The Sunday News
Intellectual communities and constituencies are born around academic disciplines, political and economic philosophies, and sometimes ideologies.
They very easily become social and political movements made out of academics, journalists, political activists and other knowledge workers that advance specific ideas and proselytise others towards defined utopia.
They grow around theorists and philosophers, titanic intellectual figures, who canonically produce concepts and generate ideas that seek to name the world, critique status quos and propose fresh insights that imagine new futures for society and the world. It is in that way that they are, or pretend to be revolutionary. Some of them point to the past where they believe some liberating futures are hidden and need to be recovered in the present for deployment in search of futures.
Others condemn the past as lost and point out the sterility and impotence of past ideas and propose new ones that they claim to be revolutionary truths that will liberate humanity. Others feed on the past and the present, combined, as archives from which futurist insights can be harvested and employed in paving new avenues and vistas towards the unknown futures that stands to be made or unmade.
Because they hold the past as a source of some creation stories that they use to look at the present in order to project some future utopia, intellectual movements or schools of thought as they are called, behave and carry themselves much like religions that define creation stories, heavens and hells.
As some kinds of religions they have their priests, prophets, teachers and disciples that religiously define and defend them.
They have messiahs too, martyrs that are crucified on the cross as social and political heretics that threaten the order of things in societies. Marxism itself, and the Marxist political and economic movement, are a good example of the life and workings of an influential school of thought.
It is thanks to the political and intellectual stamina of Marxism that communism as a political and economic ideology came to be a spectre that proverbially haunted the world and proposed a future socialist paradise away from the hell of capitalist politics and economics.
One can honestly observe that, alongside the Christian religion, there is no belief system that has presented a persuasive picture of an alternative world as Marxism has so far done. Marxism had, besides African nationalism and Pan-Africanism, a great influence in African liberation thinking and activism.
In reaction to conquest, colonisation, enslavement and imperialism that came to define the African condition, Africans have generated their own schools of thought and intellectual communities and constituencies that looked into the African past, present and projected some African futures. Thanks to the history of colonisation and legacy of imperialism some African schools of thought and thoughts became echoes and imitations of colonial ideas.
In the name of the Idea
The Germans, in 1923, generated the Frankfurt School that was alternatively called the Critical Theory School. The school benefited from a donation from Felix Weil, (schools of thought are funded) who wanted the group to deepen Marxism and like a religion of a kind, take it to the ends of the earth. In 1933 the Nazis banned the school which was based in the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Exiled in the United States of America the school found refuge at Columbia University and continued its work that remains with some forceful currency in the present world academy. Its key champions became such weighty names as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Hebert Marcuse, Walter
Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas. These thinkers expanded, amplified and magnified the ideas of Karl Marx in a changing world.
Irritated by Eurocentric understandings of Africa and African history in the 1950s, Kenneth Dike founded what came to be called the Ibadan School of History.
The drive was to recover African history from Eurocentric corruption and deformation and restore it to authenticity and truth, away from racist stereotypes, myths and fictions. Figures such as Jacob Ade Ajayi became the faces of the Ibadan School of Africa history that still has champions in the academy today. From South Africa Ntongela Masilela chronicled the work of the New African Movement of black African scholars that were serious about the
“regeneration of Africa” after many decades of conquest, colonisation, enslavement and imperialism. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Solomon T Plaatje and RV Selope Thema became the founding voices and the faces of the New African Movement as a school of thought that, well before Thabo Mbeki, coined the idea of the “Renaissance of Africa.” There are still scholars in the South African and African academy that advance new Africanism and African Renaissance.
The Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s in South Africa was a generational offshoot of the New African Movement of yesteryear. Schools of thought have generations, with ancestors, fathers and mothers, children and descendants across time.
Across the generations champions come up that in the name of the idea and its practices produce some works and lead some activities.
Present day decolonists are indeed intellectual descendants of the new Africanists of yesteryear. They do not only stand on the broad shoulders of ancient intellectual giants but they also question and critique the giants, learning from their mistakes, and proposing new ideas that revise and correct the old.
