1 00:00:00,690 --> 00:00:09,690 Thank you so much. Let me start by expressing my gratitude to Miles and to the organisers of this of this 2 00:00:09,690 --> 00:00:21,160 workshop for inviting Marina and me to share some of the data that we are collecting. 3 00:00:21,160 --> 00:00:30,710 I have some powerful images that I may show you if we have, if we have time now. 4 00:00:30,710 --> 00:00:40,400 This is really working. Work in progress and probably very preliminary work in progress of a project that we have started very recently, 5 00:00:40,400 --> 00:00:45,180 not in Guinea Bissau, by the way, in Guinea Conakry rather, but not to war. 6 00:00:45,180 --> 00:00:53,100 I mean, we've worked in both sides of the of the border. I will be presenting the paper just to make things shorter. 7 00:00:53,100 --> 00:01:07,040 But of course, the input of my has been has been invaluable, as you will, as you will see and as you will be engaging with you in being conversations. 8 00:01:07,040 --> 00:01:27,440 So the project that we have been starting recently is a project about the impact of the mining of bauxite in Guinea Conakry on the coast of Guinea, 9 00:01:27,440 --> 00:01:36,960 Conakry. Now this is a closed. This is a part of the world that we know seems quite a long time ago, especially me. 10 00:01:36,960 --> 00:01:49,280 I did my fieldwork for my thesis back in the 1990s on that, on that closed and going back four years, 11 00:01:49,280 --> 00:01:56,120 going back to it after several years of interruptions has been a challenge. 12 00:01:56,120 --> 00:02:05,480 But let me start by sharing our ideas with you. 13 00:02:05,480 --> 00:02:15,620 First of all, I would like to suggest, or we would like to suggest that the generational approach, 14 00:02:15,620 --> 00:02:23,840 which has been quite important in African studies, needs to be needs to be taken into consideration. 15 00:02:23,840 --> 00:02:35,240 History is a succession of generational perspectives in which the relationship is a more dialectical than it is often assumed. 16 00:02:35,240 --> 00:02:47,420 An intuitive understanding of history and of humanity would assert that young people learn from adults, obey adults, follow adults. 17 00:02:47,420 --> 00:02:55,760 However, we know that this is not the case. Socrates, Jesus Christ Muhammad, amongst many others, 18 00:02:55,760 --> 00:03:03,290 and just to name three very important men in the constitution of the making of the popular Western culture show the capacity of 19 00:03:03,290 --> 00:03:13,490 young people to diverge from autocratic orders and logics and make people follow young voices instead of the perceived tradition. 20 00:03:13,490 --> 00:03:22,220 The French Revolution, as Tocqueville showed, was a revolution of young Republican people against the aristocratic elders. 21 00:03:22,220 --> 00:03:25,700 But although we could find more examples of historic conversions in the past, 22 00:03:25,700 --> 00:03:32,510 it has been in the 20th century that they have blown up the anticipation The 23 00:03:32,510 --> 00:03:38,870 Beatles and I'm the second person to bring the little stranger in this table. 24 00:03:38,870 --> 00:03:45,500 The Beatles, very famously or famously amongst those of us who are followers of the Beatles, 25 00:03:45,500 --> 00:03:52,550 told an upper class man in the train Mr Johnson in the 1965 film A Hard Day's Night, 26 00:03:52,550 --> 00:03:58,100 who claimed to have opposed the war for you that they were four of them and he was only one. 27 00:03:58,100 --> 00:04:01,490 Therefore, it was they who should decide whether to turn the radio off or not. 28 00:04:01,490 --> 00:04:08,220 Not here. We want to hear it, said Paul McCartney. And I'm not going to even think he's, you know, put your accent. 29 00:04:08,220 --> 00:04:14,780 And there's more of us than you. We had a community like majority vote. 30 00:04:14,780 --> 00:04:19,940 This was in the 1960s, and we can find similar examples in popular culture in the 1950s. 31 00:04:19,940 --> 00:04:27,260 I mean, just to remain in the cinema in films like Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, etc. 32 00:04:27,260 --> 00:04:33,890 Ever since the end of the World War One, in fact, we have witnessed in Europe and in America an increasing youth empowerment. 33 00:04:33,890 --> 00:04:41,450 The father thinks read anti patriarchal graffiti on a political wall in May 1968, 34 00:04:41,450 --> 00:04:46,370 an empowerment which probably culminated in my understanding in 1970, 35 00:04:46,370 --> 00:04:52,700 when Crosby Stills, Nash and Young not only recommended parties to teach your children well and I'm not going to sing the song, 36 00:04:52,700 --> 00:04:58,400 but also children to teach your patterns while learning, according to the song must be called learning, 37 00:04:58,400 --> 00:05:05,630 a new version of tradition must be at the very least contemplated, if not encouraged. 38 00:05:05,630 --> 00:05:11,090 However, we would like to bring to our attention the fact that this well has been accepted and recognised 39 00:05:11,090 --> 00:05:20,210 in American societies is not quite automatically accepted when we move to non-Western societies. 40 00:05:20,210 --> 00:05:30,080 So African societies have been presented by anthropologists as being inherently an essentially autocratic and investments. 41 00:05:30,080 --> 00:05:44,020 Of tradition, where children can teach their parents are not contemplated with the same in the same way as they are in in in our own end of the woods. 42 00:05:44,020 --> 00:05:49,610 However, there are two in non-Western societies humans are historical animals and history is 43 00:05:49,610 --> 00:05:55,520 made of generational games of a much more dialectical nature than normally possible. 44 00:05:55,520 --> 00:06:01,160 So let's go to Guinea to discuss these and adopt this generational perspective for me, 45 00:06:01,160 --> 00:06:04,900 at least for me as well, but certainly for me more than for Marina. 46 00:06:04,900 --> 00:06:12,110 And this is quite a nice counterpoint. This requires quite a strong memory work. 47 00:06:12,110 --> 00:06:16,550 I also need a very young man or a young man in Guinea in 1992, 48 00:06:16,550 --> 00:06:23,240 and there I grew up with many biker friends, whom I visit regularly during more than a decade. 49 00:06:23,240 --> 00:06:26,780 My focus became generational very early on. 50 00:06:26,780 --> 00:06:33,350 At the time, Boro were divided along a generational line that very clearly distinguished elders from youths. 51 00:06:33,350 --> 00:06:41,000 I have written extensively on this, and I can summarise the argument that I that I presented in an article called Cathedrals and 52 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:49,280 Marbles in 2006 in colonial forces starting as early as 1886 and ending as late as 1957, 53 00:06:49,280 --> 00:06:54,110 when the French abandoned 1958, when Guinea became independent. 54 00:06:54,110 --> 00:07:02,300 Bago were portrayed by French administrators, missionaries and anthropologists as being terribly and terrifyingly daring to critique. 55 00:07:02,300 --> 00:07:07,160 The information I collected in archives agreed with my elderly people's memories. 56 00:07:07,160 --> 00:07:12,260 All they could remember from colonial days was hardship not only colonial abuse, 57 00:07:12,260 --> 00:07:19,100 but abuse by what they called themselves the Katoomba Kabaka, the Kabaka custom. 58 00:07:19,100 --> 00:07:26,900 Some of the elderly people I interviewed were quite good at separating the agency of the elders from that of the colonial intruder. 59 00:07:26,900 --> 00:07:33,260 But since French were very good at engineering, a so-called direct rule that was subtly in direct back, 60 00:07:33,260 --> 00:07:37,490 such did not perceive oppression as French, but as a US. 61 00:07:37,490 --> 00:07:44,270 It was channelled through the local chapter of the Kampong and his buddies, who were normally elderly men. 62 00:07:44,270 --> 00:07:50,330 Mahmood Mamdani has, of course, described very well that centralised despotism that this gave way to questioning the 63 00:07:50,330 --> 00:07:55,460 relevance of the distinction being indicted and indicted colonial rule in 1954. 64 00:07:55,460 --> 00:08:02,990 A French anthropologist and his phone went to a French guinea at the time and conducted preliminary fieldwork amongst Baga. 65 00:08:02,990 --> 00:08:07,790 Unfortunately, she never managed to do more than the preliminary fieldwork. 66 00:08:07,790 --> 00:08:14,090 The biography, a group of mangrove swamp rice farmers living in the swampy areas of the coast at the time, 67 00:08:14,090 --> 00:08:18,470 Baga were famous in the entire world thanks to the magnificent art. 68 00:08:18,470 --> 00:08:21,650 Artists like Picasso and Matisse, amongst others, 69 00:08:21,650 --> 00:08:27,860 had acknowledged since the beginning of the 20th century to have been inspired by the beautiful Bhargav carved. 70 00:08:27,860 --> 00:08:33,140 However, the news was shocked at the level of anomie she found in that ethnic group, 71 00:08:33,140 --> 00:08:37,040 compared to the more integrated kissy that she had been studying some years earlier. 72 00:08:37,040 --> 00:08:41,030 Also in Guinea, she wrote very pessimistically about them, 73 00:08:41,030 --> 00:08:50,960 predicting in no uncertain terms that in some years the market would disappear and be absorbed in the larger social Muslim community. 74 00:08:50,960 --> 00:08:56,330 This issue of being one of the many groups that have been encroaching over on the mangrove, 75 00:08:56,330 --> 00:09:03,860 a West Atlantic speaking communities of off the coast of Guinea, 76 00:09:03,860 --> 00:09:08,690 conceding that Baga living in the mangroves since at least the 16th century, if not before, 77 00:09:08,690 --> 00:09:16,430 had always resisted the forces of Islamization coming from the hinterland via Monday unfolded traders and jihadists. 78 00:09:16,430 --> 00:09:20,990 This was a very gloomy perspective, but actually she was right. 79 00:09:20,990 --> 00:09:28,850 A lot of biker groups and Baga is an umbrella term that used to designate a lot of different groups. 80 00:09:28,850 --> 00:09:34,430 Ethno linguistic groups living on the mangroves of Guinea have actually disappeared in the last 70 years. 81 00:09:34,430 --> 00:09:41,300 English, English speaking at least being absorbed in the Muslim social speaking groups, forgetting their language and customs. 82 00:09:41,300 --> 00:09:47,900 Our fathers whereby the young man told the new. But we we are social. 83 00:09:47,900 --> 00:09:52,580 The young man who said this was in fact summarising a very complicated situation. 84 00:09:52,580 --> 00:09:59,570 It is not clear whether he meant our fathers do not want us to be like that, or we do not want to be like our fathers. 85 00:09:59,570 --> 00:10:05,360 But in any case, it reveals the generational differences in the 1950s was expressed in ethnic terms. 86 00:10:05,360 --> 00:10:10,190 I would like to guess that the young man who said that had not been initiated into the 87 00:10:10,190 --> 00:10:16,730 rituals of manhood for which Vargo was so famous in the 1950s by the elderly man, 88 00:10:16,730 --> 00:10:24,620 would consider that you are only made to buck a man when you are initiated. Prior to that, you are a social boy. 89 00:10:24,620 --> 00:10:30,320 This may have to do with the fact that in the past, my elders did indeed make back out of social strangers. 90 00:10:30,320 --> 00:10:38,000 And all that ethnic cleansing through initiation. But it has also to do with the fact that Baga consider themselves superior to social. 91 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:39,620 They are the owners of the land, 92 00:10:39,620 --> 00:10:47,240 the landlords and they control who can and who cannot have access to land and resources and exert control on women's reproductive powers, 93 00:10:47,240 --> 00:10:55,940 too in many ways. In fact, initiation as a mechanism to make men is a threat or what effect of women for productive capacities. 94 00:10:55,940 --> 00:11:00,950 However, in the 1950s, the young people were getting fed up with abusers of the elders in Guinea, 95 00:11:00,950 --> 00:11:06,020 like in the Liverpudlian and neighbourhoods of the Beatles. 96 00:11:06,020 --> 00:11:07,670 Young people were eager to change, 97 00:11:07,670 --> 00:11:17,240 and many actors started to introduce novel ways for young people to be listened to political parties, churches, music, art, 98 00:11:17,240 --> 00:11:25,640 etc. and one by one group was particularly if it catches the youth wing of the Assembly, more democratic African, 99 00:11:25,640 --> 00:11:34,520 the anti French political movement that took over French speaking West Africa since the late 1940s. 100 00:11:34,520 --> 00:11:39,800 And thanks to them, the jihadists are schools Sayan amongst them religious Asian, 101 00:11:39,800 --> 00:11:46,220 who in 1957 started an iconoclastic rebellion amongst black youngsters who by following 102 00:11:46,220 --> 00:11:50,870 him rebelled against the power of the elders and put an end to traditional religion. 103 00:11:50,870 --> 00:11:53,600 They burned ritual objects and sacred bushes. 104 00:11:53,600 --> 00:12:00,710 They beat up ritual, especially as they even killed one and burned down houses of colonial villages as well. 105 00:12:00,710 --> 00:12:12,290 In the 1990s, when I was doing my my doctoral fieldwork, this rebellion was remembered as the watershed event in cultural history of the Baga. 106 00:12:12,290 --> 00:12:21,680 Immediately after the event, Guinea became independent. I mean, the event I'm referring to, the iconoclastic rebellion took place in February. 107 00:12:21,680 --> 00:12:27,290 It was very punctual, actually, but very, very violent. Took place in February 1957. 108 00:12:27,290 --> 00:12:32,600 Guinea became independent in 1958, and it was not just an independent. 109 00:12:32,600 --> 00:12:36,650 It was one of the most peculiar independent states of of of West Africa. 110 00:12:36,650 --> 00:12:45,110 Immediately after, the independence secretary implemented a high modernist socialist state that lasted until 1994, 111 00:12:45,110 --> 00:12:50,300 during which second bushes and traditional organisations were officially banned and persecuted. 112 00:12:50,300 --> 00:12:57,560 So let me return to what I was writing about in the 1990s when I was doing my fieldwork in both socialist guinea bago, 113 00:12:57,560 --> 00:13:02,090 where divided along a very clear line that separated elders from youth. 114 00:13:02,090 --> 00:13:12,020 This was because a lot of my informants, those who I used to refer to as my fathers in philosophy at all times, 115 00:13:12,020 --> 00:13:16,730 had been initiated in 1948 when the last initiation had taken place. 116 00:13:16,730 --> 00:13:21,140 But a lot of my other informants, those those I used to call my brothers, were not. 117 00:13:21,140 --> 00:13:26,330 In fact, they had been born after 1948. I'm not that old, after all. 118 00:13:26,330 --> 00:13:31,790 Therefore, following a similar logic to the one that his Newspoll had found in 1954, 119 00:13:31,790 --> 00:13:38,660 a lot of people were claiming that they were by the elders of a very large social population. 120 00:13:38,660 --> 00:13:43,760 The old man, some ago, one of my best elderly interlocutors, told me in 1996. 121 00:13:43,760 --> 00:13:49,910 All these people you see here they are all Sassoon. They know nothing, but they speak too much. 122 00:13:49,910 --> 00:13:58,370 A good baker knows how to shut up. They know a lot, but they know that they have to be very secretive about knowledge. 123 00:13:58,370 --> 00:14:03,830 So this generation of my friends was actually quite convinced that they were not quite as bad as their elders. 124 00:14:03,830 --> 00:14:11,900 After all, they had not been initiated, and they were terrified by the putative mysterious powers that the initiative people had acquired initiation. 125 00:14:11,900 --> 00:14:14,540 They lived in a landscape of fear. 126 00:14:14,540 --> 00:14:23,210 For instance, there was a Manchu, which is probably the name of the most powerful spiritual agency in local cosmology was an unpronounceable. 127 00:14:23,210 --> 00:14:29,270 Nobody knew what a Manchu is. The only thing they knew was that you are not supposed to pronounce this word. 128 00:14:29,270 --> 00:14:34,700 If an elderly person use it, you simply leave the room. 129 00:14:34,700 --> 00:14:43,430 It was a very powerful secret, as they as they used to say that only people who had been initiated could discuss the elders. 130 00:14:43,430 --> 00:14:51,050 I used to interview back then had, in fact, quite clever by iconoclastic leader following a section in 1956. 131 00:14:51,050 --> 00:14:56,390 They had put an end to initiations stopping the elders to abuse them. 132 00:14:56,390 --> 00:15:03,290 They converted to Islam or to Catholicism, some of them, and they behave like good social citizens and circle to this time. 133 00:15:03,290 --> 00:15:10,610 But because they had been initiated in 1948, they kept an aura of mystery that accompanied them all their lives. 134 00:15:10,610 --> 00:15:17,960 What I was doing fieldwork in 1992 2003, they were all those with power men in the mid 60s or early 70s, 135 00:15:17,960 --> 00:15:23,930 with a very clear mind and cunning verbal abilities who knew how to play the secrecy game very well. 136 00:15:23,930 --> 00:15:30,580 There were dozens of them, if not hundreds of them in the entire territory and talking about some 20 villages. 137 00:15:30,580 --> 00:15:37,300 Today, only 20 years later, there are less than 10 people in the entire territory who had been initiated in colonial days, 138 00:15:37,300 --> 00:15:47,980 and they are all very, very, very old, if not senile. The generational game we find amongst Baghdad today, when I myself, 139 00:15:47,980 --> 00:15:53,380 I'm reaching the age of those I consider elderly men back in 1992 is a very different 140 00:15:53,380 --> 00:15:58,900 one to the one I started back then ritually initiated with elders no longer existed. 141 00:15:58,900 --> 00:16:01,510 People with colonial memories no longer exist. 142 00:16:01,510 --> 00:16:08,950 The elders of today belong to the generation who went in their 30s, or maybe older, in the 40s or early 50s back in the 1990s. 143 00:16:08,950 --> 00:16:15,970 People who had been growing up terrified by the powers of initiation but without being initiated themselves, 144 00:16:15,970 --> 00:16:22,180 people who had been growing up being told they were social, not by children, not elders. 145 00:16:22,180 --> 00:16:29,710 Many things have happened to a bag of people since the end of colonial times, together with the iconoclastic rebellion and the end of initiations. 146 00:16:29,710 --> 00:16:36,490 One of them I need to single out today is the arrival in the 1970s of mining and exportation. 147 00:16:36,490 --> 00:16:43,090 Bauxite, which is the aluminium or had been extracted from the coast of Guinea by the French in the 1950s. 148 00:16:43,090 --> 00:16:46,510 But it wasn't the posh colony that comes to the mining port, 149 00:16:46,510 --> 00:16:51,340 which became very quickly one of the most important ones in the global market of bauxite and aluminium 150 00:16:51,340 --> 00:16:57,760 was constructed to export the Earth from the minds of Bangladesh to 120 kilometres in the hinterland. 151 00:16:57,760 --> 00:17:03,610 Comes Out was built in the 1960s, and the first bauxite was exported in 1973. 152 00:17:03,610 --> 00:17:11,910 Although Kim SA was in its origins, a small a village in the mangroves back, people were not recruited to work for a company. 153 00:17:11,910 --> 00:17:16,240 Bio were forced to leave the place and where resettled in other hamlets. 154 00:17:16,240 --> 00:17:22,630 And in fact, a lot of memories about come. So tell us that black people did not want to work in the factory. 155 00:17:22,630 --> 00:17:31,630 They saw themselves as being farmers of mangrove rice, and they preferred to keep on doing the farming, not get engaged in the factory. 156 00:17:31,630 --> 00:17:37,930 A similar situation for those of you who know the literature to the one described by Edwin Argungu 157 00:17:37,930 --> 00:17:48,370 amongst the Macquarie in his famous article on on on the economics of of witchcraft and other things. 158 00:17:48,370 --> 00:17:54,730 The only thing that happened to the people, which I probably started to happen in colonial period, was education. 159 00:17:54,730 --> 00:18:02,410 More and more people got education, and with education came the rise of a social figure, a social category that deserves a special attention. 160 00:18:02,410 --> 00:18:09,640 The so-called in French has autism, has autism, which means he who comes out of it or something like that. 161 00:18:09,640 --> 00:18:10,990 The effect of this is a bug. 162 00:18:10,990 --> 00:18:20,140 A person who lives in Conakry, the capital of Guinea and who belongs to an ethnic and regional association to which he or she pays a fee. 163 00:18:20,140 --> 00:18:25,570 There are several associations normally by village, so each village has its association of resort designs. 164 00:18:25,570 --> 00:18:33,310 They are very important for the general urban well-being of the migrants in the city, and they offer very strong networks of support. 165 00:18:33,310 --> 00:18:35,260 Today, a lot of resort designs. 166 00:18:35,260 --> 00:18:43,450 Even the most elderly ones have been born in the city in Conakry, although new arrivals are coming from from from the villages. 167 00:18:43,450 --> 00:18:55,120 When I did my fieldwork in the 1990s, most resort designs were people who had left their village and who had arrived in the capital back in, back. 168 00:18:55,120 --> 00:18:59,860 In those days, in the socialist days of the 1990s, when Guinea was becoming a decentralised, 169 00:18:59,860 --> 00:19:07,120 neo liberal democracy with long time I country, at least in theory and prepared in the first democratic elections. 170 00:19:07,120 --> 00:19:12,610 The Association of Resort Designs became very clearly ethnic sized and politicised. 171 00:19:12,610 --> 00:19:20,200 It also these associations with political parties secured votes in the rural constituencies as far as vital were concerned. 172 00:19:20,200 --> 00:19:23,110 They massively supported President Lansana Contenir, 173 00:19:23,110 --> 00:19:32,830 whose wife still alive is a bagger from a village of two coach designs made very often trips to the villages to instruct people how to vote. 174 00:19:32,830 --> 00:19:39,040 We have to remain united, an old man told me. This is why we must all vote for lunch on a container. 175 00:19:39,040 --> 00:19:44,860 Those artisans gave presents to villagers, but they also got a lot of support from the villagers in the form of votes, 176 00:19:44,860 --> 00:19:52,270 but also in the form of ritual protection that people from the city got from their village relatives. 177 00:19:52,270 --> 00:19:58,510 Besides this, autism's homes in Conakry became very attractive for young migrants. 178 00:19:58,510 --> 00:20:03,340 In the 1990s, more and more people started to migrate from the village to the city. 179 00:20:03,340 --> 00:20:09,910 In the household. In the village of Mali, where I used to live, only one child has so far remained in the village. 180 00:20:09,910 --> 00:20:18,040 All his brothers are in Conakry, becoming less artisans. Being a villager is seen as a failure already in 2003. 181 00:20:18,040 --> 00:20:21,550 The future security of Baga was in a fragile equilibrium, 182 00:20:21,550 --> 00:20:30,910 as they were no longer neither surplus producers nor even self-sufficient in rice, their staple food and identity marker. 183 00:20:30,910 --> 00:20:37,030 Another thing that happened to a bag of people is the arrival of more and more mining companies in the area. 184 00:20:37,030 --> 00:20:46,750 Even in 2003, there was only the CBG. The company, the Volkswagen and the only company working in are international 18 and 19. 185 00:20:46,750 --> 00:20:50,650 There are more than 50 new companies making profit in the area. 186 00:20:50,650 --> 00:20:59,650 Competition is fierce. The landscape has suffered major transformations, and more and more transformations are felt by the farmers. 187 00:20:59,650 --> 00:21:06,550 Irregular rains, rising temperatures, grass in the highs of the tides, heavyweights darst, oil in the water, 188 00:21:06,550 --> 00:21:15,880 plastic everywhere, lack of fish, lack of animals, lack of birds and intuitively attributed to the new mines. 189 00:21:15,880 --> 00:21:22,750 But the most important transformation is the arrival of people to work in the mines and in the companies. 190 00:21:22,750 --> 00:21:32,670 So these are the situation that we find nowadays. 191 00:21:32,670 --> 00:21:39,300 An increasing discontent and resentment because people did not take advantage of the of the of the company, 192 00:21:39,300 --> 00:21:47,850 the boats have gone in and they now realise that they have been left behind, becoming unable to take advantage of the new mines. 193 00:21:47,850 --> 00:21:52,380 Young people are schooled and educated, but they are mostly unemployed. 194 00:21:52,380 --> 00:21:54,930 The most active ones have migrated to the city, 195 00:21:54,930 --> 00:22:03,150 and those who have remained in the village are not drawing feelings of frustration and adopting a not meek and dependent behaviours. 196 00:22:03,150 --> 00:22:11,070 They got the galloping increase of bauxite mining companies, now 17, from Russia, China, India and other countries, 197 00:22:11,070 --> 00:22:14,940 and mining ports have further complicated, if not totally thwarted, 198 00:22:14,940 --> 00:22:19,350 the possibilities and sort of subsistence through mangrove agriculture and fishing. 199 00:22:19,350 --> 00:22:24,240 The climate change overlaps with the negative impact of mines. 200 00:22:24,240 --> 00:22:29,250 More and more backfilling to build port and other infrastructure has been converting large, 201 00:22:29,250 --> 00:22:34,800 large areas of the mangrove tidal creek in solid Earth, contributing to the rise of the water. 202 00:22:34,800 --> 00:22:39,210 High levels of dust are covering the crops using photosynthesis. 203 00:22:39,210 --> 00:22:46,650 There's an African is an African ization of the apparatus of the company of oxygen n and an increasing 204 00:22:46,650 --> 00:22:52,530 subcontracting of local enterprises to manage temporary employment that exploit young people, 205 00:22:52,530 --> 00:22:59,670 getting half the salaries and only higher based on kinship clientele, networks and underpayment of bribes. 206 00:22:59,670 --> 00:23:08,040 There is an ethnicity, Asian or a continuing ethnicity of the estate, a practise in Guinea which is getting very worrying dimensions. 207 00:23:08,040 --> 00:23:15,390 And there is an increased importance of migrants reminiscences and investments, 208 00:23:15,390 --> 00:23:30,420 which creates an economy in which people are highly dependent on these remittances and and and and absenteeism increases in the price fields. 209 00:23:30,420 --> 00:23:37,620 In 2003, in the village of Mati, there was only one concrete house being built by one of design. 210 00:23:37,620 --> 00:23:41,250 In 2019, there are several houses built by one single man, 211 00:23:41,250 --> 00:23:49,080 a very successful resort designer who has also created a very powerful NGO called Dibakar Vision 2025, 212 00:23:49,080 --> 00:23:54,600 aiming at helping the Bagga to become self-sufficient but also with very clear political alliances, 213 00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:58,530 which is creating a massive and very violent division in the region. 214 00:23:58,530 --> 00:24:04,590 One of the objectives of the NGO is the polarisation of traditional culture by helping folkloric troupes, 215 00:24:04,590 --> 00:24:12,690 and so they claim the making of a bygone museum. Interesting reinterpretations Interpretations of old objects are happening. 216 00:24:12,690 --> 00:24:20,640 For instance, there was there used to be an old headdress called the Arama, which is a chimpanzee, which back in the 1990s, 217 00:24:20,640 --> 00:24:26,460 I was always given the interpretation that that represented the wild forces of the of the boys 218 00:24:26,460 --> 00:24:33,750 the buyer had had to domesticate in their in their process of becoming mangrove rice farmers. 219 00:24:33,750 --> 00:24:43,020 But today is interpreted as being a token of respect that the show towards the natural environment. 220 00:24:43,020 --> 00:24:52,110 Time are accelerated. An old man told me told us, hurry, and we could not agree more. 221 00:24:52,110 --> 00:24:58,710 I doubt that many people have witnessed a more brutal change than the ones we have witnessed in Guinea in less than two decades. 222 00:24:58,710 --> 00:25:06,570 This acceleration has created a situation of despair. Several of our informants told us that hope has been assassinated in Guinea. 223 00:25:06,570 --> 00:25:14,250 Our only hope is rebellion, like half as they say, but by God, they mean very violent strikes. 224 00:25:14,250 --> 00:25:22,140 And indeed, violence is taking place more and more often in the urban settings of comes out and book the capital their perfected by the people, 225 00:25:22,140 --> 00:25:30,450 in particular, blend the new companies and enterprises of hiring people from the hinterland instead of favouring locals. 226 00:25:30,450 --> 00:25:37,110 They claim that local young people should be given jobs to compensate for the taking of land and resources. 227 00:25:37,110 --> 00:25:45,530 The elders of our generation, those who were my friends back in the 1990s are. 228 00:25:45,530 --> 00:25:49,700 Actually, sandwich, I would say, stuck. 229 00:25:49,700 --> 00:25:53,960 There's a lot of literature on stuckness, anomaly stuckness is referred to young people. 230 00:25:53,960 --> 00:25:58,070 Young people are being stopped being in a state of whitewood, et cetera. But in fact, 231 00:25:58,070 --> 00:26:08,600 what we are witnessing in Guinea is the older generation being stuck in between two worlds that they cannot understand and against which they cannot. 232 00:26:08,600 --> 00:26:16,520 They are not prepared to fight. In the past, they were excluded by by their elders because they had not been initiated in the present. 233 00:26:16,520 --> 00:26:21,320 They are not listened to by the youngsters because social mechanisms are changing 234 00:26:21,320 --> 00:26:26,000 and they are considered rural people without the strategic knowledge and vision. 235 00:26:26,000 --> 00:26:29,960 Let me go back to the example of a man show the world I mentioned just before 236 00:26:29,960 --> 00:26:35,540 the most powerful a spiritual being in traditional cosmology while in 2003, 237 00:26:35,540 --> 00:26:44,450 say the ball. Nobody could pronounce this word in the public sphere and only initiated elders were supposed to be able to discuss it. 238 00:26:44,450 --> 00:26:49,760 Today, a very popular song sung by a very popular singer in Come Song is called a mantra. 239 00:26:49,760 --> 00:26:57,470 Young people love it and sing it all over the place. Fear is not part of the emotions the concept provokes in the middle that the two plays. 240 00:26:57,470 --> 00:27:08,750 I'm going to finish now in the village of Marley to launch the NGO the of Vision 2025, in which several politicians were invited. 241 00:27:08,750 --> 00:27:15,740 We had an elderly resort is on stage that the young people have now taken over. 242 00:27:15,740 --> 00:27:19,130 Similar phrases were repeated by other interviewees, 243 00:27:19,130 --> 00:27:26,540 and in some occasions we saw young people telling off elders in ways that would not have been imaginable 20 years ago. 244 00:27:26,540 --> 00:27:29,570 The elders are aware that times have changed. 245 00:27:29,570 --> 00:27:36,560 Mining is taking over, and although they do not acknowledge climate change is making huge differences too. 246 00:27:36,560 --> 00:27:42,650 Young people are educated. They have been going to school. They know the world of today. 247 00:27:42,650 --> 00:27:52,760 Take the village of Tidy. This is a village that is slowly disappearing, according to forecasts of geographers in less than 50 years. 248 00:27:52,760 --> 00:28:00,290 It will have been totally swallowed by the ocean because of a series of circumstances that is on a mangrove island. 249 00:28:00,290 --> 00:28:09,170 Situated in front of cams are only seven or eight kilometres into the ocean view through a network of kinship and political alliances. 250 00:28:09,170 --> 00:28:14,030 The people of died have been given large incomes so that they can move there. 251 00:28:14,030 --> 00:28:16,670 However, instead of moving there, 252 00:28:16,670 --> 00:28:24,470 people are selling the plots they have been given and giving all the money to the children so that the latter can migrate to Europe. 253 00:28:24,470 --> 00:28:30,920 An old man told us I will sink with my island, but my children will have a future. 254 00:28:30,920 --> 00:28:40,190 So let me just conclude by by by saying that whatever change we are looking at, whether it's environmental change, 255 00:28:40,190 --> 00:28:48,620 cultural change or the change produced by the arrival of mining companies as the one we are witnessing in Guinea over the last five or six years, 256 00:28:48,620 --> 00:29:03,030 changes do not take place in a vacuum. Changes are interpreted according to a grammar that has a very deep historical history. 257 00:29:03,030 --> 00:29:13,640 The story of the poor, the history, the arrival of the new mines in in Guinea are accompanied by statements like this 258 00:29:13,640 --> 00:29:20,810 old man saying the young people are now taking us over in order to understand this. 259 00:29:20,810 --> 00:29:27,860 We need to understand the history of the Bible since the colonial times, at least to the present. 260 00:29:27,860 --> 00:29:37,160 But we also need to understand as many generational philosophers, Manheim and Ortega said, 261 00:29:37,160 --> 00:29:41,780 and many other people working on generations told the Guardian in the mid-20th 262 00:29:41,780 --> 00:29:47,120 century that every generation is a platform from where to look at the world. 263 00:29:47,120 --> 00:29:56,810 So the platform from where these people are looking at the world shows them that the young people 264 00:29:56,810 --> 00:30:04,580 are taking them over on the platform from where the young people are looking at the world. 265 00:30:04,580 --> 00:30:15,170 Tell them that only by migrating to Europe will they have a future or are football exactly through football, 266 00:30:15,170 --> 00:30:23,330 or that their only hope is the half, which is the violent strike, 267 00:30:23,330 --> 00:30:33,413 which is what is taking place and giving nowadays so far doesn't have the time to show you the pictures, but I think that's all we can say from time.