Mafia Island Marine Park

Hola a todos! I am writing this from a café in Pontevedra, Spain (a small city on the Northwest coast in Galicia). I was in Barcelona for the past week where I spent reveling in wearing sweaters, drinking cortados, and perusing museums and indoor supermarkets. After over three months in the tropics, my skin is grateful for a rest from the UV rays.

I have come to Spain to study the rich fishing culture of Galicia, this lush green and temperate region of Spain. But given that I have just reached the Atlantic shores of Galicia, I wanted to write one last post about Tanzania before I fully move on to other things.

A dhow inside the marine park

I spent the last week of my time in Tanzania with my dad on Mafia Island. Mafia is an island off the East Coast of Tanzania, just like the islands of the Zanzibar archipelago. However, Mafia isn’t actually part of Zanzibar: jurisdiction-wise it was always considered part of the mainland. The owner of our hotel on Mafia thought that political divisions between Zanzibar and the mainland were responsible for the complete lack of direct flights between the two islands (to get to Mafia you must stopover Dar es Salaam, even though they aren’t far apart).

Our plane from Dar es Salaam to Mafia

Mafia Island is home to Tanzania’s first ever marine national park: the Mafia Island Marine Park (MIMP). Unlike the land-based parks that were established during the colonial era with the sole objective of preserving charismatic megafauna, MIMP was founded in the mid 1990’s with the expressed objective of protecting marine wildlife and improving local livelihoods at the same time: the now-ubiquitous goal of "sustainable development". This new wave in international development resulted in a park that was ostensibly shaped and governed by local participation.

The question several decades later is: did it work?

To answer that question, I must defer to Dr. Christine Walley, professor of Anthropology at MIT and colleague of one of my Wellesley professors, Dr. Susan Ellison. Professor Ellison connected us way back in March 2021 when I was first awarded this fellowship, and we chatted over zoom about marine protected areas and fishing in East Africa. She shared with me some chapters from her book: Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park.

Rough Waters tracks the genesis and development of the marine park throughout its tumultuous first years. Mafia islanders, mainland Tanzanian bureaucrats, and NGO staffers clash over issues central to MIMP’s construction: Where should the park office be located? What does enforcement of rules look like? What does local participation even mean?

Dr. Walley also makes an interesting point about the word “local” itself. She argues that like the colonial-era term “native”, calling people “locals” artificially fixes them in space. This is particularly problematic for Mafia and the Swahili coast in general, where centuries of trading and immigration have resulted in thoroughly cosmopolitan communities. Mafia itself is now widely considered a very “remote” place, but this is a fairly recent phenonemon. The island was once the center of a medieval kingdom, as evidenced by the Kua ruins my dad and I visited. These crumbling blocks of coral are the skeleton of a sprawling sultan’s palace, court building, school, and mosque.

When my dad and I visited almost 30 years after the MIMP was founded, there were several hotels scattered across the southern section of Mafia. We stayed within the marine park, and thus had to pay $25 per night in conservation fees. Where exactly those fees go I’m not sure, but it seems like a fair price to pay for the privilege of staying one of the most amazing ecosystems I have ever found myself in.

Our "hotel room" for a few nights!

The very first day we were there, we went snorkeling with the whale sharks that live off Mafia’s west coast. The Rufiji River delta on the mainland funnels nutrients into this area, fertilizing a rich plankton feeding ground that supports a semi-permanent whale shark population. I was praying to see one, just one! Instead, we swam right alongside 12 or 13 whale sharks – I lost count. Even though I knew they were gentle filter-feeders, the sight of a 30-foot whale shark coming at you out of the green gloom with its mouth wide open made my heart skip a few beats. The memory of their massive, sculpted grey fins and white spots gliding through the water feels like a vivid dream rather than a lived experience.

We also did a day of diving within the marine park off the east coast of the island, an area called Chole Bay. In contrast with the rich, murky waters of the west, Chole Bay holds crystal-clear blue waters and an explosion of coral. I know two recreational SCUBA dives does not constitute a scientific coral survey, but I was thrilled by the apparent health and abundance of life in the Mafia reefs. The highlight for me had to be the nudibranchs: shell-less mollusks that range from the size of a fingernail to a foot long. If that sounds like a snooze to you, please just google them!

I can’t speak to the social, economic, or ecological effectiveness of MIMP over the last 30 years, but I can say that the marine life there was the best that I have ever seen. In the evenings, my dad and I would sit and enjoy Konyagi-tonics while we watched clouds of giant fruit bats move between the smaller islands. Tanzania, I miss you! My Swahili is already fading, kept up only by WhatsApp conversations with my friends.

In other news, my week in Barcelona was amazing. I wandered around, drank countless cortados, ingested almost exclusively carbs and olives, and looked at some art. After Tanzania, the grocery stores, pharmacies, and coffee shops of Spain feel almost like home.

Saludos,

Grace

A massive fig tree engulfs some ruins on Mafia