African Intellectuals In The Post Colonial World

This book examines the role of African intellectuals in the years since the end of colonialism, studying the contribution that has been made by such individuals, both to political causes and to development within Africa. Studying the concept of the "intellectual" within an African context, this book explores the responses of such individuals to crucial issues, such as cultural identity and knowledge production. The author argues that since the end of colonialism in Africa, various, often intertwining, factors, such as nationalism and co-option, have been used by black politicians or the political elites to muddle the roles and functions of black African intellectuals. Focusing on these confused roles and functions, the book posits that, over the years, most intellectuals in Africa have found the practice of "cheerleading" for a political cause more productive than making valuable contributions towards dynamic and progressive leadership in their countries. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of African studies, politics, and development studies.

In this book the author examines the current state of postcolonial Africa with a focus on the "liberation predicament" and the crisis of epistemological, cultural, economic, and political dependence created by colonialism and coloniality.

Addressing a neglected dimension in postcolonial scholarship, Oliver Lovesey examines the figure of the postcolonial intellectual as repeatedly evoked by the fabled troika of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha and by members of the pan-African diaspora such as Cabral, Fanon, and James. Lovesey’s primary focus is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, one of the greatest writers of post-independence Africa. Ngũgĩ continues to be a vibrant cultural agitator and innovator who, in contrast to many other public intellectuals, has participated directly in grassroots cultural renewal, enduring imprisonment and exile as a consequence of his engagement in political action. Lovesey’s comprehensive study concentrates on Ngũgĩ’s non-fictional prose writings, including his largely overlooked early journalism and his most recent autobiographical and theoretical work. He offers a postcolonial critique that acknowledges Ngũgĩ’s complex position as a virtual spokesperson for the oppressed and global conscience who now speaks from a location of privilege. Ngũgĩ’s writings, Lovesey shows, display a seemingly paradoxical consistency in their concerns over nearly five decades at the same time that there have been enormous transformations in his ideology and a shift in his focus from Africa’s holocaust to Africa’s renaissance. Lovesey argues that Ngũgĩ’s view of the intellectual has shifted from an alienated, nearly neocolonial stance to a position that allows him to celebrate intellectual activism and a return to the model of the oral vernacular intellectual even as he challenges other global intellectuals. Tracing the development of this notion of the postcolonial intellectual, Lovesey argues for Ngũgĩ’s rightful position as a major postcolonial theorist who helped establish postcolonial studies.

An examination of the attempt by Western-educated African intellectuals to create a 'better Africa' through connecting nationalism to knowledge, from the anti-colonial movement to the present-day. This book is about how African intellectuals, influenced primarily by nationalism, have addressed the inter-related issues of power, identity politics, self-assertion and autonomy for themselves and their continent, from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Their major goal was to create a 'better Africa' by connecting nationalism to knowledge. The results have been mixed, from the glorious euphoria of the success of anti-colonial movements to the depressingcircumstances of the African condition as we enter a new millennium. As the intellectual elite is a creation of the Western formal school system, the ideas it generated are also connected to the larger world of scholarship.This world is, in turn, shaped by European contacts with Africa from the fifteenth century onward, the politics of the Cold War, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. In essence, Africa and its elite cannot be fully understood without also considering the West and changing global politics. Neither can the academic and media contributions by non-Africans be ignored, as these also affect the ways that Africans think about themselves and their continent. Nationalism and African Intellectuals examines intellectuals' ambivalent relationships with the colonial apparatus and subsequent nation-state formations; the contradictions manifested within pan-Africanism and nationalism; and the relation of academic institutions and intellectual production to the state during the nationalism period and beyond. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

West African intellectuals have a long history of engaging with European intrusion by reflecting on their status as colonial and postcolonial subjects. Against the tendency to view this engagement as a confrontation between the modern west and traditional Africa, Philip S. Zachernuk argues that the interaction is far more fluid and diverse. Challenging the frequent denigration of western-educated Africans as a culturally barren "kleptocratic" elite, Colonial Subjects shows that they occupied a shifting medial position between colonizers and colonized. In the process they created a distinctive intellectual culture grounded in indigenous and European sources. Looking carefully at southern Nigeria from 1840 to 1960, Zachernuk locates intellectuals in the contours of their society as it changed from late precolonial times to the beginning of independence. He examines their engagement with British and Black Atlantic assumptions and assertions about Africa's place in the world. These ideas, shaped by the needs of others, became the often awkward material with which these intellectuals endeavored to construct their own image of their home continent. In this context, a group of Nigerian intellectuals created a dynamic intellectual tradition motivated by self-interest and marked by innovation, counter-invention, and imitation within the confines of the Atlantic world. At different times they opposed and supported the colonial state, adopted and rejected notions of racial destiny, and advocated free market principles, cooperative self-help, and state socialism. Colonial Subjects provides a historical framework for connecting these divergent ideas, thereby recovering the complexity of an intellectual tradition both colonial and modern.

This book shows the many facets of African engagements with the world. It starts from the premise that current global asymmetries ascribing Africa to a marginalized position are the effects of colonial and imperial pasts still lingering on. The decolonization process of the post-war structure which privileges the West in both political and economic terms. While new dependencies emerged, several old bonds were maintained and continue to influence African affairs quite strikingly. It is appropriate, then, to call these continued unequal relations between Africa and the West frankly 'neo-colonial'. This designation applies all the more as the post-colonial states of Africa inherited a complex legacy of foreign rule – colonial frontiers, colonial languages, colonial infrastructure and authoritarian institutions, as well as the social intricacies and imbalances so characteristic of the 'colonial situation'. The contributions to this volume look at various aspects of these complex processes from intellectual history perspectives. The topics dealt with are manifold. Contributions deliberately attack key themes, ideas and discourses of an intellectual history of Africa ('state', 'modernity', 'development', 'dependency', 'art', etc.), and introduce important engaged public intellectuals from Africa and the African diaspora. What is Africa, and how is she related to the rest of the world? How can she overcome her internal problems and her external dependencies? – These are perennial questions critically tackled by Africans throughout the 20th century. Dealing with various cases looked at from a variety of perspectives, the contributions to this book offer original insights into the intellectual history of Africa.

Decades after independence for most African states, the struggle for decolonization is still incomplete, as demonstrated by the fact that Africa remains associated in many Western minds with chaos, illness, and disorder. African and non-African scholars alike still struggle to establish the idea of African humanity, in all its diversity, and to move Africa beyond its historical role as the foil to the West. As this book shows, Africa’s decolonization is an ongoing process across a range of fronts, and intellectuals—both African and non-African—have significant roles to play in that process. The essays collected here examine issues such as representation and retrospection; the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere; and the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges. African Intellectuals and Decolonization outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity. Contributors Lesley Cowling, University of the Witwatersrand Nicholas M. Creary, University at Albany Marlene De La Cruz, Ohio University Carolyn Hamilton, University of Cape Town George Hartley, Ohio University Janet Hess, Sonoma State University T. Spreelin McDonald, Ohio University Ebenezer Adebisi Olawuyi, University of Ibadan Steve Odero Ouma, University of Nairobi Oyeronke Oyewumi, State University of New York at Stony Brook Tsenay Serequeberhan, Morgan State University

In October 2016, thirty intellectuals and artists from Africa, its diasporas, and beyond gathered together in Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal, to reflect on the present and future of Africa in the midst of transformations that are sweeping through the contemporary world. The aim was to take stock of the renewal of Afro-diasporic critical thought and to discuss the new perspectives emerging from the ongoing projects constructing political, cultural, and social imaginaries for and from the African continent. This book brings together and makes available to the English-speaking world the material presented at the 2016 Ateliers de la pensée – Workshops of Thought – in Dakar. The authors deal with a wide range of issues, including decolonization, the development of social utopias, and the pursuit of new forms of political, economic, and social production on the African continent. Running throughout is a constant concern to interrogate the categories and frames of meaning that have served to characterize the dynamics of the African continent and a shared desire to produce new frames of intelligibility through which to see Africa’s present realities and its future. The contributions also attest to the view that there is no African question that is not also a global question, and that the Africanization of the global question will be a decisive feature of the twenty-first century. To Write the Africa World and its companion volume The Politics of Time will be indispensable for anyone interested in Africa – its past, present, and future – and in the new forms of critical thought emerging from Africa and the Global South.