dig canals through the riverbank, connecting the river to the floodplain beyond. Towards the end of the wet season, these channel the floodwater, along with the fish that have hatched and grown in the floods, back into the river. Through a carefully constructed and timely inserted trap, the fishermen can catch large numbers of fish with this technique. Some years bring abundant floods and fish, others bring no floods, and therefore no fish either. But this very successful fishing model has spread so much that the increasing number of canals has changed the hydrology of the floodplain (Laborde et al. 2016), and fuelled competition and tensions among established canal owners and newcomers. While these are mostly resolved in a non-violent manner, rival canal owners frequently accuse one another of using magic or physical barriers to guide fish into one canal rather than another.

 

Krause, Franz, Tijo Salverda, Sinah Kloß, Andrea Hollington, Nina Schneider, Oliver Tappe. 2017. Social water - an introduction. Voices. 2017 (3): http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/socialwateranintroduction.

 

Ahmadou, Mouadjamou and Sarah Laborde 2017 Fishing canals of the Logone Floodplain in Cameroon. Voices. 2017 (3): http://voices.uni-koeln.de/2017-3/fishingcanals