Carnet de voyage

The suns of hope

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Carnet d'exploration anthropographique autour de savoir-faire durables en Afrique de l'Est.
Du 1er janvier 2020 au 1er janvier 2023
1097 jours
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In January 2020, we decided to embark on a collaborative adventure: writing an illustrated book on sustainable know-how in East Africa for the general public. A cross between a travel diary and a scientific account, this project is the result of a 7-month field study in three African countries: Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi. Combining our skills as anthropologist and illustrator-engineer, we set out to meet creative individuals who, every day, think and rethink their relationship with the environment, with others and with the world.

In this book, we present alternative and committed ways of being and doing that respond to pressing socio-environmental issues. As we know, these issues are the result of a global crisis, but they are expressed differently on every side of the world, giving rise to a profusion of unique innovations that are invaluable for our common future.

The originality of this project lies not so much in the subject it explores, but rather in the actors it brings to light. There have been countless calls to rethink innovation, but even today very few of them mention African initiatives. And yet, while the African continent is bearing the full brunt of drought, overfishing, pollution and the social injustices associated with them, it is also brimming with potential and inventiveness. We wanted to (re)give body and voice to individuals too often left in the shadows and in silence.


The authors

Inès Pasqueron de Fommervault has a doctorate in anthropology. Her current research - conducted within the IMAF (Institut des Mondes Africains) laboratory - examines ordinary and utopian acts of resistance embodied by various actors in Tanzania.

Rémi Leroy is a renewable energy engineer. Several years ago, he decided to devote himself fully to his other passion: drawing. Today, he works with researchers (anthropologists, oceanographers, biologists) to make scientific work more aesthetically pleasing and convey it beyond words.

For the last 7 years, we've been sharing our lives and working together in the field in East Africa, developing a more colourful, more nuanced form of anthropological research that renegotiates the usual academic constraints.


Writing: Inès Pasqueron de Fommervault ([email protected])

Illustrations: Rémi Leroy ([email protected] | Instagram | Website)

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It has become commonplace to blame the machine and condemn the technical nature of a humanity that seems to be driven only by the insatiable desire for illusory ‘progress’. And with good reason: history has painfully demonstrated the extent to which the machine, by enslaving Man, can prove exterminating.

While some machines appear to be ‘besieged by disfigured dreams’, as Malraux wrote, we must not forget that other machines are driven by ‘admirable dreams’. The inventors we met in the Twende workshop in Arusha are precisely those who are inviting us to rethink our relationship with the machine, opening the way to a possible reconciliation. In Swahili, Twende means ‘let's go’, and that's what this is all about: creating machines that can (re)activate a human impulse. It's the machine that will be in the spotlight in the pages that follow, and the images will tell their story, probably better than the words they are deprived of.

Twende's premises are located at the end of a small, winding dirt track, and are as humble as they are uncluttered: a vast room, two offices, little or nothing, a few planks of wood, tools scattered around the walls, machines arranged in a jumble - that's what the décor of this ideas laboratory looks like.

This world may be minimalist, but every day it is filled with countless inventions that reflect a rare and unwavering ethos. It all began with Jim and Bernard, the two founders. Fascinated by mechanics and unparalleled inventors, they decided to work together, driven by the same conviction: ‘We wanted everyone who has ideas, intuitions, to be able to believe in them, to believe in them enough to see them through to the end and develop machines that could improve the lives of Tanzanians’ sums up Jim. The initial idea was to create a space for reflection and experimentation open to anyone who wanted to join. The only ‘condition of admission’ is that you must have an invention and be willing to share and apply it.

The machines created at Twende are as minimalist as the offices in which they were designed: they're made from bits and pieces, easy to build and repair, inexpensive - in short, the very example of low-tech!

It seems impossible to sum up Twende's actions in just a few lines, given that they affect so many players and raise so many social and environmental issues. So we thought that a few examples would be more evocative than a necessarily fragmentary and reductive summary. Here, then, is the story of three men and their machines who, on a daily basis, strive to rethink the world.


Frank andMaassai Conservation Agriculture Technology

Tall, handsome, adorned with the finest jewellery and painted in a thousand colours, the Maasai have become an icon of prejudiced ‘African tradition’, a symbol of resistance to so-called ‘modernity’. Widely fantasised and stereotyped, today everyone praises their strength and beauty, but few are aware of their fragility.

History has established them as one of the great herding peoples, a way of life that today no longer has the same scope. Climate change, combined with growing urbanisation, has impoverished and depleted the vast Maasai lands, inevitably obstructing livestock farming.

Frank grew up in a small Maasai village and, aware of these difficulties, he devotes his life to improving the daily lives of his own people. He knows, and has learnt to accept, that the Maasai can no longer be content to be herders and must now add a new arrow to their bow as legendary warriors. The machine he conceived and designed in Twende was born of this more or less forced metamorphosis, in the light of which the Maasai must also become farmers.

His invention, like all those that have come out of Twende, is the result of the same conviction. What we call ‘leftovers’ can in fact be powerful fertilisers for innovation. The leftovers in question here are both organic and mechanical. Frank's aim is simple: to promote maassai farming by reusing livestock excrement as a natural fertiliser, using alow-techmanual manure spreader.

His machine may be innovative, but it does not break withtradition. The Maasai have a long tradition of reusing the dung from their cattle. Still used today as mortar in the construction of houses, cow dung is also used as fuel for domestic activities. By developing his manual spreader, Frank is simply making the most of this raw material, the inexhaustible wealth of the Massai, by giving it a new use. And if this machine is spreading a wind of hope for all the villagers, it is undoubtedly the women who are exuding it the most. Traditionally, livestock rearing has been a strictly male preserve, and Maasai women have long been confined to the confines of the home. By bringing his manual spreader into many homes, Frank is encouraging farming and enabling many women to fulfil their potential in other ways.

This machine is amazing for its efficiency, but it is just as amazing, if not more so, for the harmonious symbiosis it embodies, managing to combine ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, two phenomena that are too often seen in terms of rupture or antagonism rather than continuity. Culture is a moving phenomenon, never finished, never fixed, always in the process of being created in a constant state of evolution.

The development of agriculture does not mean abandoning Maasai culture, but only reappropriating it and shaping it in the light of current concerns. Frank knows this better than anyone. To carry out his work, he now lives in the city, far from the countryside, and he makes no secret of the fact that he feels he has abandoned part of his identity. And yet, convinced that sometimes you have to reinvent yourself in order to find yourself, he ends up confiding in us: ‘Today, I live in the city, I have nice clothes, my children go to school and I have a house like the one you have in Europe. You might think I've lost my culture. I would say yes and no. It's because I've moved away that I've been able to reconnect with Maasai culture. It was because I became aware of the problems that I fled the villages, and this flight enabled me to imagine this project. I lost myself, the better to find myself, to come back, I had to leave’.

Colman: wheelchairs for hope

Among all the inventors we have had the chance to meet, there is also Colman, a young man with a frank smile and no less sincere altruism.

He started working at Twende as part of a work placement while still a university student. Offered once a year, these internships reflect Twende's other major ambition: to forge links between two entities that rarely have the opportunity to work together: young engineers/technicians and village communities. The underlying idea is an ambitious one: villagers come and explain to engineers and technicians the problems they face, and over a period of several weeks they work together to design a machine capable of solving them.

For Colman, it all began when therapist Sudi Muli came into contact with Twende. A spokesperson for another neglected population, Sudi Muli runs a special school in Arusha for children with physical and cerebral disabilities, the first of its kind in Tanzania. Driven by self-sacrifice, hope and passion, it wasn't long before Sudi Muli convinced Colman to take action on behalf of the disabled. Their aim: to make a sturdy, versatile wheelchair that doesn't cost much or take up too much space.

There are wheelchairs in Tanzania, but most of them, imported from India or China, are totally unsuited to the African context. Particularly expensive, these wheelchairs also lack the sturdiness needed to withstand Tanzania's dirt and thorny roads. What's more, these chairs require a whole host of essential accessories for putting the child to bed, sitting down and getting up, accessories that are difficult to store in the small mud huts that dot the villages. In the light of all these inadequacies, reflections of a commendable but inadequate international solidarity, Colman and Sudi Muli decided to act together to create a wheelchair that, this time, would meet the expectations of local communities.

Over a period of weeks, they met, discussed, drew, built, deconstructed and rebuilt various prototypes, until they came up with a chair made from robust and inexpensive materials (brake cables, bicycle wheels, belts, salvaged here and there, etc.), but above all capable of offering the three positions essential to the proper physical and mental development of children, without the need for other accessories.

Today, the smiles on the faces of the four children who have benefited from these chairs are enough to justify the merits of the Twende company, and in itself rekindles the spirit of humanity on which it was founded.


Bernard: transmission or the driving force behind innovation

Bernard, co-founder of Twende, is one of the most passionate inventors we met during our stay. With his deep, benevolent gaze, he welcomes us into his home, a secret palace and, what's more, an Ali Baba's cave brimming with creative and frugal inventions. Strolling through his garden is an uncommonly enchanting experience. Behind a banana tree hides a wind turbine that triggers a washing machine, which in turn faces a fridge that works without electricity, behind which stands a recycled bicycle capable of pumping water... Just a few of the many machines that bear witness to Bernard's prodigious ingenuity, as he wanted his house to be a place of inspiration for scientists and passers-by alike.

Bernard has always been firmly convinced that ‘transmission’ is at the root of all invention, based on the principle that you never create from nothing and that inspiration draws its creative force first and foremost from learning. After setting up workshops for adults, he chose to devote his time to children, who are a material that is never raw, but more easily modelled. Young people still have the precious ability to constantly renegotiate their thoughts and certainties. Doubting, imagining, dreaming, believing, no longer believing, trying, making mistakes, trying again, are the very condition of innovation.

So for several years now Bernard has been making all kinds of games, miniature prototypical machines, to pass on, or rather cultivate, this art of doubt and experiment. There are no winners or losers in these games, only apprentice scientists.

This chapter, full of innovative hope, shows that Man, like the machine, is always capable of improvement, provided he concedes that he has been damaged, and that he has damaged in turn, and now agrees to repair himself in order to repair the World.

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In one of his fables, Jean de la Fontaine wrote: ‘You must oblige everyone as much as you can: You often need someone smaller than you. Well, the story we're telling you here is proof of that moral. It's loud, it's annoying, it's disgusting, and yet the fly could well be the keystone of our future! Rethinking rubbish, glorifying the insect and magnifying the larva - such is the ambition of this astonishing technique and, more modestly, of these few lines which, at times, take on the appearance of a fable: ‘The fly and the waste’.

L’histoire commence en Tanzanie, sur les places magistrales des marchés de la capitale. Loin des salles aseptisées auxquelles nous sommes habitués, ici, les marchés regorgent de beauté. Dans les étroites ruelles, les corps se collent, se bousculent et s’entremêlent, les voix se superposent et se confondent…toujours la même ritournelle ! Des marchés tanzaniens, ce sont également des couleurs éclatantes et des odeurs alléchantes dont on se souvient. Car de ce paradis des sens, les fruits et les légumes sont la quintessence.

Strollers and dreamers be damned, there's more to the market than the enchanting images that disappear as the day goes by. In some of the streets that border it, mountains of rubbish overflow. The colours are still there, but they're fading, and the smells are better than ever, but now it's all about rotting fruit and vegetables.

Although less dangerous than plastic, the situation is no less critical. In Tanzania, more than 50% of waste is organic and soils the streets of this beautiful region of Africa. The problem of managing this waste is not just aesthetic, it is also, and above all, hygienic. For thousands of families, it is a vector of disease, affecting and saddening their lives.

In the heights of Dar Es Salam, just a few minutes from the business centre and the beautiful seaside neighbourhoods, a pestilential landscape unfolds all along the city. Countless rubbish dumps obstruct the view and give these places a very sad look. No-one would want to stay in such a repulsive and disturbing environment, except perhaps the few chickens and dozens of goats that manage to find some food... for them, damaged vegetables and fruit are always better than bitter asphalt. Unfortunately, some of the most destitute families also live in these abandoned neighbourhoods, their neighbours being this murderous rubbish. Living in makeshift shelters made of metal sheets and crates, their lives are taciturn; but these families have had no choice but to get used to this unjust insalubrity. This is the case of Amina, her sister, her three daughters and her two grandchildren, whose life of hardship and pain has led them to make a rubbish dump their dark home.

This family, which for a time seems to have been rejected by the world, lives alongside Samuel, who has come to live in the capital to become a singer. After several months of stormy and fruitless searching, he had no choice but to settle in the middle of the rubbish. As the days go by, his life fades and his dreams wither. He shows us his infected wounds, caused by this polluted environment, wounds that will take a long time to heal. He tells us about his suffering, the suffering that doesn't show itself and that even time won't heal this time. They are the victims, the city's forgotten people, the ones we don't listen to, the ones we prefer not to hear, the ones we don't look at, the ones we pretend not to see.

To combat the insensitivity and indifference of this growing urban population, waste management must be a priority. It was this conviction that prompted the Biobuu team to take action, developing an unusual skill: the domestication of a fly known as the ‘ black soldier ’. Healthy and harmless, this fly is a warrior in its own right. It only lives for a few days, but it is not without its bravery, because Biobuu is now making it clean up the streets of rubbish. The so-called warrior prefers love to war. Renowned for her overflowing sexual activity, every day she gives birth to hundreds of lactescent larvae. Whatever their unsightly appearance, these larvae are truly precious to our future. At the Biobuu factory where they are reared, each week they gobble up several kilos of damaged fruit and vegetables.

Larvae with a thousand secrets: even their excrement is used as fertiliser. After their grandiose feast, the larvae finally undergo their final metamorphosis and become quality food for thousands of chickens.

There's no doubt about it: the domestication of these warrior flies is the very model of an exemplary circular economy. Thanks to them, waste is no longer decay, but food, and larvae no longer inspire repugnance, but invite recognition. Practical, this technique is no less ethical, because it leads us to rethink our relationship with others, to reconsider the forgotten, those we despise and reject, those we treat as rubbish or impure, whether human or non-human; because as Hawkins pointed out, ‘ To be blind to waste is to be blind to death and loss ’. This concludes the story of the fly and the waste.

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This is the story of a little Newtonian revolution! There's no room for confusion: this is not about Isaac Newton or falling bodies. This is the story of another Newton, Newton Owino, and his own bulwark against the fall of the world: the tanning of fish skins. And since we will be dealing with scientific experiments and chemical formulae, what better way to tell this story than with a demonstrative chronology, structuring all the stages of his brilliant development.

Premises

Newton was born in a Kenyan village at the head of Lake Victoria, in the Kisumu region. As a child, he spent hours observing the lake, its fish and its fishermen. The rhythm of his life was punctuated by the waves of fresh water and the cheeky winds that all too often swept away the foolhardy and the unwary. Newton says that he learnt to swim very early on so that he could save anyone he saw drowning. Fascinated by the environment, in all its sublime and terrible aspects, like this water that is sometimes vital and sometimes lethal, Newton took the path of science and specialised in chemistry.

His story changed when he was just 21. His brother, his sister and their respective spouses were swept away by the disease. A cruel AIDS, a terrible enemy. This tragedy left behind 10 young orphans destined for uncertain fates. With his parents already quite old, Newton suddenly became the pillar of this amputated family. He is still passionate about chemistry, but his priorities have changed and he is haunted by a question of necessity: how can he support this large family? He needs to make money, fast, but not at any price! He'll find a solution that doesn't undermine his convictions.

Hypotheses

As he reads a passage from the Bible, a crazy and luminous intuition occurs to him:

‘ One day, on my way to church, I read about Simon the tanner from Jaffa. The Acts of the Apostles mentioned an outstanding tanner who lived just off the coast of Jerusalem. I got to thinking: if this tanner lived by the sea, maybe he made leather... from fish! This new idea fascinated me. That's what I was going to do, make fish leather ‘.


Experimental protocol and demonstration

Procedure 1: recycling raw materials

The second largest lake in the world, Lake Victoria is home to many marine species.

Every day, hundreds of tonnes of fish are transported to the Kisumu Fish Procesor factory , the largest in the region. Once prepared, the fillets are sent around the world, leaving behind piles of filthy waste: bones, flesh remains, tails, skins (no less than 150,000 tonnes a year!). This waste - which most people are loathe to see, smell or touch - is nonchalantly dumped, loosely piled up opposite the industry where one of Kisumu's biggest shanty towns is located: Obunga. Malodorous, harmful, attracting stray dogs and cats, hyenas, birds of prey and other scavengers, these putrefied remains only add to the insalubrity of this marginalised area. Newton knows this, and his project aims to alleviate this sad reality. Tanning the skin of the fish in fact makes it possible to rehabilitate this degrading and degrading waste.

Procedure 2: finding the formula for natural tanning

This project is all the more beneficial in that Newton, with his strong ecological convictions, has endeavoured to find the formula for local, organic tanning: banana, hibiscus, manioc, papaya, algae (to name but a few). In Kenya, natural leather tanning is unheard of. The country has 7 tanning companies (only Newton's works with fish skin) and they all use various chemicals, including chromium, a particularly harmful toxic metal. Newton is well aware of the dangers: ‘ I may be mad enough to try anything and invent anything,’ he says, ‘ but I'm not so mad as to destroy the environment, my life and the lives of others. Sad madness, alas still all too alienating, that of a ‘ science without conscience “, which we know is only ”the ruin of the soul’.

Newton is the first and to this day one of the only craftsmen in the world to master the art of natural fish skin tanning. His company, ALISAM Products, was founded in 2006. It's an acronym full of meaning and emotion: ‘ ALI “ in tribute to his sister ” Alice “, ” SAM “ to his brother ” Samuel ’, whose death was sadly the catalyst for this fertile project.

Procédure n°3 : lutter contre la stigmatisation et créer des emplois

Si Newton a vite trouvé l'objet de son entreprise, il lui fallut également déterminer ses acteurs. Or dès les prémices, il décide d'inclure dans cette aventure les femmes les plus démunies de sa région. Ce sont principalement elles qui seront au-devant de la scène. « Au Kenya ce sont les femmes qui travaillent le plus », précise Newton, » c'est sur elles que repose toute la famille. Pas sur les hommes. Ici, si tu aides une femme, c'est toute une famille que tu aides, tout un village même. « Dans ce projet, à l'image de tous ceux que nous avons présentés dans cet ouvrage, questions environnementales et enjeux sociaux s'avèrent indissociables.

Toutes les plantes utilisées dans le processus de tannage sont cultivées par des femmes, dont la plupart sont séropositives. Donner du travail à ces femmes marginalisées était une priorité pour Newton. Ici, tout le monde a peur du sida. C'est une maladie de la peur et de la honte. Les gens refusent de côtoyer les malades, craignant d'être touchés à leur tour s'ils restent près d'eux. Les personnes atteintes sont donc exclues. Surtout les femmes, qui se retrouvent encore plus souvent seules, abandonnées de tous et sans travail « . L'impact du sida sur la vie de Newton est typique des ravages qu'il fait dans cette région, où les taux d'infection sont extrêmement élevés. Dans les années 2000 (peu avant que Newton ne se lance dans son projet), une étude menée à Kisumu révélait que 33,7 % des femmes âgées de 14 à 25 ans étaient séropositives...


At ALISAM Products, not only do the women grow the crops, but they are also the ones who prepare the hides for leather. This is the work of the women who live in the shanty town of Obunga. Only a road separates them from the net industry that dumps the waste. For these women, who have lived next door to the industry for decades, collecting fish carcasses is nothing new. Before them, their grandmothers and mothers had long devoted themselves to the task. At the time, it wasn't about making leather, but it was about reusing the remains. These women were, and still are, in the habit of transforming this waste into makeshift foodstuffs that are not much to be desired. Every morning, Benta Atina comes to collect these leftovers. Shucked and fried, they are then sold on the markets as meagre delicacies. With a touch of irony, and not without engendering some guilt in us, she once told us: ‘ You see, the beautiful fillets of our fish are sent directly to you, to Europe. All we have left is the waste. People like us can't afford the fillets. Our meat is your carcass ‘. Infamy of the industry.

While Newton's project is part of this female tradition of recovering fish scraps, it gives this activity a new lease of life.

Each stage of skin preparation is based on a simple technique that women master to perfection and perform with prodigious speed.

Sitting side by side, in a moment of communion, sharing and solidarity, the women whose bodies are dotted with glistening scales go about their task in a harmonious melody that echoes with chatter, singing, laughter and the sharp sound of sharpening knives. To obtain the leather, the skin must first be detached from the remains of the flesh and then shucked. The skins are then dried for a few hours in the sun, the final stage before tanning.

Conclusion

Splendour can spring from anywhere if you know how to contemplate it. A keen observer of the convoluted beauty of the world, Newton was able to extract creative power from misfortune, transform marginalisation into an opportunity for action, and aesthetise waste that had long been neglected and repulsed. On the day of our departure, he gave us a little lesson in ethics. Inviting reflection and self-criticism, he confesses: ‘ The foreigners who come to see me think that life in Africa is difficult because we don't have much money. They think that the only thing people need is money. Your definition of poverty is wrong. For me, being poor means having no hope, no opportunities. But here, there are options and possibilities. If you can see them, you can turn them into opportunities. That's what I did that day when I reconsidered my environment: skins were being thrown away unnecessarily, plenty of fruit could be used for tanning, there were people out there eager to work, all I had to do was link all these elements together and create. I may not have a lot of money, but I'm not poor, I create with the options I have. I'm free.

Following in his footsteps, let's strive to detect the possible where it hides, thereby pushing back the frontiers of the impossible. Re-learning to see so that we never stop creating, striving to link the disparate elements of reality to unify a world whose futile fences obstruct its possibilities - this could be one of the keys to a more peaceful future. All phenomena - natural, social, economic, etc. - interact with each other, and therein lies the complexity and beauty of life. Undoubtedly, to heal the world we first need to recognise and rethink the countless links that make it up. And since we believe in the power of connection, let's leave Isaac Newton with the final word: ‘ Men build too many walls and not enough bridges ’.

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Zanzibar... at the crossroads of myth and dream, creator and subject of stereotyped fantasies, this name resonates in everyone as the place of elsewhere and nowhere. Renowned for its Swahili culture, exuding a perfume of the Orient, famous for its ivory beaches, crystal-clear waters and countless spices, the island keeps a secret that is still somewhat concealed, but which time is slowly beginning to unveil: seaweed farming.

The ocean has always been the rhythm and structure of the daily lives of the island's inhabitants. Children play on the beach, and the life of the sea is reflected in their games and songs. The men have long been devoted to fishing, setting sail on their mythical dhows. As for the women, they have learnt to make their own the fluctuating and ephemeral world of the tide, known as ‘pwani’ in Swahili. On the strip of sand that can only be seen at the fickle hours of the tide, on the border between the visible and the invisible, not a day goes by without the women filling their baskets with shellfish and small fish. Although seaweed farming is a recent development, it is rooted in this long tradition of women's seafaring activities.

For some years now, fishing at low tide has been accompanied by the more meticulous, longer and more technical harvesting of seaweed. Every day, women, peasant women of the sea, walk the few metres of sandy path that link their village to the immensity of the Indian Ocean. Wearing straw hats to protect them from the scorching sun and colourful dresses that flap in the wind, they go barefoot to cultivate their fields. It's back-breaking work, but it's always undertaken in a warm and friendly atmosphere, both palpable and noisy, in which gossip, jokes and other bon mots never cease to flourish, provoking bursts of shared, harmonious laughter!


By the time they arrive, the water has receded for 2 km, leaving sandbanks dotted with sea fields. The seaweed is attached by a string to a nylon rope, which is stretched between two wooden sticks planted in the sand. Just as a market gardener cleans his plots of weeds, the women start by cleaning the seaweed and the ropes, and removing the moss that has tied the ropes to them.

Once the work of tending the fields is done, some two or three hours later, the ‘mama’ as they call themselves, return from the beach with the day's harvest.

Watching seaweed being cultivated creates a similar impression, which translates into sensory enjoyment. In this respect, the island has often been described as a paradise for the senses. Whether you're wandering through the small, bustling villages that line the coast, wandering through the narrow streets of Stone Town, intoxicated by the spicy smells, caught up in the musical sounds of the Taarab, or strolling along the beaches and exploring the colourful waters of the Indian Ocean, every moment spent on the island offers experiences in which hearing, smell, sight and touch are tirelessly put to the test.

It turns out that seaweed farming condenses and intensifies this sensory spectacle: firstly, it leads to contemplation, because seaweed is a sumptuous picture in itself. Underwater or dried in the sunlight, these seagrasses are painted in a thousand colours and ever-changing shades.

Today, more than 20,000 women cultivate seaweed on the island, but only a few (there are dozens of them) transform it into cosmetic products, particularly soap. Soap-making simply enhances this multi-sensory spectacle by adding olfactory notes. Like the island itself, the seaweed soaps have aromas of cinnamon, turmeric, chilli, lemongrass, coffee, vanilla and cloves, of which Zanzibar is the world's leading producer. Like the seaweed, the spices used in the preparation take you on a journey to the heart of the land and history of Zanzibar. Introduced to the archipelago during the period of Omani colonisation, they have become a key element of Swahili culture.

Harmoniously combining the island's natural and cultural heritages, seaweed processing reflects a long and rich history. And this history is not only written in the past tense, every day these women of the sea continue to write it in the light of new concerns. The history of seaweed is first and foremost the history of women. Behind this marine culture lies their desire for emancipation.

Mwani ’, “ Furahia wanamke ”, “ Usitove moyo ” - the names of the three cooperatives we visited are not insignificant. They evoke the remarkable symbiosis that links the women and seaweed farming, work that has made freedom and independence accessible dreams for them. While the term ‘ Mwani ’ refers solely to seaweed, of which it is the Swahili translation, the other two names are more significant. ‘ Furahia wanamke ‘ means “ women (made) happy ”, while “ Usitove moyo ” can be translated as “don't lose heart”. And that's exactly what we're talking about through and beyond the seaweed: the exceptional courage these women have shown to achieve happiness, a happiness that goes hand in hand with independence. In addition to the financial autonomy that none of them would dare pass up, working with seaweed enables them to free themselves from the male yoke that has subjugated them for far too long. These peasant women of the sea are proud to have mastered a technique that they alone possess. Underneath this pride, the voices of these dreamy, outspoken and liberated women, bold and mocking, are heard.

If seaweed can heal the body, it also, and above all, has the virtue of freeing the heart.

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2015.One day, on a beach in Lamu...

Ben has often walked the beaches of Kenya and he thought he would never tire of contemplating their beauty. On this wild shore, the sun's rays radiate life with their gentle warmth, the sails of the dhows docked on the calm or agitated waters, rocked by the wind, the waves foam, sink and disappear into the immaculate sands.

For Ben, director of a tourist agency, it was not difficult to extol the magic of this Swahili splendour. For a long time, tourists from all over the world flocked to this enchanting nature, eager to feel its tender caress. But one day, Ben had to face the facts and admit that this paradise had lost some of its magnificence. For some years now, hideous pigments have been marring the beauty of this evanescent picture. Flip-flops, bottles, bags... so much rubbish lies dying on the beaches and scattered in the waves, floating or drowning, devastating the abyssal depths in the process.

Is it still possible to advocate a landscape whose sublime image is no more than a hazy memory? No, this is no time for contemplation; Ben must face up to abjection. And this is where it all begins. Ready to defy the storms of our century, he embarks on the expedition of a lifetime: he will set sail on a boat made entirely of recycled plastic!

Decisive encounters

Ben is wildly confident, inspired and enchanted by this dream, even though the world of engineering and construction is completely foreign to him. A passionate dream that is all the more unreasonable given that no plastic boat has ever been built. How good it is that the heart sometimes has its reasons that reason does not know! As he meets up with an old friend, Ben's solitary reveries are transformed into a solidarity project. For years Dipesh has been obsessed with the environmental cause. Animal protection, plastic recycling, rubbish collection - he's been involved in all these activities with the same fervour. When Ben tells him about his dream, his eyes light up: ‘ Building a boat entirely out of plastic was by far the craziest idea I'd ever heard of ’.

Accompanied by Dipesh, Ben was determined to make his dream come true. At the time, many people saw this determination as a naive illusion. Would building this ship, without any model or knowledge, be pure delirium? But after all, isn't delirium the father of creation? Don't we need a sufficiently delirious imagination to dare to think the possible and push back the frontiers of the impossible?

The fact remains, however, that sometimes creation has to escape the world of the imaginary in order to be fully realised. So Ben and Dipesh set sail to complete their crew. There's no shortage of sailors on the Kenyan coast, and many of them have built their own longboats. But while they're used to braving rough waters, Ben and Dipesh's adventure seems too risky for them. Most refused. Except one: Ali. Ali is a well-known figure in Lamu. A sailor from father to son, he built his first boat when he was just a schoolboy, then a second, then a third, and so be it, he built the fourth out of plastic.

Two years in the making... and Flipflopi was born!

‘ When you tell people that plastic pollution is a problem, either they're not interested, or they're overwhelmed and feel guilty. In both cases, what happens next? They end up turning away from the conversation. On the other hand, if you start the discussion by saying: we built a boat... out of plastic! Then you can be sure that everyone is listening to you: ‘What did you do that for? how? why? And this story, our story, is about the problem of pollution, but also about the solutions that exist. We wanted to raise people's awareness in a positive way, by inspiring them rather than making them feel guilty.

Dipesh is right to point out that raising awareness these days almost always involves making people feel guilty. On our screens, photos fly past, hitting our hearts like projectiles: smothered turtles, beached sperm whales, cadaverous bodies filled with waste... Faced with these abominable, almost unbearable images, our gaze sometimes turns away and, fleeing, loses sight of the object it was supposed to be looking at.

Experiencing horror through pain is not the only way to raise awareness. Make no mistake about it, being aware of the mistakes that have been made is more than essential, but so is (still) seeing the possibilities that exist. Re-instilling hope, inspiring and marvelling are attitudes that fight against giving up, and this is another way of awakening people's sensibilities.

The gamble paid off: there's something magical about this plastic ship, and today no one passes it by indifferently. And with good reason: it was designed like a traditional dhow and... multicoloured!

Assisted by volunteers, Ali was able to complete what was his biggest project to date. A total of 7 tonnes of plastic were reused to build this 10-metre-long dhow. Ali worked with plastic as he works with wood, using the same tools, the same techniques and always the same stars in his eyes.

Adorned with tens of thousands of recycled flip-flops, this multicoloured boat conceals an astonishing beauty: blue, yellow, green, red, purple, a whole host of colours are combined to give the front of the boat the appearance of a remarkable painting. For Dipesh, the flip-flop is an object charged with symbolism: ‘ It's the most common shoe in the world. Perhaps 3 or 4 billion people wear flip-flops. Regardless of culture or social class, everyone has flip-flops. In a way, flip-flops also link people together. And it's abandoned flip-flops that are most common on beaches. They contribute to plastic pollution. For all these reasons, the flip-flop symbolises our project. While this is clearly an ethical choice, it is also an aesthetic one. ‘ Once recycled, plastic is grey. Grey doesn't attract the eye. So we came up with the idea of using flip-flops to make patches that would add colour to the storefront. We wanted people to say ‘Wow’. And that's what they do today when they see the boat. ‘.

Creating an eye-catching work of art has always been at the heart of this great adventure. The result is Flipflopi, the world's first multicoloured boat made entirely from recycled plastic. Once the vessel was completed, it could be launched.

2018-2021.Expeditions: Towards hope

September 2018: Flipflopi sets sail for the first time. Departure: Lamu (Kenya). Arrival: Zanzibar (Tanzania). Distance: 500km. Objective: achieved. The insatiability of adventurers has been proven, and this initiatory voyage opened the first pages of a much wider story.

March 2021: Two years have gone by before another adventure, bigger, more ambitious and ever more symbolic, is undertaken: this time, it's on Lake Victoria that Fliplfopi will sail.

Since the first expedition, Flipflopi has gained in notoriety. The days of doubt and disrepute are long gone. Whereas only yesterday people were talking about an illusory dream, now everyone is talking about a premonitory illumination. For this second expedition, Flipflopi's crew is as colourful as her finery. From all over the world, there are many apprentice sailors, and all of them are full of heart and aplomb. Some are sailors, engineers or carpenters, but there are also academics, scientists and a soldier, while others are photographers or journalists. There's even an anthropologist and a cartoonist (what a joy to have been able to experience - for a time, for a space - this sweet existential interlude!) So it's a multi-faceted team that embarks, but on board, the singularities of each dissipate and dissolve for the benefit of a single cause. It's not just plastic pollution that unites us, but the mutual aid, altruism, benevolence and hope that make up the fertile ground without which no environmental reflection can take root.

Sailing with its head in the clouds, the crew has nonetheless kept its feet on the ground. Over the course of the expedition, Flipflopi made numerous stopovers to pass on its floating message, carried by the winds. As Lake Victoria is at the crossroads of three countries, these stops were also an opportunity to connect with and highlight regional players - politicians, entrepreneurs and activists - who are the bearers of valuable and inspiring alternative knowledge. Propelled by this spirit of sharing and solidarity, the Flipflopi expedition brought local communities together around a common cause. Today, its message has been raised to the highest level, with the crew brandishing it without appeal and calling for an end to single-use plastics in this region of Africa.

A bottle thrown into the sea...

We have traced the story of a new kind of expedition. On board, it wasn't performance that motivated the sailors, but a belief in a slightly better world. Flipflopi aesthetises a problem that is too easy to ignore. Bahati was one of the members of this expedition, specialising in marine biology, and he evokes all the ambiguity of this dialectic of the visible and the invisible: ‘ When trees burn in a forest, everyone is moved. Why, because in this particular case, the disaster is visible. In this case, there are no trees left. But problems are not always so visible. Pollution, for example, is not necessarily visible. Plastic in the water is invisible on the surface. Because people don't see pollution, they don't care about it. But just because we can't see the problems doesn't mean they don't exist. By refusing to look at reality, we are plunging headlong into a dark tunnel that leaves little room for hope. Flipflopi is a jewel sailing through the waters, injecting beauty back into people's eyes to brighten up a world tarnished by a blinding darkness that pollution only darkens further.

7
7

This final chapter underlines what all the previous pages have hinted at: ethics and aesthetics are two facets of the same reality that intertwine, respond to each other and often end up coming together in an incredibly fertile dialectic. To bring this book to a close, we are going to give pride of place to artists, because they, better than anyone else, know how to work towards building an aesthetic world that sensitises people and life. We believe that (re)sensitising the world is a horizon that should, today more than ever, guide our gaze.

Ocean Sole: nothing is thrown away, everything is sublime!

Judy's eyes brightened as she gazed at the children playing on Kenyan beaches with abandoned flip-flops. In the nimble hands of these ingenuous dreamers, the battered bits of plastic come to life, transformed into cars, sculptures, dolls and other cobbled-together toys. Inspired by this childlike imagination, Judy realised that day that rubbish could be an invitation to create. These games drew her into a whirlwind of creative energy. She was carried away by a crazy idea: to recycle flip-flops to make art objects. That's how the Ocean Sole project was born, with its enchanted world of childhood dreams. We undoubtedly underestimate the power of the poetic and infinite imagination of the young, who don't yet care to be wise. But it's never too late to (re)learn to see the world as a child.

Nestling in the heart of an artists' residence where blacksmiths, seamstresses, painters and other bricolarts live side by side, the Ocean Sole premises amaze even before you enter. Here and there, multicoloured signs point the way. When the door to the workshop opens, a marvellous world is revealed. Plastic confetti guides the path of our feet, its rainbow hues soaking the floor, impregnating the walls, disguising faces and disguising bodies. The desks are a pretty mess: tubes of glue, scraps of paper, scissors, a dozen moulds and other tools are laid out on the tables in a harmonious disorder reminiscent of school benches.

There are also, above all, these artistic creatures whose fixed gaze contains a curiously comforting gentleness: lions, tortoises, giraffes and mermaids inhabit and enliven the rooms. This is the magical world in which the artists of Ocean Sole work. Watching them set about their task gives us a nostalgic pleasure, reminiscent of the fairytale image of little elves, tirelessly making toys that lucky children will soon discover at the foot of the Christmas tree.

But while Ocean Sole's creations evoke the magic of Christmas, they all come from rubbish bins. Every day, dozens of kilos of plastic flip-flops - collected from beaches, streets and villages - are transported to the workshop. These shoes are untidy, damaged and foul-smelling, and when they arrive they inspire rejection and are far from beautiful. Placed in bins, they are washed before landing on the artists' desks. Cut, polished, glued and assembled, the pieces of damaged flip-flops are quickly transformed.

Every day, the craftswomen produce several dozen small figurines. The larger sculptures are mainly made by men, 75% of whom belong to the Wakamba ethnic group. In Kenya, the Wakamba are renowned and admired for their crafts. Sculpture is one of the pillars of their culture. As a result, most of the craftsmen were already sculptors before working at Ocean Sole. The reason for their change of profession reveals the deep-rooted social problems that reflect the complexity of environmental issues. For several years now, Kenya's forests have belonged in principle to the government. The Wakamba sculptors can no longer freely go out to collect wood, as was their custom in the past. Francis, the oldest member of Ocean Sole, is moved to explain the effects of this new legislation. ‘ We, the Wakamba, have been sculptors from father to son for centuries. Sculpting is our work, our life. But today, it has become very difficult to get hold of wood. To keep on living, some people go into the forests illegally, after dark. It's very risky. If the police catch them, they can be fined a lot of money. But that's not the real danger. Many sculptors flee when they hear the police patrolling. In their haste to run, they fall, get hurt, sometimes the police shoot at them, and then they die like that, alone, in the forest. They die for their art ‘. By recycling plastic, Ocean Sole is reinventing the sculptor's craft and opening up a whole new world of possibilities for the Wakamba. It's true that the environmental cause wasn't behind their conversion, but today all the Ocean Sole artists are aware of the damaging effects of deforestation and are proud to have switched from wood to plastic.

If ethics revalues aesthetics, aesthetics always reveals a certain ethical dimension. Mwania, another sculptor, evokes what is undoubtedly the most fundamental value of art: ‘ The people who buy our creations don't need these objects. I mean, they have no use for them. They just buy them because they think they're beautiful. That's why we're so proud. People come from far and wide just because what we do is pretty. All the artisans at Ocean Sole insist on this point: their creations are not useful or functional, yet they attract customers from all over the world, eager to buy them ‘just for pleasure’. Herein lies the ethical dimension of aesthetics: beauty serves no purpose, it only does good, and that good is essential to life. It is perhaps precisely because art is useless that it is the most enduring of human things: ‘ Their durability is almost invulnerable to the corrosive effects of natural processes, since they are not subject to the use that living creatures would make of them (...). ) they are the only things that have no function in the vital process of society; strictly speaking, they are not made for men, but for the world, which is destined to survive the limited life of mortals, the coming and going of generations ‘ Hannah Arendt.

Wonder Welders: art as a vital organ

The ethical value of aesthetics shines through when you meet the artists at Wonder Welders, for whom art seems to be a vital organ. Shukuru, Seif and Mohamed, like a few other craftsmen, work at Wonder Welders, a small company that recycles metal into art objects. Every morning they go to their workshop facing the Indian Ocean, on the outskirts of the very chic Slipway district of Dar Es Salaam. Their day begins at dawn, even before the streets of the capital are bustling with life. It takes Mohamed more than three hours to reach the workshop from his home. It takes him just as long to get back once the day is over. Hours and hours of travel, but it's always with a cheerful heart that he goes to work. Having suffered from polio since birth, for a long time the very idea of travelling to work seemed like an unattainable dream. Seif's life has also been scarred by polio. Shukuru, for his part, suffers from several congenital malformations, and every step he takes is a test and a victory. All the artists in Wonder Welders share the physical and existential condition of disability. Many have polio, some are deaf, others have lost the use of their legs, but for none of them is illness a hindrance, and they all come to the workshop in a hurry to create.

Physical infirmity, here as elsewhere, reflects real social challenges that continue to grow as productivity amputates the world and inflicts the scars of its seal. Being useful, efficient and profitable: these are the watchwords of a new ethic that is drifting and, unfortunately, running aground all over the world. In the cities of Tanzania, many disabled people find themselves on the side of the road. Staggering, crawling or immobile, they sell a little of everything, a little of nothing, and beg for the few pennies they need to survive on a daily basis. Congenital fatality: the mother of social exclusion.

All the craftsmen who work at Wonder Welders have trained in metallurgy, determined to combat this grim reality. Today, ten or so of them come to their small workshop every day to make strangely beautiful objets d'art. Most of the metal they use comes from rubbish tips, some pieces are salvaged from garages, others are picked up by the roadside, all of them discarded as outdated and out of use. Waste for some, treasures in the making for those who know how to reveal the deeper meaning of appearances. Equipped with this knowledge, of which they are in a way the embodiment, the Wonder Welders craftsmen sublimate these pieces of metal into grandiose objects.

Most of the creations are disproportionately large, with disproportionate shapes and faces, similar to the mutilated bodies of the artists who created them. These men and their works seem to be saying to the world that aesthetics, in art as in life, can be offbeat, marginal, extraordinary; it doesn't have to correspond to a norm in order to exist. What is aesthetic emotion if not a way of being, seeing and feeling, a relationship of particular and ephemeral intensity that we forge with the world. In the close relationship they forge between their disability and their art, the Wonder Welders artists highlight the vanity of a dichotomous vision - useful/unuseful, productive/improductive, beautiful/ugly, normal/abnormal - a vision that is both contemptuous and threatening.

Their creations have brought them back to life when they were excluded and rejected, they have given new life to abandoned fragments. Through their art, these men act on life, giving it extra meaning and showing just how vital creation can be.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

At the end of the day, this book is an invitation to bring together two concepts that we don't usually think of as being linked: art and ecology. When we think of the environment, we think almost inevitably (and legitimately) of far-reaching political and economic reforms. Harmony, poetics and aesthetic emotion seem almost superfluous in a world where urgency and necessity constantly prevail. And yet, how sad and mistaken to believe that art is neither a serious solution nor a real need. The social and environmental crisis we are experiencing should lead us to rethink aesthetics, which lies at the very heart of all ethics. The aesthetic expression we are talking about is defined as an existential attitude in which the world is no longer viewed as an object of consumption, but contemplated as a work of art. All the actors we have featured in this book seem to be driven by this poetic dimension: some seek to extract beauty from ugliness, others give meaning and form to senseless dreams or breathe new life into neglected beings and objects. Perhaps our future lies above all in this ability to re-poetise the world, refusing to be subjugated by a prosaic life tarnished by the dogma of productivity. Of course, the struggle must sometimes involve revolt and indignation, but re-instilling hope by re-enchanting the world is another way of resisting.