African ‘intellectuals’ letting Africa down
But for how long should African intellectuals continue being caricatures of their true selves? For how long should we continue worshipping and referencing long departed alien souls whose fuzzy idea of Africa is couched in Conradian travelogues and monologues?
WHILE social media in general has been able to communalise communication in a manner hitherto unknown, it has had the effect of distorting knowledge accumulation and disfigured the role of African intellectuals in interpreting reality and giving a scientific prognosis of situations including offering possible realities of existence.
The unregulated and communal nature of social media has had the effect of becoming the major source of news, general information and even “knowledge” for some, right on their fingertips, from their mobile phones. The first cut is always the deepest. Many actually use social media as the ultimate source of information for all local and world affairs.
Sadly, African intellectuals who are expected to lead the way in ensuring a sober understanding of issues and organising ideas that shape the continent’s trajectory, have also been “bastardised” by social media and have become not only irrelevant but mediocre as exemplified by their failure to produce any ideas that impact the social, political and economic realms of the continent.
Far from being contemporary prophets, intellectuals are those among us who are institutionally educated and have the mandate to contribute in different ways to the production and development of cultural goods, in the form of speech, books, music, paintings or sculptures. These intellectuals can be writers, musicians, artistes, philosophers, social scientists or even the clergy whose expert knowledge and exceptional capacity in critical reflection substantiate their minority status.
In short, intellectuals are expected to produce ideas of critical nature and contribute to the general being of nations or communities.
Unfortunately, the advent of social media has come with such havocwrecking speed that many have found themselves mere “technological ululators” without any critical reflection on its impact on African intellectual discourse.
The uncritical embrace of the social media in all its forms has given birth to a different class of pseudo-intellectuals who derive their legitimacy not from institutional training but from their followers or cheerleaders on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. These pseudo-intellectuals have become so dominant in shaping the thinking of millions of impressionable minds who solely depend on the internet for their daily doses of “knowledge”.
Resultantly, African countries like Zimbabwe have since independence suffered the ignominy of the dearth of a vibrant intellectual output that could have shaped the country’s political, social and economic trajectory.
We are a nation that does not produce enduring ideas. We are a continent whose intellectuals pride themselves in referencing Hegel, Keynes, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, Gramsci, Chomsky, Socrates, Aristotle, Marx, and all other characters we cannot culturally relate to because in our training these have been imposed on us as the matador of original enduring thought.
But for how long should African intellectuals continue being caricatures of their true selves? For how long should we continue worshipping and referencing long departed alien souls whose fuzzy idea of Africa is couched in Conradian travelogues and monologues?
The late African intellectual and philosopher, Ali Mazrui, was less charitable in his description of the post-colonial African intellectuals’ failure to proffer thought leadership on various critical sustenance issues. Known globally as Africa’s leading thinker, Mazrui argues in one of his presentations that African intellectuals are mediocre and that this mediocrity informs their inability to appropriate pan-African ideals into Africa’s development process.
Mazrui’s contention is that African intellectuals have dismally failed to align their Western education with their African values in both their intellectual development and their continent’s development process.
Closer to home, those that the nation should look up to as the begetters of ideas or the modern-day griots have dismally failed to conceptualise ideas that are informed by Africa’s innate indigenous values but rather are much more obsessed with Western ideas that they have crystallised at higher institutions of learning.
Just like their continental colleagues, Zimbabwean intellectuals have literately abandoned their coveted spaces for political expediency. That coveted space has now been occupied by all sorts of pseudo-thought leaders. You find these pseudo-thought leaders not just on social media but also in mainstream media.
There is an interesting example often given by Mazrui to illustrate the confusion and contradiction of African elites. It is that of Uganda’s founding president Apollo Milton Obote.
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