If Oumarou Diakayaté eats catfish, he will develop leprosy and grow webs between his fingers.
Oumarou is a Fulani, a hereditary pastoralist. A tall rawboned man in his 70s, he lives in a pre-monetary, milk-based economy, migrating with his cattle through the laterite savannah of central Mali in ancient and unending search for pasture. Twice daily he milks his herd of humped Zebu cows; then his wife and daughters churn butter and buttermilk and trade the lot for solid food in the villages and towns near which they happen to camp. His long narrow fingers are geological, gnarled by the sun and dusty wind; it would be terrible if they became webbed. The livelihood of his family depends on the dexterity of his hands.
Intolerance to ichthyoids runs in the blood. It is an inherited proscription that Oumarou’s nomadic ancestors brought with them from the Horn of Africa, where they first herded cows 10,000 years ago. Most modern East African herdersjust as skinny and tall as Oumarou and driving the same Zebu cattle or goatsdo not eat fish; Somali goatherds insult one another: Speak not to me with a fish-eating mouth. The Fulani catfish ban is a superstition that may be as old as the first domesticated cow.
Variations of fish taboo girdle the world. Some cultures consider fish too sacred to eat; others, too unclean. Some stick to fish with scales only; some eat shellfish but not fish that have fins. Most fishing communities in modern Brazil avoid catfish; so do observant Jews. In his book Eat Not This Flesh, the cultural geographer Frederick J. Simoons describes a ban on all fish among mid-20th-century Aboriginal Tasmanians, most Moors and Berber-speaking nomads, particularly the Tuareg of northern Africathough with the advent of Islam the Tuareg have been replacing fish ban with other dietary customs. The 19th-century surgeon-ethnographer Washington Matthews explored fish prohibition among the Apache, the Navajo and the Zuñi. The 15th-century Portuguese conquerors of the Canary Islands discovered that the islanders, the Guanche, not only did not eat fish but also had no means or know-how to catch it. The Roman emperor Julian the Apostate described a taboo on the use of all kinds of fish in the 4th-century Phyrgia; Plutarch, around 100 A.D., reported that Egyptian priests abstained from fish. Homer’s heroes stooped to eating fish only when they were on the brink of starvation.
Oumarou and his family are on the brink of starvation all the time.
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Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s hungriest region: One in four of its people is undernourished. In the face of such mass hunger, many nutrition experts and aid workers see traditional food prohibitions as a nonsensical, nightmarish hindrance to hunger relief. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has advised agriculture educators in Africa that undesirable food habits and nutrition-related practices, which are often based on insufficient knowledge, traditions and taboos or poor understanding of the relationship between diet and health, can adversely affect nutritional status. Undesirable food habits are NGO-speak for millennial traditions that have outlasted centennial droughts, religious conversionsand that now may be slowly killing off their own custodians.
In Mali, population 15 million, more than half of the people live below the global poverty line of $1.25 a day, and every third child under five suffers from chronic malnutrition; nearly half of all households have at least one stunted child. Malnutrition underlies these macabre statistics: Even in relative peacetime, Mali has the second-highest infant mortality rate in the world, after Afghanistan. And as climate change wrings the Sahel, life is becoming hungrier by the year. Since the 1960s, Mali has become 12 percent drier and about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit hotter; its weather continues to change. The wind here is growing stronger and laden with more sand from the Sahara; rainfall is becoming more fickle; cyclical dry spells have become killer droughts that now wham the bush in rapid-fire succession, decimate water resources without giving them time to recover.
A perfect storm of global and local factors is responsible for Mali’s environmental crisis: disastrous land management by French colonialists; post-colonial explosion in population growth; overgrazing by expanding cattle herds; gluttonous commercial farming and fishing. And, of course, the meta-source: cataclysmic change in global weather sparked mostly by fossil fuel emissions of the industrialized world. During Mali’s most recent presidential election, in 2013, both leading candidates signed a pledge, prepared by a coalition of nearly 100 local NGOs, to prioritize the social and environmental fallout of global warming. But such symbolic measures are largely inconsequential against the backdrop of the environmental intransigence of the West. In the United States, one of the main contributors to global warming, climate change deniers sit in Congress; and what passes here for climate policy is so schizophrenic that it enables President Barack Obama to describe climate change as a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security just days after his administration, tuning out warnings of an ecological catastrophe, provisionally allowed Royal Dutch Shell to restart drilling in the Arctic for oil.
In your country, you have many industries that contribute to climate change. But they will never admit they contribute to climate change, and your government will not accuse them, says Adikarim Touré, director of the Bamako office of the Global Climate Change Alliance, an agency the European Union established in 2007 to assist developing countries most affected by climate change. We don’t have industry. But climate change affects us more than you in the United States.
Catfish have been around for at least 70 million years. There are 35 species of them in Mali. In 1975 and 1976, the Malian government commemorated catfish with postage stamps.
Catfish are exquisite. Some swim belly-up. Some squeak when they are angry or scared. Their thick heads are plated and barbeled, their skin often patterned with leopard spots; I know one fisherman who has decorated the adobe wall of his shack with parchment of catfish skin. They can breathe out of water and survive in just a modicum of moisture for weeks. Before seasonal rains arrive at the marshlands where Oumarou grazes his herd for six months of the year, village children yank sluggish fish out of the viscous mud the way you would harvest turnips.
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