Now that political power has been achieved, we cannot afford to marginalise the realm of ideas in the process of transformation, writes Eddy Maloka.
The current debate on the Native Club speaks directly to the question of the role of intellectuals in South Africa, an issue already raised in the pages of Umrabulo particularly by Jeremy Cronin and Mandla Nkomfe (See Umrabulo 25).
Yet, the Native Club is simply a movement, or rather a network, of a section of our country's intelligentsia which is 'gatvol' with the dominance that whites continue to enjoy in our knowledge production sector.
Three revolutionary intellectual traditions
The intelligentsia has historically played a role throughout the world, not only in the generation of ideas, but also in the many struggles against inequality, exploitation and oppression. In the African context, the nationalist project has dominated the preoccupation of the continent's intelligentsia, especially with respect to issues around colonialism, the right to self-determination, anti-imperialism and combating racism. Over the years, these issues came to coalesce around Pan-Africanism, which is simultaneously a movement for the liberation of the African continent and an intellectual project aimed at contesting the ideological hegemony of the West.
The Pan-African project evolved in the context of the anti-colonial struggles, and came to entail four elements: a sense among Africans on the continent and those in the Diaspora of themselves as 'one' people because of common historical experience and destiny; the quest for the 'regeneration', 'awakening' or 'renaissance' of Africa on the social, cultural and economic fronts as well as in global affairs; the 'dream' of an Africa united in the social, cultural, economic and political spheres; and the spirit of solidarity among people of African descent.
The South African intelligentsia, like its counterparts in the world and the rest of Africa, could not escape the effects of the anti-colonial struggle.
For most of the white intelligentsia, colonialism was a project to rationalise and defend. The few who broke ranks fell into three categories.
The majority of the latter resorted to the liberal interpretation of the South African question; they reified 'race' at the expense of 'class', and regarded the oppressed as objects of pity. To them, identifying with the struggle of the oppressed was as exotic as visiting a stone-age community in the middle of some jungle. Nonetheless, the liberals dominated 'left' thinking among the whites, and their influence continues to this day.
In the second category were a comparatively smaller group of white intellectual cadres who made a genuine leap to join the ranks of the struggle of the oppressed. An even smaller group, in the third category, refused to join either the oppressed or the liberals. These 'legal' Marxists accused the liberals of failing to understand 'class', and dismissed the liberation movement as a 'petty bourgeois' project; they searched for 'class' purity and 'perfect' revolutions in lecture halls and libraries. This tendency has dwindled in influence, especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. In fact, some of the former 'legal' Marxists are today over-zealous champions of the racist campaign against affirmative action.
The black South African intelligentsia, by contrast, has generally been influenced by three revolutionary intellectual traditions. Since the early years, the liberation movement in South Africa never lost sight of similar struggles taking place on the continent and elsewhere in the world. In this context, the influence of Pan-Africanism reached our shores. Some of our compatriots, like Pixley ka Seme, Sol Plaatje and Albert Luthuli, also contributed to the development of Pan-African thought. To this day, various tendencies of Pan-African thought dominate the ideological orientation of the liberation movement and the outlook of post-apartheid South Africa. Some of the ideas currently on the table which are traceable to this intellectual tradition include our determination to regain and assert the independence of our country and continent, building strong linkages with the African Diaspora, reaffirming and asserting African culture, challenging Western notions of Africa, and working hard to position Africa as a force in the global arena.
Marxism is another intellectual tradition whose influence on the black intelligentsia continues to this day, thanks to the role particularly of the South African Communist Party. The early Black Consciousness (BC) Movement, building on the heritage of Negritude and the influence of Frantz Fanon and the Black Power struggles in the United States, has also made its contribution in directing the outlook of our country's black intelligentsia.
The three revolutionary intellectual traditions are, indeed, complementary, to the extent that they could even be synthesised into a single body of thought. For example, Marxism, by extracting 'class' out of the complex of racial colonial domination and adding an internationalist dimension to the anti-colonial struggle, helped deepen and enrich the understanding in the liberation movement of the national democratic project. And, thanks to the BC influence, very few in our ranks will dispute the importance of reaffirming and asserting black identity. Whereas the emphasis of BC is on psychological liberation, the primary focus of Pan-Africanism and Marxism is on resolving national oppression and class exploitation, respectively.
To a large extent, the debate among the black intelligentsia has mainly revolved, on the one hand, around the definition of and the relative weight that one attaches to dialectically linked categories such as 'race', 'class', 'culture' and 'nation', and, on the other, around the political definition and socio-economic content of post-apartheid South Africa. There is in our country a genre of intellectual thought whose components are elements of the three traditions.
The liberation movement has had to depend for decades on its own intelligentsia, not least because pillars of knowledge production in the country were in the hands of whites. Even the black intellectuals who were based at institutions which were controlled by whites had to draw inspiration from the three traditions and from the actual experience of struggle. The theories of the liberation struggle which informed the approach of the various organs of the liberation movement were the product of the thinking within the ranks of the movement itself; they were not developed by some intellectual sitting somewhere high, up there, in some ivory tower. To be sure, most in the knowledge sector establishment were hostile to the liberation movement; liberals thought our struggle was too violent while 'legal' Marxists doubted whether we were radical enough. To this day, the cadreship of the movement is trained not by some academic, no matter how well read the person may be, but by those well schooled in the theories and praxis of our struggle.
The members of the Native Club are influenced predominately by the three revolutionary intellectual traditions, with the battle-cry being to address the legacy of apartheid in the knowledge production sector. The liberation movement, as argued already, came to power with its own body of knowledge and an engaged intelligentsia, but since 1994 there has been a significant retreat on these two fronts. This has largely been because many of those who in the past were dedicated to the generation of ideas for the struggle have now been absorbed into new responsibilities. The private sector is also playing its part, paying the highest price for the best brains in the country. In the private sector innovation is subordinated to the logic of capital accumulation.
The terrain of ideas should not be left uncontested, lest our school children are condemned to singing, under the banner of the flag of our new South Africa, praise songs for Christopher Columbus for having 'discovered' the world. Our ancestors, in their resistance against colonial intruders, never lost sight of the importance of ideas, some even sending their children and trusted cadres to missionary schools to learn the 'secrets of the white man'. During our struggle the realm of ideas always stood vigilant behind the barrel of the gun. Why then, when we have political power, do we marginalise ideas as a priority sector for transformation?
Eddy Maloka is the President of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS)
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