Tasso Island is one of the islands that dot the Sierra Leone River Estuary. Home to a relatively new ecotourism project, its beach-side chalets and campsite make it a go-to destination outside the rainy season. It’s about 8 miles east of Freetown – a 50-minute boat ride.
Our boat landed at Tasso Town, one of the island’s four villages. The local kids waited for us to disembark and then with shouts of Oporto! (hello white person) they quickly grabbed hold of a hand and walked with us through the village. It was both cute and somewhat uncomforable.
In trying to navigate the protocols of West African life, I found it difficult at times to know what to do. It’s hard to say no when kids ask for money, harder still when you know that what is a relatively minor sum to you is significant for them. But fomenting a begging culture can’t be good.
As with all the villages we’d visited, we paid our community tax (in this case it was included in the price of the tour of both Tasso and Bunce islands). This system works well if the local headman/woman/chief is on the right side of decency and funnels the money to the village and those who need it. Ecotourism also contributes, bringing visitors to the island who might not ordinarily find their way there.
Historically, during the transatlantic slave trade in nearby Bunce Island, Tasso was used as a plantation to feed the captives and British troops stationed on the island. Today, it survives by fishing.
Islam, Christianity, and Animism all coexist peacefully on the island. It’s a textbook example of religious tolerance. Animism was new to me.
Animism is a religious and ontological perspective common to many indigenous cultures across the globe. According to an oft-quoted definition from the Victorian anthropologist E. B. Tylor, animists believe in the “animation of all nature”, and are characterized as having “a sense of spiritual beings…inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls”. More recently, ethnographers and anthropologists have moved beyond Tylor’s initial definition, and have sought to understand the ways in which indigenous communities, in particular, enact social relations between humans and non-human others in a way which apparently challenges secular, Western views of what is thought to constitute the social world. (This new approach in anthropology is sometimes called the “new animism”.) At a minimum, animists accept that some features of the natural environment such as trees, lakes, mountains, thunderstorms, and animals are non-human persons with whom we may maintain and develop social relationships. Additionally, many animist traditions regard features of the environment to be non-human relatives or ancestors from whom members of the community are descended.
On reflection, I have a bit of that in me. I talk to my house and more often my car, Ime.
mmmm…
We walked through the village accompanied by our young entourage. In an amusing reversal of blacking up, some of the young lads had whitened their faces with white mud and then posed for photos. I would have wondered at this (the posing, not the whiting up) had I not spent an afternoon watching the selfie and ussie takers on River #2. Social media is huge here; it’s easier for many to access the internet than to access clean water. People, wedded to their smartphones, have made posing an art form.
The village’s big tree is spectacular. More than 200 years old, it marks an assembly area and place of prayer. I had little trouble believing it to be a non-human person. Likewise with what they call the mermaid (mami wata) tree. One played a big role in a marriage between a local man and a woman from Freetown. I wasn’t quite following the story as I was being pulled in every direction by my young guides.
The medical centre, with its couple of beds, is what the village depends on for medical care. Childbirth and STDs are the main focus. Perhaps 3 or 4 births a month, they said. Med centre births are a big improvement on home births, where both baby and mother surviving was an exception. The donation box was pulled out and while the guide said there was no pressure to give, the pressure was palpable. In the face of so much need, it’s difficult to rationalise not giving. There’s a fine balance though.
One young girl’s reaction when someone did give her money was to brandish the note like a medal as if some unspoken competition had been won. Kids are kids. Quite possibly that was what was going on.
I cringe at being seen as wanting to embody a white saviour, great or otherwise, dispensing largesse. The arrogance of it, albeit misguided, gets to me. This was the second tour we’d joined with random strangers and the outdated, patronising superiority (however unintentional) that seeped through comments and questions was getting to me. It’ll take some time to process and reflect on.
After our trip to Bunce Island, we disembarked at Kissi Camp on the other side of Tasso to have lunch at the Baobab Restaurant.
I am completely sold on West African rice. This part of the world wasn’t known as the Rice Coast for nothing.
As we gathered our things to get back to the boat – the promised swim was off the agenda as the tide was way out – we were asked if we wanted to visit the soon-to-open-to-the-public heritage centre.
To think that we nearly missed this gem.
It’s a great little museum that gives the history of the slave trade and some good examples of indigenous masks and carvings. There’s even a replica of a galleon found in an antique shop in the UK that was brought to the island.
Tasso Island is usually parcelled with Bunce Island as a day trip from Freetown. Presumably, if you’re staying on Tasso for a few days in their eco chalets or on the campsite, you can boat over to Bunce Island as well.
Both have something to offer – Bunce Island has the slave-era history, Amazing Grace, John Newton, and Mary Moran. Tasso, with its heritage centre, has the context, the beach, and the food.
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