Aizi Erotic

The Aizi are lagoon people in the most literal sense. Their villages, roughly a dozen of them, ring the western reach of the Ébrié Lagoon in southern Côte d'Ivoire, around Jacqueville and west of Abidjan. The best known, Tiagba, sits on an island with part of its housing raised on stilts over the water. What holds the Aizi together is not a single language or a single origin story. It is the lagoon itself, and a long history as the specialist fishers of this stretch of coast, trading smoked fish to farming neighbors such as the Adioukrou and the Alladian for palm oil and cassava.

That shared trade covers a striking linguistic split. The Aizi speak three languages, and they do not all belong to the same family. Tiagbamrin and Mobumrin are Kru languages, eastern outliers of a family that otherwise runs west from here across southwestern Côte d'Ivoire into Liberia, set down in a neighborhood where the nearest neighbors speak Kwa. The third, Aproumu, was long filed alongside them until linguists took a closer look and found it was Kwa after all. Village traditions tell a matching story: founders arriving from different directions, some from Kru country, others from neighboring lagoon groups, and becoming one people by living and fishing side by side. One French ethnographer titled a study of them L'Aïzi pluriel, the plural Aizi, and the label fits.

Most Aizi today are Christian. This coast was swept in 1913 and 1914 by the Liberian preacher William Wadé Harris, and the Harrist church that grew from his tour still stands beside Catholic and Protestant congregations across the lagoon country, while regard for the spirits of particular waters and for the ancestors has not entirely gone away. Daily life runs on fish and attiéké, the steamed cassava couscous that is the signature food of the Ivorian lagoons, with coconut, oil palm and rubber plots supplying cash.

The pressures are those of a small people living next to a very big city. Arguments over who may fish the lagoon, and with what size of net, have flared since the 1970s as outside crews moved in. Pollution and overfishing have thinned the catch. The bridge that replaced the Jacqueville ferry in 2015 brought the city's weekend traffic closer. French and the neighbors' languages are strong among the young, and all three Aizi languages have small speaker bases. The villages, though, are still there on the water, and the canoes still go out.