Lekgantshi Console Tleane
It was the Palestinian academic and activist Edward Said whose articulations shaped the current usage of the term public intellectual.
In his book, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1996) Said argued that the intellectual is an outsider whose role is to “speak the truth to power”.
This conception became popular with many on the left of the political spectrum who identify with ordinary people, instead of being concerned with the machinations of different factions of capital or the political class.
In his 2014 offering put together with Christa Buschendorf, Black Prophetic Fire, Cornel West examines the ideas and lives of six revolutionary African American thinkers: Frederic Douglas, WEB Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida Wells.
While the subject of intellectuals and how they relate to those in power can be traced to the days of ancient philosophers, the modern concern with the phenomenon gained prominence with Julien Benda’s 1927 book, The Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda criticised European intellectuals for their silence in the face of rising crass nationalism that led to racism and war.
Benda’s criticism and Said’s concerns are relevant to our situation now more than ever before.
While intellectuals were commended in the past few years for offering pointed criticisms against kleptocracy, many of these learned men and women have now turned into members of a ‘fan club’ for those who are currently in power.
They ‘clap hands’ no end for the current dominant political faction while failing to offer reasoned criticism against capital and the political class across all parties.
With a few exceptions many have uncritically joined the ‘bandwagon’ of reducing the challenges faced by the country as being that of public sector corruption.
Listening to them or reading what they produce is no different to going through the latest publication from the World Bank.
What is lost is the failure to resolve both the national and social questions, that is, the unfinished business of the 1994 negotiated settlement and the crisis of capitalism.
How then does this latest offering, Public Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past, edited by Chris Broodryk, measure up to the Saidian conceptualisation of the public intellectual?
There is broad consensus that some of the public intellectuals that this country has produced include Charlotte Maxeke, Anton Lembede, Robert Sobukwe, and Steve Biko. All four, and many others, were political activists.
Thus, the South African representation of the public intellectual has mainly been that of a philosopher activist.
And perhaps that is where we might have our own trappings and expectations on any attempt to broaden the scope of this critical area of study.
The book is a product of a bigger project spearheaded by the University of Pretoria, focusing on the lives of public intellectuals in South Africa.
To this end, another book in the series: The Fabric of Dissent: Public Intellectuals in South Africa (2021) features prominent names in our political lexicon.
In the current collection Broodryk and his fellow writers focus on some of the intellectuals who may not fit into the Saidian conception.
The journey starts from the middle of the 19th century, with the rich history of intellectual enterprise in current day KwaZulu-Natal and the self-assertion of black writers in the pages of both the British and local press to articulate the history and travails of their people.
It was during this time that the voice of John Langalibalele Dube, later the first president of the ANC, emerged.
In the era when colonialism was involved in the project of erasure of African languages Reverend Elijah Makiwane used his journalism to promote these languages through writing.
For this, he was a pioneer who deserves recognition and gratitude.
He was therefore a trailblazer who paved the way for the later generation of The Bantu World newspaper, the predecessor to The World and later the Sowetan.
This link is important because even within the limitations of its times, the 1930s, The Bantu World provided a platform for black arts criticism to emerge.
The World would later become a platform for the articulation of black anger, particularly in the aftermath of the June 16, 1976 uprisings.
Born out of the ashes of The World was the Sowetan whose editor, Aggrey Klaaste, remains a legend for openly using the publication as a forum for debate and articulation of the aspirations of black people.
While not a radical in his political posture, Klaaste must be credited for creating the space for the expression of all major political persuasions for black people at the time – Charterism, Pan-Africanism, and Black Consciousness.
It is not only journalists who are viewed as having challenged the might of the apartheid state.
Film critics such as William Pretorius and film makers such as Koos Roets produced work that, viewed within the confines of their conservative spaces, could be considered to have been progressive.
In the performing arts Mandisi Sindo is profiled as a community arts activist in Khayelitsha who uses theatre and his own positioning to raise social aims that affect the community within which he operates and for his audiences.
In many ways, pulling all these together is the focus on Mewa Ramgobin and the evolution and politics of cultural policy.
This has become an important topic on its own as the debates around names of places, monuments and remembering in general remain contested avenues.
The value of this collection of essays is its ability to demonstrate that there are many South Africans whose stories remain to be told.
They may not be the Steve Bikos of this world.
The book may therefore be found wanting in trying to live up to the idea of a Saidian public intellectualism.
Nonetheless, those profiled here contributed to the challenge of power in their own right.
Public Intellectuals in South Africa: Critical Voices from the Past is published by Wits University Press and is available from bookstores and online outlets. Prices range between R350 to R360.