Dispersing information

In June 1999, two MCM civil servants undertook an information campaign in the Eastern Cape; to coastal community Port Alfred, and to Grahamstown located 55 km from the coast.

Both areas suffered from unemployment and poverty. The objective of the tour was to inform

98 about the structure of the fisheries administration, the policy reform, and how to qualify and apply for a quota. A representative for Norwegian fisheries authorities and I came along as observers. A meeting was arranged between MCM representatives and a group of female social workers in Grahamstown. They were concerned about the serious situation in their community, with unemployment, poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDS and crime. They saw a possibility in using a fishing quota to generate employment, in order to relieve these problems.

Photo 6: Photo session after the meeting with social workers in Grahamstown, June 1999 (Photo: Mr.

Zuki, MCM)

Another meeting with a different group was arranged later the same day at the Noluthando Hall in Grahamstown. About 120 people showed up, most of them women, as demonstrated in Photo 7 below. After the presentation by the MCM, the attendees were eager to know how they could go about to benefit from the fisheries policy, to create employment, reduce poverty and eventually cut crime. They were not the only ones with expectations to the fisheries policies, other fieldwork material shows that the mayor of Lambert’s Bay placed high

expectations on the prospect of getting quotas to the community, which could be used to uplift

99 the community through job-creation.

Photo 7: Information meeting, Noluthando Hall, Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, June 1999 (Photo:

Normann, A.K.)

A meeting had also been planned with the fishing community in Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape. Seven men appeared at the meeting in the city hall, none of them small-scale fishers.

Most of them were white, representing the mayor, the local council and some fishing

companies. Due to the absence of small-scale fishers at the meeting, it was agreed to convene an additional meeting the following morning. However, no small-scale fishers appeared at this meeting either. This time, only five men were present, of whom three had been present the previous day, and two other white men, a fisher and a councillor respectively. After some time, more people came to attend the meeting, but none of them were fishers and most of them were white. When I later talked with the two civil servants at the local Port Alfred MCM office, who were inspectors and advisors to the local fishers, they were of the opinion that the small-scale fishers possibly did not know about the meeting or that they were allowed to attend. If the fishers had known, the inspectors were positive that they would have been there, as they had approached the local MCM several times to get information about the new policy.

100 When we moved around the community of Port Alfred, we saw no placards or signs providing information about this meeting in the places where small-scale fishers would be. This

indicates a lack of information on the fisheries policy, which applied both to fishers and fisheries authorities. The above mentioned local MCM civil servants in Port Alfred had received little information on the policy reform from the central authorities. One of them had recently gone to a public workshop in Cape Town by his own initiative to get information, to talk to MCM head quarter civil servants, and to learn about the policy reform.

These incidents show that the state indeed made an effort to spread information about the fisheries policy in the fishing communities. It turned out to be difficult to reach the grassroots.

I discovered one explanation: A short and easy-to-understand summary of the White Paper was published in different languages directed at the different ethnic groups in the fishing communities.²⁵ A Lambert’s Bay organisational entrepreneur had received several boxes from the MCM containing copies to distribute in the community. He had not distributed the copies to the fishers, and explained that it would be a useless effort, as the fishers would not read it anyway, let alone understand the content, because many of them were illiterate. I cannot judge whether it was right or not, but it was nevertheless puzzling. During my interviews in

Lambert’s Bay, it was obvious that very few small-scale fishers were informed about the fisheries policy reform, and that they wanted information. Even though illiteracy is a problem, most fishers can hear and would be able to perceive orally transmitted information. As a contrast, informants in Ocean View were rather well informed about the content and

implications of the policy reform. The local organisations informed fishers about aspects of the fisheries policy reform and about further action to be taken by the local organisation.

Despite this, some informants were of the opinion that information was held back. One informant had on one occasion wanted to double check some information that the local organisational entrepreneurs had given, and went to Cape Town and collected the White Paper on the Marine Fisheries Policy and the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998, and talked to MCM officials. This is an indication that resourceful persons who know their way around can acquire some of the information they want and need. It also demonstrates that distance matters. Ocean View is close to Cape Town, while for Lambert’s Bay fishers it would be a much larger effort, both in terms of cost and initiative, to travel to Cape Town and

25 There are eleven official languages in South Africa (South African Languages Web, http://salanguages.com, attended on 21^st of August 2005).

101 seek out relevant information.