Music

I went to a concert a few weeks ago by a famous (in Gambia at least) musician called Jaliba Kuyateh. It was a concert in his home town at the end of the month of Ramadan (Koriteh), so it was a pretty special event. There were about 2,000 people at the concert, and I reckon about 3 of the audience (me and two friends) were non-Gambian.



This is the big man himself, from a publicity shot. He plays the kora, which is an instrument somewhat like a harp, but with a large sound chamber at the bottom, which is made from a big gourd. It has 21 strings, and is a popular instrument across much of West Africa. It makes a great sound, and it complements his deep and throaty singing really well. He plays standing up, and really gets into the dancing as well

He sings in Mandinka, with occasional bit of English and French too ... I couldn't really follow what it was about, but it was a great sound.





He was playing with a big band with a couple of guitars, a balafon and several drums. A balafon is a kind of xylofone, with gourds under the keys to amplify the sound - see pictures.



There were also female backing singers and a troupe of dancers. The backing dancers were a funny assortment : two energetic rastafarians with the most enormous grins you ever saw, and several children with assorted disabilities - one with a withered arm, one with an abnormally shaped head, for example - whose presence I didn't quite understand.



The concert started off about 12 midnight, everyone in a big open-air yard with seats for those who got there early, everyone else standing at the back. It was kind of slow to start with, quite a lot of thanks being made to the event organisers, and I was just beginning to think that it was going to be a bit of a flop when - bang - it suddenly all kicked off at about 1:30am - singing, dancing, everyone in the crowd up and dancing too... amazing. I was just too tired to take much of it - we left at 2am when it was just getting into full swing. But it was a great night out, and everyone was happy to be at the end of the Ramadan fasting.

Food (part 2)

I've been trying to write about the Gambian fishing industry for a couple of weeks, but the MRC blocking software has been obstructing me ... but after a prolonged bout of pleading, they have allowed me back in at last.

So, I'm going to write more on food : I've started getting into fish here, both the cooking and eating of it, and also finding out a bit about where are how it is caught here...




Most fish here is caught from small boats (like left) that operate on day trips out of the small port at Bakau (see below), with is just 1km down the road from where I live ... so I see lots of these boats (really just oversized canoes!) headed out of a morning, and then sailing back about 4pm.




This is the dock where they unload all the catch at the end of the day, which is done by a relay of small boys carrying boxes of fish out from neck deep water ...







The next stage is the packing in ice and selling of the fish. I went and bought fish last week, direct from the market sellers. I got a big Red snapper filleted and de-boned on the spot for about £2.




Finally, the majority of the fish caught get dried in the sun or in a smokehouse before being transported in-land.








After reading the excellent book "End of the line" (by Charles Clover) about the disastrous state of overfishing across the world, I had totally gone off the whole fishing industry, especially the EU and Japanese fleets - definite recommended reading for budding biological science journalists. Here in Gambia, I'm much more enthusiastic about the fishing industry - although they probably catch too much, they aren't wrecking entire marine environments, and they are really only very small scale operators ... but it makes me really angry when I see big trawlers way offshore - I suspect they are probably EU fish "poachers". But mostly here it is boats like this: