Thank you so much. Let me start by expressing my gratitude to Miles and to the organisers of this of this
workshop for inviting Marina and me to share some of the data that we are collecting.
I have some powerful images that I may show you if we have, if we have time now.
This is really working. Work in progress and probably very preliminary work in progress of a project that we have started very recently,
not in Guinea Bissau, by the way, in Guinea Conakry rather, but not to war.
I mean, we've worked in both sides of the of the border. I will be presenting the paper just to make things shorter.
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.
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,
Conakry. Now this is a closed. This is a part of the world that we know seems quite a long time ago, especially me.
I did my fieldwork for my thesis back in the 1990s on that, on that closed and going back four years,
going back to it after several years of interruptions has been a challenge.
But let me start by sharing our ideas with you.
First of all, I would like to suggest, or we would like to suggest that the generational approach,
which has been quite important in African studies, needs to be needs to be taken into consideration.
History is a succession of generational perspectives in which the relationship is a more dialectical than it is often assumed.
An intuitive understanding of history and of humanity would assert that young people learn from adults, obey adults, follow adults.
However, we know that this is not the case. Socrates, Jesus Christ Muhammad, amongst many others,
and just to name three very important men in the constitution of the making of the popular Western culture show the capacity of
young people to diverge from autocratic orders and logics and make people follow young voices instead of the perceived tradition.
The French Revolution, as Tocqueville showed, was a revolution of young Republican people against the aristocratic elders.
But although we could find more examples of historic conversions in the past,
it has been in the 20th century that they have blown up the anticipation The
Beatles and I'm the second person to bring the little stranger in this table.
The Beatles, very famously or famously amongst those of us who are followers of the Beatles,
told an upper class man in the train Mr Johnson in the 1965 film A Hard Day's Night,
who claimed to have opposed the war for you that they were four of them and he was only one.
Therefore, it was they who should decide whether to turn the radio off or not.
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.
And there's more of us than you. We had a community like majority vote.
This was in the 1960s, and we can find similar examples in popular culture in the 1950s.
I mean, just to remain in the cinema in films like Blackboard Jungle, The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, etc.
Ever since the end of the World War One, in fact, we have witnessed in Europe and in America an increasing youth empowerment.
The father thinks read anti patriarchal graffiti on a political wall in May 1968,
an empowerment which probably culminated in my understanding in 1970,
when Crosby Stills, Nash and Young not only recommended parties to teach your children well and I'm not going to sing the song,
but also children to teach your patterns while learning, according to the song must be called learning,
a new version of tradition must be at the very least contemplated, if not encouraged.
However, we would like to bring to our attention the fact that this well has been accepted and recognised
in American societies is not quite automatically accepted when we move to non-Western societies.
So African societies have been presented by anthropologists as being inherently an essentially autocratic and investments.
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.
However, there are two in non-Western societies humans are historical animals and history is
made of generational games of a much more dialectical nature than normally possible.
So let's go to Guinea to discuss these and adopt this generational perspective for me,
at least for me as well, but certainly for me more than for Marina.
And this is quite a nice counterpoint. This requires quite a strong memory work.
I also need a very young man or a young man in Guinea in 1992,
and there I grew up with many biker friends, whom I visit regularly during more than a decade.
My focus became generational very early on.
At the time, Boro were divided along a generational line that very clearly distinguished elders from youths.
I have written extensively on this, and I can summarise the argument that I that I presented in an article called Cathedrals and
Marbles in 2006 in colonial forces starting as early as 1886 and ending as late as 1957,
when the French abandoned 1958, when Guinea became independent.
Bago were portrayed by French administrators, missionaries and anthropologists as being terribly and terrifyingly daring to critique.
The information I collected in archives agreed with my elderly people's memories.
All they could remember from colonial days was hardship not only colonial abuse,
but abuse by what they called themselves the Katoomba Kabaka, the Kabaka custom.
Some of the elderly people I interviewed were quite good at separating the agency of the elders from that of the colonial intruder.
But since French were very good at engineering, a so-called direct rule that was subtly in direct back,
such did not perceive oppression as French, but as a US.
It was channelled through the local chapter of the Kampong and his buddies, who were normally elderly men.
Mahmood Mamdani has, of course, described very well that centralised despotism that this gave way to questioning the
relevance of the distinction being indicted and indicted colonial rule in 1954.
A French anthropologist and his phone went to a French guinea at the time and conducted preliminary fieldwork amongst Baga.
Unfortunately, she never managed to do more than the preliminary fieldwork.
The biography, a group of mangrove swamp rice farmers living in the swampy areas of the coast at the time,
Baga were famous in the entire world thanks to the magnificent art.
Artists like Picasso and Matisse, amongst others,
had acknowledged since the beginning of the 20th century to have been inspired by the beautiful Bhargav carved.
However, the news was shocked at the level of anomie she found in that ethnic group,
compared to the more integrated kissy that she had been studying some years earlier.
Also in Guinea, she wrote very pessimistically about them,
predicting in no uncertain terms that in some years the market would disappear and be absorbed in the larger social Muslim community.
This issue of being one of the many groups that have been encroaching over on the mangrove,
a West Atlantic speaking communities of off the coast of Guinea,
conceding that Baga living in the mangroves since at least the 16th century, if not before,
had always resisted the forces of Islamization coming from the hinterland via Monday unfolded traders and jihadists.
This was a very gloomy perspective, but actually she was right.
A lot of biker groups and Baga is an umbrella term that used to designate a lot of different groups.
Ethno linguistic groups living on the mangroves of Guinea have actually disappeared in the last 70 years.
English, English speaking at least being absorbed in the Muslim social speaking groups, forgetting their language and customs.
Our fathers whereby the young man told the new. But we we are social.
The young man who said this was in fact summarising a very complicated situation.
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.
But in any case, it reveals the generational differences in the 1950s was expressed in ethnic terms.
I would like to guess that the young man who said that had not been initiated into the
rituals of manhood for which Vargo was so famous in the 1950s by the elderly man,
would consider that you are only made to buck a man when you are initiated. Prior to that, you are a social boy.
This may have to do with the fact that in the past, my elders did indeed make back out of social strangers.
And all that ethnic cleansing through initiation. But it has also to do with the fact that Baga consider themselves superior to social.
They are the owners of the land,
the landlords and they control who can and who cannot have access to land and resources and exert control on women's reproductive powers,
too in many ways. In fact, initiation as a mechanism to make men is a threat or what effect of women for productive capacities.
However, in the 1950s, the young people were getting fed up with abusers of the elders in Guinea,
like in the Liverpudlian and neighbourhoods of the Beatles.
Young people were eager to change,
and many actors started to introduce novel ways for young people to be listened to political parties, churches, music, art,
etc. and one by one group was particularly if it catches the youth wing of the Assembly, more democratic African,
the anti French political movement that took over French speaking West Africa since the late 1940s.
And thanks to them, the jihadists are schools Sayan amongst them religious Asian,
who in 1957 started an iconoclastic rebellion amongst black youngsters who by following
him rebelled against the power of the elders and put an end to traditional religion.
They burned ritual objects and sacred bushes.
They beat up ritual, especially as they even killed one and burned down houses of colonial villages as well.
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.
Immediately after the event, Guinea became independent. I mean, the event I'm referring to, the iconoclastic rebellion took place in February.
It was very punctual, actually, but very, very violent. Took place in February 1957.
Guinea became independent in 1958, and it was not just an independent.
It was one of the most peculiar independent states of of of West Africa.
Immediately after, the independence secretary implemented a high modernist socialist state that lasted until 1994,
during which second bushes and traditional organisations were officially banned and persecuted.
So let me return to what I was writing about in the 1990s when I was doing my fieldwork in both socialist guinea bago,
where divided along a very clear line that separated elders from youth.
This was because a lot of my informants, those who I used to refer to as my fathers in philosophy at all times,
had been initiated in 1948 when the last initiation had taken place.
But a lot of my other informants, those those I used to call my brothers, were not.
In fact, they had been born after 1948. I'm not that old, after all.
Therefore, following a similar logic to the one that his Newspoll had found in 1954,
a lot of people were claiming that they were by the elders of a very large social population.
The old man, some ago, one of my best elderly interlocutors, told me in 1996.
All these people you see here they are all Sassoon. They know nothing, but they speak too much.
A good baker knows how to shut up. They know a lot, but they know that they have to be very secretive about knowledge.
So this generation of my friends was actually quite convinced that they were not quite as bad as their elders.
After all, they had not been initiated, and they were terrified by the putative mysterious powers that the initiative people had acquired initiation.
They lived in a landscape of fear.
For instance, there was a Manchu, which is probably the name of the most powerful spiritual agency in local cosmology was an unpronounceable.
Nobody knew what a Manchu is. The only thing they knew was that you are not supposed to pronounce this word.
If an elderly person use it, you simply leave the room.
It was a very powerful secret, as they as they used to say that only people who had been initiated could discuss the elders.
I used to interview back then had, in fact, quite clever by iconoclastic leader following a section in 1956.
They had put an end to initiations stopping the elders to abuse them.
They converted to Islam or to Catholicism, some of them, and they behave like good social citizens and circle to this time.
But because they had been initiated in 1948, they kept an aura of mystery that accompanied them all their lives.
What I was doing fieldwork in 1992 2003, they were all those with power men in the mid 60s or early 70s,
with a very clear mind and cunning verbal abilities who knew how to play the secrecy game very well.
There were dozens of them, if not hundreds of them in the entire territory and talking about some 20 villages.
Today, only 20 years later, there are less than 10 people in the entire territory who had been initiated in colonial days,
and they are all very, very, very old, if not senile. The generational game we find amongst Baghdad today, when I myself,
I'm reaching the age of those I consider elderly men back in 1992 is a very different
one to the one I started back then ritually initiated with elders no longer existed.
People with colonial memories no longer exist.
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.
People who had been growing up terrified by the powers of initiation but without being initiated themselves,
people who had been growing up being told they were social, not by children, not elders.
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.
One of them I need to single out today is the arrival in the 1970s of mining and exportation.
Bauxite, which is the aluminium or had been extracted from the coast of Guinea by the French in the 1950s.
But it wasn't the posh colony that comes to the mining port,
which became very quickly one of the most important ones in the global market of bauxite and aluminium
was constructed to export the Earth from the minds of Bangladesh to 120 kilometres in the hinterland.
Comes Out was built in the 1960s, and the first bauxite was exported in 1973.
Although Kim SA was in its origins, a small a village in the mangroves back, people were not recruited to work for a company.
Bio were forced to leave the place and where resettled in other hamlets.
And in fact, a lot of memories about come. So tell us that black people did not want to work in the factory.
They saw themselves as being farmers of mangrove rice, and they preferred to keep on doing the farming, not get engaged in the factory.
A similar situation for those of you who know the literature to the one described by Edwin Argungu
amongst the Macquarie in his famous article on on on the economics of of witchcraft and other things.
The only thing that happened to the people, which I probably started to happen in colonial period, was education.
More and more people got education, and with education came the rise of a social figure, a social category that deserves a special attention.
The so-called in French has autism, has autism, which means he who comes out of it or something like that.
The effect of this is a bug.
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.
There are several associations normally by village, so each village has its association of resort designs.
They are very important for the general urban well-being of the migrants in the city, and they offer very strong networks of support.
Today, a lot of resort designs.
Even the most elderly ones have been born in the city in Conakry, although new arrivals are coming from from from the villages.
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.
In those days, in the socialist days of the 1990s, when Guinea was becoming a decentralised,
neo liberal democracy with long time I country, at least in theory and prepared in the first democratic elections.
The Association of Resort Designs became very clearly ethnic sized and politicised.
It also these associations with political parties secured votes in the rural constituencies as far as vital were concerned.
They massively supported President Lansana Contenir,
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.
We have to remain united, an old man told me. This is why we must all vote for lunch on a container.
Those artisans gave presents to villagers, but they also got a lot of support from the villagers in the form of votes,
but also in the form of ritual protection that people from the city got from their village relatives.
Besides this, autism's homes in Conakry became very attractive for young migrants.
In the 1990s, more and more people started to migrate from the village to the city.
In the household. In the village of Mali, where I used to live, only one child has so far remained in the village.
All his brothers are in Conakry, becoming less artisans. Being a villager is seen as a failure already in 2003.
The future security of Baga was in a fragile equilibrium,
as they were no longer neither surplus producers nor even self-sufficient in rice, their staple food and identity marker.
Another thing that happened to a bag of people is the arrival of more and more mining companies in the area.
Even in 2003, there was only the CBG. The company, the Volkswagen and the only company working in are international 18 and 19.
There are more than 50 new companies making profit in the area.
Competition is fierce. The landscape has suffered major transformations, and more and more transformations are felt by the farmers.
Irregular rains, rising temperatures, grass in the highs of the tides, heavyweights darst, oil in the water,
plastic everywhere, lack of fish, lack of animals, lack of birds and intuitively attributed to the new mines.
But the most important transformation is the arrival of people to work in the mines and in the companies.
So these are the situation that we find nowadays.
An increasing discontent and resentment because people did not take advantage of the of the of the company,
the boats have gone in and they now realise that they have been left behind, becoming unable to take advantage of the new mines.
Young people are schooled and educated, but they are mostly unemployed.
The most active ones have migrated to the city,
and those who have remained in the village are not drawing feelings of frustration and adopting a not meek and dependent behaviours.
They got the galloping increase of bauxite mining companies, now 17, from Russia, China, India and other countries,
and mining ports have further complicated, if not totally thwarted,
the possibilities and sort of subsistence through mangrove agriculture and fishing.
The climate change overlaps with the negative impact of mines.
More and more backfilling to build port and other infrastructure has been converting large,
large areas of the mangrove tidal creek in solid Earth, contributing to the rise of the water.
High levels of dust are covering the crops using photosynthesis.
There's an African is an African ization of the apparatus of the company of oxygen n and an increasing
subcontracting of local enterprises to manage temporary employment that exploit young people,
getting half the salaries and only higher based on kinship clientele, networks and underpayment of bribes.
There is an ethnicity, Asian or a continuing ethnicity of the estate, a practise in Guinea which is getting very worrying dimensions.
And there is an increased importance of migrants reminiscences and investments,
which creates an economy in which people are highly dependent on these remittances and and and and absenteeism increases in the price fields.
In 2003, in the village of Mati, there was only one concrete house being built by one of design.
In 2019, there are several houses built by one single man,
a very successful resort designer who has also created a very powerful NGO called Dibakar Vision 2025,
aiming at helping the Bagga to become self-sufficient but also with very clear political alliances,
which is creating a massive and very violent division in the region.
One of the objectives of the NGO is the polarisation of traditional culture by helping folkloric troupes,
and so they claim the making of a bygone museum. Interesting reinterpretations Interpretations of old objects are happening.
For instance, there was there used to be an old headdress called the Arama, which is a chimpanzee, which back in the 1990s,
I was always given the interpretation that that represented the wild forces of the of the boys
the buyer had had to domesticate in their in their process of becoming mangrove rice farmers.
But today is interpreted as being a token of respect that the show towards the natural environment.
Time are accelerated. An old man told me told us, hurry, and we could not agree more.
I doubt that many people have witnessed a more brutal change than the ones we have witnessed in Guinea in less than two decades.
This acceleration has created a situation of despair. Several of our informants told us that hope has been assassinated in Guinea.
Our only hope is rebellion, like half as they say, but by God, they mean very violent strikes.
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,
in particular, blend the new companies and enterprises of hiring people from the hinterland instead of favouring locals.
They claim that local young people should be given jobs to compensate for the taking of land and resources.
The elders of our generation, those who were my friends back in the 1990s are.
Actually, sandwich, I would say, stuck.
There's a lot of literature on stuckness, anomaly stuckness is referred to young people.
Young people are being stopped being in a state of whitewood, et cetera. But in fact,
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.
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.
They are not listened to by the youngsters because social mechanisms are changing
and they are considered rural people without the strategic knowledge and vision.
Let me go back to the example of a man show the world I mentioned just before
the most powerful a spiritual being in traditional cosmology while in 2003,
say the ball. Nobody could pronounce this word in the public sphere and only initiated elders were supposed to be able to discuss it.
Today, a very popular song sung by a very popular singer in Come Song is called a mantra.
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.
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.
We had an elderly resort is on stage that the young people have now taken over.
Similar phrases were repeated by other interviewees,
and in some occasions we saw young people telling off elders in ways that would not have been imaginable 20 years ago.
The elders are aware that times have changed.
Mining is taking over, and although they do not acknowledge climate change is making huge differences too.
Young people are educated. They have been going to school. They know the world of today.
Take the village of Tidy. This is a village that is slowly disappearing, according to forecasts of geographers in less than 50 years.
It will have been totally swallowed by the ocean because of a series of circumstances that is on a mangrove island.
Situated in front of cams are only seven or eight kilometres into the ocean view through a network of kinship and political alliances.
The people of died have been given large incomes so that they can move there.
However, instead of moving there,
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.
An old man told us I will sink with my island, but my children will have a future.
So let me just conclude by by by saying that whatever change we are looking at, whether it's environmental change,
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,
changes do not take place in a vacuum. Changes are interpreted according to a grammar that has a very deep historical history.
The story of the poor, the history, the arrival of the new mines in in Guinea are accompanied by statements like this
old man saying the young people are now taking us over in order to understand this.
We need to understand the history of the Bible since the colonial times, at least to the present.
But we also need to understand as many generational philosophers, Manheim and Ortega said,
and many other people working on generations told the Guardian in the mid-20th
century that every generation is a platform from where to look at the world.
So the platform from where these people are looking at the world shows them that the young people
are taking them over on the platform from where the young people are looking at the world.
Tell them that only by migrating to Europe will they have a future or are football exactly through football,
or that their only hope is the half, which is the violent strike,
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.