busride musings

On the hour long bus ride from Moshupa to Gaborone yesterday morning, my ever-jumping thought process landed me briefly on Antonio Gramsci, the intellectual who grappled with the question of why communism didn’t work out as Marx predicted and who might best be recognized as the guy who coined the (now much over-used) term “hegemony”. His writings were later published in “The Prison Notebooks”, excerpts from which I read in my Development Studies class this past spring. Gramsci talked about the need for “organic intellectuals”, in contrast to Marx’s vanguard class. Unlike the vanguard class which was supposed to use its intellectualism/enlightenment to lead the workers in revolution, organic intellectuals, according to Gramsci, were not supposed to “lead” anything, per say. From what I can remember (and its a bit hazy), organic intellectuals were instead supposed to facilitate and foster what organic mass social movements already existed within the People. These individuals should arise from movements themselves, not create movements.
Anyways, WHY was I thinking about this?? Because on my bus ride I had the somewhat cynical thought that the priorities of the people on the bus had very little to do with the focus of my own research in this country—wildlife and community-based resource management (CBNRM) programs that attempt to create benefits from wildlife for local peoples in order to incentivize conservation. The mamas on this bus were thinking about what shopping had to get done, the twenty-somethings were sms-ing their friends in Gabs, and the handful of kids in tow just looked happy that it was Saturday and they were taking an outing into the big city. I’d just finished reading a book that mentioned some of the environmental movements that have started among indigenous Amazonian communities fighting oil companies and their destructive practices, and I thought about how passion, anger—emotion in general, really—seems to be the driving force behind these grassroots place-based environmental organizations. I couldn’t help but contrast those movements to CBNRM programs here, which have been started by foreign conservationist academics and basically placed upon communities. And it’s not like all of these communities are resentful of the programs—many in fact hold out great hope for the benefits intended to result from CBNRM. The thing is though, that a sense exists that a small group of ‘enlightened’ outsiders are leading (or in very unsuccessful cases dragging) these communities by the hand. There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of energy, passion or sense of purpose created within the communities involved in CBNRM, and perhaps its a result of the fact that they haven’t started any ‘movement’ themselves as have groups in the Amazon; instead they’ve had a model presented to them by those who claim to “know” how it should work out. In Gramscian terms, perhaps what’s missing are the organic intellectuals.
Anyways, those were my brief musings of the morning, until I got to Gabs and indulged in an afternoon of watching the new Harry Potter movie on the big screen, eating ice-cream, and paying for a two-hour wash and dry laundry service. Oh, Gaborone, what a big city you now seem....