Translation of the French article by Jacques Rouchaud
We were taught to respect books. Diplomas. Reports. Experts. We were taught that truth is found in libraries and in the offices of ministries.
Book knowledge is not the key. The key, very often, is the simple knowledge of local people: the village woman, the fisherman, the farmer, the shepherd. A single person who knows their land is often worth more than a huge army of experts from elsewhere. And in the poorest regions of the world, it is this knowledge that saves lives.
The Sundarbans: 20,000 women against the sea
This afternoon, on Arte, a report: “India: the green army of the Sundarbans” (ARTE Reportage).
The Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, stretch between India and Bangladesh, in the Bay of Bengal. More than five million people, among the poorest on the planet, live there. The sea advances, cyclones strike, and according to the report, four islands have been entirely swallowed up in twenty-five years.
Who is fighting on the front line? Not a ministry, not an institute. Women, led by a remarkable woman. She knew. She knew the effect of planting mangroves: roots that hold the mud, land that rebuilds itself, a sea that retreats. No report taught her this; it was the knowledge of her own land.
She brought together the women of the villages. Today there are 20,000 of them, dressed in green saris like the forests they are saving. With shovels, pickaxes and binoculars, they have planted more than 16 million mangrove trees in fifteen years. Their roots slow the currents, break the force of the waves and protect the villages during cyclones. That is the only army that has pushed back the sea: a green army of local women, not an army of experts.
The griots already knew
None of this is new. In Africa, people have known for a very long time that the mangrove protects the land, feeds families and holds back the sea. But this knowledge was never written down. It exists in no book. Only the griots, those guardians of memory, could teach it, by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
And because it was not written, the “learned people” did not see it. For them, what is not on paper does not exist. They had to “rediscover” it, years later, with studies and conferences.
The man who stopped the desert
In Burkina Faso, a farmer, Yacouba Sawadogo, turned land taken by the desert green again. Without a degree in agronomy. He took up and improved an ancient technique from his region, zaï: dig small pits, add manure, wait for the rain. The water stays, the seeds sprout, the trees grow back. Where people said nothing would ever grow again, a forest returned.
For a long time, people mocked him. Then the experts came to see. And they understood that the farmer was right.
The shepherd and the sky
Look at the shepherd in the mountains. He has no satellite, no computer. But he reads the sky above his valley: the colour of the clouds that announce the storm, the wind that turns before the rain, the mist rising from the stream, his animals growing restless before bad weather. For his mountain, for tomorrow morning, he forecasts the weather far better than the weather experts, who look at the map of a whole country from their office.
Why? Because he is there. Every day. For years. Like his father before him. The land does not lie.
For poor regions, it is a matter of life
In rich countries, an expert’s mistake costs money. In poor regions, it costs harvests, homes, lives. There, there is no money to wait for the next report. What is needed is what works, right now, with what is at hand.
And what works is often local knowledge:
- It costs almost nothing. Shovels, seeds, hands. No imported machines, no debts.
- It is adapted. It was born of this land, this climate, this water. It was not designed for another country.
- It feeds people. The mangrove gives fish, crabs, honey and wood. Zaï gives millet and sorghum. Protected land becomes land that sustains life again.
- It restores confidence. When a village sees that its own actions save it, it stands up again. It no longer waits for help from above. It acts.
- It is passed on. What a mother shows her daughter, what an elder tells the young, stays in the village. No one can confiscate it.
Book knowledge is not useless. The scholar can measure, verify, explain, and help spread what works. But he must listen first. He must learn from the ground before wanting to teach it.
This is the method of demosciocracy
Demosciocracy does not put power in the mouths of those who speak best. It puts it in the hands of those who know and who do:
- Power starts from the district, where people know their ground. They are the first to see the problem and they know the solutions.
- Territories are autonomous in their management: what suits a coast does not suit a mountain. Each decides according to its reality.
- Representatives are drawn by lot among citizens, with parity: the shepherd, the fisherwoman, the farmer, the craftswoman, the elder who remembers. Not only graduates and smooth talkers.
- The Chamber of Corporations brings together those who work with their hands and their know-how, on equal terms with the Chamber of the People.
- The scholar remains useful, but in his place: he enlightens, he measures, he verifies. He replaces neither experience on the ground nor the memory of the people.
Masters, the sea does not read your reports
While you were writing, the coast was retreating. While you debated at conferences, with canapés and paid plane tickets, whole islands were disappearing. While you searched for a learned name for the solution, the griots of Africa had been teaching it for generations, without books, without diplomas, without subsidies, without a platform. And in the Sundarbans, it was women in green saris, not a committee of experts, who planted 16 million trees.
You invented nothing. You did not even listen. What was not written, you despised. What came from the ground, you called folklore. Then you “rediscovered”. Then you signed the study. And you still want to be listened to first?
The sea does not read your reports. The mangrove does not know your titles. The desert does not retreat before your diplomas. And the shepherd does not need you to know it will rain tomorrow. What holds the land are roots, and the hands that plant them.
The time of the masters of words is over. What the griots of Africa passed on, the green army of the Sundarbans applies; what India and Burkina Faso do, Egypt, Tunisia and France can do tomorrow, from people to people, without asking anyone’s permission.
You talk. The people plant. Demosciocracy decides.
And end every gathering, every rally, by singing together the Song of the Demosciocrats, to the tune of La Marseillaise: “Liberty, Equality, Long live Truth!”
🎵 Listen to the Song of the Demosciocrats · Read the lyrics
Liberty — Equality — Truth.
No one is master, no one is weak.
Contact: jacques.rouchaud@me.com
Thank you for your comments
Mercidevoscommentaires