The treehouse sat close enough to the water that at night you could hear the Atlantic moving. In the morning the light came in through the gaps in the wood and the air smelled of salt and something else — something heavier, synthetic, out of place. It took me a day or two to understand what it was.
The fishmeal factory. Chinese-owned, sitting on the edge of Sanyang, processing fish into powder that gets shipped out of the country. The smell reaches you before you understand it. A thick, industrial heaviness that has no business being in this air, on this coast, in this place.
What the factory takes
I spoke to Bakary — who runs Happy Corner, a small beach lodge in Sanyang that you can find in my lodge directory — and to many others during the weeks I was there. Fishermen. Families. People who have lived on this coast their whole lives.
The story they tell is not complicated. The fish are disappearing. Not because of nature — because enormous nets are sweeping the ocean clean to feed a factory that employs very few local people and sends its product somewhere else entirely. The local fishermen go out and come back with less. Some days almost nothing. The ocean that fed their families for generations is being quietly emptied.
"Before, we knew what the sea would give us. Now we go out and we don't know anymore."
This is not a distant environmental statistic. This is a man in a pirogue at dawn, coming back to shore with an empty net, trying to understand what happened to the fish that were always there.
The shore is disappearing too
And then there is the land itself. The sea is coming closer. Every season, a little more of the shore is gone — eaten away, pulled back, swallowed. The beach I walked on during my first week was narrower by the time I left. You could see where it used to be.
Coconut trees that once stood well back from the water now lean over it. Plots of land that families owned are partly underwater. The fence posts of old compounds stand in the surf like markers of something that used to exist.
People talk about it the way you talk about something you are watching happen in slow motion and cannot stop. A quiet, helpless witnessing.
Two kinds of extraction
I kept thinking, lying in the treehouse at night, about how these two things are the same story. The factory taking the fish from the sea. The sea taking the shore from the land. One is industry, one is consequence — but both are taking something from people who had very little say in either.
The factory arrived because land and access are cheap here, because regulation is weak, because what happens on this stretch of West African coastline does not register in the places where these decisions get made. The local community was not consulted. They were not the ones who signed anything.
And the erosion — while it has its own natural rhythms — is accelerated by the same forces that govern everything else: trawling disrupts the seabed, industrial activity disturbs sediment, and the climate that wealthy countries have been heating for a century is raising the sea that now eats at Sanyang's shore.
And now there is something else coming. In July 2024, the Gambian government signed a concession agreement with Albayrak Group — a major Turkish construction conglomerate — to build a new deep sea port at Sanyang. The project is valued at close to one billion euros, with a 30-year operational concession. Phase one is already underway.
Bakary's Happy Corner sits in that same stretch of coastline. The shore that is already eroding. The community that is already under pressure from the fishmeal factory. And now a billion-euro port is planned for the area — the largest foreign investment in Gambian history, described in press releases as progress, development, opportunity. Nobody asked the people who live there what they thought.
I do not know exactly what the port will mean for Bakary's lodge, for the fishermen, for the families whose land backs onto that beach. Nobody seems to know yet. But I know that when billion-euro projects arrive in places like this, the people who were already there tend to absorb the cost while the benefit flows elsewhere.
What stays with me
I did not go to Sanyang to witness any of this. I went to rest, to practice, to be somewhere quiet by the ocean. And all of this was just there — in the smell of the morning air, in Bakary's conversations over tea, in the way people looked at the waterline.
That is what I keep thinking about. Not that this is happening in some remote place that requires effort to find. It is happening in a place where people live, run small lodges, catch fish, raise children, build things with their hands. Ordinary life, under quiet pressure.
I do not have a solution to offer. I am just someone who was there, and who listened, and who cannot quite let go of what I heard.
If you ever find yourself in Sanyang — stay at a local lodge, eat local food, put your money directly into the hands of the people who are still here, still building, still watching the sea. It is the smallest thing. But it is not nothing.