This month we review a book that looks behind Polisario's desert war, and assess a new study of Paulo Freire, the guru of revolution through literacy.
Editor: Anuradha Vittachi
The Western Saharans
by by Virginia Thompson & Richard Adloff
UK: Croom Helm (hbk) £13.95
Aus: (agent) Cambridge University Press
US: Barnes & Noble
At the heart of this topical book is an obscure corner of Northwest Africa; an ill-defined, almost unpopulated desertland of rock and sand - half the size of France with less than one hundred thousand people. It has scanty water resources and recurrent plagues of locusts and droughts. If it had nothing more, the former Spanish Sahara territory would never have become the centre of regional dispute. But the recent discovery of massive mineral riches, mainly in phosphates (the basis of fertilisers), made both Morocco and Mauritania eager to annex the desolate region in 1975, regardless of the wishes of its few nomadic inhabitants, the Sahraouis.
The authors give an objective account of the background to this dispute. They explain Mauritania and Morocco's involvement, and fill out the details of tribal society and nomadic life in the region as a whole. They make a strong case for the importance of this neglected problem as the source of continuing friction in the region and eventually, perhaps, open war between Morocco and Algeria (with Libya too?). At present Algeria and Libya are fighting a proxy war with Morocco, through their lavish backing for the Polisario Front, a motley assortment of Sahraoui patriots and mercenaries drawn from the wider region. Polisario strikes across the Saharan wastes from their bases inside Algeria, in fleets of Landrovers crammed with Soviet and Czech weapons, have faced stiffer opposition from Moroccan troops over the past year.
While the Moroccans are fighting for the idea of 'Greater Morocco', with total public support for King Hassan's policy, there is no such evident public support in Algeria for the war. Algeria already has vast reserves of oil and gas, after all, and its motive in backing Polisario seems to be rather to deprive Morocco of rich mineral reserves.
The main victims of this regional rivalry are plainly the Sahraouis themselves, with their pastoral nomadic economy shattered by the war, as well as by a succession of droughts, now a people of refugees living off charity. Polisario has already won diplomatic victories against Morocco in both the OAU and the Arab League. But if it also succeeds in getting a military withdrawal there are grave doubts as to how the Sahraouis could by themselves exploit the mineral riches, or avoid domination by their erstwhile patrons, Algeria and/or Libya.
Freire without tears
Literacy and Revolution: the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
edited by Robert Mackie
UK: Pluto Press (pbk) £3.50 f $7.95 (post-free surface mail)
'Alternative education' is now respectable: UNICEF devotes pages to its academic appraisal and its leading exponents have been elevated into gurus.
Paulo Freire is perhaps the most trenchant and original, if not the clearest. As a teacher in Brazil, he soon realized that education is never neutral but can be used for the domestication or liberation of human beings. The traditional method merely made deposits of information from above and was aimed primarily at creating a docile work force. He therefore decided to go and work with the people and to use their form of reference and not his own.
In reaction to the 'banking' system of education, he further proposed in his most famous work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) to extend adult literacy by a process of 'conscientizacao'. Translated as 'conscientisation', sometimes interpreted as 'consciousness raising', the term really means the attempt to encourage a form of critical awareness which leads to action. By freeing people from their culture of silence and myth, it would enable them to understand their circumstances in order to change them. To learn would thus no longer be to passively digest but to act in the world and to become more fully human.
To this end, Freire formed 'culture circles' in which the educator acted as a coordinator in a dialogue between equals. Rather than solving puzzles, their aim was to pose problems in concrete living situations. But to begin to read with words like 'poverty' or to ask questions such as 'Why do you build skyscrapers and live in a slum?' clearly had political implications. As a result, Freire was forced into exile and eventually went via Chile to Guinea-Bissau.
The excellent collection of articles in Literacy and Revolution, written in clear and incisive prose, place the opaque Freire in his social and intellectual context and critically assess his work. They bring out the close link between his religion and politics: 'God led me to the people,' he declared, 'and the people led me to Marx.' Indeed, he attacks the Church no less than the State for creating myths and controlling the people. He therefore works for the World Council of Churches and aligns himself with the theology of liberation. But where many see in his eclectic brand of humanist Marxism and existential Christianity an uneasy alliance, he finds no tension: 'God is an invitation for me to make history.'
Nevertheless, as the contributors rightly point out, Freire tends to stress
cultural action rather than economic and political revolution. Moreover, in his faith in charismatic leaders like Mao, Fidel Castro and Amilcar Cabral, who sacrifice themselves for the people, he overlooks the authoritarian dangers of single party states and personality cults.