Anti-intellectualism festers

 The fiasco at the Judicial Service Commission shows that the anti-intellectualism of the kleptocrats retains a hold on important sites in public life.

 

8 May 2006: Supporters of Jacob Zuma, who had been fired as deputy president of South Africa, demonstrate outside the high court in Johannesburg during his rape trial. (Photograph by Reuters/ Mike Hutchings)

The appalling scenes outside the court during Jacob Zuma’s rape trial in 2006, and the nature of his campaign for the presidency of the ANC the following year, marked a dramatic turn towards anti-intellectualism inside the party and in political life more broadly.

The sorry history of anti-intellectualism in degenerated national liberation movements was sketched out with brilliant analytical power and clarity by Frantz Fanon in 1961 in his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. Achille Mbembe explored this further in On the Postcolony in 2000, paying particular attention to the vulgarity of the neocolonial dictatorships that plagued Africa. Similar themes have been a powerful presence in much of the best African cinema and literature, with Wizard of the Crow (2006), the simultaneously comic and desperately sad novel by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, pushing hard against a fictionalised account of the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship in Kenya.

But the anti-intellectualism that surged into public life via the project that united around Zuma, and took on a kleptocratic and authoritarian form when he was in office, was not simply a contemporary avatar of this history. It followed the degeneration of public life in Italy during the successive periods of rule of Silvio Berlusconi and anticipated elements of the politics of the grotesque figures to come to power elsewhere – men like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte.

source ;  ://www.newframe.com/

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(With input from news agency language)

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