Africa: Social Responsibility of Intellectuals in Building Counter-Hegemonies

10 February 2019
opinion

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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