Abstract
In this contribution, the role of progressive African intellectuals fifty years after independence in the context of African postcolonial, political and socio-economic conditions is examined. African intellectuals have been marginalized by the African state, and progressive intellectuals have been disunited in their struggle for relevance. The possibilities for African intellectual autonomy and international solidarity are shown through a recollection of the flourishing intellectual environment and local publishing output of post-independence Tanzania. The end of that era and the demise of publishing, including in African languages, has negatively impacted African economic and intellectual emancipation and can only be addressed by international solidarity among progressive intellectuals.
Growing up in Colonial Africa
I was asked to say something about my growing up during the colonial period in Tanganyika because that would throw light on some of the things I am going to share. I come from what used to be a very remote part of Tanzania and went to a mission boarding school when I was close to eleven years old, about two hundred miles from my village. I was not baptized then; and shortly thereafter, those of us not baptized had to be, and there was a thinly veiled threat that to refuse would lead to expulsion from school. The evening before our baptism we were told to select from a list of so-called “Christian” names, two that we would be known by from then on for the rest of our lives.
I went through the list and didn't find any that I particularly liked. The head master came to my assistance and chose the name Pancras for me, which I told him I did not like even if it was that of a saint, as he explained. He then unilaterally decided on Walter Scott, who he told me was a famous British writer. Somehow even at that age I instinctively thought my life would be more interesting as a writer than as a saint. I legally dropped Scott many years ago, but occasionally when I go to my village a few old Christian pastors still call me Scott.
I must have given the impression to my teachers that I was pious so it was decided that I should be included in a select group that met every Sunday evening to sing hymns and to pray. Later we were also introduced to confessing sins we had committed the week before. I told my uncle, a teacher at the school, before it was my turn for confessing, that I did not know what sins to confess. After a moment of reflection he told me to read the Ten Commandments and that there would be at least one or two I had violated. I read them and ticked off one after another that I had not violated. I had not stolen, had not lied, had not killed anyone; I loved and respected my parents so I could live long on the land that was given to us by God. Number seven, thou shall not commit adultery, “I don't know what that is.” Number ten, thou shall not covet thy neighbour's wife, “I don't know that, either.”
So, through the process of elimination, I concluded that those two commandments were probably the ones I had violated unknowingly and the ones I should therefore confess and repent. I did. You can imagine the horror on the face of that missionary. His face went red, which I had never seen before, someone's colour changing! Despite that, surely he must have known that I couldn't have committed adultery, and that my neighbours, other eleven-year-olds, had no wives to covet, I was still dropped from the group as a potential sinner and candidate for hell. It is funny now, but it was extremely humiliating at the time. I think those two experiences summarize the ethos of encounter between the colonizer and the colonized; we had no names and we had to be forced into Christianity to be saved.
There were usually no more than two colonial officers in our district: the district commissioner and his assistant, the district officer, who also acted as the district magistrate. With such minimal presence of colonial agents, we did not experience many of the ills of colonialism endured in countries such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and, of course, South Africa, with their large populations of white settlers. We learned through whispers from our local nationalist leaders about the Mau Mau war in Kenya, but the official reporting on it was pure one-sided colonial propaganda in which ruthless Mau Mau warriors from the forest stole into houses of European plantations owners and slit the throats of white babies in their cots.
Lumumba's assassination, on the other hand, shocked the whole continent because of the turmoil that it unleashed in the Congo and, I suspect, because it was a harbinger of the coups d'etats and assassinations of other leaders. Only much later would the truth that the CIA masterminded the assassination be revealed and the extent of the Cold War costs the continent would have to bear be known.
I left to go to the US five months before our independence and it was during my stay in the US between 1961 and 1965 that I came to understand, through reading, the history of our continent, from slavery to colonialism to independence. Racism I learned through personal experiences. At the University of Kansas in the Midwest of the US, where I went on a scholarship (thanks to CIA funding, as I learned later) from 1961 to 1965, I came face to face with racism in all its variations, from patronization (“You are different, not like the negros in America”) to segregation in housing, to refusal of service in restaurants – or service on the condition that you ate your food outside (which I would reject and therefore go without food) – to being allowed to stay only in certain hotels. I came close to being lynched in Carlton, a little town in Missouri, because I was travelling with a white girl. Our rescue was by two African Americans who took us from the streets and hid us in their house and arranged our escape from the town at three o'clock in the morning.
Those experiences, difficult and challenging to say the least, also provided a great education. They connected me to the history of black people and the worlds of the oppressed in the US and Latin America. When Philip Agee's book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was published in 1974, we were suddenly made aware of our vulnerability, the same way Edward Snowden's revelations have done – only, at the time, with no awareness of the potential of IT, this vulnerability was even more frightening. It would not be possible from then onwards for me to be indifferent to the struggles of people against oppression anywhere. A Colombian graduate student and friend of mine introduced me to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, from which I learned a lot about colonialism, racism and wars of national liberation. At the same time, one understood what solidarity meant because of the progressive white students and faculty that supported the black students’ protests.
A poem by Ho Chi Minh, “Guards Carry a Pig”, made a great impression on me and became even more sharply etched in my mind during the years that I was involved in support of liberation movements while in the Tanzania Foreign Service and through the OAU Liberation Committee and after a visit to war-torn Hanoi in 1970. The poem reads:
Going with us, guards carry a pig
On their shoulders,
While I'm dragged along rudely.
A man is treated worse than a pig,
Once deprived of his liberty.
Of the thousand sources of bitterness and sorrow
None can be worse than the loss of liberty.
Even for a word, a gesture, you're no longer free:
They just haul you along, like a horse or a buffalo. 1
See www.vietnamembassy-brunei.org/vnemb.vn/tinkhac/ns050214084200 (19 November 2014).
This reflects some of my experiences during my own socialization and engagement within a transition towards African sovereignty, which influenced my future career in the publishing sector. Before addressing the role of progressive African intellectuals, I would like to make a few comments on the meaning of the term “progressive” in the context of African post-colonial political and socio-economic developments.
Who Are the Progressive Intellectuals?
What is the meaning of the term “progressive” in the context of African postcolonial, political and socio-economic conditions? In his lecture entitled “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals”, Edward W. Said reported an interesting incident at a writers’ conference in New York in 1981. The attendance at the lecture was so big that the organizers made an appeal that only those who were genuine writers should register to vote. When they had failed to reduce the number, one person in the audience suggested adopting the Soviet definition of who was a writer, which was that “a writer is someone who says that he or she is a writer”; the corollary is that a progressive intellectual would be one “who says he or she is a progressive intellectual”. 2 Said's definition of an intellectual is an individual who possesses the “faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public” and someone who “confronts orthodoxy and dogma, representing people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug” and “does so on the basis of universal principles, such as freedom, justice, humanity” and so on. 3
Edward W. Said, The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals, in: The Nation, 2001, quoted from Edward W Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 120.
Edward W. Said, Representations of an Intellectual, Reith Lectures, 1993, Lecture 1, online: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1993_reith1.pdf (19 November 2014).
Mwalimu Nyerere's assertion that “the intellectual freedom of man, without which progress cannot take place, is confined by the walls of dogmatism” 4 adds to the weight of Said's definition. In the struggles for independence, the generation of leaders – Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Lumumba and Senghor among those who did not have to wage armed struggle, and among those who had to, the Mandelas (Nelson and Winnie), Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel, Mohamed A. Babu in Zanzibar and Robert Mugabe – were intellectuals of this kind. The legacy of the South African Communist Party, exemplified by Chris Hani, Joe Slovo, and Ruth First is of many committed revolutionary intellectuals who contributed enormously to the political education of militants within the ANC with which the CP was allied.
Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966, 121.
These qualities have also been pronounced in the personalities and works of illustrious African intellectuals – historians Cheikh Anta Diop, Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Ali Mazrui and others – whose cumulative contributions are enshrined in the UNESCO General History of Africa. That project was itself initiated and seen through by the first African UNESCO director-general, Mokhtar M'bow, who refused to bow to the dictates of the US and UK on the issue of the New World Information and Communication Order and caused them to withdraw their financial contributions to UNESCO. 5 The list of contemporary scholars and intellectuals articulating a common vision of an Africa liberated from dependence and taking its destiny into its hands is long and impressive.
Mokhtar M'bow, Senegalese educator, headed UNESCO from 1974 to 1987.
I also believe a discussion on progressive intellectuals in Africa ought to include activists in the wider community – militants in labour organizations, sports clubs, artists and musicians, a point consistently brought out by Noam Chomsky, for whom intellectualism is empty if not reinforced by opposing the wars of aggression, whether by the Israeli government against the Palestinians with US support or in Iraq or anywhere in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and challenging the lies that are used to justify them. These voices, often ignored by mainstream intellectuals, end up being co-opted and put to use by the establishment, especially during election time. In Tanzania the so-called “Bongo Flava” hip hop artists and non-professional journalists working for gossip papers and electronic media are highly influential and a potential force for championing and defending progressive causes if mobilized and given the opportunity to study and to understand national issues from progressive perspectives.
Intellectuals and the African State
Thandika Mkandawire states that “Amina Mama and I, myself, note that generally African intellectuals have accepted their social responsibility and in most cases have also accepted both the nation-building and developmentalist projects espoused by the political class. For a whole number of reasons, however, recounted by Ki-Zerbo, Mazrui and myself, such heroic attempts to be relevant have often proven forlorn and quixotic.” He goes on to say that “the barriers have included authoritarianism, dependence, the pettiness of state projects driven by power hunger and self-aggrandizement, etc.” 6 This analysis is correct, but many of those who form the barriers are, I am afraid, also intellectuals, which is the difference between them and the progressive ones. They have not “accepted their social responsibility” and are not interested in advancing the interests of the poor and marginalized masses.
Thandika Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender and Development, Dakar: Codesria Books/London: Zed Books, 2005, 2.
Immediately after independence, the few university graduates occupied high positions but there were not enough of them for all the decision-making positions. Still they were motivated by the promises and rhetoric of the independence struggle to produce results and, indeed, they made considerable gains in improving school enrolment rates and were able to expand other social services, as Mkandawire has shown in writings about the trajectories of economic performance in Africa in the last fifty years. 7 However, the longer they stayed in power, the more entrenched they became in living the good life, taking it as their right and embarking on private wealth accumulation through rent-seeking and corruption facilitated by agents of foreign and local corporate interests. They no longer fit the mould of the intellectual described in the second half of Said's quotation; they have long abandoned the universal principles “such as freedom, justice, humanity, etc.” The bureaucratic bourgeois intellectual in the state apparatus is no longer with the people. It is the “intelligentsia” – that “counter-elite dedicated to radical change”, in the words of Amilcar Cabral – that has to work out strategies to enable it to continue to work for the interests of the people despite and also because of the barriers in their way. As Cabral further illuminates, that intelligentsia despite its status as “only a minority of a minority in terms of numbers […] has […] a potentially very large revolutionary constituency among the masses of the population”. 8
Thandika Mkandawire and Charles Soludo wrote in Our Continent, Our Future, Dakar: CODESRIA/IDRC/AWP, 1999, 14: “Considerable investment was made in the social sector, especially in education to counter Africa's colonial heritage of being the most educationally backward region in the world. The result of these social investments was an impressive improvement in the levels of education and literacy. Primary-school enrollment increased from 41% to 68% between 1965 and the mid-eighties. A cadre of professionals was produced to administer the postcolonial state.”
Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969, 62.
The Progressive Intelligentsia
Perhaps we need to ask ourselves how the intelligentsia has performed, in Gramsci's words, to “work for social structural changes to bring about a more humane and egalitarian world” 9 – the world in this context being first and foremost Africa. There can be no doubt about the crucial contributions African progressive intellectuals have made to the total liberation of the entire continent from colonialism and apartheid. If there are examples of the strength of the pan-African ideal, the united position of African intellectuals in support of liberation is a shining one. We do know that at times the support for the liberation of Southern Africa was used by African dictatorships to mask the internal repression that they were practising in their own countries. Still it goes to prove the strength of the progressive forces that even such devils at least had to pay lip service and some money to the just cause.
Quoted from F.P.A. Demeterio III, Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said and the Roman Catholic Priest as a Modern Intellectual, online: https://sites.google.com/site/feorillodemeterio/gramsci,saidandtheromancatholicpriest (19 November 2014).
It is equally clear that African scholars and academics have produced a wealth of research on all aspects of African states and societies and reduced considerably the overwhelming domination of Western scholarship that was the norm on the eve of independence. They have moved centre stage to own the debates on African issues and challenged Western orthodox scholarship that analysed Africa through the prism of tribalism and other demeaning catch phrases.
One question which I think we African progressive intellectuals need to ask ourselves is: Is it more the power of African governments, and their persecution and marginalization of the intelligentsia, or the inability of the intelligentsia to develop strategies to grow and strengthen itself that is at the heart of its failure to become more influential? As a person with some experience in and outside of the state structures, and by way of self-criticism, we have weaknesses that are not difficult to identify. One is the absence of self-awareness of us as a community with a common view of Africa and its place in the world. Concomitant to that has been the tendency to exaggerate differences and minimize the far greater common grounds. By the same token, to fail to take advantage of elements within the state that could be allies because it is easier to dismiss them than to work with them, has been to our disadvantage. Both the disdain for finding ways to finance progressive causes (making money even if it is for good causes being looked down upon as smacking of capitalist tendencies) and the reliance on external funds as exemplified by civil society organizations and African think tanks pose a great danger to the autonomy and independence of African progressive institutions.
The final and perhaps most crucial issue of all, particularly in the light of the recent events in the so-called “Arab Spring”, has been the lack of organizational and institutional structures capable of filling the vacuum created by the removal of oppressive regimes. There has been much research on the phenomenon of the Arab Spring and implications for other parts of Africa and the world. Whilst social media has proved a phenomenal tool for mobilizing youth in particular, 10 it has not invalidated the necessity of a strong political organization capable of uniting disparate groups and channelling their energies into forming new democratic governments after the overthrow of the old regimes. 11 I do not dare claim that there is no other way, but for youth to think that tweeting can deliver long-lasting gains is akin to an “infantile disorder” as in Lenin's essay. 12
For an informative account of the social media phenomenon in the Arab Spring, see Alcinda Honwana, Youth and Revolution in Tunisia, London: Zed Books, 2013.
Antonio Gramsci, quoted from Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography, London: Merlin Press, 1977, 17.
V.I. Lenin, A Popular Essay in Marxian Strategy and Tactics, New York: International Publishers, 1940.
Publishing and Progressive Intellectualism in Africa
Mwalimu Nyerere, reflecting on education in the colonial era, made the following observation, which still resonates with evident practices in African writing and publishing: “Our young men's ambition was not to become well educated Africans but to become Black Europeans.” 13 The ambition to become black Europeans was nurtured in part by what the young men read. There exists today a considerable body of research, which is constantly being augmented, on what is being read in Africa from African publishing houses.
Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1966, 186.
Because of space constraints I shall only briefly sketch issues that have dominated debates on African publishing in the last fifty years – namely, autonomy, textbook and scholarly publishing and finally the language of publishing. In an article in Research in African Literatures, 14 nearly all of these issues are covered in substantial detail. Earlier research on publishing appeared in Development Dialogue, a journal of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. Most relevant is the report of proceedings from a seminar in 1984. 15 Many issues were subsequently covered in articles by African scholars and our Northern colleagues, and published in three books. 16 A most recent, excellent addition to this body of literature 17 will hopefully put to rest the myth that publishers like Oxford University Press (OUP) have a “commitment to research and scholarship”, a claim they have made for decades, and for which they received favoured-publisher treatment in ex-British colonies. For instance, the editors of the official Kamusi Sanifu ya Kiswahili: A Standard Swahili–Swahili Dictionary chose to publish it with OUP, I suppose for the prestige. It was the first major academic and language project carried out by the Institute of Kiswahili Research, a Tanzanian institution, after independence, and an extremely lucrative publication of which tens of thousands of copies were printed in the first edition. It has continued to sell steadily ever since. The equally lucrative books by Mwalimu Nyerere were likewise published by OUP, despite there being a state publishing house, Tanzania Publishing House (TPH), which was poorly funded and that would have benefitted from the publication of those books. Mandela's autobiography went to a Northern publisher. Macmillan and OUP were each involved in bribery scams: Macmillan in Sudan, and OUP related to two subsidiaries, East Africa (covering Kenya, Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda) and Tanzania (covering Tanzania and Zanzibar). They were fined and debarred from World Bank–financed orders for six years and three years, respectively. 18 This vindicated what African publishers had been complaining about, having been dismissed as whimpers of African publishers afraid of competition, by implication even if not explicitly stated.
Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay, Publishing in Africa from Independence to the Present Day, in: Research in African Literatures, 44, 2, Summer 2013, 17–34.
Developing Autonomous Publishing Capacity in Africa, in: Development Dialogue, 1984, 1–2, Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
Philip Altbach and Salah Hassan (eds), The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture and Development, Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996; James Gibbs (ed.), The African Writers’ Handbook, Oxford: African Books Collective, 1999; Alois Mlambo (ed.), African Scholarly Publishing: Essays, Oxford: African Books Collective, 2006.
Caroline Davis, Creating Post-Colonial Literature: African Writers and British Publishers, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
As reported in: Serious Fraud Office, Action on Macmillan Publishers Limited, Serious Fraud Office Press Room, SFO, 22 July 2011; Serious Fraud Office, Oxford Publishing Ltd to Pay Almost £1.9 million as Settlement after Admitting Unlawful Conduct in Its East African Operations, Serious Fraud Office Press Room, SFO, 3 July 2012.
TPH and Publishing in the 1960s and 1970s
Dar es Salaam in the 1960s and 1970s was an exciting place to live. The University of Dar es Salaam was imbued with extraordinary intellectual vigour for more than a decade. It was the centre of pioneering work, greatly inspiring and influencing discourses on state and society and challenging orthodoxy, particularly in the then-emerging field of development studies and development economics. Work in the Department of History, for example, became renowned to the extent that it was recognized widely internationally as the Dar es Salaam school of history. TPH, the state publishing house referred to earlier, was a partner and participant, publishing books reflecting that intellectual movement, putting out seminal original works that testify to that creativity. Together they gave the country a justified reputation as the centre of African progressive intellectualism. It is worth noting that unlike many places where there was censorship, TPH had absolute freedom of decision as to what to publish. Indeed, on one occasion when the chairman of the board consulted Mwalimu Nyerere as President of Tanzania as to whether we should publish Tanzania: The Silent Class Struggle by Issa Shivji, the president replied by saying that his job as president is to run the country, and that TPH should do its own job of publishing books. And, by the way, my predecessor, Robert Hutchison, supported by me (in his handover period to me), threatened to resign if TPH was forced not to publish that book. I reinforced that by saying that if TPH did not publish, I would not take the job.
You may well ask, what were the reasons for this flowering? First, there was great pride in the independence of our country, which had on several occasions been demonstrated, including by informing the Commonwealth that Tanganyika would not join it if South Africa remained – the first act of boycotting South Africa. The Left enjoyed a favourable political environment under Mwalimu Nyerere. There was a genuine thirst for knowledge emanating from the political values of independent Tanzania. Personally disinterested foreign intellectuals, genuine intellectuals, enjoyed an openness and a welcome atmosphere; as a result they too, felt inspired to find a place which allowed them to think and to be challenged, and at the same time to share their knowledge with eager learners.
The distinguished list of names of academics who at some point worked in Dar es Salaam is very long: Walter Rodney, Tamas Szentes, Giovanni Arrigi, Grant Kamenju, John Saul, Lionel Cliffe, Claude Ake and Wamba-dia-Wamba; later, Yash Tandon, Dan Wadada Nabudere, Issa Shivji, Mahmood Mamdani, Jacques Depelchin, Horace Campbell and others. This list gives a good picture of just how in one sense the university was lucky to have had such a group of scholars and intellectuals. Ruth First taught there for some time before going to Mozambique where, unfortunately, she was assassinated. For the last nearly three decades, the influence of the university can be seen in the many high-ranking officials and political personalities in the whole of East Africa. When Yoweri Museveni (an early progressive intellectual who later changed hats) came to power, 50 per cent of his cabinet, if not more, were graduates of the University of Dar es Salaam.
Progressive Publishing Elsewhere
In the 1960s and 1970s to the early 1980s, university publishing was vibrant, especially in Nigeria, but with the military coups and financial crises in universities, publishing dried up and only now seems to be ready to start again. Of the institutions producing knowledge in Africa, CODESRIA (The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) must be put at the very top: Since its foundation in 1973 (when I took over management of TPH), it has coordinated pan-African research in social sciences, leading to the publication of Africa's top scholars including Samir Amin, Mahmood Mamdani, Amina Mama, Thandika Mkwandawire, Paul Zeleza and others, no less distinguished, such as Ebrima Sall, the current CODESRIA executive secretary. 19 CODESRIA books are published in Arabic, English, French and Portuguese. CODESRIA was one of the founding members of the African Books Collective and continues to play a leading role in making sure that the African research and publications ethos is kept alive.
Ebrima Sall participated in the ASAUK conference.
There are other research organizations such as the Organization for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (OSSREA), which are also producing good work, and there are indications that new prospects are opening up for scholarly publishing as university funding improves. Private indigenous publishing is also doing moderately well and in some countries it is thriving. The indigenization of Heinemann and Longman in Kenya showed just how African publishers knowing their people and societies well could do the job of publishing in all genres better than the multinationals who always thought they knew better. Two Kenyan publishers, East African Educational Publishers (EAEP) and Longhorn Publishers, along with Fountain Publishers in Uganda and several other publishers in Tanzania are turning out a fair number of scholarly titles every year.
Limited space does not allow me to do justice to the subject of publishing in African languages. This languages debate is not going away. It is becoming clearer, everywhere in Africa, that African societies are being divided educationally, with those who have access to private establishments with high tuition costs which teach only in foreign languages rapidly becoming a ruling class with access to the best jobs and the best economic opportunities. As regards development of African countries, Professor Ali Mazrui poses the questions “Can any country approximate first-rank economic development and transformation […?] Will Africa ever effectively take off when it is held hostage so tightly to the languages of its former imperial powers?” 20 Trying to find an answer will certainly keep that question alive.
Let me end by repeating yet again the importance of solidarity among progressives the world over. The coming fifty years, really ten or even fewer, will demand solidarity in every way we can manifest it. The achievements gained in progressive studies have been the result of healthy, not necessarily polite, debate. As long as we retain the view that with our work we can move mountains, we cannot but win.
Ali A. Mazrui, in: Philip Altbach and Salah Hassan (eds), The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture and Development, Trenton: African World Press, 1996, 3.