The crucifixion of the public intellectual

In 1967, a brave and possibly irresponsible Nigerian poet, teacher and librarian left his comfortable university office to join the ill-fated Biafran war of independence, a separatist war that sought to tear Eastern Nigeria from Nigeria for good. As a result, Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo died in action, leaving the world one African poet poorer. African intellectuals and other followers of the works of Okigbo were taken aback by the needless loss, a loss that could have been avoided if the man kept to his mind and pen, and left guns to soldiers. Fittingly, in 1971, a calm and collected Africa intellectual, one who would never dream of doing what Okigbo did wrote a novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, a bleeding story that fictionalises the gruelling court trial of the writer who abandoned his intellectual vocation and poetic mission to dabble in a bloody and dirty war.

Ali Mazrui’s understandable irritation and disappointment with Christopher Okigbo’s irresponsibility and treachery of intellectualism was not unique or new. Throughout the ages, the Western and colonial understanding of an intellectual is that of a cold and dry thinker, calm and collected, dispassionate about things and thoughtful. One of the meanest insults one can levy upon a selfrespecting intellectual in the Western scheme of things is to call them emotional, polemic and fanatic. As a result, in the scholarship of the present model of the university emotions are as good as banned, they are something to be ashamed of, the exemplary intellectual is a scientist and an artiste of knowledge who must collect information scientifically and artistically compose writings, deliver lectures and seminars that dispatch cut and dry truths, cold and calculated knowledge. Anger, passion and radical activism are despised as an article of the taxi rank and property of the peripheries of the university that fancies itself as an island of wisdom in a societal sea of ignorance. In the Westernised university elsewhere and in Africa, intellectualism has as a result become a disciplined and a disciplining occupation, where emotions and activity are looked at with contempt. Intellectuals who have taken up partisan positions, assumed defined ideological postures and advanced strong political causes, even if they were just causes, have lived to endure rather than enjoy the university. Because of this strong bias against radical political causes and emotive subjects in the university, public intellectuals, that tribe of thoughtful men and women of political action, have had to suffer persecution, ostracisation and contempt in an academy that expects stoic calmness from its thinkers. As radical and practical an intellectual figure as Frantz Fanon had to delay his writing of the classic, Black Skin White Masks, because he felt he was too angry to do a good job of it. That is how far criminalised emotions are in the universe of the intellectuals, yet Fanon was an exemplary man of action and public intellectual who easily moved from gun trigger to writer in pursuit of political causes that he passionately believed in and was willing to die for.

Who is a public intellectual? In reality, public intellectuals can easily be found from among university academics to journalists and editors right up to taxi rank comedians and the philosopher touts who dispense pearls of reflection and wisdom in bus termini. Powerfully, Linda Martin Alcoff has described “public theorists,” “permanent critics” of political establishments and public “popularisers” of social causes as public intellectuals as long as they use their intellection and access to information to confront public problems. Whether certified or not, degreed or undegreed, public intellectuals are those brave individuals who gather information and knowledge and use that advantage of sensing and knowing to fight for social and political justice. Largely, this tribe of dissidents and intellectual bandits are prepared to go down and dirty in pursuit of causes. In the Westernised University these individuals sacrifice their institutional tenure and opportunities for promotion, some of them get censored or dismissed for espousing contrary views and inciting public dissent to hegemonic ideals. In short, public intellectualism is defined by a commitment to public social, political, cultural and spirituals causes besides and beyond disciplinary and disciplining pursuits of scholarship and intellection. Otherwise, easily the majority of good intellectuals in the Westernised University make it through their careers by dealing in safe ideas that don’t frighten establishments, in the media they churn out acceptable columns and articles that deliver comforting myths and fictions for hegemonic causes and institutions. They tend to produce beautiful but not powerful ideas, they trade in ideas that maintain orders and have no potential to influence or inspire positive change. Not so the public intellectual, he or she is a kind of rouble rouser, who trades in revolutionary and counter hegemonic propositions, the public intellectual is a merchant of troubling and largely unpopular but mostly powerful sentiments.

The PI Writes Back By their nature, as endangered as they are in the Westernised and colonial academy in Africa and outside, public intellectuals are the fellows with big minds and big mouths, they have said and written a lot about their vocation and place in the world. Noam Chomsky, who is the public intellectual’s intellectual, an exemplar, wrote The Responsibility of Intellectuals in 1967, a punchy essay in which he debunked the unjust American war in Vietnam. In the same essay Chomsky made lunch and supper of American academics who used the guise of neutrality and objectivity of the academy to shy away from confronting the tyranny of the USA in the world, he called the cold and dry academics cowards and sell-outs against humanity. Edward Said was severally attacked by conventional intellectuals for his partisan and passionate commitment to the question of Palestine against the Zionism of Israel delivered the Reith Lectures of 1993 which culminated in his publication of the monograph Representation of the Intellectual, in 1994, a narrative which defends the public intellectual as a brave and committed prophet of justice that speaks truth to power at the risk of pain and death. In his account of Writers in Politics in 1997, Ngugi wa Thiongo stated that a writer and intellectual worth his salt cannot claim neutrality in politics, he or she must take the side of the oppressed and dominated or resign to being a conspirator against humanity. John Pilger has established a global journalism school of thought whose emphasis is in exposing the “hidden agendas” of Empire, in the process becoming a thorn in the very wrong place of the Euro-American establishment. Unlike Mazrui who theorised within the cold walls of the university as a radical but disciplined distinguished professor, Walter Rodney got out to rallies and took to assembling and also actually throwing bombs and grenades, and he died of a bomb blast. The universe and life world of the public intellectual is a vocation of the brave and dedicated who are willing to lose limb and life in defence of chosen and believed causes. The vocation of the public intellectual is not a walk in the park but a dirty and bloody war against the complicity with Empire that is found in the Westernised academy and media landscape. There are no awards or rewards for the PI in the Westernised University and the Westernised global media landscape, the true crown of thorns and the bitter cup await the dissident and the intellectual bandits who seek to disturb and trouble Empire.

In several spaces, public intellectualism, just like the theories and philosophies of decoloniality has been adopted and adapted by pretenders and opportunists that seek to call their fanaticism and fundamentalism public intellectualism. It should be easy however, to separate pretenders from the vocationists of liberation in that usually public intellectualism as marginalised as it is in the formal academy it involves more intellectual rigour and commitment to truth and just causes. The public intellectuals might be unruly and undisciplinary, disobedient of colonial intellectual conventions but they almost always exude enduring passion for truth and justice in their counterhegemonic thought and activism. When the usual academics and conventional journalists have gone to bed, the public intellectuals among them remain behind to do extra work. When the poets and artistes of Empire relax, the imaginists and critical humanists stay put producing images and discourses that propose a new decolonial and humanist world. In defense of his self-sacrificing political activism, Christopher Okigbo, we like him or we don’t, saw and understood himself as a patriotic disciple of the Igbo goddess of the river, Idoto, who demanded of him the highest honour of dying fighting for the motherland. It is with that religious and zestful passion that public intellectuals reject comfort zones of the university and the media houses to write and speak truth to power. Part of the business of decolonising the university and the global media should be invested in seeing the value and integrity of the public intellectuals as those intellectuals who reject the ivory towers to keep their brains and minds in rhyme with the pulse of their oppressed masses. On their part, public intellectuals should be the first to note the value of thoughtful activism against thoughtless activism and actionless thought. In a world where the Euro-American Empire has sought to normalise and naturalise its economic and political hegemony, to turn its propaganda into global common sense, public intellectuals who have not been co-opted into the eliticism and privilege of the media the academy are the true “last ones left” to defend liberation and critical humanism.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: decoloniality2016@gmail. com