In this keynote speech that Professor Issa Shivji gave at the launch of African Humanities Programme books at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 1 February 2019, he calls on the African intelligentsia to construct a counter-hegemonic project in the face of new nationalisms.
Intellectuals pride themselves as producers of knowledge. They are also articulators of ideologies, a role they do not normally acknowledge. Respectable universities worth the name call themselves sites of knowledge production. I say "respectable" because these days many neo-liberalised universities have abandoned the role of knowledge production in favour of packaging disparate information and branding their "products" (students) to make them saleable on the market. That is a story for another day. Today I don't want to talk about packaging factories. Today I want to address those intellectuals who still consider themselves producers of knowledge rather than assembly line supervisors of packaging industries.
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