Comment & analysis

Intellectuals fail in times of crisis

Simon Gikandi

2008-02-07, Issue 343

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/45990

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Simon Gikandi takes on the role of the intellectual in a time of crisis.

What is the role of the intellectual in times of crisis? Do ideas make any difference in the management of public affairs? Can the imperative to act to change things be reconciled to moral demands?

These are questions that many Kenyans, especially the intellectual and professional classes have been wrestling with in the aftermath of the flawed elections of December 2007 and the wreckage of destruction and death that it has left in its wake.

At the centre of the agonising and hand- wringing that has been evident in the writings of intellectuals responding to the crisis, has been the question of how individuals should respond to a series of events that have broken up families, destroyed old friendships, and turned the very notion of a Kenyan identity into a what Chinua Achebe, writing on Nigeria, once called a convenient fiction.

What now appears to be a moral or ethical gap in the conduct of public affairs in Kenya has tended to be blamed on the political class, its opportunism, and its greed.

What has been missing in this debate, however, is the role of the intellectual class, the one group of people who should have provided us with the theoretical apparatus for managing public affairs without consideration of the demands of power politics and the dangerous cocktail of sectarianism and careerism.

Indeed, since 1982, we Kenyan intellectuals have abrogated our responsibilities as custodians of free thought and willingly supported the antics and policies of the political class.

Now we are in danger of yielding the moral high ground to the most parochial segments of our population. Soon, we will be at the beck and call of the Kenyan equivalent of John Kony or the late Alice Lakwena in northern Uganda.

Intellectuals are not likely to be seen walking across the rural countryside dressed in “tribal” dress, and wielding machetes, but it is a well-known fact that in Kenya some of our best minds have provided the ideas and the idiom that has fuelled communal conflict.

The worst kind of failure has been one of omission: The values we hold and the stories we tell ourselves, has often been distorted by respective governments and their opponents, but intellectuals have not been quick to correct such distortions.

The history books used in Kenyan secondary schools are a glaring example of this failure. They are all written to confirm to a syllabus established by the Ministry of Education and thus, instead of presenting history in a critical version, they rehearse political mythologies in the language of bureaucracy.

The section on political leaders in the New History Syllabus is a glaring example of what happens when the regimen of truth is sacrificed to bureaucratic expediency: it talks about the achievements of Jomo Kenyatta, Tom Mboya, Ronald Ngala, Oginga Odinga, and Daniel arap Moi, without even a hint of their monumental failures, the colossal mistakes that have brought us to the current crisis.

The history books used in our schools do not even pretend to invite critical thinking or to raise basic questions about historical memory, actions, or ideals.

The sections dealing with the structures of government, especially the role of the Electoral Commission of Kenya in governance, are banal recitations of the statutory function of this now disgraced body and others.

And it does not end there: Turning to the subject of “Mau, Mau” is even more troubling. Here, the most contentious event in the modern history of Kenya is represented as a list of causes and results, not conflicts and debates.

Major scholarship has been done on “Mau Mau” in some of the major universities in the world and great advances have been made on the politics of the movement, its causes and its aftermath, but the new history syllabus is not very different from the one in operation 35 years ago when I was a high school student.

Then and now, the education of Kenyan children was organised around a bureaucratic consensus. No wonder many products of our educational system rehearse some of the darkest moments of our cultural history with a bizarre mixture of ignorance and impunity, willing to slaughter their neighbours, friends, and even members of the own family in the name of invented colonial identities.

There is another dimension to the failure of national pedagogy: Why have Kenyan intellectuals failed to rise beyond partisanship to provide the voice of reason when rationality is needed most? I have known some of the intellectuals associated with both the Kibaki and Raila camps since I was an undergraduate at the University of Nairobi in the late 1970s and I worked with many of them in various groups opposed to the last dictatorship.

Yet, the people who should be providing guidance through the crisis, promoting the larger ideals that might still hold the country together, now seem to be functioning as the cold war warriors of the plutocracies.

What happened? It is common knowledge that after the 1982 coup attempt, the Moi government embarked on a systematic destruction of the university as an autonomous unit of knowledge production.

The campaign against the university took two forms: First, there was the imprisonment and forced exile of intellectuals and the wilful emaciation of institutions of higher education which, deprived of essential material resources and overwhelmed with unreasonable demands for admission, were reduced into skeletons of their former selves.

Second, the professorial class was incorporated into the State apparatus. Shuffled between the university and the bureaucracy, professors and lecturers could no longer claim to be custodians of free thinking; instead, they had become workers in the service of power. here were several consequences of the destruction of the university as an autonomous body.

One was the emergence of the Non Governmental Organisation as an alternative sphere of knowledge production. Unable to get jobs or sustain research projects at the university, intellectuals turned to non-governmental organisations, most of them funded by foreign interests.

It is here that some modicum of research was conducted in such areas as the rule of law, democracy, and gender equality. NGOs were crucial in creating a space in which issues that were not part of the state’s agenda for the university could be explored, but NGO knowledge could not provide a real alternative to the university as an autonomous space for disinterested thought.

It is not my intention here to malign NGOs, which I consider crucial in civic education, poverty eradication, and the general business of ensuring good governance, but NGOs are dependent on the interests of their foreign donors who decide research priorities within the larger project of “development.”

Much more seriously, NGO knowledge could not be pure knowledge because it was premised on utilitarian ends and its success was judged on its ability to influence policy. NGO knowledge could not be a substitute for the university as a conduit of pure knowledge.

A final consequence of the destruction of the local university was the expatriation of Kenyan knowledge. Kenyan intellectuals, working in all fields of human knowledge, hold prestigious positions in some of the leading universities in the world. Many of them produce important knowledge on Kenyan issues.

But in relation to the Kenyan polity, this is extroverted knowledge, produced within the confines and privileged spaces of foreign universities, and tied to the institutional needs and desires of foreign audiences and interests.

Research on Africa outside Africa carries the burden of its own alienation in relation to the place that is supposed to be its object of study.

* Prof Gikandi teaches at Princeton University. This article first appeared in the Business Daily Africa.

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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