The Formation of West African Intellectual Community: Tasks and Possibilities

A society which aspires to pass from a state of economic under-development and a traditional culture into a modern condition commits itself to a many-sided dependence on its intellectuals.

To be modern, a society must possess a modern system of administration. This entails the rational application of laws and action based on ordered knowledge. It entails the rational organisation of government and the adoption of general rules to justify particular decisions and actions.

Modernity in economic life assumes rational technology based on scientific knowledge, systematically acquired and rationally applied in the form of technology in industry, transportation, communication and agriculture. It requires calculation of the prospective results of alternative ways of allocating resources: accounting and planning. Without departure from strictly traditional models of doing things and the acceptance of relatively rational standards in the organisation of production neither an economy as a whole nor a single productive unit can meet the requirements of modernity.

The establishment of a modern society involves, fundamentally, systematic education in certain skills and basic types of knowledge, that are not acquired in one's family, but that have been developed on the basis of a much wider range of experience than the family affords. The modernisation of society entails the development of the social and welfare services, which rest on the application of medical knowledge, psychiatric knowledge, and knowledge concerning family organisation; which is to be gathered not just from orally-transmitted traditions and the experience of living in a family, a village or a locality ruled by these traditions, but through disciplined systematic study. Modernisation entails the establishment of institutions of public opinion, because a modern society is one in which there is a feeling of unity, a common focus of attention, responsiveness of rulers to the preferences of the citizenry, and the response and initiative of the citizenry vis-à-vis the governing group. The common opinion, consisting of both a general outlook, a sense of affinity, and responses to particular problems, cannot exist without an elaborate organisation of the press, periodical as well as daily, the organisation of radio communication and, prospectively, television communication.

Fundamentally, it entails the establishment throughout the society, or the most relevant parts of society, of the modern outlook, which is a rational outlook and a readiness to make decisions in a reasonable way, on the basis of carefully gathered knowledge and rational reflection - not just in the sphere of government but in family life, economic life, and in other spheres of life. All these things cannot be done by politicians alone, however virtuous, however devoted to the public good, however much they embody the will of the people. The modernisation of a traditional society, like those of West Africa, cannot be carried out without the active collaboration of a diversified corps of intellectuals.

Intellectuals are important in all modern countries. Nobody questions their indispensability in most of Europe and even in the Soviet Union and China. The very fact that they are so harried from time to time, in certain spheres, attests to the importance that the ruling elite of those countries attribute to them. Similarly, although there was a vigorous flurry of McCarthyan anti-intellectualism in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the fundamental importance of intellectuals in the conduct of the life of the country was never controverted during this period. Even the most anti-intellectual politicians could never shake the vital position of intellectuals in the working of American society. In the under-developed countries, the role of intellectuals is especially central, because the middle class, which has been the instrument of progress in the more advanced countries of Europe and America, is in these countries very rudimentary. It consists of two groups: small traders, carrying on within a traditional framework, without any of the outlook, apparatus, or qualifications for playing an energetically progressive part in the conduct of a society developing towards modernity; and foreigners, who are not integrated socially or culturally into the life of the society in which they carryon their enterprises. Whereas there was, from the very first stages of modernisation, an indigenous middle class in the Western countries, in the under-developed countries there has been only a poorly developed indigenous or very small and alienated middle class. The intellectuals in these countries will therefore have to take on many of the functions that have been performed by businessmen, inventive artisans, and practical men of affairs in the modern Western countries.

One of the first tasks of the under-developed countries is to produce the right number and the right kind of intellectuals for public administrative and executive functions and also for the truly intellectual activities. They must not only see to the adequate production of intellectuals. They must be equally concerned about their proper allocation and the provision of conditions that will allow the effective performance of the various functions that fall to intellectuals.

It is not necessary to stress that there must be intellectuals in politics. Politics in under-developed countries is full of intellectuals. It is indeed the nature of politics in under-developed countries that in the struggle for liberation from the colonial powers, intellectuals should have become the political leaders. There was no one else to take on the task. to promulgate the idea of nationality and to contend on its behalf with the foreign ruler, as well as to try to arouse their fellow countrymen to an appreciation of this idea. Countries cannot, however, be run by politicians alone, however intellectual these are, if they are to become what their intellectual-politicians wish them to be. There must be intellectuals in administration, in private business as well as public, working as accountants, as economists, as statisticians. There must be intellectuals in the judiciary, in the legal system, in finding, declaring, applying, and enacting rationally intelligent and consistent laws. There is a very fundamental need for intellectuals as teachers and as trainers of teachers; modern countries require intellectuals as social-welfare administrators, as physicians, and as engineers and research workers in technology.

Any country to be effective and self-respecting must produce most of its own intellectuals. Each under-developed country, to overcome its backwardness, must develop the seed bed from which all of these kinds of applied activity of a higher sort in science, in scholarship, in literature, and in elaboration and modernisation of the indigenous traditions of their own society, must spring. Unless a country has a body of intellectuals who are not merely doing executive and administrative work, and unless it has a body of intellectuals who are creating, thinking, discovering, and performing those tasks that are at the heart of the intellectual process, the intellectuals of that country will have inferiority feeling towards the metropolis from which they have gained their political independence. They will be excessively preoccupied with foreign intellectual events, and they will also be excessively preoccupied with praising their own indigenous traditions. However much they assert the merits of the latter, they will feel inwardly that their own intellectual life is inferior, and their own indigenous traditions, despite all the praise they receive, will stagnate.

The path of intellectual health in the under-developed countries requires the creative fusion of the inherited indigenous tradition with the modern intellectual tradition brought into the country by the modern intellectual. This cannot be done by programmatic declarations. It can only be done by working creatively on important problems, on problems that are important in themselves, which means important according to the standards embedded in modern intellectual traditions. That is why an under-developed country must also allow the essential core of intellectual work to be carried on under conditions as favour able as its economy can provide. 

(Edward Shils: Africa: The Dynamics of Change, Ibadan University Press)