The poverty of ideas

‘Now, it is a fact that an intellectual is someone who fails to mind his own business.’ Jean-Paul Sartre[1]

The debate on what constitutes the role and responsibility of the intellectual in South Africa generates much acrimony. We believe that it is appropriate to revisit this debate at this moment in the life of our new democracy. Our starting point is that active and engaged public intellectuals play a crucial part in the ongoing life of democratic societies, perhaps even more so in new democracies like ours. As Barney Pityana has said, the capacity of a nation to conduct public debates is an important foundation in building a democratic society. ‘In such debates the nation examines its shortcomings and strengths, surveys the infinite variety of views and opinions and treats everyone with respect, exercising tolerance and promoting meaningful communication’.[2] But instead of active engagement, intellectuals in South Africa have increasingly since 1994 beaten a retreat.

Until the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane in December 2007, the space for debate, dissent and public dialogue was significantly narrowed during the Mbeki administration. Even mildly critical patriots were seen as disloyal, as opposed to the ‘people’. Sadly, some intellectuals resorted to ‘nativism’, to exclusive, rather than plural, definitions of South Africanness. Criticisms were assessed on the extent of one’s blackness, on whether one was on ‘our side’. Such was the hostility to new ideas that critics wondered whether they would have their passports confiscated and their citizenship revoked.

Since Polokwane there has been a visible opening of space for debate, though it is not yet enough. True, Polokwane finally broke the numbing consensus and allowed fresh ideas, imagination and new leadership to be brought to bear in renewing a faltering democracy, mending a torn society and fostering more equitable development. But some of the worst excesses of the Mbeki era are still with us. For one thing, intolerance of different opinions still continues; loyalty to one faction is often still expected for public sector appointments, promotions and state tenders; and new terms have been invented to still opponents: They are said to be ‘coping’, a reference to the Congress of the People (COPE), the breakaway party that seceded from the ANC.

The legacy of the Mbeki administration will be hard to undo. It was not only within the state where demands were made for absolute loyalty to the cause, but also in the wider society that those with dissenting views often faced ridicule, marginalisation and attacks on their integrity. The smear is one of the most devastating weapons for stifling debate and silencing critics. In 2006 Graeme Bloch rightly pointed to the ‘current anti-intellectual populism that blames commentators, intellectuals, unidentifiable conspirators; that bays at independent views; ... none of this augurs well for a climate of critical debate and ideological or intellectual renewal’.[3]

The need for fresh ideas, debate and engagement with pressing issues has never been greater. Njabulo Ndebele has diagnosed a ‘generalised and undefined sense of anxiety in the body politic [which"> breeds conspiracy and fear’.[4] As he expressed it: ‘South Africans across the class, racial and cultural spectrum, confess to feel uncertain and vulnerable as never before since 1994,’ and he listed a whole series of events that indicated and encapsulated the sense that the country was unravelling.[5] Prominent among these was the revolt in many townships across the country in which the poor – the vast majority who had not benefited from the new democracy – expressed their anger at slow delivery of services, corruption, arbitrary decision-making, and callous public servants and politicians.

As Desmond Tutu noted in 2004, South Africans have lost their idealism.[6] Politicians no longer have the respect of the public. Very few of them appear to have a social conscience or to believe in anything greater than their own enrichment. The idea that civil servants and politicians are there to serve has become a fading dream. South African society itself is in crisis. The ideals of the ANC and of like-minded progressives, both white and black, of creating the good society appear to be collapsing. Tutu lamented that South Africa was losing its moral direction. The evidence for this is stark and undeniable: Child rape, violent crime, family breakdown, a deteriorating environment, ethnic and racial divisions, xenophobia, rising inequality and a declining sense of social justice.

In fact, South Africa is stuck in several interlocking crises. Not only has there been a staggering collapse in the sense of social justice, ethics and moral values but the dream of a caring and compassionate society, which many fought for during the liberation struggle, has now turned into a nightmare for millions who ‘live in gruelling, demeaning, dehumanising poverty’, while a small elite connected to the leadership of the ANC ‘become very rich at the stroke of a pen’.[7] It was Thabo Mbeki himself – who must take some responsibility for the malaise – who, while President, said that South African society had absorbed a value system in which ‘personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs and the most theatrical and striking displays of that wealth’.[8] Not much has changed since his administration. Although the country has been in recession since late 2008, government ministers splash out in conspicuous consumption frenzies, buying luxury motor-cars and throwing huge parties at taxpayers’ expense, while admonishing long-suffering citizens to tighten their belts.

Indeed, South Africa is facing a defining moment in its efforts to build a sustainable and equitable democracy as external circumstances become less propitious. The global financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, presents obvious dangers, but it also offers a developing country like South Africa the opportunity to refashion its economy and help create a new global financial system to replace the outdated Bretton Woods accord. In fact, the financial crisis may just provide the kind of shock therapy needed for Africans, for the first time since independence, to build sustainable democracies as well as strong economies. But for this to happen, African intellectuals will need to rise to the challenge and grab the opportunity in adversity. Similarly, China’s entry into Africa may offer the continent the first real chance to lift itself out of poverty, as postwar Europe did under the Marshall Plan. Once again, unless African intellectuals come up with innovative ideas for a new partnership, the continent will lose out, just as it did during colonialism.

South Africa desperately needs intellectuals to wake from their Rip Van Winkle-like slumber and work towards a new progressive agenda for the renewal and reconfiguration of society. To deal with the interlocking social, political and economic crises in which the country is stuck, in an increasing complex, dangerous and economically volatile world, we need fresh ideas, a new mindset and renewed energy. At the same time there has to be a reassertion of progressive values. ‘Human values are required, of integrity, of equity, solidarity, a belief in human potential and human dignity, the possibility of social involvement to eliminate suffering. Consistent willingness to engage with people, to discuss openly, to listen to and incorporate concerns on the ground, (and) encourage transparency and accountability. Tolerance of difference and the celebration of diversity within an inclusivist but principled approach must be central.’[9]

For all these, South Africa needs engaged, active and responsive intellectuals. A recurrent refrain in the essays that appear in this volume is the worry that the role of the public intellectual in South Africa’s infant democracy seems to have declined. Although they have a crucial part to play, their place and value have become uncertain. Indeed, as Leslie Dikeni writes, they appear to have been displaced by the ‘soundbite’, the so-called ‘expert’ television analyst, the servile intellectual and the ideologue howling down critical debate and dissent as ‘sellout’, unpatriotic and even as ‘un-African’ (if the critic is black) or ‘racist’ (if the critic is white). Instead of welcoming public dialogue, critique and dissent, the government appears to have discouraged public criticism in fear that it might endanger the ‘public interest’, as William Gumede points out. Shireen Hassim laments the fact that there is now less political tolerance to ask questions about the ‘norms and values underpinning our democracy’.[10] As a result, some progressive intellectuals have withdrawn from public debate, with obviously negative consequences for public life in general.

A conference held in May 2006 to look at the role of black intellectuals in shaping the new democracy concluded that ‘black intellectuals are marginalised or are marginalising themselves’.[11] Some argue that black intellectuals are ‘still trying to find a role for ourselves’, [12] while others contend that progressive intellectuals appear unable to make the transition from oppositionism to new forms of engagement.[13]

At issue is the question how progressive intellectuals who fought in the liberation struggle should relate to a democratic government that has demanded absolute loyalty behind its nation-building project. Not surprisingly, many of them have been suspicious of the ANC government’s three great intellectual projects to date: The African Renaissance, the stabilisation of the economy and the modernisation of the ANC as a liberation movement.

In the democratic South Africa that took shape after 1994, a large number of intellectuals joined the government or the civil service, as happened elsewhere in post-independence Africa. Indeed, the civil service appears to be the last outpost of the progressive intellectual (though given public maladministration, policy failures and delivery bottlenecks, one wonders if this is something to be celebrated). As a result, the intellectual discourse in South Africa has often appeared to be dominated by the state, rather than by those outside the state. Indeed, the state played an important role in mobilising intellectuals behind a ‘Native Club’, supposedly an attempt to corral black intellectuals into a social force. Predictably the move led to further polarisation. The post- liberation experience across Africa has shown that withdrawing into nativism results in a form of retribalisation. Furthermore, opting for such exclusivist solutions has been behind the collapse of many post- independence nation-building projects.

In South Africa, the universities have declined as places for intellectual engagement and debates, Jonathan Jansen argues. Some of society’s great intellectuals exist outside universities, in the churches, for instance, or in civil movements. At the same time there has been a decline in student and youth intellectuals, which Prishani Naidoo discusses. Compared with the generation of youth intellectuals such as Anton Lembede, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela who established the ANC Youth League in the 1940s or the generation of intellectuals who formed the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s, the present-day leaders of the ANC Youth League, Young Communist League and the student movement are an embarrassment.

There has been a decline, too, in the quality of intellectual discourse from traditionally progressive NGOs and trade unions. This is in part to do with the fact that many progressive intellectuals based in these organisations moved into government after 1994. Although many have returned, and new social movements have emerged, it is hard to discover the same kind of dynamism that prevailed in the 1980s when progressive think tanks played an important role in the politics of the anti-apartheid movement. Indeed, the period between the late 1980s and 1994 was a golden age for progressive intellectuals, who were engaged, as Mala Singh wrote, in ‘translating the programmatic ideas and hopes of the liberation movement into policy options’.[14] Prominent among these organisations were the Economic Trends Research Group, the Sociology of Work Programme (SWOP), the Community Agency for Social Enquiry (CASE), PLANACT and the Centre for Development Studies. Some of these think tanks were close to the trade unions or the liberation movements and many were involved in working on policy blueprints for a future democratic South Africa. At the time progressive intellectuals saw their role as active participants in the struggle for social and political change and for achieving a non- racial, non-sexist, democratic society based on social justice. It was none other than Alec Erwin who warned against intellectuals becoming ‘instruments of particular political and economic interests in the process of transition’.[15]

After 1994, many progressive think-tanks were marginalised by the government, partly because they were perceived to be producing critical or otherwise unacceptable research. Moreover, the diversion of NGO funding by overseas funding agencies to the new government often gave it extraordinary leverage and patronage over NGOs and research think tanks. Max Price has shown, for instance,[16] how very soon after 1994 the Centre for Health Policy, set up in the late 1980s by progressive researchers, became marginalised. He pointed out that its funding was sometimes withdrawn by the government if it was not happy with the policy direction taken by the Centre. The great weakness in democratic South Africa has been that once intellectuals or activists are viewed as critical of public spending priorities, their views are unlikely to be heard on policy proposals. Others argue that the decline of intellectual engagement has also to do with the fact that most progressive intellectuals from the 1980s conceived their work in a ‘statist’ framework. They invested all their ambitions and expectations in the state to steer development. Those who insisted on a role for the grassroots, community and civil society in policy-making have since been sidelined.[17] The disappearance of the United Democratic Front is a case in point.

With the collapse of Soviet communism, and the temporary decline of social democracy in Western Europe in the early 1990s, progressive intellectuals submitted to Anglo-American liberalism in social theory. The Reconstruction and Development Programme and the Macroeconomic Research Group’s work were the last attempts by progressive theorists to come up with a localised set of development paths for South Africa. In any case, the social sciences in South Africa ‘have been insulated or cushioned from intellectual developments elsewhere’.[18] Given, as Vishnu Padayachee argues in this volume, this ‘relative isolation, which intensified during the 1980s, a lack of innovative thinking, the absence of a broad-based and rigorous economics debating tradition, and the fact that most progressive economists working with social movements did not originally train as economists, [many prominent social scientists were" align="left"> extremely vulnerable to the neo-liberal juggernaut, when these ideas, backed by powerful global institutions and resources, entered South Africa after 1990’.

Thus when the ANC leadership came under pressure to win market confidence in its economic leadership, it was able, with little opposition, to adopt orthodox policies that undermined the well-being and development of the poor majority which had voted the party into power in the first place. Thereafter, the space for ‘committed’ intellectuals, active in economic and social debates, to influence policy formulation and implementation began to close drastically. As early as 1996, Michael Morris warned that such intellectuals faced the danger of either embracing the ‘romantic, appealing, yet unrealizable, slogans of the past’ or else adopting the ‘technicist logic’ of apartheid- era policy-makers, which the same intellectuals had so vociferously opposed in the past.[19] Morris warned that if ‘social problems are reduced to technical ones in the tense and fraught transition currently under way in South Africa, it is a short step to authoritarian repression to ensure the implementation of unpopular technical solutions’.[20] When the philosopher-king Mbeki imposed his development reforms without consulting the would-be beneficiaries and in the process marginalised those opposing the policies, the recipients in the townships around the country revolted. But progressive intellectuals have not offered them any credible alternatives.

Jacklyn Cock argues that intellectuals need to stand in solidarity with local social movements that challenge social injustice. ‘This means firstly adopting the needs of the vulnerable and marginalised as our research priorities. But it does not only involve participating in collective, participatory research and policy formulation together with, rather than on, these movements. It also involves struggling for robust, open and democratic debate inside those structures. Both are necessary to practising what [the sociologist C. Wright"> Mills termed “the politics of truth”.’[21] Cock rightly argues this could lead to a ‘new architecture for producing and sharing knowledge’ between ‘the poor, the vulnerable, the dispossessed and the marginalised’ and those critical voices who speak on their behalf. In addition, it could lead to ‘new forms of dialogue between public intellectuals, activists and policy-makers’.

Since 1994, there has been a decline in the vibrancy of intellectual engagement within the ANC and within the society as a whole. Debate has been narrowed and dissent discouraged. Many of the leading intellectuals have now become politicians or work in the civil service and the rest have remained in policy think tanks or universities, mostly focusing on policy research. Most are reluctant to be critical of government, in an atmosphere in which debate is discouraged or outspokenness could mean the loss of a job. Since 2000, new spaces have opened up for intellectual engagement, on the mainstream ANC left, in civil movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign. Other new intellectual activity has been evident in the mushrooming of civil movements outside the ANC family. These have, however, remained scattered, very narrow in focus, and often unlikely to influence policy. There has also been a decline in innovation in social science and development theory. Furthermore, the democratic state, even after all the human resources invested in it – with progressives from trade unions, universities, the media and so on joining it in 1994 – has proved a disappointment in its failure to meet the demands of the most vulnerable in society. But it will not do to reject the state and think that the answer lies only in the mythical ‘grassroots’ as the only viable transformation agent. As Shivana Shiva has argued: ‘The real issue of our times is how to reinvent the state’, in order for it to deliver.[23] This is among the key challenges for the progressive intellectual.

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* This is an extract from The Poverty of Ideas, edited by William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni and published by Jacana Media (ISBN 978-1-77009-775-9).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Plaidoyer pour les intellectuals (Paris: Gallimard,
1972), p. 12.
[2] Barney Pityana, Liberation, Civil Rights and Democracy: Perspectives
on a Decade of Democrcacy, The Martin Luther King Jr Lecture, Rice
University, 20 January 2004.
[3] Graeme Bloch, ‘Where did the left go wrong?’, Mail & Guardian, 16
September 2006.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Njabulo Ndebele, Board Chairperson’s Report, Idasa 2005 Annual
Report (Cape Town: Idasa, October 2005.
[6] Desmond Tutu, Second Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture, Johannesburg,
23 November 2004.
[7] Thabo Mbeki, Fourth Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture, Johannesburg,
29 July 2006.
[8] ibid
[9] Bloch, ‘Where did the left go wrong?’
[10] Shireen Hassim, Sociology in a Localised Context: Report, Institute for
Globalisation Studies, 5 October 2004.
[11] Xolani Xundu, ‘Black intelligentsia stirs’, Sunday Times, 7 May 2006.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Blade Nzimande, Sociology in a Localised Context: Report, Institute for
Globalisation Studies, 5 October 2004.
[14] Mala Singh, ‘Intellectuals and the politics of policy research’,
Transformation, 18/19, 1992.
[15] Alec Erwin, ‘The research dilemma, to lead or to follow’,
Transformation, 18/19, 1992.
[16] Max Price, ‘Some reflections on the changing role of progressive
policy groups in South Africa: experiences from the Centre of Health
Policy’, Transformation, 1995.
[17] Mike Neocosmos, ‘Intellectual debates and popular struggles in
transitional South Africa: political discourse and the origins of
statism’, Paper presented at the African Association of Political
Science Congress, University of Durban-Westville, 1997.
[18] B. Fine and Z. Rustomjee, The Political Economy of South Africa:
From Mineral-Energy Complex to Industrialisation (Johannesburg:
Witwatersrand University Press, 1996).
[19] Michael Morris, ‘Methodological problems in tackling socio-
economic policy in the transition to democracy in South Africa’, in J.
Gaspankova, V. Bakos, N. Pillay and C. Prinsloo (eds.), Methodological
Challenges of Inter-disciplinary Research in the Social Sciences
(Pretoria: HSRC Press, 1996).
[20] Ibid.
[21] Jacklyn Cock, Shireen Hassim and Eddie Webster, Sociology in a
Localised Context: Report, Institute for Globalisation Studies, 5
October 2004.
[22] A. Appadurai, ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’,
in J. Vincent (ed.), The Anthropology of Politics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), pp. 271–84.
[23] Shivana Shiva, Water Wars (Boston: South End Press, 2002).