Where will the New Deal intellectual/ Writer Stand at the Trumpet of Reckoning?

(To the memory of Kenjo wa Jumbam, playwright, educationist and novelist, who died in his sleep on 12 December, 2005)

By BATE BESONG

Brahmins of our higher institutions of learning have not provided the elixir that would redeem our inchoate democracy from its prolonged, socio- economic death sleep, and, political quagmire. This refusal to turn history into a useful dialogue has given rise to the perverted culture of glorification of a parasitic, comprador bourgeois ruling class, as well as, the encrustation of a pleasing propaganda image of the Establishment.

In Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (1993), Ngugi wa Thiong’O has pointed out that ‘One can only meaningfully say that there are two types of writers in Kenya today. They are the official writers, or officially approved writers, and the unofficial ones, that is those who are not accepted by the government’ (31). No where could this assertion be so provocatively relevant, especially, in the last two and a half decades or so, than at our state universities which are the breeding ground for our writers, technocrats, lawgivers, intellectuals etc.

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