Leslie Dikeni

United Nations Photo

‘What constitutes an intellectual in the South African context?’ asks Leslie Dikeni in this week’s Pambazuka News, ‘Who is an intellectual and who isn’t?’ In an extract from a new book of essays, ‘The Poverty of Ideas’, Dikeni separates the ‘real intellectuals’ from a new breed of ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ that have emerged in recent years: The ‘celebrity intellectual’, the ‘commercial intellectual’, the ‘policy analyst’ and the ‘new gender activist’.