*Intellectuals and the African Condition*

*By Baba Galleh Jallow*

The African condition is desperate and ugly. African intellectuals know
this. What are they doing about it? These old but perennially new realities
were the recent subject of a series of articles and a panel discussion on
Kairo News. One of the pieces published by Kairo was an open letter to
African intellectuals in which the writer seemed to wonder what African
intellectuals working in international educational and other institutions
are doing about the desperate situation in their own native backyard.

What seemed to escape critical scrutiny in the conversations on Kairo News
was whether we might consider all educated persons intellectuals, or
whether the title intellectual may only be applied to certain educated
persons and not others. This question has been widely debated by writers on
the subject ranging from Julien Benda (1928), Ernest Gellner (1990), and
Edward Said (1994) among many others. In this small reflection, we draw
inspiration from Said’s thoughts on the subject.

In *Representations of the Intellectual*, Edward Said (pronounced sayid)
characterizes the intellectual as simply that educated person – “an
oppositional figure” - who speaks out against injustices in his society and
‘whose public performances can neither be predicted nor compelled into some
slogan, orthodox party line, or fixed dogma”. The intellectual is not
merely one who has obtained an advanced degree in a particular field of
study. They have to be someone actively engaged in speaking truth to power
in the service of their society and those who are not able to fight back
when bullied by the power structures of society. Said’s characterization of
the intellectual disqualifies many educated persons from claiming the
status of intellectual. An intellectual in Said’s formulated cannot afford
NOT to take sides – be on the side of the underdogs - in national
discourses of power, oppression, and exploitation. The Saidian intellectual
is vocal and openly on the side of the oppressed masses and in total
opposition to the oppressive individuals, structures and institutions of
society.

According to Said, the true intellectual is a lonely outsider, an exile to
mainstream society, even if they physically live within their own country.
The intellectual is marginal to whatever public he finds himself in.
Ironically, the marginality of the intellectual derives precisely from his
total immersion in society and his unwavering and uncompromising engagement
with national mission. At once marginal to society, the true intellectual
is perpetually embedded, energized and motivated by his engagement with
issues of social concern. It is his hatred of injustice, his total
identification with the plight of the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the
otherwise powerless victims of structural violence that at once makes him
an outsider and the quintessential insider and champion of social justice.
Unable to partake of the ordinary joys of belonging, the intellectual
nevertheless resides in the epicenter of belonging. It is this total
belonging that makes the intellectual an unyielding, uncompromising
advocate for a just social order.

In Said’s formulation, educated people who keep mute over the injustices
inflicted upon their compatriots or who join and actively serve the
oppressive political structure may write and publish many books and
articles in academic presses and learned professional journals. However,
because they either passively or actively condone or aid tyrannies and
injustices in their home countries render them disqualified for the title
of intellectual. These kinds of educated people, Said suggests, are mere
academics or professionals contributing to the production of knowledge in
their fields or otherwise serving their narrow professional and personal
interests. By their abstinence from critically engaging the tyrannical
system or their active participation in the tyrannical power structure,
these educated people actively participate, if by default, in the heartless
destruction of their own people. Said suggests that the intellectual cannot
afford to be either part of an oppressive structure or quietly sit on the
proverbial fence in the face of injustice or aggression.

Every moderately schooled African knows that most African political systems
are broken, utterly dysfunctional, and perpetually tottering on the brink
of ignoble collapse. The utterly broken, dysfunctional and nauseatingly
amoral states that preside over these broken systems survive only by
tightly squeezing the nation in one fist and using the other fist to
brandish the trigger-happy gun and the grave-like jail as evidence of
unquestionable national ownership. The typical African state is powerless
and impotent in the face of all the challenges that matter. It is unable to
lift its people out of poverty. It feels helpless in the face of a growing
mountain of foreign debt, of budget deficits, of scarcities of medicine and
other basic commodities, of sky-rocketing inflation, and of a growing
population of depraved citizens whose young are so desperate that they risk
drowning in the Mediterranean to reach a Europe of illusory ease and
plenty.

Paradoxically, these same weak African states function within their
national borders as bone-chilling leviathans, so brutal and merciless that
citizens are afraid to mention their name in public. The national voice is
reduced to an embarrassing monotone of untruths about the nonexistent
virtues of the brutal leviathan. Under such circumstances as we have in
Africa today, the nation is constantly belittled and bullied by a state
that has no conception of national mission. The tragic comedy is that all
the bullying, all the destruction is inflicted by the state in the name of
national mission. The bully state swears by national mission. It callously
poses as a personification of the national mission. It constantly squeaks
and roars that only over its dead body can anyone prevent it from
actualizing the national mission which, incidentally, totally requires that
it stays in power. The educated African, whose senses cannot but be
perpetually assailed by the outrageous transgressions of the African state
has at least one key question to answer: Why are you not doing anything
about it?

The answer most educated Africans would quickly utter in response to this
key question is that they are not interested in politics. The implication
of course, is that politics is a dirty game in which they are too clean to
engage. What is there to be gained from getting involved in politics, they
ask. To justify their abstinence they reduce the entire national crisis -
brutal leviathan, hostage nation and guilty moral conscience - to the
question of getting involved in politics which, conventional fallacy has
it, should best be avoided by all means necessary. Having thus repressed
their natural inclination to do something, they convince themselves that
they are merely decent citizens sitting on the fence. They forget that
being part of the nation, every fence they sit on is inevitably located
smack in the middle of the national presence. The national presence could
never be diminished or excluded from citizen consciousness. It can never be
ignored either. There is no sitting on the fence when it comes to being
part of a nation, however geographically removed you are from your native
soil. It’s like staring at the blazing sun with your eyes tightly shut: you
still see red and feel the heat.

Of course, some of the worst atrocities against human kind both in Africa
and around the world have been committed by people who would characterize
themselves as intellectuals. Almost all of Africa’s founding fathers held
advanced academic qualifications ranging from masters degrees to PhDs. Yet,
their most glaring legacy is “Africa 2015”, a continent of unimaginable
poverty and misery, a people set far below the rest of the world’s peoples
in almost all aspects of life that matter. A people prostrate under the
burdens of poverty, disease, and political oppression and conflict; a
perpetually hungry people. One can understand that our so-called founding
fathers were faced with a particularly difficult task of leading new
nations within the context of an impersonal and exploitative capitalist
world system, and at the height of a cold war that threatened to sabotage
Africa’s emergent independence. But as Africans faced with a particularly
malignant problem of unjust rulers, we cannot afford to overlook injustices
and oppression merely because the perpetrator has also made great
contributions to the advancement of society. Under no circumstances may
acts of injustice and oppression be condoned, ignored, or glossed over
especially when they are perpetrated by “intellectuals” who should know
better than to assume positions of infallibility. There are always
alternative ways of doing things, alternative choices to be made which may
achieve the same or better results.

Most African leaders hold higher education qualifications that place them
firmly in the category of Africa’s top intellectuals. Yet, most of them
willfully impose unjust social orders on their societies simply by refusing
to recognize that they could be mistaken in some of their ideas. It is to
be said for Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere that once he recognized the error of
his ways, he stepped aside and allowed an alternative system to replace his
failed experiment in Ujaama socialism. That is a true mark of a true
intellectual – the capacity to recognize error, say sorry, and take
corrective action in the interest of national mission. Of course, we also
have those African leaders, aka “the greatest pretenders” who, much like
cows in a library, pretend to eat the books and attach to their names
grandiose titles that suggest Olympian erudition and saintly humaneness
even as they use their spiked political hoofs to viciously trample upon and
mercilessly crush any signs of true intellectuality in the nation. But in
all the areas that matter, in the face of every meaningful national
challenge, their giant feet immediately turn to clay, their spiked hoofs
into butter pads that melt at the slightest contact with reality.

The true intellectual recognizes above everything else his human
fallibility. He certainly expresses strongly held beliefs and opinions and
could prove extremely stubborn in upholding and defending them. But he
never assumes a position of infallibility and certainly never suggests that
his version of whatever issue is at stake is the only correct version. He
always leaves room for the possibility of error, and depending on his level
of maturity as an intellectual, is always prepared to revisit and revise
his position in the light of strong evidence suggesting that he might be
wrong. In short, the true intellectual is a perpetual student, both of
academics and of life. One of the greatest intellectuals of all time, the
Greek philosopher Socrates famously confessed that the only thing he knew
was that he knew nothing.

The true intellectual will not be co-opted by power structures that bear
the tiniest bit of responsibility for human suffering. He is utterly
incapable of inflicting premeditated injustice except as a response to
injustice inflicted upon him or some other victim. In Africa however, and
admittedly in all parts of the world, people who consider themselves
intellectuals often serve as the spokespersons and legitimating signposts
for oppressive and unjust social orders. Every tyrant has a crop of
intellectuals around him, with some others waiting in the wings, licking
his boots, and hoping to be co-opted into the system for monetary and other
benefits. Some go out of their way to produce works on the tyrant’s
non-existent achievements, or to praise the tyrant’s non-existent
magnanimities as a way of attracting favorable attention and perhaps
landing a lucrative job from the tyrant. Because tyrants are generally
insecure and have grossly over-inflated egos in constant need of stroking,
they are famously addicted to intellectual sycophancy because it confirms
their own unrealistic estimations of themselves. Intellectual sycophancy
confirms but can never validate the lie that the tyrant tells himself every
day in a bid to escape the pangs of bad conscience. But, if we agree with
Said and especially Bender before him, those intellectuals who attach
themselves to unjust power structures and corrupt institutions for monetary
gain are not true intellectuals; they are mere academics utterly heedless
of the lessons of history and neglectful of their rightful roles as
citizens. Some of them are victims of self-inflicted mental blindness who
assume convenient truths to convince themselves that the only way they
could escape what appears to be a life-long cycle of material poverty is to
court the favors of the tyrant. Indeed, it is their obsessive preoccupation
with material gain that pushes them into the thorny arms of the tyrant and
makes them sell their souls to the devil. The true intellectual does not
dismiss the necessity of material comfort; but against the exigencies of
national mission and the necessities of human dignity, principle and
integrity, material comfort pales into utter insignificance in the mind of
the true intellectual.

 Then there are those intellectuals who will neither sell their souls to
the devil nor actively fight the injustices in his society. These seem to
be in the majority. Having obtained higher educational qualifications, they
are well aware of the nature of structural violence in society. However,
they tend to lean more towards silence largely for reasons of
self-preservation, cowardice, or mere laziness. African intellectuals
belonging to this group are often prolific writers and great scholars
working for some of the world’s greatest universities or corporate
institutions. However, they maintain a stony silence while their own people
are bullied and killed by tin pot despots. They place the conveniences of
being able to freely land at their home airports and bask in the communal
glory that greets them back home to the inconvenience of having to stay out
of the country while waging a battle against unjust social orders. They
claim to be not interested in politics; yet their entire professions deal
with politics, a subject they engage on a daily basis. These are the types
of intellectuals the sociologist C Wright Mills call “inactionaries.” They
convince themselves that they are not doing anything bad, that they are
independent beings who have no bone to pick with the unjust system as long
as it does not attack them or theirs, or that they are not interested in
politics. Assuming these convenient truths, they manage to willfully
maintain what they feel is a clear conscience and go about their lucrative
business. It is to be said for these inactionaries that they seldom sell
their souls to the devil either. It is easier to leave other souls at the
devil’s mercy.

The true intellectual neither sells his soul to the devil nor remains mute
over social injustices. Marginal to society, he is embedded in a sea of
social concerns. His entire being is animated and inspired by an
irresistible urge to speak out against tyranny and injustice in all their
various forms. He cannot survive long in an environment of intolerance and
censorship. He will allow others to control anything about him but his
mind. He is a fiercely independent individual who finds it hard to belong,
yet inextricably and almost literally belongs to his community. And he will
not be silenced, except by brute force that renders him totally incapable
of talking truth to power. Some of the greatest intellectual treasures of
all time were produced by intellectuals in prison or on the verge of being
murdered by unjust regimes. Within our current Gambian and African context,
we can only wish that there are more of this type of intellectual.


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