I am terribly annoyed by academics and political analysts in
this country. It has become a Herculean task for me to even read their works
and research based on the conditions of black people, particularly in the
townships and rural areas. Most of these academic papers and articles, whatever
issue they deal with, however different the research methodology employed, seem
to be arriving at the same conclusion about the consciousness of our people.
The conclusion is that the toiling masses in townships and rural areas, the
majority of them black, are ignorant or stupid.
Over the years, we have been subjected to “intellectual”
analysis about the reasons behind the African National Congress’s election
success and popular support. The main point in many of these analytical
contributions is that the ANC, with its majority black leadership and
membership, is continuously emerging victorious despite its established
problematic conduct because its voters, in their majority black, are too stupid
to understand the ramifications of having an ANC-led government, or too
gullible to realise that the ANC does not have their interests at heart.
Impressive intellectual jargon is used to give legitimacy to this diabolical
analysis, to give coherence to an argument that is supposedly cast in stone on
the basis of its producer’s intellectual and academic credentials.
This exaggerated sense of importance that is projected by
academics and intellectual activists of our time is best expressed at political
rallies and campaigns. Many campaigns, even legitimate ones that address
genuine struggles of our people, are championed by academics on the behalf of
our people. And don’t misunderstand what I am saying. There is nothing
fundamentally wrong with the learned minority taking an active role in the
class struggles that confront our people on a daily basis. It is in fact very progressive
to have academics whose involvement with our struggles is not restricted to
textbook theories and debates in lecture theatres that have been shut in the
faces of millions of our youth. However, what irks me is the approach employed
by these academics and intellectual activists, an approach that assumes a
superior approach.
Two years ago, I was part of a team responsible for
organising a public lecture at the Mowbray Community Hall in Cape Town. This
was an initiative of an NGO that I was working for at the time. The focus of
this public dialogue was the national health insurance (NHI), which the South
African government wants to implement. The hall was packed with black masses
that had been mobilised through their grassroots community-based organisations
and NGOs. These were uneducated masses in the main, men and women who dedicate
their lives to pursuing genuine community struggles of issues that they are
confronted with on a daily basis. The panel in that forum was not only
dominated by white academics, but even the blacks who were part of it were the
elite kind whose contribution to the struggle is mainly intellectual. There
were professors and other intellectuals and academics speaking above the heads
of our people. This was proven during the question-and-answer session where
hardly anyone in the audience raised a hand to engage with the content of the
presentations that had been made.
I posed an argument to my comrades that this was not the way
we ought to have gone about with the public lecture, but the argument was
countered with the assertion that the document outlining the NHI is not
necessarily pedestrian. This argument was not entirely false, but it posed
another problem: if it is agreed that the NHI document is intellectual in
posture, why was a public forum hosted because it meant we converged people to
come and decorate the hall. Thinking of it now in retrospect, I realise that
the argument I should have posed was: had the NHI document been sent to these
grassroots organisations prior to the forum? The comrades there could have at
least read through it and come to the public forum better equipped to
interrogate the presentations that were being made by the intimidating
academics and intellectual activists. But this was not done, perhaps because it
served the organisers well to have an unquestioning audience that would support
their position on the matter without questioning. Such is how our people are
treated even in the civil-society movement where they ought to be having a
dominant voice. The same academics who accuse the ANC of using the poor as
voting fodder do nothing differently, for they engage the people in the same
patronising manner.
Having attended many political workshops and symposiums, I
have noted with mild irritation the glib manner in which the real debate about
the consciousness of black township and rural people is dismissed. Academics
and intellectual activists want to diagnose the struggles of our people and
then to provide the solutions to these struggles, because they do not trust the
capacity of our people to define and champion their own struggles, because they
want to treat the masses of our people like mindless things that cannot
rationalise. But our people are NOT stupid and they are NOT mindless. They live
their suffering and therefore, they understand better than anyone else the
nervous conditions of their existence. They don’t need to speak of their hunger
in complex terms. They don’t need to speak of their poverty quoting complex
Marxist-Leninist literature. They need to be allowed to define and diagnose
their struggles without the diabolical interference of the educated and
sophisticated, who speak of these conditions from ivory towers.
I live in Soweto. I have lived in Soweto for the most part
of my young life. I know my people and I know for sure that contrary to reports
and analysis by academics, these people are conscious of the systematic
injustices they are subjected to. Let them tell academics what they want, not
the other way around. They are poor, but NOT stupid.