Fishing Mystery

Just arrived back from a few days in Bamako: this was the scene witnessed on the early morning of my departure: just on the other side of the Djenné ferry: a communal fishing, when a whole village goes to fish in one of the ponds that remain before all the water is dried up by the great heat of March, April and May in the plains of the Niger inland Delta.  The reasons for this communal fishing remain shrouded in mystery. I ask a sensible question: ‘why do they ALL go fishing at once?’ I get a reply that does not satisfy me and I have not been able to get to the bottom of this mystery. But that is one of the charming and infuriating facts of West Africa: one will never really understand it.