Mangrove School

We went to research the conditions of the students in the guerrilla schools in the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the learners and the first lesson was how to walk. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

A ghostly hand emerges from the water to clutch a branch. A friendly branch that can offer refuge in the lowlands. During the anticolonial struggle against Portuguese occupation, the free schools in Guinea-Bissau had to relocate frequently to avoid the bombardments. The schools moved deep into the jungle and found the mangroves. A vegetive system that seems to have grown and developed for no other purpose than to protect the schools from the bombs and from the teachings imposed by the colons. It is as if this impassable ecosystem were inviting struggle. Just as mountains, maquis and jungles provide haven for guerrillas, in Guinea-Bissau nature is an ally. Filipa César and Sonia Vaz Borges film the mangroves as an infrastructure with a networked architecture. It is here that they place the young bodies of students to whom the legacy of the anti-colonialist struggle and this environment is handed down. The filmmakers reinvest the mangrove as the locus of transmission, of radical education, attentive to the memory of the struggles. The film becomes a guide on how to occupy its branches. The weaving and merging created with the help of the mangrove are reproduced, knowledge is restored. The friendly tentacles recall the struggle to repel the colonial occupation that worked to tear up the roots of men and women. The mangrove’s branches are powerful and encourage networks, collectives and horizontality. It is the rhizome structure of Deleuze and Guattari, far removed from single, vertical and hierarchical roots: a structure that resists.  

Clémence Arrivé