Mongo Beti and the Responsibility of the African Intellectual

Someday, the history of the African intellectual must be written. The confusion created by this term in numerous debates on the continent is such that it will not be simple for those who would like to launch this project to easily untangle the web. Management leaders, executives, and university graduates of all kinds claim to be intellectuals, undoubtedly because of the prestige the word carries. As Michel Winock has shown in Le siècle des intellectuels, the term intellectual made its fortune in France starting with the Dreyfus Affair and the Emile Zola trial: "Les deux maîtres mots du combat intellectual au coeur de l'Affaire sont lâchés: justice et vérité. Les antidreyfusards leur opposent, à l'instar de Barrès, préservation sociale, défense de la nation, raison supérieure de l'Etat. Valeurs universalistes contre valeurs particularistes" 'The two key words of the intellectual combat at the heart of the Affair [were] unleashed: justice and truth. The Antidreyfus camp counter[ed], following the example of Barrès, with social preservation, defense of the nation, the State's superior reason' (30-31).

Furthermore, in La faute aux élites, Jacques Julliard establishes that of the "trois critères universels pour sélectionner les elites—la naissance, l'argent, le mérite—, les Français continuent, en principe de préférer le troisième. Ils n'aiment pas le modèle bourgeois qui repose sur la fortune. Depuis la Troisième République au moins, ils sont attachés au modèle mandarinal, à base de concours" 'three universal criteria for selecting elites—birth, money, merit—the French continue, in principle, to prefer the third. They do not like the bourgeois model based on financial fortune. At least since the Third Republic, they have been attached to the mandarin model, based on competition' (73).

Because of the colonial model obstructing African minds, the confusion between notions of elites and of intellectuals can be explained rather easily. Quite often, it is the same individuals who, having benefited from the rudiments of colonial education or its postcolonial byproduct, hold power and money, and believe that they are authorized to define the social categories. Now, an intellectual is not necessarily just another elite, writes J.-B. Placa in L'Autre Afrique, because cultured people or politicians are often "stars aussi artificielles qu'éphémères, des gloires acquises à bon marché par une élite prompte au reniement, à la compromission" 'stars that are just as artificial as they are ephemeral, with glories bought on the cheap by an elite that is quick to repudiate or compromise.' Sometimes the role of intellectual is ascribed to individuals who are merely agents of mediation between the sources of knowledge and the consumers of that learning. Thus, numerous categories of graduates are easily and often grouped with intellectuals.

Indeed, Mongo Beti can be classified in more than one of these categories. An elite in the mandarin sense of the term—he was an agrégé in Classical Letters—as well as an agent of the transmission of knowledge (as a journalist, he is a successful political writer), he is also a fierce defender of justice and a speaker of truth. It is the former sense that beckons to us with a particular urgency because of its ethical dimension, as explained by Noam Chomsky ¹ :

En ce qui concerne le devoir de découvrir la vérité et de la dire, il n'est pas nécessaire d'insister. Rappelons seulement que c'est une mission souvent compliquée et qui peut s'avérer périlleuse. C'est vrai dans les sociétés dites «libres», mais les risques sont émment plus importants dans les autres. [. . .] De quelle vérités s'agit-il? [. . .] Certain problèmes sont d'une importance tout intellectuelle. Par exemple, le problème des rapports entre le fonctionnement du cerveau et les activit&eacute...