A Boy, an Island, a Country
A Boy, an Island, a Country
Tanner Clegg
The water is high and flat and the canoe is pointed toward the gaps between the islands. The thatch rooftops on the houses on the islands comb the underbellies of lethargic clouds. Bubbles repopulate in water displaced by the small motor at the back of the boat. We are moving north and west.
A small Bijagós man with a large fishing pole is sitting next to me. He casts, he lets the lure sink to the floor, he flips the rusted bail arm, he trawls. The fish match the clouds today, but he is patient. A bonga, which is something of a staple fish in the region, is deceived by the skittering jig, and the man is rewarded with 35 centimeters of lunch. He takes his knit cap off his head and dries the reel.
Humans aren’t the bonga’s only predator: the fish is routinely caught in the maws of nurse sharks and saltwater crocodiles. Bonga are not, however, eaten by the saltwater hippos or manatees of the region. These oceanic mammals are generally herbivorous, our makeshift captain explains in Bissauan Kiriol while gripping the steering tiller. “Besides, the hippos are nearer to Orango. You won’t see them over here.”
The Bijagós archipelago and its associated stockpile of biodiversity became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1996. Orango is the largest of the archipelago’s 88 member islands. Bubaque, this morning’s launch site, is the most populous of the bunch, and has a long, straight, and seashell-paved road that perfectly bisects the island. Today we are headed to the ihla de Formosa, which is Macote’s childhood home. Macote’s muscular frame is covered by a gray tank top, board shorts, and a New York Yankees ball cap, and he’s smiling more than usual because he “can’t wait to see [his] mother.” Our small canoe crew—the driver, the fisherman, myself—notices his excitement.
Macote Ambrozio in a Yankees Cap
The green water merges with the heavy sky, and the islands are rendered distinct from this water-sky connectivity only because they manage to be a bit greener. A small canoe passes us, and it is brimming out the sides with a bundle of yellow roof-thatch material. The bundle’s escapee stalks swirl in the canoe’s trail of bubbles. The people aboard are going home with a home. The Atlantic’s escapee salt molecules cling to their nasal passages.
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Macote Ambrozio was born on February 14, 1982 in Acuno, a village in northeast Formosa. His earliest memories involve fishing and walking, and for good reason: he did a lot of both. “I walked at least 8 kilometers a day,” he recently told me over the phone, because, “my school, in Abu, was 4 kilometers from Acuno.” Because Acuno didn’t—and doesn’t—have electricity, Macote spent the dark evenings awkwardly stooped by a fire, his homework strategically cupped to catch the flames’ photons. He studied like this from 1st to 4th grade.
“When you weren’t walking to school or doing schoolwork, what were you doing?”
“I was fishing,” he tells me. “My dad passed away when I was seven, and I had to help my mom…by fishing and rice farming.”
Macote channels delicacy while explaining this to me: he understands and appreciates the West’s presuppositions apropos working children, but he doesn’t think his community should be blamed. As in much of rural West Africa, children in the Bijagós work hard to support their respective kin groups’ sustenance structures. “We had to make do with the environment we were given,” Macote explains. In the just world Macote yearns to bring about, Bijagós children would climb palm trees for fun, not for palm oil.
A particularly frightening childhood fishing experience is recalled. On a cloudy morning Macote and his cousin, Augusto Ambrozio, hitched a canoe ride with a stranger who was traveling to a nearby island in search of honey. The island offered fantastic fishing: the two boys quickly stacked their stringers with as many fish as they could carry. But good fishing is often the forebear of bad weather, and by midday thunderheads began to crawl across the archipelago. Sheets of rain were inconvenienced, but not deterred, by the island’s canopy during their downward journey, and Macote and Augusto found themselves soaked, cold and alone. The honey hunting stranger had either found the motherlode of all honey or was keeping dry in the root skirt of a big tree. The boys waited for him, and waited longer. After imagining themselves sitting in the lousy weather for an unknown number of additional hours, and after contemplating the morality of leaving the stranger marooned on the island without his boat, the boys killed their catch, tied the stringers around their feet, and began swimming through raindrop ripples toward Formosa.
A large channel separated the island from Formosa, and though he was young, Macote was not naïve to the sorts of lurking dangers therein: Acuno village educated its children in the way of toothy, oceanic hazards. Dragging a freshly-slain configuration of fish across a wide, nutrient-rich channel during a storm seemed to break a lot of rules. The boys sought to balance fast swimming with inconspicuous swimming, and they made it to the safety of Formosa’s guardian mangroves with all limbs intact. With the first danger (sharks) averted, they now had to manage another: their parents couldn’t know about the dangerous swim.
The honey hunter, who had spent the afternoon scouring the small island in search of the missing boys, clamored into Acuno later that evening, ready to break bad news to the boys’ parents. His sorrow slid to anger when he learned that Macote and Augusto had already made it back. Proudly spoiling the boys’ plans to not be outed, the honey hunter explained the situation to Macote’s mother. “We were in big trouble,” Macote says, and he was in big trouble with the very person whom he looked up to most.
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Bijagós cultures are matriarchal and matrilineal. Women call the sociopolitical shots, and descent is traced through the maternal parent. “My mom held more cultural, familial, and decision making power than men,” Macote tells me. “In the Bijagós ethnic group, women hold more power. Women propose to men instead of the other way around.”
Macote has always been fond of his mother, and is a product of her tutelage. By her side he learned to hunt, fish, farm, build, and run a business. She also taught him how to manage civic affairs, how to resolve interpersonal or community-level conflict, and how to build relationships. The death of Macote’s father only brought him closer to his mother. “We have a special relationship,” he says. “I am closer to her than anyone else in my family.”
Macote’s mom helped him with his first business venture. The nearest market to Acuno was in Abu, the village of Macote’s school, and community members had to walk 8 kilometers round trip to buy vegetables. “The rice and fish sometimes weren’t enough to live off,” Macote explains, so villagers used the market in Abu to supplement their food supply. Macote decided to open a small store in Acuno, so his friends and family wouldn’t have to walk far to buy food. He describes the operation: “I climbed to the tops of palm trees, got palm oil, took a canoe to Bissau with my mom, and sold it. Then, I would take the money from the palm oil and buy vegetables, which I would take back to Acuno to sell in my store.” By age 12, Macote, with some help from mom, was running a sophisticated business operation.
These precocious problem-solving talents would neatly transfer into educational domains. After finishing the 4th grade—the highest level the school in Abu offered—Macote wanted to move to Bissau, the capital city of Guinea Bissau, to pursue high school-level education. But because he didn’t have any connections on the mainland, he “had to stay on the island for, like, six years,” after which his brother, who had been studying at an electrician school in Cuba, came back to Formosa, put Macote on a canoe, and took him to live in Bissau.
Macote excelled in high school. In 2006, the Brazilian government awarded him a scholarship, enabling him to move to Sau Paulo and complete an associate degree. “I went from Formosa”—which, in a 2009 census, registered a population of 1,873—“to the fourth-biggest city in the world!” As Macote explains this to me, he praises the Brazilian educational exchange program while thumbing his nose at less efficacious methods of foreign aid disbursement: “Brazil believed in building human resources in developing countries, instead of just throwing money at them.” Macote is also a fierce critic of the IMF and World Bank, whose austerity-inducing structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) drained the budgets of public education programs in Guinea Bissau, leaving it with the eighth-worst Human Development Index scores in the world.
Here is Macote’s “educational journey,” as he calls it: Abu became Bissau, Bissau became Sau Paulo, Sau Paulo became Panama Beach, Florida, Florida became Utah Valley, Utah, and Utah Valley became Salt Lake City, Utah. Macote picked up languages, visas and degrees as he moved across the continents. He also picked up an acute awareness of something he didn’t experience in Bissau: racism. “In Bissau, I never had to face racism. We are all black. It was always just something on TV, something happening in South Africa, the United States, or somewhere else. But in Sau Paulo and the United States, I had my first experiences with racism. I began to see how it affected things. I had to adjust. I had to learn how to behave. I had to speak softly with police officers. I had to keep my hands on the steering wheel when I was pulled over.”
The change in landscape was also jarring. Sau Paulo was all about skyscrapers, and Utah was all about skyscraping mountains and snow. I am scared that asking him about his “first time seeing snow” will out me as a trite interlocutor, so I am lucky when he tells me, unprompted, “I had never seen snow in my life. Seeing it for the first time was amazing. I had to go touch it, feel it, drive on it. I just couldn’t believe it! Every time I return to Utah, I get the same feeling again.”
Macote was less eager to talk about mountains—they made him sad. While the snow offered novelty, the mountains reminded him of how much he missed the ocean, the rainforests, the rivers, the islands. “At some point, I got tired of waking up and seeing mountains; I wanted to wake up and see the ocean. It was tough for me to adapt to the mountains.” I ask him if the Great Salt Lake placated his penchant for oceans.
“No, no.”
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If there’s one thing that became clear to Macote as he completed bachelor and master degrees in Utah, it’s that he needed to get back to Bissau. It was weighing on him; he couldn’t bear the thought of his fellow Bissauans being denied access to education. He tells me that his single most galvanizing educational experience in the US was learning JFK’s immortalized maxim: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
This may strike the reader as hyperbolic, if not platitudinous, but let me assure you: Macote is one of the rare few who walk the walk. Soon after graduating with an MS in International Affairs and Global Enterprise from the University of Utah, he founded an NGO, the “Macote Entrepreneur Center,” (MEC) which seeks to fill the social void left by a nonexistent public education system in Guinea Bissau. English, entrepreneurship, and conflict resolution pedagogies are emphasized in his curricula. His school, located in Bissau, has attracted a wide variety of students. When I was teaching there, my classroom was full of farmers from rural villages, street vendors from Bissau’s metropolitan sprawl, and senators and bureaucrats from parliament. Macote recently submitted a proposal to the Bissauan government that would involve the creation his dream: a university in the Bijagós archipelago. He wants it to become a destination university for people of all West African countries. The government has tentatively granted him access to land, and he is in the process of attracting donors.
Macote speaks to journalists at the school
Efforts to bolster education outcomes may be moot without a sophisticated plan to address political-economic corruption, however, so Macote is also running for congress. If he wins, and he thinks he will, he will claim one of the three seats allotted to the Bijagos islands district. Elections are scheduled for March 2023.
But the government of Guinea Bissau is notoriously unstable. The country has been devastated by four coups, over a dozen substantive conflicts, and even a civil war since its independence from totalitarian Portuguese rule in 1974, and the threat of political violence is ambient. In February of this year, for example, an unknown armed group attempted an unsuccessful coup.
By exploiting the absence of strong institutional structures, the current incumbent government is trying to bar Macote’s party from holding its preliminary elections, he tells me. “We were supposed to have our convention yesterday,” he tells me over the phone, “but the police wouldn’t let us hold our meetings. They’re trying to keep the PAIGC out of parliament.” The PAIGC, or ‘African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde,’ was originally formed by Amilcar Cabral, who directed Guinea Bissau’s and Cape Verde’s guerilla resistance against Portuguese colonizers. It is a major—and popular—party in Guinea Bissau, and credibly threatens the incumbent government’s power arrangements.
We end the interview in this weird, uncertain space. Macote must scramble to find a way to salvage the convention: a selective process must take place, or candidates, including himself, will be unable to run next year. Much is still up in the hot, viscous air.
Unmistakably frustrated at the affair, his voice remains, nevertheless, firm, deep, almost comforting. Macote has operated in conditions of uncertainty for his entire life.
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The mangrove forest is like a concentric circle model—it hosts an outer, middle, and inner wall—and the forest’s thickness obeys a centripetal gradient; the closer to the center, the thicker. We’ve passed through the outer mangrove wall, and two small boys are helping us dock our canoe on a sandbar. We must switch from one canoe to another, as the initial canoe is too wide to navigate the spindly avicennia corridors that lead to Acuno. The boys, who had been fishing when we arrived, remind Macote of his childhood.
winding through mangrove corridors
We wind through the tunneling sinews of the inner mangrove forest until our canoe hits solid ground. We walk up a well-traveled trail, passing a seashell-studded water well that sits just below the high tide line. “This is where we get all our water,” Macote says. “It’s a miracle that we can get water from here: the well is covered by the ocean at high tide.”
Macote’s mother, who knows Macote is coming, meets us on the trail before we reach the Acuno. They embrace. The sun shines hot on the thatch roofs as we eat rice together.
Macote's mom, a village matriarch
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