agenda of globalization, has nonetheless gained ascendancy through the complicity of the
intellectual class. The feeling of betrayal and disappointment this situation registers on
the minds of the ordinary people that gave their support to the intellectuals who led the
struggle in the days of apartheid is expressed further in the lines below.
African intellectual,
who are you
what resides in your marrow...
when European intellectuals plotted our demise
where
where were you, my deodorant brother,
don’t you know
how with our illiteracy, ignorance and poverty
we resisted
we built liberation movements... (41)^83The sense of betrayal that is palpable in the above also appropriates the feeling of
desertion that the disappointed class of the uneducated has. The refusal of the intellectual
class to speak in the language that their illiterate but committed elders understand
constitutes a signal in the refusal of the intellectuals to remember their “home address”.
For they may have become famous, but the largely illiterate generation of their parents
“gave the last we had” and their “children to armed struggle”. The paradox that results
from the realization of freedom coincides with the ascendancy of the sentiments of
83
But one must also acknowledge the fact that there is a coincidence of the articulation of the
disappointment and frustration of the abandoned and uneducated African elders, and the general
disappointment that is palpable in the comportment of African intellectuals for whom policy and economic
formulations from the West are paramount. Here again, refer to an earlier reflection on this issue: “To
adopt Njubi Nesbitt’s paradigm, those postcolonial intellectuals for whom the fetishization of postcolonial
theory is paramount, have formed themselves divisively into categories such as “comprador intelligentsia,
and postcolonial critics”.^83 These two have connived wittingly or unwittingly to frustrate the decolonization
mandate further. According to Nesbitt, those in the first category end up shuttling between universities of
the North and policy formulation institutes where their agency for tackling Africa’s problem is recognized
by the West through “their uncritical adoption of the free market ideology of globalization”. Those in the
second category compound the problem further through their denial of Africa and African-based
scholarship meant to expose the root of African developmental problems. Yet when he identifies the third
category as “progressive exile” which has the potential of turning the tragedy of “brain-drain” into “brain-
gain”,^83 one still finds this possibility suspect. Suspect because, while many African social scientists are
quick to point at the possibilities inherent in the abstraction and practices of globalization, by specifically
pointing to the movement of people across spaces, they shy away from the incongruity of the movement
which, to hit at the stark truth, is nothing but the one-way movement of Africans, intellectuals and non-
intellectuals alike, and citizens of other poor countries of the South to the North, a phenomenon that subtly
robs Africa of its intellectual capital base.” See Senayon Olaoluwa, “Decolonising the Social Sciences in
Africa: The Unfinished Agenda,” Africa Development : Forthcoming.