The role of the public intellectual is particularly important in Africa, with such individuals having a responsibility to promote a cosmopolitan Pan-Africanism and pursue seemingly “lost causes” such as reparations for slavery and colonialism.

Late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said consistently insisted on the need for secular intellectuals to engage with the public to “speak truth to power”, stir up debate and controversy, and avoid patriotic nationalism and corporate thinking.

Said regarded intellectuals as iconoclastic, marginal exiles who belonged to no tribe and subscribed to no creed. They had therefore to speak out for their fellow displaced and dispossessed, challenge the status quo and seek to uphold “eternal standards of truth and justice”.

He defined genuine intellectuals as crusaders against corruption, promoters of human freedom and knowledge, defenders of the weak and voiceless, confronters of orthodoxy and dogma, and challengers of oppressive authority. For Said, intellectuals also traverse disciplines and demolish idées fixes.

Late Kenyan intellectual Ali Mazrui noted that “we can imagine intellectualism without Pan-Africanism, but we cannot imagine Pan-Africanism without the intellectualisation of the African condition”. He observed that Pan-Africanism’s founding fathers — WEB du Bois, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah and Léopold Senghor — were all intellectuals.

Mazrui described the rich public intellectual tradition in the East Africa of the 1960s where he became the youngest professor at Uganda’s Makerere University, engaging in public debates with the country’s founding president, Milton Obote. This was also a period when founding Tanzanian president and philosopher-king Julius Nyerere translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Kiswahili.

However, Mazrui criticised the lack of intellectual diversity of Tanzania’s largely Marxist University of Dar es Salaam School of Political Economy — championed by scholars such as Guyanese Walter Rodney — which he accused of suffering from an Nyerere-infatuated “Tanzaphilia”.

The Kenyan further lamented that increased autocracy and the decline of Pan-Africanism by the 1970s eventually stifled public intellectualism across the continent. He thus called for African universities to keep a political distance from the state while staying culturally close to society.

Late Malawian economist Thandika Mkandawire similarly bemoaned the widespread autocracy in post-independence Africa, which had often co-opted intellectuals into silence as part of development and nation-building projects. He argued that many African intellectuals adopted statist definitions of social transformation that excluded important non-state actors.

Mkandawire noted that even Kwame Nkrumah sought to coerce the University of Ghana into serving state interests. The Malawian observed that by the 1980s intellectuals were accusing African leaders of having betrayed the nationalist cause, while governments in turn accused academics of engaging in research that was irrelevant to their development needs.

Mkandawire further lamented the World Bank-enforced cuts to higher education budgets across Africa, which decimated the sector and resulted in a “brain drain” of 50,000 African academics a year to Western institutions by 1995. He bemoaned a new era, by 2005, of “postcolonial pessimism”, an obscurantist anti-“victimology” discourse represented by scholars such as Cameroon’s Achille Mbembe, as well as a donor-led consultancy industry harmful to research.

Late Burkinabè historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo elegantly captured the dearth of intellectual dissent in post-independence Africa as involving leaders proclaiming: “Silence: development in progress.” He called for African intellectuals to exhibit “responsible citizenship” and advocated the independence and autonomy of civil society from national governments.

Like Mazrui and Mkandawire, Ki-Zerbo advocated a return to an integrationist pan-African vision involving diasporas in the Americas that could transcend more parochial ethnic identities.

SA was deeply isolated from the rest of Africa during the apartheid era. It is thus yet to produce many public intellectuals with a deep pan-African ethos who can help transform the inherited Eurocentric epistemologies that still dominate the country’s post-apartheid universities.

These institutions often tout themselves as pan-African, but are frequently promoting a poor parody of the ideology.

• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.