We must encourage the growth of a cadre of black intellectuals who can produce discourses to rigorously engage with the transformation of our society.
Alongside the decline of civil society we have seen the decline in black intellectual production. There is a resulting dearth of independent and committed black intellectuals. So discourse in every field continues overwhelmingly to be dominated by white academics and intellectuals.
Even the discourse of black working-class liberation is dominated by the white left outside the African National Congress-led alliance, a reality that they prefer not to discuss.
The white left pursues a materialist analysis only to the extent that it suits them, which results in a disproportionate emphasis on class at the expense of its racial derivatives. They wish to avoid reflecting on how the racial origins of their privileged upbringing shaped the advantages they today still enjoy over black people, but they are quick to critique and deride the bourgeois class dimensions of black economic empowerment.
Black poverty and unemployment, still at alarmingly high levels, and the resultant social crisis demands much greater black intellectual involvement.
We urgently need black intellectuals whose horizons are not constrained or compromised by party political loyalties, and who can boldly confront elitist domination and the neo-liberal policies.
After all, the vast majority of black intellectuals, unlike their white counterparts, organically arose from the ranks of the black working class. Today few black intellectuals are critical of neo-liberalism and supportive of the emancipatory projects opposed to it. We also need to see the re-emergence of older black radical intellectuals, who left the public stage after 1994 from burn-out and demoralisation in the face of overwhelming ANC domination and the decline of the political organisations they were a part of, such as the Pan Africanist Congress and the Black Consciousness movement.
President Thabo Mbeki’s call for the increased participation of black intellectuals in national discourses was very important. Not, however, to sing the praises of the ANC or rationalise and sanitise its policies and their negative social effects, but to critically engage it.
Black intellectuals have a pivotal role to play in our political and public life, particularly as regards the central discourse of how race-class relations continue to shape post-apartheid society. They also need to self-critically discuss the social and class forces that have in post-apartheid South Africa reshaped them and that account partly for their partial or total withdrawal from public intellectual life and politics.
No sphere of society is free from often conscious attempts to frustrate or deny critical voices, but the hard truths must be spoken to those who wish to deny their ventilation, both inside the ANC alliance and outside it. The development of a more radical social transformation of our country requires the boldest intellectual openness and transparency. Black intellectuals have a vital role to play in both invigorating and expanding the national discourse.