VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Mbeki has often alluded to the importance of Africa’s intelligentsia supportingMamdani’s point of view. Mbeki maintains:[T]he enormous brain power which our continent possesses must become avital instrument in helping us to secure our equitable space within a worldaffected by a rapid process of globalisation and from which we cannot escape(Mbeki 1999: xxi).Mbeki is convinced that a great burden rests on the shoulders of Africa’sintelligentsia, for Africa to realise the objectives of an African Renaissance. Mbekigoes on to detail briefly the tools of the intelligentsia as[e]ducation, organization and energisation of the new African patriots who,because to them yesterday is a foreign country, join in the struggle to bringabout an African Renaissance (Mbeki 1999: xxi).Mamdani wonders whether the continent has the necessary “intelligentsia to driveforward an African Renaissance” (Mamdani 1999:130). Mbeki, who acknowledgesthat Africa needs intellectual movements to drive the African Renaissance, raises thisquestion also. Unfortunately, the effect of ‘brain drain’ on the continent limitsintellectual contribution to the development of such a rebirth (cf Mbeki 1999: xxi;Serote 1999:354).The performance of the intelligentsia was remarkable in the past in Africa’srealisation of independence, and is perhaps more needed now than ever before as adriving force in the development of an African Renaissance. Davidson recalls that itwas the intelligentsia of the 1900s who “looked closely into the colonial system ...studied these systems ... (and) found out how these systems worked .... (then they)began to ask themselves what could be done to change them” (Davidson 1994:30).Consequently, these elites formed revolutionary movements for Africa’sindependence. A realisation that the past successes were made possible by acommitted intelligentsia is both a challenge and a motivation for the presentintellectuals as they map their way forward.H. S. Wilson records how, in the 1930s, the “new breed of African scholars identifiedstrongly with the movement for African independence” (Wilson 1994:108). A77