On scholars and social commitment in Southern Africa

Scholars and intellectuals are faced with stark socio-political choices, writes Henning Melber. Do they side with those maintaining the status quo in unequal societies or do they demand the right to engage in social struggles?

This essay argues for the need for a permissive postcolonial socio-political system allowing for dissenting views, including manifestations of critical loyalty through the articulation of dissenting views, and concludes with an appeal to opt for such a socio-political commitment.

The virtues advocated are considered as ingredients in the promotion of a human-rights-focused and development-centred culture conducive to socio-political as well as economic progress of the people. This view follows the notion advocated by the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In the introduction to his collection of lectures on Development as Freedom he maintains: “Freedoms are not only the primary ends of development, they are also among its principal means”. He points out that freedoms of different kinds are linked with one another. They include political freedoms, social opportunities, and access to economic resources.

Political regimes in many of the African societies lack recognition of such contributing factors or even deny them. Instead, all too often, the political environment has militated against freedom of thought and expression.

Honesty and Betrayal

“Where there’s no fight for it there’s no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it’s the lesser evil to destroy it.”

These were the thoughts of Yakov Bok, the protagonist of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer, while being carried to his bitterly-fought-for trial to prove his innocence after a long and excessive ordeal under torture and dehumanisation in the prisons of Czarist Russia.

As a victim of anti-Semitic hatred, he refuses to compromise with a regime that violates his human dignity and self-respect, but even more so his profound sense of justice. Malamud created his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as a monument to civil disobedience, guided and motivated by a strong belief in humanism.

Those in control over social power have often considered the Yakov Boks of this world as a threat to their hegemonic rule, not in their individual capacity but mainly reduced to the anonymity of faceless ‘masses’ representing social movements. In contrast to this tendency towards an impersonal reduction, those considered as scholars and intellectuals are often perceived as a danger on the mere grounds of their individual capacities. They are viewed as individual ‘risks’ in the sense of being potential opinion-leaders able to contribute to, if not actively shape, public opinion and debate.

It would be a gross misunderstanding, however, to conclude that scholars and intellectuals are by nature or preference a critical counterweight to authoritarian or totalitarian rule or any other forms of abuse of power. Instead, the ‘intelligentsia’ has all too often been of strategic relevance in supporting such power structures for the sake of their own benefits.

Members of an educated elite have frequently been advocates and protagonists, if not architects and masterminds, of oppressive structures, and many more have even been among the silent supporters of such systems and their devastating results. To be educated does by no means protect one from turning into an ideologue or a perpetrator of crimes against humanity of the worst kind.

Far from being noble creatures, scholars and intellectuals are often tempted to serve political aims for their own gains. Honesty and integrity, supposed to be among the core values of intellectually ethical behaviour, are abandoned or neglected for more profane rewards than respect. Those who uphold their principles despite lack of material recognition are a rare species. Opportunism reigns. This is also true for the postcolonial era of southern African societies, some of which had to fight long and bitter wars of liberation at high costs to achieve sovereignty – only to deny their citizens the right to practise freedom in a democratically comprehensive way.

Decolonisation processes all too often displayed cases of a striking metamorphosis by individuals. Being social revolutionaries initially, claiming to represent the ‘povo’ or masses, they ended up as relatively high-profile representatives of a postcolonial establishment placing their own gains above earlier principles.

These members of a new elite have become part and parcel of a set of deep-rooted anachronistic values within a system of former liberation movements now in power. After seizing legitimate political control over the state, they turned their liberating politics of anti-colonial resistance into oppressive tools under the guise of pseudo-revolutionary slogans. Their “talk left, act right” seeks to cover the true motive of aiming to occupy the political commanding heights of society against all odds – preferably forever – at the expense of the public interest they claim to represent in the light of deteriorating socio-economic living conditions for the once colonised, now hardly liberated (and anything but emancipated) majority.

The Struggle Within the Struggle

Scholars in politics include all too often the prototype of the sell-out intellectuals already lambasted by Frantz Fanon for their role in the decolonisation processes of the late 1950s, whom he accused of joining the liberation movement only to secure a slice of the cake shared after independence among those in control of the party in power.

Almost half a century ago, the Martinique-born psychiatrist and political revolutionary, who had joined the Algerian liberation struggle, presciently described in his manifesto The Wretched of the Earth the internal contradictions and limits to emancipation in anticolonial resistance and organised liberation movements. Writing at a time when the Algerian war of liberation had not even ended, Fanon prophesied the abuse of government power after attainment of independence and in the wake of establishing a one-party state. In a chapter entitled “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” he predicted that the state, which by its robustness and at the same time its restraint should convey trust and calm, foists itself on people in a spectacular way, makes a big show of itself, harasses and mistreats the citizens and by this means shows that they are in permanent danger.

He continues by criticising the abuse of power exercised by the party, which:

"…controls the masses, not in order to make sure that they really participate in the business of governing the nation, but in order to remind them constantly that the government expects from them obedience and discipline. The political party, instead of welcoming the expression of popular discontentment, instead of taking for its fundamental purpose the free flow of ideas from the people up to the government, forms a screen and forbids such ideas."

The growing blending of party, government and state among the liberation movements in power indicates a very similar development in the post-apartheid era. The specific constellation based on the use of force to gain liberation from undemocratic and repressive conditions like those that prevailed in the colonial societies of southern Africa was hardly favourable to the durable strengthening of humanitarian values and norms. As part of abolishing anachronistic, degrading systems of rule it created new challenges on the difficult path to establishing sound and robust egalitarian structures and institutions, and in particular to promoting democratically-minded people. But independence without true democracy is still far from being liberation.

Criticism as Loyalty

The governments of postcolonial states in former settler societies such as Namibia and South Africa are, in contrast to the previous minority regimes broadly legitimate. Hence there is no justification for a right to generalised resistance to the state authorities as implied in the arguments concerning the colonial order. Notwithstanding this necessary clarification, a similar guiding principle of legitimate dissent from the state authorities’ controlled and enforced views should be advocated for an ethically motivated civic behaviour in the postcolonial societies of today.

In the context of a political culture committed to the values and virtues of pluralism in a liberal democracy, critical voices should not automatically be associated with disloyalty to the existing system. After all, this has been one of the aims of a struggle against the totalitarian regimes previously in place – to abandon the intolerant authoritarianism shaping the colonial societies under minority rule and to allow for a variety of views. Unfortunately, this seems not to be the common and accepted understanding of many of those in control of political power in post-apartheid societies, who seem to feel mainly “accountable to themselves”, as the scholar Ken Good phrased it. He had spent most of his academic life in Southern Africa until he was - 72 years of age and after lecturing 15 years on the campus of the University of Botswana - declared a prohibited immigrant by the Head of State Festus Mogae, allegedly for his criticism of the government’s policy of forced removal imposed on the Bushmen.

While most of the existing political orders are able to claim – in contrast to the preceding minority regimes – a more or less democratic legitimacy, they often fail to recognise the difference between its formal and moral dimensions. In other words: the mere fact that one is formally entitled to take certain decisions and actions on behalf of others without further consultation on the basis of (at times dubious) election results, does not necessarily and always justify such decisions or actions from a moral or ethical point of view.

Rapid social transitions have an impact on those involved in the transformation, which affects them in a direct way. Once moving into the seats of power, the effects of being alienated from people at the grassroots whom political office bearers claim to have represented since the ‘struggle days’, should not be underestimated. It requires a high degree of (self-)critical reflection and assessment to protect oneself from not being moved further and further away from ‘the masses’.

With reference to democratic South Africa, this process has been described by a local observer quoted in an article in the Guardian (16 May 2001) thus:

“The pace of change is such that individuals cease to live in real time. Human journeys that under normal circumstances take decades, if not generations, are completed in a few years, if not months. So the prisoner becomes president; law-breakers become law-makers; armed guerillas become arms dealers. The person who slept on your floor only 10 years ago, after a wild party, is now a government minister with an entourage.”

With the change a growing degree of intolerance often emerges, which considers dissenting views as unacceptable. As a recent South African study by Gibson and Gouws on the degree of (in-)tolerance diagnosed:

“For most South Africans, the idea of putting up with their political enemies is distasteful and/or foreign. And indeed, most South Africans have political enemies they dislike a great deal, and these enemies are perceived as quite threatening. The combination of disliking a group and feeling threatened by it is a powerful source of political intolerance.”

With reference to earlier processes of transition from colonial minority rule to formal political sovereignty under African governments in other parts of the continent, the backlash which often occurred, had been described as a return to repression by Hydén and Okigbo in a chapter to a volume on Media and Democracy in Africa:

“It became clear quite early on after independence that the new nationalist governments were not comfortable with the idea of challenges to their policies. Arguing that the new nation-states could not afford bickering over what is right or wrong, these leaders did their best to suppress opinions other than those favorable to their own stance. The political leadership was ready to bar others from using the public realm, exceeding the efforts of the colonial state in this regard. Political space in this public realm could only be used at its pleasure and permission to do so could be revoked at its sole judgment. The most significant change was the transformation of the discursive realm from being civic and cosmopolitan to becoming parochial and local.”

As part of the historical legacy, those who were fighting against institutionalized discrimination and oppression under totalitarian structured societies tend to resort to similar mechanisms of control once in power themselves. They are tempted to marginalise those who beg to differ or are perceived as different from the accepted norms under the newly imposed discourse of nation building.

Choices for Commitment

African societies and the social forces operating under the given constraints imposed by state control – similar to forces within other societies the world over – face the challenge to achieve and maintain a maximum of independence of thought as a precondition for the realisation of citizenship. It is important to note that such criticism of repressive policy is shared by some of those in established and responsible positions within the currently emerging continental African bodies of relevance. In his keynote address to a conference organized mid-2004 in collaboration with the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda did not mince his words. Having worked as a legal expert on the drafting and conclusion of the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (adopted in 1981), Jallow stated:

“Good governance is not only about majorities; it involves the protection of all, including minorities such as those in the opposition. The right to free speech and dissent rests on the existence of an independent private media – both in print and on radio, given literacy levels in Africa. The establishment of independent civil society organisations and the creation of the democratic space for them to operate effectively must be nurtured to diffuse the over-centralisation of power and authority, empower the ordinary citizen and thereby reduce the risks of abuse of centralised authority. Governments should relentlessly strive to ensure the realisation of all categories of rights and freedoms for all without distinction.”

As scholars and intellectuals we have socio-political choices to make. We have to decide if we are merely guided by our petty bourgeois class interests to enhance our relative privileges in a given power structure and social hierarchy by siding with those executing social control and maintaining economic and/or political power within the grossly unequal societies of southern Africa. Alternatively, we can opt for committing class suicide as Amilcar Cabral had suggested (and practised), although this sounds rather crude (and highly idealistic) in the era of postcolonial re-established social hierarchies.

Instead, demanding the right to engage in social struggles as academics might be a more realistic point of departure – and difficult enough to practise. Like any other members of society, scholars and intellectuals are faced with bigger choices. These are about more than how best to ensure their narrowly defined self-interest of academic freedom in cosy niches of institutions of higher learning. Academic freedom in its true, wider sense is related to and is about fundamental aspects of human rights and development. And it’s up to us, if we accept the challenge and decide to fight for such interlinked goals. The question remains: Which side are we on?

* Acknowledgement: This is a shorter version of an article based on a plenary paper presented to the 24th Biennial Conference of the Southern African Universities’ Social Sciences Conference (SAUSSC) on “Human Rights and Development” (University of Botswana, Gaborone, December 5–7, 2005) and published in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, May 2006, pp. 261-278. Please consult the original publication for the full text with detailed bibliographic references.

* Dr. Henning Melber was Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek (1992-2000) and Research Director of The Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden (2000-2006), where he is now the Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (www.dhf.uu.se).

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