Durban - “This is my friend, Werner, a white bloke that lives on the beach. We live and die with these blokes every single day,” subsistence fisherman Nathal Sewell says proudly beside a picture of a man fishing from a South Pier concrete dolos, on display at the KZNSA Art Gallery’s Fisher Tales exhibition.
Sewell finds the display significant “because we make our living from this”. Every day, he adds.
“At the present moment, the country is in junk status, so we make our living from the sea. We are there every single day. We, as fishermen, take care of it. Every second, third day we are at the beach. So, we clean up there. We fish there. This is what it's all about. What's here is what we are living and dying with every single day.”
Stories shared on the backs of picture cards available at the exhibition tell of life out on the “dolosse” as always being harsh but filled with strong bonds.
Like “Riaz’s story” of when he went fishing with his little brother, Razak, “a maestro on the South Pier” who, while trying to jump on a “dolos”, landed on a sardine.
“He slid and he was gone… all I could think of was how am I going to tell my mother… I’m still shaken up and I’m just looking at the water and all of a sudden, I could hear, you know like when you hit something, that heavy noise, it smacked on the ’dolosse’. So the people had lined up, I said let’s just form a human chain, and I’m the first one in front.
“They grabbed me from my legs and I looked down, all I could see was a head coming, the ’dolosse’ had been shaking and I grabbed him.”
“Snowy’s story” also tells of a human chain.
At night.
“This guy comes running to me, ‘hey, Snow, my connection fell in, now between the pier’.”
Getting into the water is dangerous. Slime on the concrete makes it slippery.
“We got him out, in the morning they took him to hospital… he was fortunate that he had a dislocated shoulder, he could have lost his life.”
At the same spot, Snowy nearly lost three friends in one morning, his story continues.
“We told them, ‘listen you guys, the shad is biting, do not get excited and be impatient, there’s a 1.5 to 2m swell running here in front of this pier, every now and again it lifts… these guys… were standing on the dolosse, and the swell came past, three of them, in the hole.
“What saved them was the one guy was holding on to the rod, and the second guy was holding onto the first guy and the third guy is right at the bottom holding on to the second guy.”
“Guy number three” fell in the hole, had a gaping wound, went to King Edward Hospital to get stitched up and returned in the morning to carry on fishing.
Another story set in the dark of night is told by a Mr Mbhele who would accompany his father crab fishing.
“I used to carry the lantern for him and put the lantern over the water where there was a rocky place. And then he would come and spear them… in the morning I would go and sell them at the Marina Beach Hotel.”
His children prefer to “stay in offices” rather than fish. However, his grandchildren accompany him fishing.
He’s sad that the ocean is unlikely to offer much to future generations.
“Our hopes are now diminished by the government,” his story goes on, as he refers to the saga around it favouring companies’ wanting to drill for oil and gas.
However, it was certainly no utopia back in the day.
At the peak of apartheid, a black man could barely stand on the ocean shoreline, let alone fish, and when fishing gear was confiscated it was impossible to get back, Mr Mbhele recalls.
“We were just thieves, we became thieves. We just became poachers, so whenever those khaki-wearing guys came along, then you’ve got to run into the bushes.”
Today’s struggles are more about quotas that dictate how much fish subsistence farmers can reel in and, he says, put an unfair limitation on their livelihood as they fish solely to feed their families.
Photographs on display are the work of artists including Durban University of Technology (DUT) students who took their cameras to the beaches.
Zimvo Nonjola, who came from Alexandra in Johannesburg to study in Durban, said she found the experience eye-opening.
“Especially if you are not exposed to fishermen, you really don’t know the disadvantages they are exposed to. Also, coming from a disadvantaged community you get to relate.”
She said she hoped her images would encourage people to “be a bit more compassionate when it comes to the disadvantages and struggles they face, especially during Covid”.
The exhibition, which runs until April 3, is a project of DUT’s Urban Futures Centre in partnership with the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, funded by the Deep Emotional Engagement Programme Fund.
Independent on Saturday