#fante

Navigating ‘mobility regimes’ through land-sea patron-client networks: The case of Fante’s shark fishery in West Africa by Iddrisu Amadu, Ingrid Boas, Simon R. Bush, and Aliou Sall, Geoforum 169 (February 2026)

This article examines how nomadic Fante fisherfolk from Ghana sustain their transboundary shark fishing and trade livelihoods in West Africa despite tightening fishery laws, conservation, and border regulations. It focuses on how patron-client relations enable them to navigate and counter these restrictions, providing insights into patrimonialism as infrapolitics of the worse-off. In this piece, the term “patron-client relations” refers to long-standing socio-economic ties through which patrons provide credit, protection, and information in exchange for loyalty and fish supply.

Fante fisherfolk. From here.

Rather than being passive subjects of regulation, the Fante actively socially navigate shifting regulatory environments. Fisheries regulation, conservation measures, and border controls together form an interconnected “land-sea mobility regime” that constrains Fante fishing and trade. Patron-client networks function as a “counter-mobility regime”, allowing the Fante to mitigate, evade, and reshape these controls.

According to the authors, shark meat (kako) is culturally and economically important in Ghana. The Fante have long practiced seasonal, cross-border shark fishing across Senegal, Gambia, Mauritania, Guinea-Bissau, and Ghana. However, the practice has been criminalized or restricted due to declining shark populations, climate change, intensified surveillance, and the creation of Marine Protected Areas for conservation and other reasons. Despite free-movement protocols in the ECOWAS area, border harassment, fees, and detentions persist. Because they are nomadic, the Fante tend to be classified as foreigners everywhere, leading to discrimination at borders and in licensing fishing. Previously, their fishing activities had mainly been regulated in customary ways, but states have been extending control.

The article is based on mobile ethnography across several West African countries, using interviews, participant observation, and policy analysis, and encompassing both sea- and land-based trade routes. It argues that people navigate controlling and shifting social environments through proactive initiatives to counteract control.

The authors find that three strategies are used to neutralize repression. Firstly, patronage serves as a way of spreading and reducing risk. Patrons (who seem to be traders in major cities, who buy the shark meat from fishers) finance fishing trips, pay fines, provide information on the state of the market, and absorb losses from arrests and gear confiscation, thus reducing the potentially debilitating risks to individual fishers. Information sharing (via phones and WhatsApp) helps fishers avoid patrols and target profitable markets. Financial and regulatory risks are redistributed across regional networks. Secondly, fishers switch roles to become middlepersons (middlemen) or traders when fishing is banned. Former fishers coordinate trade logistics, aggregation, and transport of kako. This allows continuity of livelihoods despite fishing restrictions and border controls. Thirdly, patronage networks have diversified to include media figures, politicians, customs officials, and shipping authorities. Media advocacy and institutional connections help negotiate arrests, border detentions, and bureaucratic barriers. These connections allow the Fante not only to evade controls but to reshape governance practices.

The authors insist that patron–client relations operate as a systematic counter-mobility regime, not just a series of informal coping mechanisms. This analysis challenges state-centric and territorially fixed models of marine governance. The study shows how mobility, not place-based ownership, underpins customary rights in nomadic fisheries.

The article shows the continuing power of rhizomatic, everyday networks to undermine and overpower top-down, vertical systems. Governance efforts that seek to “fix” mobile fishers in place using borders and protected areas are undermined by relational, mobile social networks. Effective marine governance must engage with social relations and mobility, not just territory and enforcement. The case highlights the tension between urgent shark conservation and the survival of mobile, customary fishing livelihoods, calling for governance approaches that recognise and work with mobility rather than against it.

What it means for radicals: The issue is a complex and ambivalent one. It’s easy to sympathize with people trying to preserve their traditional culture and lifeways, and to survive in adverse economic conditions. I’m very much reminded here of James Scott’s work on infrapolitics of dominated peoples, and Neumann’s work on peasant resistance to enclosure practices involved in the exclusion of human activities from nature reserves. It’s also worrying that fishing practices have become unsustainable and that nobody has the will or power to do much about it. And of course, some people would object to the whole idea of killing animals for meat.

The main lesson, I think, is that social problems aren’t easily solved by state repression and control. Because the state does not engage properly with the reasons for people’s actions, provide viable alternatives, or relate to their own meanings and needs, it often demands the impossible or makes demands which seem unjust to those affected by them. This leads to everyday resistance which undermines whatever goals the state seeks to achieve. The more peripheral the state within the world-system, and the lower the state’s capabilities, the more this tends to happen.

As with conflict resolution among humans, these kinds of conflicts are often complicated rather than mitigated by state authoritarianism. Fante fisherfolk do not have a long-term interest in overfishing, nor is it inherent to their culture. However, a move towards sustainability would have to involve the fisherfolk themselves, including realistic reconfigurations if they decide to reduce fishing.