In this blogpost, Yusuf Serunkuma slams the cowardice of intellectuals today, who display self-censorship and contentment with the status quo, in contrast with an earlier generation of activists and subaltern scholars. Serunkuma argues that this did not happen overnight, rather it has taken years of manufacturing conformity and consent.
By Yusuf Serunkuma
There is a less discussed component about the profiles of earlier generation of anti-colonial, subaltern scholars and public intellectuals: their activism and militancy, and above all, community organising. Take Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Ramji Ambedkar, Kwame Nkrumah, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sédar Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Walter Rodney, and several others of this earlier generation, their intellectual output was intimately entwined with their interaction with the struggle of their compatriots, which they ceaselessly sought to end.
These comrades were not just authors and theorists but were public intellectuals in the organic sense of the term: community organisers, activists. Their scholarship and life-stories—which is standard reading to this day—as author and activist Leo Zeilig, among others, has so committedly demonstrated—reveals a complete immersion and investment in seeking to identify, expose, and resiliently fight the exploitation and colonialist power. Whatever they touched, whatever angle they approached the world, fighting foreign exploitation and control (in its many forms, things that have continued to ruin our wretched lives to this day) was the air they breathed. Whatever micro manifestation they focused their intellectual abilities—whether it was the struggle for gender parity, literature, domestic violence, local land wrangles—all these were approached and connected to the wreckage of the violent global capitalist machine. They were convinced the ways in which events within the superstructure played out, directly impacted the ways in which the more localised manifestation of the adjunct problem played out.
Even subsequent scholars—whose work and activism would become more prominent in the 1970-1990s onwards—such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Samir Amin, Ama Ata Aidoo, Christopher Hope, Robert Serumaga, Byron Kawadwa, Wole Soyinka, Okot p’ Bitek, Ken Saro Wiwa and several others of this time—there was militancy and active engagement with their communities and scholarship. Reflecting on and documenting their life-stories—again as folks such as Zeilig, António Tomás among others, have done – reflects so poorly on the ways in which today’s scholars are emasculated, and rendered almost useless to their communities.
Today’s scholar has so wholeheartedly, cowardly, acquiesced to colonialist-capitalist tyranny, and in many cases has volunteered their services to the same folks that their grandparents died fighting to depose. It is not that today’s scholars aren’t issuing radical statements, but rather (with minor exceptions), that they are terribly detached from the struggles of the ordinary folks, and are too tame, and too cowardly. While a great many of them appear to be doing “good scholarship”—by the standards of their peers—they have only gotten more entangled into a web of obfuscated realities, focused on terminologies, representation and micro-manifestation of phenomena, and terribly afraid of confronting the biggest elephant in the room, which imbues every aspect of their scholarship. Their partial involvement, and obsession with safety away from (anti-exploitation, anti-capitalist) trouble, not only pays well (or so they are convinced) but it also guarantees them a material buttress against their more wretched compatriots. But in a word, this is cowardice.
I try in this essay to map the history of this cowardice, self-abasement, censorship and contentment with the status quo. In truth, this did not happen overnight. It has taken years of cobbling, manufacturing and manipulating. The present condition thus represents, on the one hand, the thoroughness of new colonialism (subtle, comprehensive and apparently friendly, and distractive), and on the other, the complacence and cowardice of today’s mostly southern intellectuals.
The scholars is a community organiser
If the intellectual is meant to give their compatriots homogeneity, awareness and influence the course of history, the anti-colonial intellectuals of the 1950 and 1960s lived true to the definition of the term. As Steven Feierman writes in 1990 book, Peasant Intellectuals, “they got involved in socially recognised organisational, directive, educative or expressive activities” as Feierman has noted, and their scholarly production was mediated within the fabric of their society. To retain their independence and be “capable of elaborating dissenting discourse without losing valued occupations,” they never sought to see their intellectual production as a means of subsistence, even when the opportunity presented itself.
Thus they did not write for peer reviewed journals in the pursuit of impact points, plaudits among peers or promotion. Neither did they write in coded incomprehensible language, problematically called rigour, and long-winding theorisation. They wrote more creatively, angrily, and simply. To quote the secretary in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, they wrote in isand was. Thus, they published mostly in newspapers, pamphlets and magazines, which was ideal for mass audiences. Rajat Neogy’s magazine, Transition now curated at Harvard is an outstanding example (whatever the politics of its creation and existence). Most of the time, knowledge production was not the job, but something they felt they needed to do as their contribution to their collectively wretched lives.
And if these intellectuals ever wrote books—scholarly or creative fictions—the publishers were normally indigenous, self-published, or church outlets—but these were mostly located on the continent: Tanzania Publishing House, and later Mkuki Na Nyota in Dar-es-Salaam, East African Publishing House (EAPH) in Nairobi and later Fountain Publishers in Kampala. Heinemann Educational Publishers, which published the Heinemann Africa Writers Serries edited by renowned editor and publisher, Henry Chakava, and would soon become East African Educational publishers (EAEP). There was also the East Africa Literature Bureau, which took a great deal of pride in publishing texts in the local languages. Together with the Penguin Africa Writers Series, these became the major outlets. These intellectuals rarely obsessed with the rankings of the western world. Even when publications were in foreign languages—because of the tragedy of colonial enlightenment as David Scott has so succinctly demonstrated in Conscripts of Modernity—they tried as hard as they could to have their knowledge reach their homebred compatriots, by making sure these books sold on the streets and sometimes, freely photocopied and distributed.
These eminent Africans lived on the streets, and among the peasants. They were involved in the daily lives of their compatriots. They not only participated in protests and other actions and community organising, they offered themselves for political positions as soon as need arose. They were present in local public meetings discussing cleaning of markets and protecting the environment, for example. They appeared on local radios stations to explain big and small issues. You would find them at the National Theatre curating a political play, or in the market square doing Theatre for Development or speaking to audiences such as market women and taxi touts—not just de gratis, but they took pride in these engagements. Their scholarship directly derived from and disseminated amongst their compatriots. This is especially true of Ngugi’s work with the Kamirithu Theatre group, Okot p’ Bitek’s work at the National Theatre in Kampala, not to mention Nkrumah who would become first president of Ghana. And poet, Ken Saro Wiwa was a committed environmental activist and died fighting Shell in the Niger Delta. The list goes on and on.
Don’t look, don’t see scholars
This quality of their militancy and activisms blossoms more powerfully when cast against the current crop of intellectuals, specifically the ones operating mostly in the fields of decolonial, and postcolonial studies. Or any other discipline seemingly insulated away from new colonialism. Here, you find folks preoccupied with discourse, framing, language, ethics, and theorisation (all of which are undeniably wonderful things). But rarely do these scholars aspire to confront the subject of their theorisation head-on. Firstly, these folks are not only selfishly walled away from the rest of their compatriots, they are also endlessly producing scholarship, which ironically (sometimes, unbeknownst to them), only reproduces exploitation. These scholars of today have decided to spend entire careers and productive lifetimes quarrelling with their equally conflicted peers from the western world—the ‘New Intellectuals of Empire’—about how they have wrongly framed the discipline, and whether they are willing to listen to the subalterns. The idea of “studies” has replaced the urgency of activism and conscientisation. This gulf between academics and their communities has become more pronounced with scholars seeing themselves as too polished to mingle with their dirty wretched compatriots, but also see themselves simply as chroniclers of events. (Makerere University recently completed a huge high-rise wall around their over a hundred acres of the land—a long, long winding wall—so as to keep the scholars away from their unwashed compatriots, whom they accuse of stealing side mirrors off their second-hand Japanese-made vehicles, and wearing down the public infrastructure i.e., paid for by these same unwashed taxpayers, who wish to use it with unauthorised entry).
With the stark exception of political economists, the majority of other scholars (in disciplines such as human rights, democracy, historical studies, medicine, literature, culture, gender studies, postcolonial studies, conflict and peace studies), all of them—be they Europeans or Africans—do not see, nor seek to integrate continued colonisation into their analyses. While they might agree that colonialism is alive and well, they see no reason to practically confront it—as their predecessors did—neither do they even aspire to expose it as the bedrock around which everything else falls in place. They see their different departments and disciplines as only slightly linked to the economies in which they operate (and many Euro-American funding organisations marauding the continent appear very friendly and have often gifted them with a few peanuts, they would themselves have gotten either as taxes or endowments from the juggernauts of corporations maiming the continent).
For example, conflicts are studied mostly as products of local agency: so, things such as corruption of local elites, Islamic extremism, autocratic tendencies of leaders, tribalism are common. Which are often clearly undeniable. The historian, or political scientist will spend endless pages knitting the story together, showing the mistakes and overzealousness of the autocrat and other local actors; their dangerous pronouncements, the monies stolen, etcetera. But while this is undeniable, it is outrightly the smallest part of the story. They’ll not tell or see as a key factor, that autocracies across the African continent after the 1980s onwards, have been mostly emissaries of Euro-American banks and corporations (see here, and here, and here for example).
Thus, studying a men such as Yoweri Museveni, Paul Biya, Mobutu Sese seko or even the Kabila family in DRC for their contribution to the mismanagement of their countries, branding them “monsters” is clearly unhelpful analysis. Because these men are workers of a superior power which continues to set their terms of work. The big Pharma (say as spelled out in Prof. Peter Mugyenyi’s book) will not be mentioned, but instead will be told how local countries and their leaders are unable to invest in local manufacturing of medicines. They’ll discuss underdevelopment of Africa and throw about pompous theories about the failure to build structures and institutions as “what makes nations fail”. Or they’ll tell you, the tribalism of the African elite in Robert Mugabe, or Yoweri Museveni or the autocracy of President Amin. And they’ll knit a wonderful story together—often with good evidence.
But all of this is absolute nonsense. They’ll never discuss debilitating sanctions say against Robert Mugabe, Fidel Castro or Idi Amin. They will never integrate in their analyses, the blatant investment in violence and corruption by major Euro-American extraction agencies, such as Glencore Plc. or Dan Gertler International (DGI), Africom, which are well spread across the African continent doing dirty work and failing these countries. While these stories are blasted all over news outlets, scholars have tended to see very limited connection between them and their work. But more importantly for me is are scholars uninterested in organising with the rest of the wretcheds.
Standardization as stupefaction
What has happened over the years is that knowledge production and its subsidiary chain (gathering evidence, publication, and dissemination) have all become aligned to a sophisticated colonial packaging: First, knowledge production became a job for the subaltern intellectual. This was quickly followed by standardisation: gathering knowledge, publishing it, and disseminating it—even if not for monetary gain—all became legitimated by the university. Only through the university (its journals and presses, and its people with titles behind their names) is knowledge validated as scientific. At the face of it, the guidelines look logical benevolent: Knowledge has to be “scientific” to avoid “fake news,” they say, to argue. Then journals and university presses become the vanguards of “scientific knowledge.” Data has to be “ethically” gathered and presented in a particular grammar and ordering. But what do they mean by an abstract concept such as “scientific knowledge” or even “ethics”? Journals and publishers have to have impact, and texts have to show rigour. But what do these things mean in the life-threatening quest for freedom from violent exploitation from colonial control? As critical race theory scholars have demonstrated, the quest for fairness and liberation becomes obscured or (colour) blinded by claims of science and demands of “de-personified” “passive” neutrality or “objectivity,” which in effect glosses over the histories of violence, racism and exploitation behind that which finally becomes labelled scientific.
Like genetically modified tomatoes or apples, which have to look the same from Saigon to Nairobi, everything has been coded and standardized in the false claim that we live in a “global commonwealth of knowledge” and all of us contribute to the same pool, on an even turf. So, you find African scholars producing endless publications about being negated in African studies; about not being cited; and not being acknowledged—all by the white universities! At the centre of the clamour for this validation is the assumption of a benign knowledge commonwealth, a thing which is simply a delusion.
Ever wondered why universities rushed to bestow prominent African intellectuals with PhDs and professorships, without these people actually studying for those things? Yes, to gentrify them and take them away from the streets. After succeeding with the intellectuals of the 1970s and 1990s, the current crop is yearning for being locked into the university, far away from the madding crowd of their compatriots, and in the end, we have scholars completely unconnected to the masses.
Yusuf Serunkuma is a columnist in Uganda’s newspapers, scholar, and a playwright. In 2014, Fountain Publishers published his first play, The Snake Farmers which was received with critical acclaim in Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. He is also a scholar and researches topics in political economy, and teaches decolonial studies/new colonialism, and writes regularly for ROAPE.
Featured Image: Mubarak hiding behind his tanks during the first days of the Egyptian revolution (30 January 2011).
