By Takura Zhangazha *
Over the Africa Day long weekend in Zimbabwe a good cde asked me if I was not intellectually weary after all these years of reading and trying to decipher key nodes of Zimbabwe's political and economic history?
It was an awkward question. But completely answerable.
I replied, "One cannot get tired of thinking. Its the easiest thing one can do before one acts."
He was slightly adamant and retorted, "But thinking does not pay! And even if it does you would have to at least be a lecturer at a college, university or in primary and secondary education as at least a teacher or headmaster."
That was a fair point.
Only issue I had with his retort was that it assumed I was thinking of 'thinking' as academic intellectual prowess. You know that one that qualifies one to be a teacher, professor or PhD qualified person. In whatever field. And I am not any of the above anyway.
What was sort of bothering me in the conversation was how in the first place the cde assumed intellectualism must be immediately profitable.
No matter what it is about. And how now in contemporary Zimbabwe it appears to be completely futile.
Our primary, high school, college,university teachers, lecturers and professors appear to be universally judged as not only poor but also as cdes who 'read for nothing!'
Mainly because not only does being genuine in a professional intellectualism, via perception, not pay enough, but one can always assumedly buy their way to a qualification.
Or that if it pays, its still nowhere near the wealth that the very students you taught have despite being significantly less educated than you are!
Then I remembered Antonio Gramsci and his arguments around 'cultural hegemony' and also how "everyman (woman) is an intellectual but not all men in society have the function of intellectuals."
As abstract as that may appear, it is neccessary to reflect deeply on it.
There is no progressive society that is not shaped in one way or the other by its own organic intellectuals. Be they western educated, Masvikiro (spirit mediums) or in some cases, religious leaders (male and female).
Ones who think beyond their paycheck. Even if they eventually get it after a 'eureka moment!' At whatever level they are at.
I have raised these points about intellectualism in Zimbabwe not just because of a relatively abstract, money-motivated conversation I had with a cde.
But more becuase of the situation where we are not only in Zimbabwe but also on the African continent and globally.
A situation (sichaz) in which intellectualism, education is completely not only purchasable but also populist and undertaken without local or organic progressive global and African context.
In this, getting educated for proximity to legacies of 'late colonial materialist power' as argued in part by Mahmood Mamdani. Or as even argued more deeply by Franz Fanon in not only his 'Black Skin, White Masks' and 'The Wretched of the Earth' seminal books but regularly by inference in the amazing speeches of Julius Nyerere and Samora Machel.
Africa is at a precipiece of repeating the history of a 'false intellectual consciousness'.
From every level of our education system through to an adult level of a desire of mimicry of global Western or Eastern intellectualism driven by an again false assumption that capitalism in its financialised/mafia like/stock market forms is sustainable for progressive development.
As Africans, we need to rethink who we are intellectually. Moreso as Zimbabweans.
As I quoted the Italian revolutionary Gramsci, the Algerian/Martinique one, Fanon, we need to learn how to read between the lines of the age we are now living in.
One in which there is a neo-liberal repetitive cycle where organic progressive intellectualism is shunned for celebrity politics and populism that keeps history at a standstill. With the prevalent threat of a third world war based on not only greed but also sadly racism and the undermining of the still all-important United Nations Charter.
The necessity of countering this stagnant false consciousness and ahistorical narrative has never been more apparent than now.
We have to go back to the drawing board and harness new technologies to our own African contexts ( e.g Artificial intelligence, mobile telephony, social media) and always work to rise above the fray of post colonial legacies and mimicry!
So we do not, cannot get tired of thinking about a progressive African and global future. Intellectually or in general conversation.
No-matter what Trump says or does. Or even what the European Union, Putin of Russia or Xi-Xinping of China says in response to Iran or Ukraine.
As Africans and as global progressives we need to regain our organic intellectual progressive consciousness beyond the edicts of the likes of social media owners and right wing polutical leaders.
In order to do that we have to rise above the intellectual neo-liberal fray and remember the nexus between history, being, the contemporary, the future and generational praxis.
Thinking still matters cdes. Just be careful who and what you are thinking for. Its always better to think with the people's realities for a progressive shared better future.
*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity
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