As much as I like to think of myself as a modern, enlightened man, I am still loath to ask for directions from strangers, but I’ve learned that to catch fish you need to ask for advice all the time. If I’m new to an area the first thing I do is go to the local tackle store, and ask whoever is there a whole bunch of questions: What’s biting? Where are they biting? What are they biting on? They always have good answers, though the style of delivery can vary quite a bit depending on the locale. In my favorite, and only remaining, tackle shop in Manhattan there’s a fast-talking, loquacious kid who has talks to me for hours about the merits of home-made bread balls vs store-bought boilies to catch carp in Central Park (bread balls win). Out on the Cape, the advice is delivered in New England monosyllabic pulses that go something like this: Are the fish biting? Yup. Where? Off the beaches. What beach? Race Point. What are they biting? Depends. Depends on what? And so on, but with perseverance and a bit of patience I always find out what I need to know to catch fish. Other anglers can sometimes be good sources of intel, but anglers are also notorious liars: exaggerating their own fishing prowess and jealously guarding their favorite fishing spot. Likewise, tackle shop employees are in the business of selling you gear, so I always consider what is being said and who is saying it and take advice with a grain of salt. But if you want to catch fish local knowledge is invaluable.
As activists, we are in the business of reaching people. To reach people you have to know people, not as an abstraction: The People! (or some equally conceptual subset, like The Workers, Women, Immigrants, People of Color, et al.) but as real people, living in real places with real lives, and having real thoughts and feelings. To know these things you need local knowledge. The importance of this was brought home to me on a small island off the coast of Dakar in Senegal. I was there as part of a training workshop in partnership with West African trainers, working with a group of artists, activists, and investigative journalists interested in combating corruption. None of us were from the island, yet we were planning on doing a training action at the end of the week-long session. Keyti, one of the trainers (and co-creator of the Senegalese rap news show Journal Rappé) quickly identified this problem and came up with an exercise. That afternoon, the workshop participants were instructed to wander the island and do research. The French and Wolof speakers were to interview locals to talk to them about how corruption impacts their personal lives, while the English speakers watched where people congregated and what they did there. After a few hours, we reconvened and shared what we had learned, and from this knowledge, we identified local targets of corruption: officials who receive kickbacks for allowing locals to act as guides to visiting tourists, and a place for the action: a prominent sculpture across from the ferry landing where the tourists come ashore. With this local knowledge, we were able to stage an affective intervention that spoke to local concerns in a meaningful location populated by locals.