Xolela Mangcu
Guest Column
`Where are the black intellectuals?” President Thabo Mbeki has often asked. I would urge him to consider an even larger and prior question: where is the intellectual environment required for the emergence of those intellectuals?
Black people have been excluded from what I have previously called the “knowledge-ideas- complex”. It consists of interlocking, mutually supportive and impenetrable relationships among white intellectuals – from literary criticism to urban planning. Because of their strategic position at the cusp of intellectual and cultural production, white intellectuals have been able to disproportionately project their values on to our public morality and public policies. Our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and rules and rituals of political decision-making have a liberal Western outlook. Happily, the values of justice and fairness enshrined in the Constitution coincide with the values of most South Africans.
But why should black people continue to be coincidental in the shaping of the national political culture? Are there ways for increasing black participation in the making of the national political culture? Moving from a procedural democracy of Western-type institutions to a more substantive democracy might create new spaces for black intellectuals. Creating a proper intellectual environment is therefore inextricably tied to a larger question: where is the social vision that challenges intellectuals to bring out the best in them?
How might we then begin to facilitate greater black intellectual participation in the endeavour of nation-building? Let’s start with the question of a social vision, and end with some ideas on what we can do about the intellectual environment.
The absence of a social vision has undermined black intellectual participation in public life in many ways. For example, during our recent elections, I noticed a racial division of labour in the public discourse. White political parties and intellectuals dominated the discussion of broader democratic values and principles. As Steven Friedman has put it, the right issues were being raised by the wrong people. However dubious their motivations were for opposing an African National Congress two-thirds majority, their language was framed in terms of democratic principles.
Black parties and intellectuals, on the other hand, seemed stuck in the discourse of delivery, as if they had become more knowledgeable about building houses than building nations. This is not to say that there isn’t a tiny minority of black scholars working on issues of democracy, but rather to ask whether we have anything resembling the society-wide substantive discussions that took place among the French philosophes in the 18th century, in the 13 states of the pre-independence United States, in India in the 1950s and in South Africa itself during the stuggle. All of that energy has dissipated under the weight of post-apartheid technocracy and materialism. Getting government contracts has become more important than reading and writing – the essence of intellectual function.
Getting to intellectual environment, I am struck by the absence of institutions in which people of ideas can get together to engage each other and the public on the democratic experience. We talk to each other only through newspapers, radio, television and, for the lucky few, the Internet. The ideas that float in the public domain are never followed up and interrogated in any in- depth manner with members of the public. If South Africa is ever going to be the winning nation that Mbeki talks about, we have to know how to become a learning society first – in the manner that organisational gurus talk about learning organisations. One practical suggestion would be to introduce topics such as nation-building and pluralism in the agenda of existing community forums. Members of Parliament could also use their constituency meetings to talk about issues that pertain to our identity as a nation.
Something drastic should also be done about the state of university salaries – as long as universities remain underfunded, the perception will continue that the intellectual function is not a priority in our national development. Young people will continue to shun academic careers for as long as they see them as not prestigious or lucrative enough. Perhaps Mbeki and Minister of Education Kader Asmal can have a tte– tte about how the state of the universities prevents the emergence of a black intellectual class – most of whom do not have inheritances like their white counterparts.
But being black is not in and of itself a sufficient condition for playing a progressive role in the articulation of a new national identity. Black intellectuals should learn from the lessons of the black economic empowerment movement. We should avoid a situtation where a group of self-anointed elites become the high priests of black intellectual life.
Nor should we allow envy and petty jealousies – that great affliction of formerly oppressed people everywhere – to interfere in the way of intellectual collaboration. One of the weirdest things I have heard is that there is a growing divide between those who have attended American and European universities and those who have either remained behind or attended African universities. Seemingly, the latter are the true intellectual arbiters of the African experience while the former are pawns in a grand white scheme to deny Africa its true intellectuals. Rubbish, let’s just get on with it.
We should also be careful that black self- determination does not turn into a blind black jingoism. The challenge is to make sure that a healthy black nationalism is not turned into a degenerate anti-whiteism.
People like Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe were able to avoid that fate through their relationships with whites. We should challenge the dictionary-based, and therefore static, definitions of who is an African that have come from some black scholars. We need a definition that evolves and expresses our changing circumstances, aspirations and position in the world. It is that improvisational approach to identity that made it possible for Biko and his black consciousness comrades to redefine blackness to include coloureds and Indians. That is why Malcolm X came back from Mecca a changed man – less essentialistic about the white man as the “devil”.
Just as we speak of Arabian-Africans like Colonel Moammar Gadaffi, we should be able to talk of Jewish-Africans or Italian-Africans, or whatever. Improvisation, adaptation, hospitality, generosity and inclusion are at the heart of the African personality: ubuntu.
Black intellectuals have the potential to responsibly bring those values to the generation of a new social vision for South Africa. But that’s all it is at this point – a potential.
Dr Xolela Mangcu is a senior analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies