A Guatemalan poet, guerrilla fighter and revolutionary, Otto René Castillo, forces us as Africans to return from our retreat from the habit of thinking when he speaks to us of apolitical intellectuals of our time. Castillo says of these people:
“One day the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the simplest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their nation died out slowly, like a sweet fire, small and alone … No one will care about their higher financial learning. They won’t be questioned on Greek mythology, or regarding their self-disgust when someone within them begins to die the coward’s death. They’ll be asked nothing about their absurd justifications, born in the shadow of the total lie.
“On that day the simple men will come. Those who had no place in the books and poems of the apolitical intellectuals, but daily delivered their bread and milk, their tortillas and eggs, those who drove their cars, who cared for their dogs and gardens and worked for them, and they’ll ask: ‘What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life burned out of them?’
“Apolitical intellectuals of my sweet country, you will not be able to answer. A vulture of silence will eat your gut. Your own misery will pick at your soul. And you will be mute in your shame.”
This is unarguably one of the most important contributions to revolutionary literature, for it asks of us a fundamental question that begs for critical analysis. It asks of us the question of what the purpose of education is. This is not a rhetorical question; it is a question that must be answered, particularly by Africans. It is Africans who must answer what the purpose of education is, primarily because it is us who are victims of this education that we continue to insist is both necessary and progressive. We are victims of this education because by virtue of its neo-liberal nature, it is divorced from the solutions to our dispossessed humanity.
The education that we are receiving, from primary to tertiary level, is not one that teaches us how to think, but one that teaches us what to think. It is not an education that is geared towards an African developmental agenda, an agenda which seeks to give rise to a critical mass that will champion the struggle for an African Renaissance ideal. It is not even an education that teaches us to embrace our African humanity. Rather, it is an education that seeks to maintain the status quo of producing a great supply of labour to be exploited by an elite White minority that has control and ownership of means of production that were dispossessed through criminal means.
It is an education that at best creates sophisticated workers who have had the retina removed from their eyes such that theirs is merely a struggle to survive within the system and at worst, creates functional illiterates who exist to consume without producing.
This is evident in the vulgarisation of progressive socialist doctrine by even the most “progressive” of institutions as well as the refusal to include critical African literature in prescribed readings at primary and secondary level. It is evident in the prohibiting of radical thinking by the very education system which supposedly seeks to create a critical mass. It is evident in the violent neutralisation of student activists, who operate in a vital site of struggle: education. Indeed, everywhere around us we see the violence and vulgarity of this “anti-Africa” education, but we continue to embrace it with great gusto.
And yet, what is it exactly that makes this education important when by all indications, it has done little to make us reclaim our dispossessed humanness? Many African people are getting educated and yet, the African community remains in a nervous condition. The reason for this is primarily that the ideology that informs that education is deliberately architected to be individualistic. But it is also that our people use degrees to negotiate themselves into well-paying jobs that allow them to afford houses in affluent suburbs and vacations in exotic islands. They use degrees to get jobs that allow them to drive luxurious German-made cars and take their children, who cannot speak in their mother-tongue, to expensive private schools. It is all about what they as individuals can get out of degrees.
But surely the purpose of obtaining a degree, in a country where thousands of young people have the doors of universities shut in their faces every year, cannot be to maintain a culture of crass materialism. Degrees ought to be used to penetrate into the logic of a destructive education system with a conscious intention of destroying it to make way for one informed by an ideology that is people-centred. Education that is Africanist is for the greater good of humanity. Degrees in an Africanist and pro-poor education system will be used for the benefit of society rather than the upward mobility of individuals, which is inversely proportional to the development of the toiling masses.
The first step in fighting for the attainment of this progressive education is to defy the environment systematically designed to make of us apolitical intellectuals, by being active in the civil society movement, in student organisations such as the South African Students Congress and Pan Africanist Student Movement of Azania, to obliterate all constructs of regressive ideas. When future generations ask us what we did to fight for Africa’s mental liberation, we shall not, like apolitical intellectuals, be mute in our shame.
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