A Future for the Excluded? Learning from Brazil
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ocal/Global Encounters
A Future for the Excluded? Learning from Brazil RAFF CARMEN
ABSTRACT Raff Carmen explains the significance of the Brazilian sociologist and social activist Clodomir Santos de Morais. Carmen looks at his theory and practice of job and income generating capacitation which has proven its feasibility, effectiveness and replicability on three continents for the last 30 years. KEYWORDS capacitation; de Morais; IATTERMUND; income generation; interactive learning
Doing enterprises While the fame of the Brazilian adult educationist Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, travelled far and wide, few have heard of his contemporary, Clodomir Santos de Morais. One explanation is that de Morais remained largely confined to his native Portuguese (whereas Penguin published Freire as early as 1972). Moreover, Freire, a Christian Marxist, was not only championed by the radical liberation theology wing of the Catholic Church but also was the WCC Educational Advisor in Geneva during the 1970s. De Morais – whom Freire affectionately refers to as ‘amigo irmão, velho de guerra’ (1987a: 135) – shared the same prison cell with Freire in Olinda (Recife). They then parted paths due to enforced exile: while Freire became the great inspirational adult education innovator and alphabetization guru (rooted in critical consciousness or ‘conscientization’, a term he coined and made part of the English language) (Freire 1987b), de Morais, always the social activist, became intimately involved with workers’ organizations and peasant land reclamation movements. Although an author in his own right, de Morais never aspired to become a producer of literature. He has been all his life, and still is, a prodigious generator of jobs and income.1 When asked one day what kind of work the organization he founded, IATTERMUND (Instituto de Apoio Tecnics aos Paises de Terceiro Mundo – Institute for Technical Support to Third World Countries),2 did, he replied: ‘None whatsoever’.
Development 43(4): Local/Global Encounters What do you mean: “we don’t work”? Well, we do work, and work quite a lot. Forgive me, but I don’t understand. Let me explain: we ourselves we don’t do any “work”, because we understand “work” as the kind of activities to which some Institutions and some people in those Institutions have been hanging on to for dear life for a year, for ten years, sometimes more, without any hurry, without any sense of urgency, without, certainly, any rush to get the job done and over with, because, if a Project is finished, so is the job of the operator, of the “doer-of-work”. As for us [at IATTERMUND], we do not “do work”, we, instead, “do enterprises” (Personal communication by de Morais).
In the end, it is indeed not the work that is ‘done for’ people, but the enterprises, jobs and livelihoods they can create for themselves and by themselves which, above all in situations of extreme hardship and/or natural disaster, are the sole realistic, solid building blocks of ‘sustainable livelihoods’. Elsewhere, de Morais summarized h
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