Sunday Times ( 27/1/2008 ) — 02/01/2008
A LAMENT FOR SOUTH AFRICA'S ABSENT INTELLECTUALS
Pitika Ntuli
Hired guns on the road to the OK Corral of Inducements

IF YOU call to mind the great thinkers, among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edward Said, Jean Baudrillard and Kwame Anthony Appiah, you understand why there is scepticism about the existence of intellectuals in South Africa. If true intellectuals are around, we will need a powerful microscope to find them. The two or three who aspire to this role turn out to be hired guns on the road to the OK Corral of inducements. This is the age of information, communication systems and knowledge industries. It is the age where intellectuals are more needed than ever before - but they seem to be sleeping through the great revolution. In South Africa , with the advent of the new dispensation, intellectuals were induced from academe into government to function as bureaucrats. Those who felt constrained there were in turn induced into the corporate world. In both these new homes they find their voices circumscribed by the logic of survival. There were those who went the NGO [Non-governmental Organisation] route, but even there they found that if they spoke out they would not receive state funding. Some sought other means of contributing to the broader society: they sought funding from international agencies, but this brought new problems; they were accused of collaborating with enemies of the state or were used by these agencies to subvert our new democracy.
 
Wilting under the weight of self-imposed authority
The most radical of the intellectuals became part of social movements and networks with the aim of creating a new global civil society movement, such as the World Social Forum. They attempted to galvanise the populace to find a common voice through which to struggle for the betterment of their lot. In South Africa today we are wilting under the heavy weight of self-imposed insularity. Day in, day out we are too preoccupied with issues within our borders - as though we were not part of the wider world. What are intellectuals doing in India , Brazil and China ? They are developing their indigenous knowledge systems in the fields of medicine, engineering, economy, art and architecture - while around us in South Africa we see a proliferation of Tuscan buildings visibly colonising our landscapes. They work as part of think tanks to develop policies, some of which have to do with turning these indigenous knowledge systems into new systems of innovation and to work out instruments of protecting the intellectual rights of our indigenous communities.
 
A voice from a century ago, from a founder of the ANC
We have still to write the nascent history of the African renaissance. For now, confining ourselves to South Africa, let us quote one of the leading ANC intellectuals, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, writing in 1906, and ask ourselves whether we are advancing or retreating: 'The brighter day is arising upon Africa. Already I seem to see her chains dissolved, her desert plains red with harvest, her Abyssinia and her Zululand the seats of science and religion, reflecting the glory of the rising sun from the spires of their churches and universities. Her Congo and her Gambia whitened with commerce, her crowded cities sending forth the hum of business, and all her sons employed in advancing the victories of peace greater and more abiding than the spoils of war.'
 
Speaking truth to power: where are the intellectuals of today?
The media laments, but also loves, the personalisation of leadership. Either there are no policy issues within the ANC succession race or the media wilfully ignores them with a view to sensationalising it. So run the arguments. Who is to expose these? If the ANC says there are policy issues, who is to work out mechanisms for open debate so that the truth will out - or is the truth even relevant? It is time for the real intellectuals to stand up and be counted - those who will speak truth to power, identify blind spots in the regime and find ways to help the government meet its delivery needs. I recruit Michel Foucault to sum up: 'The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.' Therein lies the challenge of the true intellectual.
 
[Professor Pitika Ntuli is Executive Director of the Centre of Organisational Culture and African Scholarship at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, having previously been Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Dean of Students and Professor of Fine Arts at the former University of Durban Westville. He is a writer, poet, sculptor and academic who spent 32 years in exile in Britain, where he lectured on Fine Art and English Literature, worked closely with Amnesty International and Index-on-Censorship and helped establish the Europe-wide poetry circuit, Apples & Snakes. He has performed at numerous Poetry Africa festivals, including the 10th Poetry Africa festival in 2006, and has published extensively. He performed at the inauguration of President Thabo Mbeki in April 2004.]