Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - An Open Letter to African Intellectuals

A Provocative letter.

However this letter forgets that the military episode in Africa introduced another phase of the intellectual history of Africa;where anti-intellectualism assumed the position of a social norm.

Secondly the intellectual is first of all a human being before he became an African.The real essence is the human being.Africa is merely accidental to this being.

If to be an African intellectual is to keep your talent and skill where it will be killed and buried(even among your people) "without any promise of resurrection"- then it is not even desirable to be one.

If Africa was not fertile for rogue politicians and politics were to be an international trade for political roguery many of them would also have left Africa to practice their trade elsewhere!

I think what to tell African diaspora intellectuals is how to reconnect their imagination with the continent instead of interrogating why they should seek the health and peace of their intellect and mind elsewhere.

To do amounts to what Olusegun Oladipo(1999) has called being "an intellectual against the intellect".


Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi, Ph.D
Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Great Zimbabwe University,
Masvingo-Zimbabwe











Date: Saturday, October 18, 2014, 3:16 PM

By Bwesigye bwa
MwesigireDear
contemporary African Intellectuals,We
find your names on lists published in western media, among
the top African Public Intellectuals, sometimes among the
lists of Global Thinkers. And we celebrate. 'Our'
thinkers are shaping the world, we say. You appear in
TIME's lists of Influential People. You have theorised
about important things. About the end of capitalist
hegemony. About the failure of the African state. About the
representations of Africanness. About the rise of
Afro-capitalism. About many things your Western audiences
find very captivating. And this is why they rank you highly
alongside their own intellectuals. You are indeed one of
their intellectuals as well.What
if Africa needs or desires a different intellectual from
what the West needs? How do you become an intellectual for
both societies without losing relevance in the other? These
are questions I want you to think about. I am writing
because I seek knowledge. I want to understand if, on the
streets of Burkina Faso, The Gambia, Uganda, Zimbabwe,
Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria and other
African countries, you are still the intellectual you are in
the West. Let us exclude the prophet is not appreciated in
their own home alibi, because we know for sure that Africa,
or Asia, or South America does not identify intellectuals
for Europe or North America. It can't be that this
prophetisation of intellectuals applies only to
Africa!What
if Africa needs or desires a different intellectual from
what the West needs?I
will refer to Africa's immediate post-colonial period to
show what I mean by relevance of an intellectual to the
African condition. Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Haunted out of
Kenya because his theorising was 'radicalising' the
Kenyan rural masses and pockets of the urban elite, where he
was taking his plays that hit hard on the neo-colonial
nature of post-colonial Kenya, he has since found refuge in
the West. You see, Ngugi's intellectualism was in the
language the majority of his people understand. Gikuyu. And
so he became so influential in his own homeland and too
dangerous to Euro-American interests in Kenya, and thus had
to be eliminated. The story of his imprisonment over his
writing is known to you. The story of the novel he wrote on
toilet paper in his prison cell is also known. The story of
his liberation of the Literature Department at University of
Nairobi from the hegemony of English Literature to the fresh
shores of African Literature is also known to you. No one
will deny that Ngugi was therefore a Kenyan intellectual in
his prime. His ideas were not only relevant to Kenya and
Kenyans but also influential. We know this because were they
not influential enough, the post-colonial Kenyan
establishment would not have shut him up by all means.Cross
the border into Uganda, where Ngugi studied, at Makerere
University. His contemporary Okot P'Bitek also exemplifies
the image of a relevant intellectual to their society.
P'Bitek believed that theory does not only belong to the
hollowed walls of universities and addled pages of
newspapers and books. He was head of the extra-mural
department of Makerere University, based in his home-town of
Gulu, not the ivory tower at Makerere. Ideas live with
people. While he was director of the Uganda National Theatre
(the first African director of the institution), he took
theatre out of the elitist urban Kampala to the people,
through festivals in the countryside and the work of a
travelling theatre troupe. He was also active in Kenya with
travelling theatre companies, after running away from Idi
Amin's regime. As he wrote in his posthumously published
collection of essays, Artist,
the Ruler, "In an African society, art is life.
It is not a performance. It is not necessarily a profession.
It is life." I would like to extend the argument to
intellectualism. Ideas are life. They must be relevant.
Lived. Or they are dead and non-existent.I
return to you, our esteemed contemporary African
intellectuals. Where are your ideas in our life, us Africans
living in Africa today? I understand that your theorising
makes sense to those who praise you and list you among the
most influential thinkers of our time. But do they make
sense to us? Do they benefit us? Do we live by them? When
you leave your busy lives in Western universities, your
non-stop lecture schedules in all the world's (read
'developed' world) capitals and retreat to Africa, where
majority of the population still lives in rural areas and
obviously does not consume Western media, do you feel that
your intellectualism is relevant to the lives we lead? Do
you feel that the Socrates, Adam Smith, Hegel, Marx, Kant,
Keynes etc. that you are always citing is relevant to our
lives?Of
course you know for sure that every society is based on
certain philosophies, ideas and systems. Or else it would
not be a society. Who or how do you think the ideas,
philosophies and systems that inform our lives came to
exist? Or are you still purveying the fiction that these
philosophies are dead-dying? They are not, I can tell you.
They are evolving and what they are becoming is not
necessarily a replica of Euro-American life. There is such a
thing as African contemporaneity that is not mimicry of
European culture nor is it a re-imagination of an African
past. If you refuse, come and I take you to Nyanja, the
village of my birth and upbringing. Or do you think the
okadas in Lagos or boda bodas in Kampala are mimicry of the
West? Did our ancestors ride them? There is your hint. But
you are the same advising African city managers to ban these
things because in your Euro-American vision, they do not
exist!Know
why our sewage pipes keep bursting? Workers of National
Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) yet another burst pipe
on Jinja Road in Kampala. Photo: Wilfred SanyaI
will share something I learnt from a renowned African
journalist, Charles Onyango Obbo. In Kampala, there is a big
sewerage problem. Whenever it rains, or even when it does
not, you find sewage freely flowing on the city streets.
According to Charles Onyango Obbo, much of Kampala under
colonial times was inhabited by Europeans and Asians, and so
the infrastructure was to serve their needs. He says that
these Europeans and Asians did not eat heavy organic food
and so their waste was lighter. Africans on the other hand
eat heavy organic food. The sewage pipes made for Kampala in
colonial times were therefore light as the waste would not
be heavy. Africans took over most of these houses that used
to be inhabited by the Asians and Europeans on independence.
The size of sewage pipes has not changed. Even new pipes
bought are as small as they were then. Africans have not
urbanised culturally. They still eat their heavy organic
food. And the pipes are always bursting. Kampala is stuck
with its sewerage flowing on the streets? Why? Because the
post-colonial intellectuals have not decolonised their
thinking. They think for Euro-America shadows. But Africa
has not necessarily become a shadow of Europe. This is
probably why in the West, Africa has intellectuals that
speak to a reality the West knows. In Africa, these same
intellectuals are leading to solutions that cause more
problems. Like the flowing sewerage.There
is such a thing as African contemporaneity that is not
mimicry of European cultureMost
of you have been insistent on the need to 'develop'
Africa. Some of you speak about this development in the
economic sense, while some of you talk of social
development. You are partly responsible for the cliché that
Africa is bedevilled with ignorance, poverty and disease.
Our esteemed African intellectuals, have you asked
yourselves if this development you preach is necessary or
even desirable for African populations? Have you re-thought
what development actually means? You now talk of
Globalisation! Dear fellow Africans, is Africa the centre of
the globe in your globalisation vision? If Euro-America is
the centre in this globalisation vision, is this then, not
Westernisation? Isn't this why Euro-America calls you
African intellectuals? Is this not your utility to them? You
centre the future on them and yet you are African by
descent. You intellectualise for them. You are their
intellectual but also African.
--

Yona Fares Maro
Institut
d'études de sécurité - SA







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