The Poverty of ideas: South African Democracy and the retreat of intellectuals edited by William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni (Jacana)
The disappearance of the public intellectual is by now a tired, if not irritating, refrain. Americans have for at least 50 years warned that their true thinkers are an endangered species, that the ones hanging around today are poor substitutes, easily seduced by cushy academic appointments or even worse, celebrity — in other words, certainly not the real deal.
Not coincidentally, just across the pond, the French and the Brits are of the same opinion, more or less, although the former have published a dictionary of Gallic intellectuals, which runs for a modest 1 300 pages. Pity the self-deprecating British then, who recoil at the very idea, preferring instead to claim that there are no intellectuals in Britain and there never have been. Try telling that to the millions of colonial subjects reared on Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and company.
It was only a matter of time before the South African chattering classes, proving once again just how unexceptional South Africa really is, latched on to this queer notion of the ”absent intellectual”. The editors of The Poverty of Ideas — South African Democracy and the Retreat of Intellectuals are confident enough to make some bold but hardly novel observations. South Africa’s democracy is under siege, its landscape has morphed into a vast, unrecognisable intellectual and moral wasteland barren of clear and courageous thought.
Where are the Robert Sobukwes, Steve Bikos and Griffiths Mxenges of today, they ask. Is anyone pushing back and fighting for ground? It appears not — that is if one is seduced by the nostalgic self-indulgence.
A closer listen, however, reveals that much of it sounds like a lament, eerily reminiscent of my grandmother’s mutterings for a return of the serialised Zulu radio drama of the 1970s. As one public intellectual said: ”To attest decline is not to indulge in nostalgia.” There have been losses and there have been gains.
So let’s put the glamour days of moral clarity behind us for a while. What Messieurs Gumede and Dikeni would have us believe is that all we have today is a handful of parasitic underachievers masquerading as clever dicks in newspapers and on television.
In Dikeni’s words, more or less no substance, just small talk. And it is not just the ”media whore” who comes up for a thorough drubbing — although Dikeni apportions a fair amount of venom to this sort.
The pragmatic policy analyst, the commercial intellectual, the cunning ”new, late-arriving gender activist” all receive a come-uppance. In fact, I suspect that anyone who has not de-privileged her or his knowledge and become a pragmatic activist the author would like to have strung up.
But in boxing for Pierre Bourdieu, Dikeni fails to reckon with the inevitable and timeless trade-off between academic credibility and public profile. His kind of intellectual cannot stomach the two-minute radio spiel, relegating such moves more suitable to the banal and generalist. Surely popular media has created wider and far greater possibilities for intellectuals to engage with various publics?
In the world of good intellectual versus bad intellectual Dikeni hopes to separate the wheat from the chaff. It would be interesting to see just exactly how he would go about this sorting given that more than half of the 14 contributors to the collection of essays have done or continue to do intellectual work for the very policy think-tanks and institutions he so disparages. Ah, lest we forget that it is a rite of passage for the young contrarian to rubbish the labour of other intellectuals.
The honey bear trap when it comes to scholarship on the role of intellectuals, of course, is resisting the temptation to tell the world what intellectuals should or should not do. It is not only bad manners, it is haughty and quite simply wrong. But never one to resist a challenge, Gumede does just this.
Edward Said tried to get away with this in the 1993 Reith Lectures and barely escaped. Michel Foucault notoriously shied away from such prescriptions. Gumede obviously thinks he can get away with comfortably sounding off on the sides intellectuals should take.
There is always something fishy about the idea that intellectuals must necessarily be oppositional. Yes, we can expect that an intellectual advances human freedom and knowledge. And yes, we can hope that they hallow the national purpose and generate some fresh ideas. But who told Gumede that the poor want to co-partner with intellectuals in developing ‘a new architecture for producing and sharing knowledgeâ€? A bad idea William, if ever there was. Haven’t the poor shared enough since industrialisation? Should we expect more?
Of course, with nostalgia comes finger-pointing, and it is no surprise then to find smack bang in the middle of all this hand-wringing over the imminent demise of the intellectual, the biggest faux intellectual of them all, Thabo Mbeki. I’ll spare you the details of mudslinging and thus say in short that we are all in this great big mess because of he who reigned from Olympus. Paranoid and petty, Mbeki once in power set his hounds on anyone who could string a sentence together: university professors, journalists, artists, filmmakers, let’s just say the critically literate. Now, given the chance I will gladly take my place in the queue to throw a punch at Mbeki, but it strikes me as incredibly disingenuous and intellectually lazy to single out Mbeki for a special lashing.
Is it really a case of everything is burned, nothing can be saved? Jonathan Jansen seems to think so. According to the Free State University vice-chancellor, intellectuals in academia have left the building altogether, leaving behind substandard tutors and managers bent on reproducing mediocrity. Academics have been stopped from doing what they do best. Campuses, once the sites for intellectual activity, have become the battleground for party allegiances.
This is in no small part due to the interference of Mbeki and his mandarins in otherwise academic affairs. Was Mbeki’s power really so pervasive, so totalising?
Foucault had a couple of things to say about this, but I suspect Jansen knows this. The chapter ends with Jansen in a Chicago hotel room envying the sea of critical voices in the US.
Undoubtedly, any thinking visitor to Johannesburg will arrive at the same perception — more or less. The cliché of the disappearing intellectual is not without company. Attached like a hip flask is the more severe recurring motif: ”We don’t have intellectuals. Others do”.
To be fair there are some stunners albeit somewhat ill-fitting amid what turns out to be overdetermined commentary. An essay by Mahmood Mamdani on African intellectuals and identity and a piece by Grant Farred, both teachers at Ivy League universities in the US, stand out.
Ironically these pieces have very little to say about either the state of democracy in South Africa or the retreat of its intellectuals and instead take the opportunity to think through the politicisation of indigeneity in the postcolony and the pathology of power and intellectualism.
Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Farred’s deployment of the meta-intellectual to read Mbeki’s ambivalent relationship with his own intellectualism is innovative and will undoubtedly be picked up by graduate students across the country. Presumably Farred has many more useful things to say if only he could get past the poetics of post-structuralism.
I suspect that in turning away from speaking directly to the subject of the collection, both academics are well tuned to the cycle of concern over the death of the intellectual.
In the interest of setting the record straight, the editors included a contribution from academic gender activist Shireen Hassim, whose piece unfortunately belabours the trajectory of the women’s movement since the first democratic elections. Nothing new there. Is lively writing now out of fashion?
In the end what we are left with is a rather simple observation — intellectuals are alive and well and going nowhere. They may not be what we are used to, but then perhaps they never were.