The Mob’s Only Question: Whose Side Is Your Mind On?

By Themba Khumalo

When “intellectual” is spat out as an insult by someone who claims to speak for the people, the speaker is rarely asking you to think less. They are asking you to stop checking their work.

The insult is old, and so is where it leads.

Start with Mao. Mao’s Cultural Revolution produced nine categories of enemy: landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, rightists, traitors, foreign agents, capitalist roaders and, last, intellectuals. The ninth was the “stinking old ninth.”

The definition was generous. It took in not only professors and researchers but schoolteachers, technicians and office workers. Ordinary literacy was enough to make you suspect. The Party itself eventually conceded the damage, admitting in 1981 that the Cultural Revolution had caused the most severe setback and heaviest losses since the founding of the People’s Republic.

Stalin’s state used a different phrase and the same instinct. The “bourgeois specialists” were the engineers and technicians of the old order, tolerated and protected for as long as their skills were needed, until a 1928 show trial marked a shift toward replacing them with young proletarian communist specialists.

In the Shakhty trial, fifty-three engineers and managers were accused of sabotage, and eleven were sentenced to death. The accusation did its work long after the verdict. The propaganda theme, repeated for years, was that bourgeois specialists could not be trusted, and large numbers were arrested afterwards.

Then came the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938. Historians estimate roughly 680,000 to 750,000 people were executed in 1937-38 alone. Most were not scholars, but the Soviet Union lost writers, scientists, engineers and scholars whose contributions were permanently foreclosed. Everyone left behind learned the arithmetic. You did not have to be arrested to be edited.

The so-called free world is not exempt. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee went looking for subversion in Hollywood. The “Hollywood Ten”, screenwriters and directors who refused to answer, were jailed for contempt, and thousands more lost their livelihoods in the blacklist that followed.

Richard Hofstadter, anatomising the era, noted that “egghead” became the flash word of the 1950s anti-intellectual. McCarthyism was never only about communists. It was about suspicion of anyone who read too much and agreed too little.

Now come home, because we are not entitled to think this is someone else’s disease.

Under Thabo Mbeki, black intellectuals who criticised government were denounced by his loyalists as aspiring to be like “a foreign minority” and as “foot-lickers of the white system”.

Under Jacob Zuma, the contempt got its own slogan. In 2012, he complained about black people who “become too clever” and grow eloquent in criticising their own traditions, and the phrase “clever blacks” stuck as a label for the urban black professional and thinker who dared to criticise the movement.

Former ANC MP Makhosi Khoza later said it made black intellectuals feel awkward for being black and smart.

Weigh those words. Let the tonnage settle on you.

In a country that spent centuries insisting black people could not think, it is a bitter irony that black intellectuals now face hostility not only from government but also from pseudo-activists and hashtag-obsessed campaigners who insult and diminish them for refusing to toe their line.

The ANC has also been here before, in a harsher form. In exile, the movement ran a detention camp in Angola. Officially the Morris Seabelo Rehabilitation Centre, it was known to everyone as Quatro. It was meant for suspected spies, but the independent Motsuenyane Commission, appointed by the ANC itself, found that it became a dumping ground for dissenters and “misfits”, with torture, executions and arbitrary detention.

The 1984 mutineers were not agents of Pretoria. They demanded a democratically elected conference to choose a new national executive, and the ANC’s own Stuart Commission rejected the allegation that enemy agents had organised and led the revolt. Yet its report was kept secret from ANC members for nine years. It was released only in 1993, alongside the findings of the Motsuenyane inquiry. Former detainees claimed that scores of people were still missing. The word “rehabilitation” deserves a long, cold look. It is what a movement calls it when it has decided that disagreement is a disease.

Every one of these episodes began the same way, with a label for people who think differently, delivered with the confidence of someone who knows what the people want. The label comes first. The harm follows when the label is allowed to replace the argument.

In the democratic dispensation, no black intellectual has been killed for thinking aloud, and we should be grateful. But gratitude is not a strategy.

The danger that hangs on the horizon is not a camp or a cell. It is quieter than that, and it is already here. It is a political culture that has learned to hear a question as an insult and a critic as an enemy. Each time a thinker is sneered at as “clever,” each time an analyst is told to go and “start a party,” each time a columnist’s patriotism is put on trial in place of the column’s argument, a little more of the public square is paved over.

Nobody has to be silenced for a society to go quiet. It is enough that thinking becomes expensive: that the young learn that the safe thing is to nod, that the gifted learn to dim themselves, that the honest learn to keep their conclusions to themselves.

Any formation that punishes ideas does not stay in power by being right. It stays in power by making sure no one can prove it wrong.

That is the horizon. A republic of flatterers, where the loudest voices are the least curious, where loyalty is measured by how little you ask, and where a government that cannot bear examination slowly loses the ability to see itself. The wreckage of every country that went down this road looks the same afterwards. Nobody remembers who shouted loudest. They remember who was missing from the room when the decisions were made.

A nation that cannot tolerate its thinkers will one day find it has none left to save it.

So, as you grow comfortable stamping “intellectual,” “clever” or “unpatriotic” on whoever you would rather not answer, look at the company you are keeping. The ninth category, the specialists, the eggheads, the clever blacks and the detainees of Quatro, all began as an insult before they became a weapon.

History has no blank pages, only those who choose not to read them.