Day 3 in Malawi: The Crew Pulls an Illegal Net out of the Lake

I arranged for a boat ride yesterday, and the boat was ready at nine o’clock as we had agreed. The guide, John, quickly introduced the crew with whom I would spend the morning: besides himself, there was the captain (John had to repeat the captain’s name twice before I accepted that the man was named “Comment”) and Moses, a tourism student from another town. John did most of the talking, making many oblique references to his appreciation of a potential tip. The profits of his tours, he said, do not go directly to him but are divided among several dozen official tour guides in the area. Furthermore, the people who own hotels in the area are foreigners and keep their earnings to themselves; John complained that the Afrikaners were especially tough.

I noted with interest that the inhabitants of Cape Maclear have nailed the language of Western NGOs to a tee. When John was pitching his tour to me, he justified the initially high price as “investment in local livelihoods.” Indeed, even the souvenir sellers told me that regardless of whether I wanted to buy something or not, making a purchase would be a way to “support the local community.” During our ride, John went on to say that the local community had been promised infrastructure and investment by the government after the area was declared a national park – which doubtlessly brought a lot of red tape – but these never materialised.

As we drew closer to our first stop, Thumbi Island, which lies just a few hundred metres away from the peninsula, the guide’s eyes narrowed upon a few plastic bottles floating by the shore. He hollered at the captain to steer towards them and told Moses to begin recording on his phone. His suspicions were confirmed. The plastic bottles, we now clearly saw, were holding up nets, which drooped down from the surface towards the shallow lakebed of the island’s shore. Affecting an official tone for the sake of the recording, John began to explain what we had found as he began to pull the wide net into our boat.

“You see this net in a protected area, not even ten, fifteen metres away from the shore. This is completely illegal. They cannot fish here and destroy our coast.”

The law, John later explained to me, is that fishermen cannot ply their trade within one hundred metres of the shore. The measure intends to protect adolescent fish, which need the shallow ecosystem to survive, as well as to conserve the colourful cichlids beloved by tourists. Locals involved in the tourism sector, therefore, frequently find themselves pitted against other locals who try to make a living as poaching fishermen, though they claim that many of these fishermen actually come from farther reaches of Lake Malawi which have already been plundered. The legal fishermen, who can be seen crossing the lake on their dugout canoes, use lines farther away from the shore to catch much larger fish, especially adult catfish.

The net was at least twenty metres long and two metres wide. As John pulled it into the boat, it glistened with tiny fish of various colours. Most were grey and silver but some a vibrant light blue, and there was even the occasional yellow cichlid. They were all so small that I could hardly imagine anyone taking the pains to cook and eat them, for they were not small enough that one could ignore their bones. Some, I saw, were still twitching. I mentioned this to John, but he said that we could not release them because the net had to be brought “as evidence” to the person in charge of the hotel association. I suggested that the fish who were already dead were enough evidence and that we could spare the ones that still stood a chance of surviving. This, however, did not move John. Right after the captain left us at the island, he sailed off for the mainland to present the find.

In the meantime, John and I snorkelled around through the massive shoals of blue and yellow cichlids, as well as their slightly drabber cousins. After a while, I began to recognise the differences among the many species in the water: there were some with red fins, some with spots, some with stripes – we must have seen at least a dozen types in just the first few minutes. I was not particularly reassured when John told me there were no hippos or crocodiles in the area (despite being present just a few kilometres away in Monkey Bay), and I kept glancing back uneasily in case I saw a long menacing shape hurtling towards me. Of course, I have no idea what to do in the case of a crocodile attack, but at least a bite would not have come as a surprise.

Despite John’s opprobrium at finding the illegal fishing nets, the attitude of local guides to conservation is far from non-involvement. Snorkelling with cichlids typically involves feeding them bread, and John insisted on showing me how he could catch them in his palms by luring them in with soggy clumps. Once we had finished snorkelling, John went on to feed the fish eagles. Every time he threw a dead fish some distance from the boat, he screeched like an eagle to alert the birds. I wondered whether the eagles could become obese with all the food they were getting from different tour groups.

We then headed back to Otter Point by the mainland. John offered another snorkelling session, but we had just eaten some of the leftover bread and I did not feel like going into the water again. Instead, we climbed up the rocks that overlook the lake, taking the small forested path I had walked the day before. We saw no monkeys this time, but I noticed a monitor lizard far off in the bushes. After that, John sent me to the boat, which was already waiting for us at a beach back towards the village, and excused himself to a pee break. However, he soon came back running and said he saw a two-metre-long snake just where he entered the bushes. I am not sure whether he ended up relieving himself or not.

We only sailed a little way ahead though we could have walked; it was becoming apparent that John was flying by the seat of his pants and did not have a concrete itinerary. We got off again in a few hundred metres and took a right through the forest. This time, we visited a massive baobab tree under which it is said Doctor Livingstone rested when he visited the area. Farther on, we visited a site where another missionary and one army man had been buried, but they were since dug up again and sent back to the United Kingdom. On the way, we passed a number of baboons who seemed completely nonplussed by our presence. John said the baboons do not fear people and even intimidate women, who often drop fruits and vegetables when particularly ferocious specimens approach them on their way from the market.

We finished our tour by throwing our three remaining fish to the fish eagles of Otter Point. It was half past twelve and despite the guide’s assurances to the contrary, it began to rain not long after we returned to the hotel. I waited for the rain to subside while reading Jack Mapanje’s prison memoir, and when it did, I decided to make one last tour of Cape Maclear. Walking down the main street that runs along the coast, I passed by wooden shacks selling souvenirs and big baobab trees surrounded by women selling vegetables. Between the houses, I occasionally saw racks for drying tiny fish.

I found it strange that people were ogling me considering there were at least two or three other tourists out and about. Indeed, I was approached by one boy with a handwritten request that I pay for his school fees and another group of boys with a whole memorandum about how they needed money for their sports activities. Clearly, they were used to tourists. By the time I reached the main mosque, however, the atmosphere became more comfortable. Children said hello and waved without asking for money, and the boys fixing up their fishing nets by the mosque were thrilled when they saw their picture on my camera screen.