Toubacouta

The delta around Toubacouta has been inhabited for a very long time, and the proof is under foot: mounds of discarded shells, some of them many metres high and used as burial sites, were built up over centuries by people harvesting shellfish from the mangroves. The delta holds more than two hundred such mounds, and excavations at some of the burial grounds among them have opened a window on how long people have lived here; it was these mounds and tumuli that led UNESCO to list the Saloum delta in 2011.

Historically this southern edge of the delta lay on the frontier between the Serer kingdom of Saloum and the Mandinka-ruled lands along the Gambia river, and the mixed population of the commune still reflects that meeting. Toubacouta itself is described as a Mandinka village. In the nineteenth century the region was crossed by the jihad of Maba Diakhou Ba and then brought under French control, and the colonial border that followed the Gambia river turned what had been an ordinary stretch of country into an international frontier a short distance to the south.

Under French and then independent rule, the area lived from farming, fishing and salt, and Toubacouta was a modest village on a road to the border. Two later decisions shaped it: the creation of the Saloum Delta National Park in 1976, which protected the channels and forest around it, and the arrival of tourism from the 1980s onwards, as campements and lodges opened on the waterside and the village became a base for visiting the delta.

Toubacouta sits at a cultural crossing point. Serer, Mandinka, Fula and Wolof families share the commune, most of them Muslim, with a Christian minority among Serer households, and several languages are heard in a single street. Wolof is the common tongue and French the language of school and administration, while Mandinka links the area to The Gambia just to the south, and cross-border family ties are ordinary here.

Life in the delta villages is organised around the water and divided by gender in long-standing ways: men fish from pirogues and cut poles in the mangroves, while women gather oysters, cockles and arches, process and smoke them, and increasingly run the associations that manage the shellfish beds and replant mangrove. Those replanting days, often organised village by village, have become a local institution and a point of pride.

Music and celebration follow the national pattern — sabar drumming at naming ceremonies and weddings, kora players in Mandinka households, wrestling bouts after the harvest — and visitors staying at the lodges are often invited to village events. Manners are those of rural Senegal: long greetings, an offer of tea, and a preference for asking permission rather than assuming it.

A few thousand people live in Toubacouta itself, with more in the villages of the commune scattered between the road and the water. It is a rural place with a school, a health post, shops along the road and a market that comes to life once a week; the nearest town of any size is Sokone, and the department town is Foundiougne to the north.

Three activities carry the local economy. Farming fills the rainy season and the months after it: groundnuts above all, with millet, sorghum and vegetable plots, and cattle and goats kept by most households. Fishing and shellfish gathering go on all year in the channels, supplying dried and smoked seafood that is traded far inland. Tourism is the third, employing guides, boatmen, cooks and drivers at the lodges — work that is seasonal and concentrated in the dry months.

Days begin early, quieten through the hot afternoon and end with tea and talk outside the compounds. The problems people name are the ones common to the delta: salt pushing into farmland, the loss of mangrove cut for fuel and building, falling catches in the channels, and the shortage of work that sends young people to Kaolack, Dakar or The Gambia.

The delta's own food is shellfish. Mangrove oysters, prised from the roots by women working at low tide, are grilled over wood, dried in the sun or simmered into a sauce with rice; cockles and arches are boiled, dried and sold by the bowl. Fish from the channels — mullet, captain fish, barracuda, catfish and shrimp — is grilled whole, or cooked as ceebu jën, fish and vegetables over broken rice, and yassa, with lemon and a mass of softened onions.

Inland the cooking is that of the peanut basin. Mafé, meat or fish in a thick groundnut sauce, appears constantly, and millet is eaten as thiéré, steamed couscous under a sauce, or as lakh, a sweet porridge with curdled milk. Rice is the staple of the main midday meal, eaten from a shared bowl, and roasted groundnuts are sold in paper cones wherever transport stops.

Drinks are simple and cold: bissap made from dried hibiscus, bouye from baobab fruit, ginger juice, and ataya, strong green tea boiled with sugar and poured in three rounds through the afternoon. Palm wine is tapped in some villages towards the Gambian border, and the lodges stock beer and soft drinks that are otherwise hard to find in the commune.