Sunday is a working day like any other in Thiaroye-sur-Mer, a fishing village long since swallowed up by the urban sprawl of Dakar. The tarmac road down to the seafront in the downtown suburb of Senegal’s capital quickly gives way to sand; motorized traffic morphs into horse-drawn carts which carry women with buckets stacked high with fish. Along the side of the road dust rises between flocks of brown sparrows, piles of rubbish and watchful stray cats.
Down on the quay, racks of salted and drying sea creatures – lumps of crustaceans and rubbery squid, snappers and rays – stand against the backdrop of a flat, deep blue Atlantic Ocean. Half a hammerhead shark, sliced head to tail, lies on the ground; three one-metre-long captain fish, faces frozen into a final gasp, come past on a wheelbarrow.
