BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The Cambridge dictionary defines an intellectual as “a person whose life or work centers around the study or use of ideas such as in teaching or writing.” The term intellectual has various connotations. According to one of them, an intellectual is someone “relating to the ability to think and understand ideas at a high level, or involving ideas.” An intellectual is also “a very educated person who is interested in very complicated ideas and enjoys studying and careful thinking.” We can in fact keep on defining an intellectual from different perspectives.
Perhaps the definition given by Wikipedia can be relatively more holistic or complete. It says that, “An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research and reflection about the reality of society and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or mediator, the intellectual is participates in politics either to defend a concrete proposition to denounce an injustice usually be either rejecting producing or extending an ideology and by defending a system of values.”
French philosopher and writer Albert Camus used to say that to be an intellectual is to differ, that is o say top differ from the run of the mill ideas and attitudes of the common people. This is because intellectuals are supposed to be well-educated, well-read and able to analyze the complex economic, social and political problems of society and come up with palatable solutions. This may be true in the context of European intellectualism. African intellectuals have the double or triple responsibility of leading their communities to the road kingdom of Reason and out of the narrow spectrum of tribalism and ethnic identity so that they can embrace globalism and metropolitan culture in their thinking and actions.
Intellectuals are thinkers as well as doers. They think to produce new and feasible ideas to society and put their ideas into practice. They are the producers of theories and the translators of these theories into practice. Theories guide actions and vice versa. Theories are born of practical actions and actions are guided by practical theories. Not everyone can become an intellectual as the quotations above show. One has to be educated at the highest levels in order to become an intellectual or a man capable of thinking independently for the good of society. This is everywhere true. Intellectuals in the West and the developed countries in general have similar objectives, tasks and responsibility of their peers in less developed countries.
The intellectual tradition is born in ancient Greece. Aristotle maybe considered the foremost philosopher who wrote and said a great deal about the nature and education of intellectuals. According to Aristotle, “”In sum the intellectual virtues in the proper sense of the term appear to be wisdom. Prudence, deliberative excellence. And consideration for others, as well as consideration in the narrow sense of the word. We could also add cleverness, since Aristotle suggests that ingenuity in achieving good ends is praiseworthy.”
According to Aristotle, education or learning is key to producing intellectual virtues. “One overlooked area of Aristotle’s contribution to educational thought is his conception of five intellectual virtues. While Aristotle claims that ‘moral virtue’ comes by habit, intellectual virtue “owns its birth and growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time).”
African intellectuals can generally be divided into two groups. First those who deliberated in a learned way, about the genesis of ancient African communities, their mode of existence and interaction as well as the values they developed and the world view they shaped in their interactions with other communities near and far. The second group of African intellectuals can be categorized as the post-colonial intellectuals whose education and value systems are borrowed from European intellectuals and occupied the intellectual space in many African countries after the advent of political independence in the 1960’s.
These intellectuals were shaped by the Western educational and value systems and tended to look at their respective communities with jaundiced eyes because of their ignorance of their societies or their deliberate distortions of their value systems. For this reason, “The intellectual history of Africa, like its international counterparts, is concerned with understanding how communities in the past understood and debated the spaces they inhabited, and how discourses circulated and changed over time.”
The post-independence African intellectuals were the new elites who guided and impacted or shaped the political, economic and moral orientations of the African communities under the leadership of political elites, when many of them tried to copy the European systems of government and paste them on the African body politic. The results were not always successful and often led to serious dislocations, contradictions and upheavals simply because their ideas did not reflect the wishes, aspirations and values of the African communities. In this period, African intellectual activities boiled down to power struggle among the various elite groups that vied for control of their respective societies.
However, it would be unrealistic to say that all African intellectuals of the post-independence period were the same. True, many of them did not understand African societies because of their alienation and ignorance of African history and anthropology or because of the distorted way they were looking at these things as a result of Western education.
However, some of them could break out of the colonial intellectual or mental cocoons in which they were kept and tried to articulate the dreams of their compatriots in a radical way as being a rebellion against not only colonial intellectual paradigms but also against neocolonial influences that were always more tenuous and more dangerous than the pre-independence intellectual bondage imposed on them by Western thinkers in the service of European powers.
Perhaps we can single out a third group of African intellectuals who were rather passive or neutral in their endeavors and followed personal interests of power and prestige at the const of African societies.
Ethiopia’s situation is slightly different from other African countries in terms of intellectual contribution to the enlightenment of society or to the modernization and continuity of ancient intellectual values that were mainly religious in origin. No viable research is available as to the origin and growth of Ethiopian intellectual life. According to a paper entitled “Ethiopian Intellectual History and the Global by Sara Marzagora from the University of London, the role of intellectuals in Ethiopian society has its origin to the period after Ethiopia’s victory at the Battle of Adwa and the country’s membership to the League of Nations from which Ethiopian intellectuals took great pride of and considered themselves equals to their European peers.
According to Professor Emeritus Bahru Zewde of the Addis Ababa University, Ethiopian intellectual life in the post1941 period was uninteresting compared to the pre-war period. Sara tells us that “Bahru Zewde has described the post-1941 period as characterized by “Drab intellectual climate” in contrast to the “intellectual vibrancy that prevailed in the 1920s”. it appears that intellectual developments do not follow a linear trajectory and tend to swing up and down following historical events.
By the same token, the intellectual climate in Ethiopia in the 1960s and 1970’s was rather vibrant while the decades that followed it, including the present one have seen sharp intellectual declines that coincided with the sharp decline in educational quality and the lack of initiative on the part of the older generation of intellectuals that were the victims of state repression during the half century from the Revolution to the present. It is therefore no accident that Ethiopian intellectuals are presently wrangling with a very weak legacy they are trying to redeem through better education of the next generation.
However, this is not to imply that Ethiopian intellectuals have no role to play in contemporary Ethiopia. On the contrary, what happens in the country is more or less the product of the intellectual resources of the older generation of learned citizens whose ideas and actions are continuing to shape the destiny of the country. Whether they will succeed in their present endeavors is something that will be up to the next generation to judge because, As Aristotle long said, the rise and fall of intellectual activities need time and experience to mature and produce the desired results.
The vibrancy of African, and by implication, Ethiopian intellectuals at [present should be measured in terms of their contribution to research and development, the spiritual enhancement of their people and the material and mental emancipation of African societies. Otherwise being educated might remain an empty and non-functional or dysfunctional claim. The links between research and development as well as investment and growth would only be effective when government, the intellectual class and society form strong bonds. The other alternative would be stagnation, alienation and underdevelopment.
The Ethiopian Herald 5 February 2023
