Rather than allowing our thinking or thoughts to be enslaved to narratives that follow existing paradigms of and about our Africanness, we can engage with these narratives while in conversation with great writings by diverse authors who help us to understand dimensions of truth, goodness, and beauty that we cannot access without drawing on their unique experiences and ways of being in and seeing the world. In this sense, the writings of Black intellectuals such as Anton Lembede, AP Mda, Robert Sobukwe, Steven BaNtu Biko, and many others should be the essential part of all of our education in truth, goodness, and beauty.
Black
Intellectualism is not only about black intellectuals seeking to recover “what
people in the past meant by the things they said and what these things ‘meant’
to them.” It is about exploring what concerns the livelihoods of societies they
come from, live in, and live with. More acutely, it focuses extensively on
black livelihoods discourses and cultural innovations, including music,
materiality, heritage management, and spatial structuring, and how these types
of production have changed over time.
The
depth of this intellectualism will remain shallow if it addresses itself to the
social rapture associated with socio-cultural' encroachments that manifested
themselves through conquest, marginalisation, dispossession of the base, and
dislocation. Catastrophic social and cultural violence that got recorded as the
dominant history of being African, and which made black intellectuals
unconscious brokers of the legitimisation of the narrative, requires new
versions for society to take charge of the destinies imagined.
What
we now call ‘Black Intellectualism’ is precisely the result of decades worth of
push and pull between the forces of ideation, accountability and avoidance,
morals and profits, transparency and opacity, and hope and cynicism. Despite
its history of choked success over centuries, Black Intellectualism can work by
holding black intellectuals accountable for what they proffer beyond their
blackness solutions to humanity. This should result in interventions that
liberate the self-image of blackness.
To
create real change and progress in the Black Intellectual universe,
institutions charged with curating positive blackness through a self-standing
thesis should prioritise outcomes that make a substantive difference, such as
-identifying the templates of economic liberation - the templates of
socioeconomic liberation - the nature, character, and form of social, political,
and economic capital in the hands of black people. As far as possible,
black intellectualism should be about the authenticity and sincerity of the
thoughts black intellectuals invest their cognitive resources to make black
livelihoods matter. Those who emerge as leaders of society brigades should
always maintain a reasonable level of trust by society and partners beyond
primary beneficiaries of Black Intellectualism.
As
a thesis in its own right and not a valorisation of what it is not, Black
Intellectualism should morph from being etched in protest to being a tool used
to sustain and validate the positivity inherent in black thoughts.
Institutions
of Black Leadership such as the Black Management Forum, Black Business Council,
ABASA, NAFCOC, and AZAPO in its Black Consciousness mode only, and others
should understand that what they proffer to society will always be the
foundation of trust they will get in return. Achieving the actual value of
beyond blackness socioeconomic transformation of (South) Africa requires that
such institutions understand Africanness inside and out, accurately conceptualise
the arc of change-making with the level of trust they are working with, and
that they focus on solving the right problems.
While
political movements and leaders have dealt with the colonialism of Africa and
its adjuncts, such as Apartheid, the dimensions of Black Intellectualism that
characterised that type of liberation have to date, not dislodged from the
coloniality of inherited leadership and systems. In these systems resides the
power to harness authentic, legitimate, and liberating Black Intellectualism to
influence outcomes. Black intellectualism cannot ignore power because if it
does not choose to act on power, the administration will always act and be
exercised on it in some shape and form.
Where
Black Intellectualism is in history and how it is harnessed to liberate black
livelihoods wherever they exist organically would require well-considered
coalitions. It would need; strategists to curate the comprehensiveness of
outcomes; leaders of society brigades to craft the entire policy value chain;
sponsors to provide resources and corporate legitimacy to the cause; system
reformers to focus on improving capacities and human capital resources we have;
node organisers to bring like-minded groups together into nodal substrates of
influence; advocates that might include, with all the risks associated to it,
politicians, to bring energy to the course; and educators who would take the
responsibility to make the cause intergenerational.
To
support the democracies Black Intellectualism finds itself, it should endeavour
to define a firmament of human rights. It should undergird this with the rule
of law, where the law should be an outcome of intellectualism to the extent
that it is indigenous. The Black Intellectual tradition should be about the
obligation to respect, protect, promote, and fulfil the rights and
responsibilities that come with being black. CUT!!!
Wa
twaa!!
Comments
Post a Comment