"A fatal stabbing sends a Gambian fishing village into turmoil over fishmeal" 29 April 2021

• Three Chinese-owned fishmeal factories have opened in the Gambia since 2016, sparking tensions over allegations of competition with local fishers, overfishing, illegal fishing, and pollution.
• In the town of Sanyang, unresolved disputes with the Nessim Trading fishmeal factory reached a flashpoint on March 15, triggered by the stabbing death of a Sanyang resident, allegedly by a Senegalese worker at the factory.
• Hundreds of people took to the streets in protest, some of them torching the local police station and the fishmeal factory, and destroying boats and equipment belonging to Senegalese fishers.
• The violence drove more than 250 Senegalese residents to flee to the nearby town of Batakonko.

Residents of the Gambian coastal town of Sanyang say life has gotten harder since a fishmeal plant set up production in 2017.

Growing tensions over unresolved disputes with the factory reached a flashpoint on March 15, when hundreds of people took to the streets in protest. Some of the protesters set trucks and tires ablaze and destroyed a score of fishing boats and thousands of fishing nets. The destruction escalated into the torching of Sanyang’s police station, along with the fishmeal factory, run by Chinese-owned Nessim Trading.

The trigger for the unrest was the stabbing death of 33-year-old Sanyang resident Gibril Ceesay on March 14. A Senegalese national who reportedly worked at the Nessim factory allegedly broke into Ceesay’s home at night with the intention of stealing, killing Ceesay and seriously wounding his brother.

“We are protesting in Sanyang because of so many reasons,” Muhammed Jabang, 22, told Mongabay. “If not because of the fishmeal factory, he [the alleged perpetrator] wouldn’t have been in Sanyang,” said Jabang, who attended the protest but said he was not involved in damaging property. [...]