Post-industrialism and knowledge production: African intellectuals in the new international division of labour

Abstract

A strong intellectual force, owing to its strategic role in knowledge production and training of manpower and policymakers, is undoubtedly the engine of a vibrant economy. As the world integrates, the Marxian class struggle is internationalized, pitting the 'bourgeois' postindustrial information society against the 'proletariat' of the newly industrialized and agrarian societies of the Third World. Africa, with it small and beleaguered knowledge class and an extremely weak intellectual infrastructure, is the 'sick man' of the new knowledge-based World Order. It is losing the capacity to think for itself and becoming increasingly dependent on externally generated and externally driven policies. This in turn has entrenched the dominance of expatriate personnel in policymaking and policy implementation. With this the recolonization of the continent's economic and intellectual space has gathered momentum. The author traces the rise of the postindustrial society, the international division of labour and the position of intellectuals, setting the context for an examination of the evolving relationship between African intellectuals and the State from a period of harmony in the 1960s through to the current crisis.