The Role of Intellectuals In the State-Society Nexus

If we are to talk of a ?new’ intellectual movement, the question is begged: what happened to the ?old’ intellectual movement? What happened to the thinkers who inspired and led our struggle against colonialism, apartheid and exploitation? What has happened to the thinkers who gave substance and guidance and, in many cases, practical leadership to our attempts to undo the past and forge a new future? In pursuit of answers to these questions, the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), in partnership with the Liliesleaf Trust, hosted a roundtable in March 2015 on the theme ?The Role of Intellectuals in the State-Society Nexus’. The roundtable received inputs from a range of thinkers, including Ibbo Mandaza, Ben Turok, Ari Sitas, Ayanda Ntsaluba, Xolela Mangcu, Joel Netshitenzhe, Tshilidzi Marwala and Nomboniso Gasa, as well as provocative and piercing inputs from the attendees. This publication aims to put the contributions and debates at the roundtable further into the public domain and records the input of the main speakers, the respondents, as well as the discussion from the floor. The rigorous debate at the roundtable spilt out of the boundaries of the event itself and encouraged a number of thinkers to provide additional material for this publication: Z. Pallo Jordan, David Moore (with Tshilidzi Marwala) and Desiree Lewis.

The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), which was publicly launched as a think tank in March 2011, was founded by a group of South Africans with experience in research, academia, policy-making and governance who saw the need to create a platform for engagement around strategic issues facing South Africa. The Institute combines research and academic development, strategic reflections and intellectual discourse and applies itself to issues such as economics, sociology, governance, history, arts and culture, and the logics of the natural sciences. Through her work with the Rural Women’s Action Research (RWAR), Nomboniso focuses on the intersections, continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, especially on questions relating to land and customary systems. Gasa’s political life started in her teens, with her first detention without trial at the age of 14. For almost 32 of her 46 years, Gasa has been involved in political and gender struggles in one or other form, including student activism, the political underground and in the women’s movements. Gasa worked for the African National Congress’s Commission on the Emancipation of Women, through which she was part of the ANC internal and backup team on gender, traditional leadership issues and rural democracy during the negotiations. She served in the Commission for Gender Equality. Wrestling with the unsaid and unsayable, Gasa is best known for her skill in weaving the academic and her activism into her research, writing and public commentary. Her work continuously interrogates the relationship between power, political issues, gender, masculinities, femininities, land environmental questions and issues of social and political location. For more than ten years, she worked on the making of a man, masculinities, manhood, initiation and rites of passage. She continues to work on the ?girl child’, particularly early marriages and the impact of male rites of passage in parts of the Eastern Cape. She has published in scholarly, commercial and other media. Gasa is currently working on the study of the body as a site of identity, ritual and manhood. This examines some of the issues that continue to mark South African society today. As an art critic, she has published essays in catalogues and has written in ?mainstream’ media, including for exhibitions relating to manhood, identity and the Shembe church. Gasa worked in Nigeria for four-and-a-half years, where she represented the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. Following the intense consultative process, a substantive report entitled ?Democracy in Nigeria: Continuing Dialogue(s) for Nation Building’ was produced. Z. Pallo Jordan is an ANC veteran who served in various capacities in exile in the 1970s and 80s. In 1975, he worked in the ANC’s office in London as a researcher in the Department of Information and Publicity. He was deployed to Luanda, Angola in 1977 to head Radio Freedom and also became involved in training programmes for new recruits to Umkhonto we Sizwe, employing his academic background in history to compile a syllabus for political training. In 1979, he was appointed director of the ANC's internal mass propaganda campaign, The Year of the Spear, marking the centenary of the Battle of Isandhlwana. In 1980, Jordan was promoted to head the Research Unit of the ANC Department of Information and Publicity in Lusaka, Zambia. He was elected on to the National Executive Committee (NEC) at the Kabwe conference in 1985 and became Secretary of Information of the ANC in 1989. After South Africa’s first democratic elections in April 1994, Jordan served as Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Broadcasting until 1996, after which he served as Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism until 1999. From 1999 to 2004, he served as Chairperson of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the National Assembly. After the 2004 National