Mbeki highlights lack of ideas in post-colonial discourse

THIS year, characterising the African intellectual scene as nothing but a “culture of apemanship and parrotry… ” could conceivably be mistaken for racism.

Not so in 2004, when this phrase featured prominently in a report on the AU’s conference of intellectuals in Dakar, Senegal.

The wording was penned by Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o – who lamented that the problem with African intellectuals, and the reason for their “demobilisation” after independence, was that they had allowed themselves to imitate and be used by the “international bourgeoisie” to pursue their “neo-colonial” goals in Africa – and was repeated in comments by then president Thabo Mbeki.

Mbeki, whose presidency was defined in part by his determination to stimulate an African renaissance, called for a “revolutionary struggle” by Africans to overcome post-colonial intellectual lethargy.

Here is the report on the conference from 13 years ago. October 10, 2004, African renaissance needs ‘revolution’

President Thabo Mbeki has urged African intellectuals to guide the African masses in a “revolutionary struggle” of resistance against neo-colonialism to help achieve the African renaissance.

He was writing in his weekly internet newsletter about the AU’s conference of intellectuals in Dakar, Senegal which ended yesterday.

Mbeki attended the conference, along with former president FW de Klerk, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, AU Commission chairman Alpha Konare, and almost 700 other African leaders, artists and intellectuals from the continent and abroad.

Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade hosted the conference, themed “Africa in the 21st Century: Integration and Renaissance”.

Former president Nelson Mandela was unable to attend the meeting but in a recorded message urged for peace on the continent.

“Mandela speaks for all of us,” said Soyinka, inviting Africans to admit their mis- takes and move forward.

“It is time for us to give a hand and to say ‘what can we do to bring Africa from under-development to development’,” said De Klerk.

“I believe that the African decade has arrived,” he said.

In his newsletter, Mbeki quoted from the AU concept paper for the conference which said “the African intelligentsia seems to have a lot of difficulty influencing the course of contemporary African history”.

It appears as if the African intellectual development is in crisis.

“The demobilisation of intellectuals after ‘ independence’ – which was the main focus of attention, the repressive nature of the political systems established in many states, the predominance of one party systems as the preferred form of political management, the apparent triumph of the neo-liberal model following the dismantling of the Soviet Bloc are factors which explain the crisis or at least the lethargy into which African intellectual thinking has fallen,” the AU paper said.

Mbeki supported the analysis of the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o that the problem with African intellectuals – the reason for their “demobilisation” after independence – was that they had allowed themselves to imitate and be used by the “international bourgeoisie” to pursue their “neo-colonial” goals in Africa. In his book

Decolonising , Ngugi had written the Mind that “the economic and political dependence of this African neo-colonial bourgeoisie is reflected in its culture of apemanship and parrotry enforced on a restive population through police boots, barbed wire, a gowned clergy and judiciary; their ideas are spread by a corpus of state intellectuals, the academic and journalistic laureates of the neo-colonial establishment”.

Mbeki joined Ngugi in calling on the intelligentsia in Africa and the Diaspora to resist this neo- colonialism. “The struggle to achieve Africa’s ‘integration and renaissance’ cannot but be a revolutionary struggle,” he wrote.

“It requires the negation of the situation according to which a ‘culture of apemanship and parrotry (is) enforced on a restive population through police boots, barbed wire, a gowned clergy and judiciary’.”

Obasanjo also blamed colonialism for the dearth of original thinking among African intellectuals who had merely “recycled” colonial and neo-colonial ideas and had abandoned African traditions.

To reverse the trend, Obasanjo urged African intellectuals to retrace the continent’s historical and political steps to unearth the specificities of African environment and society.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o