Environmentalism as Extractivism in Academia, Activism and State in Mozambique

Photo by author (2016): Nangaze community, Lugela Distict, Zambézia, Mozambique

In my short path as an environmental student I have engaged with consultants, academics, state agents, activists, NGOs as well as local communities in Mount Mabo rainforest where I am studying how humans and nonhumans are interwoven together in a way that recreates the current pristine Mountain and rainforest. I also worked for a government institution working under the ministry of Environment, Land and Rural Development in Mozambique. It is based on these experiences that I claim that environmentalism is a form of extractivism in Mozambique, I suspect elsewhere too.

The urge to write this text sprung from my fieldwork with the poor communities living with Mount Mabo in Zambezia Province, Mozambique. When in 2016 I first heard of a mountain that was discovered in Mozambique, I did not react as strongly as I did when I read the same news in 2016 after I had started my PhD in Social Anthropology within the Environmental Humanities – South project at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. It was during this period that a more decolonial flavor was added to my environmentalism degree that first started in Sweden. This flavor made me feel revolted and disgusted when I read the news again and I decided to write about it with the view of decolonizing nature and conservation in Mozambique. I managed to get my research proposal approved last year, with substantial funding from a South African and American organizations.

It was when I, an educated young black male from the south of Mozambique, specifically the outskirts of Maputo city who is married to a young white Swedish woman, went to the field, started living with the communities and experienced their lives that I realized the other shades of privilege as I only saw white researchers and ruling elites as privileged individuals. I came to realize that my being poor was not a static position from which I could represent all poor people in Mozambique. Frequently, as academics we are taught to critically think about our positions and privileges and I have come to realize that, while this works to brush our moral grounding and provide a feeling of self-righteousness and a consequent feel-good sensation about the work we do, a lot remains to be done in terms of how to address these privileges and make them shift from the thesis, articles, and essays as well as workshops and conferences in which we intellectualize about it to effectively make transformations in people’s lives who we all claim we are working for, and here like Antonio Gramsci I am going all organic (pun intended).

There is a load of money and privileges circulating around academics, activists and the state while the communities remain in need. Scholars, universities and the state receive huge amounts of funding from different organizations to carry out the work of mitigating and adapting to climate change; experts are made which will then become the new elite thinkers who are capable of attracting money and accumulating fame – privilege. Activism is not exempt from this. Many activists are currently made in Mozambique (I would speculate, around the world as well) taking into account how “environmentalism is a job that pays well”, it is easy to explain the proliferation of environmental NGOs, university programmes and research institutes in this field in a short period of time in Mozambique. The soil is indeed fertile.

In my everyday life as an environmental student, topics such as HIV-AIDS, Malaria and poverty seem so far distant and dwarfed by such a high profile catch phrase like climate change which proliferates at a very high rate and speed. However, the fact is that Carbon Dioxide continues to rise; capitalism still thrives: REDD+, extractive industries and economy, monocultures, land grabbing, militarized conservation, corruption, poor governance, economic crisis, war, socio-economic and regional inequalities continue to dance mockingly in the face of all the big money, big data, and big moral groundings in Mozambique. I reckon all these are fertile soils for the elites to thrive while the rural communities continue spiraling in poverty despite the fact of being “noble savages” who hold “good traditional knowledges” that need to be taken into account for “conservation”. These communities while remaining without income continue to be source of income to these elites which are mostly educated, local, urban and international, myself included.

What’s at stake here? I sense that there is another layer of extraction that most of us are implicated in and have not yet been able to effectively address. This goes back to idea of ethics and justice. This extractivism which is being carried out by activists, scientists, and NGOs also needs to be addressed and combated in the same way we combat CO2, capitalism and other maladies of our times. In Mozambique most NGOs are born in urban areas, and work in rural areas where they supposedly “open the eyes” of the communities to the extractions that take place in their forests, rivers, mountains, lakes – significant others nonhumans. However, the funding usually goes to the NGOs and the communities are left to fight against an outside enemy like CO2, REDD+, colonialism, etc., and these NGOs as well as the communities cannot account for another kind of extraction that is going on. The same goes for natural scientists. These visit communities (in the case of Mabo they usually just go straight to the mountain) to study species, plants (mostly medicinal or of commercial use) people or both (my case) then leave the site, publish articles about their discoveries, findings, and circulate around their circles of prestige and privileges, while the communities stay behind watching the field site (and their dangerous ambitious peers) for the scientists so that these can later come back to their backyards for more. The only source of income local communities have in the case of Mount Mabo is literally carrying the load of modernity in their backs at very low rates. Institutions that were supposed to fight this modern day slavery find themselves also being fieldworkers or foot soldiers of foreign institutions who frame the issues because they own the money and expertise.

What will you leave behind? This question was posed to me when I first visited the local administration in Lugela district in Zambezia Province last year and I didn’t know exactly what to say. I will publish my thesis in which I will write a chapter about my privileges, become a PhD and that’s pretty much it. Maybe along the course of my fieldwork I will discuss this and that issue that will raise people’s awareness to an issue – maybe. My thesis will be written in English and people here can barely speak Portuguese.

I feel that I am continuing what others have called rural environmental injustice or in less fancy words the exploitation of the rural poor communities for my personal, professional and academic gain while fighting against capitalism, colonialism and C02. I will have the communities carry my bags, host me, feed me, and give me information for no (or next to no fee) as scholars (social scientists) cannot pay local communities while carrying out their fieldwork. It must be a gift economy while our work sits on the giant shoulders of commodity economy (universities are not free). Isn’t this the kind of science the colonizers were doing? Are we not in time to revise this kind of ethics? If yes, how do we start?

I am aware that some NGOs, activists, scientists and state officials do take the communities’ issues seriously and work for the benefit of communities from their hearts, but even these ones need to critically look at the work they are doing and see how they might or not be replicating the very same system that they branded as devilish –I argue that this system can be a devil within. The same goes for local communities which most of the romantic scientists and activists as branded as the ever “good savages” with “good traditional knowledges” who are trapped between the guts of modernity and tradition but for some magical reason manage to keep their “traditions pure”. Power struggles in these communities also unfold. The little money that NGOs, activists, state officials and others leave here creates new kinds of cartographies and categories of people and resulting conflicts. Some poor rural individuals sell their knowleges, their nature, their dead, and their kin for money, which means that the commodity economy and extractivism has hit in the core of what means to be human or nonhuman in these areas.

The possible way out of this are the very same mantras we have been monotonously chanting since the times of HIV-AIDS, Malaria, poverty, wars and now climate change – dialogue, participation, involvement and cooperation (Yawn!). I also argue that we also need to acknowledge that the enemy is not only outside but also within each one of us, and understanding how our own work can be a vehicle for the replication of the evil system we are fighting against. The privilege should not just be discussed and sat comfortably on a chapter of a thesis but be translated into effective transformations in local people’s lives.

We all need funding because I know almost no NGO, university, politician, activist, researcher can work for free in the current time-for-money epoch, but the same should be valid for the communities. It’s time there is transformation in the ways we do our work in Mozambique to avoid accumulation of negative issues which somewhere else has been called a “negative moment”. Decolonization entails this kind of structural transformation.