Don’t ridicule Mozambican academics and intellectuals

Josué Bila (uhurubila@gmail.com)

As a result of the political crisis sparked by the so-called mega-fraudulent 2024 elections, there is a social wave, which seems to me to be popularizing these days when the people believe they are in power, of discrediting academics and intellectuals for allegedly being useless in their assumptions and propositions. Academics and intellectuals are also discredited for their alleged ‘stomach alliance’ with the party in power. I agree to a certain extent. Despite these accusations against Mozambican academics and intellectuals, with this text, I intend to present another multidimensional platform for observing Mozambican thinkers.

What I still haven't seen on the public assessment platform (mainly social media) is: who is an academic or intellectual? Why is it immediately assumed that ‘every’ academic is an intellectual? Who is an intellectual, from which schools of thought or from which social realities? Do the academics evaluated so far (in the social networks) represent the totality of the social, theoretical and methodological models of the total universe of academics? How many academics does Mozambique have? Of all the Mozambican academics, how many whose behaviour (does not) live up to the title they bear? Could it be that out of every ten academics, seven, for example, are chatterboxes and hand-kissers for the oppressors? Is every academic or intellectual a hand-kisser?

Intellectuals at all times in Africa

Due to the lack of a definition that encompasses local thinkers (for the categorization ‘intellectual’, for example), we lose sight of the fact that intellectuals, for example, cannot only be linked to European institutionalization, brought about through colonial violence, but also to the African continent, while the so-called ‘old continent’ had no meaning, it had already risen up in the systematization of political, legal and economic models - and this was also the role of intellectuals and academics, who were found in Ancient Egypt and where present-day Sudan, Ethiopia and West Africa are located - take Timbuktu, for example. To put it another way: when we generalize in pejorative accusations against intellectuals and academics, we lose sight of the fact that before colonial violence, which produced black intellectuals and academics for the maintenance of Power, communities always had their cultists and intellectuals, who worked in pre-colonial African governments. Ancient African kingdoms and empires could not have risen to such stature without intellectuals - and academics, in some cases. In fact, some of those who organized the ideology of the struggle against colonialism, before the liberation movements, were local intellectuals. Not least because the intellectual, since the Dreyfus affair in France (19th-20th centuries), is the one who also fights for justice. So to speak, it's one thing to criticize the hand-kissers who are considered to be academics and intellectuals. It's another to construct critical narratives that exhaust the relevance of intellectuals and academics. We need to prevent young people from the ‘This country is ours. Save Mozambique’ generation don't lose their dreams of fighting for a place in academia and intellectual life. Not everyone will fight for their rights in the street; there are those who can fight through the academic pen and intellectual pencil.

Anonymous academics

I know that moments of political crisis and social exhaustion produce solidarity among the oppressed or the people, the latter also having unidirectional spokespeople. It's a way of proposing that the people are also made up of propositional differences, and this is hardly respected by the ‘Salve Moçambique’ scouts.

However, in the name of solidarity with the oppressed, we can't forget that perhaps the majority of anonymous academics and intellectuals are nowhere near collaborating with the assumptions and propositions of the famous academics, who have the privilege (I'm not talking about a right. I'm talking about a privilege) of filling the media with their thinking.

It's highly likely that anonymous academics and intellectuals don't appear in the media because, allegedly, journalists prefer the famous sameness of a few academics and intellectuals. Our public and private press could be questioned about this reproduction of the same old political thinking, according to which Mozambican society needs more dialogue and less truth and electoral justice. In general, journalists do little to find out what academics are researching to make an agenda.

So journalists do what's easy. They almost always look for the same old academic or intellectual, who is unlikely to refuse an interview on the grounds that they don't know the subject. And we have to recognise: an academic or intellectual who frequently agrees to give interviews will inevitably fall into disrepute due to argumentative wear and tear or even the pathology of verbomania. Perhaps the complaint on the social networks could specify that they are against the academics and intellectuals of political verbomania.

In any case, the ‘people’ perceive this chatter that offers to give answers or go to debates, without a deep knowledge of the society in which it is inserted. They therefore deny that society has a high level of political awareness. I myself, being neither an academic nor an intellectual, am surprised by what the slogan ‘This country is ours’ implies. It's a political and social outcry for the Republic and the Rule of Law, even if this desire needs to be systematised by academics and intellectuals, due to the way our state is organised and, equally, the way our society is structured.

We need to be able to distinguish between academics who are linked to the oppressive Power, with privileges of being in the media, and academics whose activities contribute substantially to this Mozambique.

A debt to academics

Let's not forget that we are all the fruit of the efforts of academics and intellectuals, whose lectures and writings awaken in us a sense of citizenship, and part of the human rights that we enjoy and are aware of are those that anonymous academics and intellectuals have cemented. Emerging human rights activists are forbidden, for example, from inciting people to generalize criticism against academics and intellectuals. We are the fruit of many academics and intellectuals, whose inspiration is removable. This Mozambique has been thought about for a long time by people, most of whom have no oral or written memory of it. So let's keep up our fight for human dignity, a republic, opportunities for all, human rights and citizenship. Let's not allow a group hand-picked to fill prime space in the media to capture us with their anti-republican, one-party delusions.

It is therefore our existential duty to remember that not all academics and intellectuals are lost in unbridled ambition. And they are the majority! There are still many sensible academics and intellectuals in Mozambique who are willing to contribute to the Republic, democracy and social justice.