Harvesting the Sea in Soqoṭra

This chapter discusses how the seas were harvested around Soqoṭra, the main island of the Soqoṭra Archipelago, in the days before fishermen owned sea-going boats and still had to make their own fishing equipment. The aim of the chapter is to provide a snapshot of how islanders made use of the sea before the fisheries became a modern commercial enterprise in the 1990s. Prior to this, fishing was a seasonal activity for many islanders, though there were those who would not eat fish at all, and for others who owned no land it was a subsistence activity. Along the northern coast there were also full-time fishermen, in pursuit of the larger fish that they salted and dried to trade with the boats that called in on their way to and from the Gulf, Oman and East Africa. The study’s co-authors, the late Mubārak ˁĪsa Walīd and the late Aḥmad Saˁd Taḥkí, represented both the seasonal tradition and the full-time one. The chapter is followed by a series of transcribed, translated and annotated Soqotri-language material collected from Aḥmad Saˁd Taḥkí between 1990 and 2010, either during author Miranda Morris’s time spent on the island or during his visits to work with her in the UK.