The Sunday News
Today I choose an old topic.
An old one but that always has some fresh relevance to it. And which has many meanings to different people with diverse interests in the world of life.
For many centuries intellectuals have spilt much ink in the attempt to name their place, and role, under the sun.
That intellectuals have a role to “speak truth to power” was said by Edward Said in his BBC Reith Lecture of 1993: The Representation of the Intellectual. Said loudly wondered if “intellectuals are a very large or an extremely selective group of people?”
Before Edward Said, the great Italian journalist, Marxist and political theorist, Antonio Gramsci ruminated about intellectuals in his Prison Notebooks, and concluded that there are traditional intellectuals that keep doing the same regular work generation after generation, and organic intellectuals that are affiliated to certain classes and that advance certain interests and causes, these are theorists and ideologues that lie embedded in social and political movements.
Gramsci observed that in actuality “all men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectual.”
This is a comforting observation that assures all human beings that just by being alive they have the capacity to intellectualise even if they may not have to play such a role publicly.
Another intellectual who thought about intellectuals and is noted by Edward Said is Julien Benda. Benda is the French Philosopher that is best known for his classic treatise: The Treason of the Intellectuals, of 1927, a book about the “undoing of thought.” Benda haughtily believed that intellectuals are a tiny group of super-gifted clerics, philosopher-kings that are not to be found everywhere.
His examples of intellectuals included Jesus Christ, Socrates, Voltaire and Spinoza. Much like Benda there is many scholars today who entertain the belief that intellectualism is a preserve of a few talented individuals, not all and sundry.
These scholars always shake their heads in pity when they witness one and all making efforts to advance themselves intellectually.
My own observation is that successful scholars, especially those that overcame many adversities on their way to the top, tend to develop an unfortunate ego which believes that scholarship, and intellectualism itself, should not be easy or should it be for all those that wish to be scholars and intellectuals.
God help you if you are a masters or doctoral student and you are supervised by a scholar who struggled through his or her own higher education, they will do everything to ensure that you feel that it was never easy, it is not easy, and it will never be easy. The cold and dry truth is that with interest and commitment, anyone with average intelligence can be trained into an academic, a scholar, and even an intellectual.
The Julien Bendas who ride on high horses and insist that the intellectual vocation is for a few chosen prophets are only doing their part as high priests, judges, magistrates, police officers and insecure gate-keepers of the intellectual landscape.
They are the biblical King Herods who believe that after them there should be no one called king, even if this means genocide of all the boy babies around town.
The Julien Bendas and King Herods of academia haunt universities and drive young students to suicide by not teaching and training where they are supposed to, but cast harsh judgement, police, discipline, and even laugh at, and lampoon the work of novices that they should use their experience to train into academics, scholars and intellectuals.
A typical Julien Benda and King Herod of the intellectual landscape finds herself or himself unconsciously but really helplessly competing with own students instead of teaching and training them, and recognising their excellence as the work of his or her own mentorship.
The intellectual ego can be that fragile and vulnerable.
Can we be Enemies Please?
Some many years ago I decided that, like other kids, I needed to have a doctoral qualification under my miserable belt.
I knew the subject area of my research, and the philosophy of liberation, decoloniality, that was to be my conceptual and philosophical framework, the spectacles I was to wear to examine my subject. I even had a case study, the thought of a political thinker that I needed to examine. I appointed two official supervisors.
That is how full of myself I can be; I needed a team not a person to work with me. Over and above the two scholars that I admired and chose for their different qualities that I needed in my corner of the intellectual boxing ring, I appointed about two other shadow supervisors that would read my drafts and give me comments; all were people that I somehow wanted to be like when I grew up.
Being a student, even a doctoral student in the present academy, is many ways like being a child even if one has many children of his own.
My shadow supervisors were fellow travellers in the decolonial movement, one in the university of Coimbra, in Portugal and another in the United States of America, an arch-philosopher of Liberation, a canonist. Trouble was with one of my formal supervisors who asked the curious question: “of all people that you know, I know you well, why do you choose that you will be enemies with me?”
I asked why enemies when I am creating a convivial academic and intellectual relationship with him. His answer was that from his many years in the academy there is no doctoral supervisor and supervisee relationship that has not ended in many tears and deep enmity.
He reminded me of a student in one university who had to shoot his supervisor. I comforted him with the words that, ok we are enemies already at least I promise no shooting, let’s get down to work. The other formal supervisor expressed his delight and made the claim that he had always known that one day now or in the future we would work together. We worked very well in the mutual knowledge that the supervisor and supervisee relationship can make or unmake students and supervisors alike.
Power relations and egos come in and true trouble in paradise can ensure. Fortunately both of them were critical, very critical, but constructive and motivational in their comments and suggestions.
I wanted to be taught, trained and encouraged, motivated and not made to feel inferiorised and objectified, or thingified. I had warned that I do not wish for a supervisor that will make me feel useless and inferior, reduced to a child or a clown, but recognised as a thinker even if in the making.
It worked. Supervisors as senior scholars frequently use their lofty positions and seniority, their intellectual weight, to crush rather than cultivate talents, to ridicule instead of irrigating potential.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Mabusabesala Village in Siyabuswa, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected]
