03 ISSUE VIII
OCTOBER 2025
OCTOBER 2025
What kind of public intellectual
Reflecting on the role of the public intellectual today, and how collective projects interpret Africa’s politics, culture, and diaspora through critical, leftist, and intellectual traditions.
By Sean Jacobs
So when I began reflecting on the role of the public intellectual today—on whether there are still forms of knowledge, critique, and commitment that we expect, or resist, from this role—I naturally thought about my own work in building Africa Is a Country. By any measure, the site has played the role of a public intellectual project, or more precisely, a collective of public intellectuals, seeking to make sense of the political and cultural life of Africa’s 55 countries and its diaspora. But my orientation toward this work is not neutral: it’s heavily influenced by left-wing, Marxist approaches to ideology and the role of intellectuals, by a South African tradition embodied in figures like Neville Alexander, and by the post-independence ferment captured in Transition magazine.
The South African artist Peter Clarke, 1979. Photograph by George Hallett.
So when I began reflecting on the role of the public intellectual today—on whether there are still forms of knowledge, critique, and commitment that we expect, or resist, from this role—I naturally thought about my own work in building Africa Is a Country. By any measure, the site has played the role of a public intellectual project, or more precisely, a collective of public intellectuals, seeking to make sense of the political and cultural life of Africa’s 55 countries and its diaspora. But my orientation toward this work is not neutral: it’s heavily influenced by left-wing, Marxist approaches to ideology and the role of intellectuals, by a South African tradition embodied in figures like Neville Alexander, and by the post-independence ferment captured in Transition magazine.
Growing up in Cape Town, South Africa, the first person whom I recognized as an intellectual was Neville Alexander. He remains absolutely central to my intellectual formation. He was a South African linguist and activist who studied in Germany in the early 1960s, then returned to join the armed struggle. He was arrested in 1964, spent ten years on Robben Island, and afterward lived under house arrest not far from where I grew up in Cape Town’s coloured townships. Despite these restrictions, he helped organize political movements, wrote incisively on national liberation, and grappled with the entanglement of race and class under apartheid. He is widely recognized as one of the originators of the concept of “racial capitalism,” which insisted, against the ANC line that dominated liberation politics, that apartheid was not a separate system but integral to capitalism itself. This was a Marxist analysis that Cedric Robinson later encountered in Britain and expanded in the US and globally in “Black Marxism” in 1983.
For me, Alexander embodied Marx’s famous injunction in the “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” He wasn’t only a theorist but also a teacher, a political educator, and an institution builder.
And when I was still in elementary school, I actually met him. He came to deliver magazines—such as Learn and Teach and Upbeat—at my school. My teacher, Evelyn Mehl, knew him, and one day after he left, she told us who he was.
These publications were written in plain English and covered struggles for equality, history and culture, women’s movements, health, democratic rights, and more. They were part of an alternative press culture in 1980s South Africa: alongside small nonprofit papers like the Weekly Mail, New Nation, South, and Vrye Weekblad, and magazines like Work in Progress, Staffrider, South African Labour Bulletin and Die Suid-Afrikaan—all committed not to profit but to political education, grassroots mobilization, and amplifying left-wing and Black Consciousness debates. Reading them shaped my sense of what intellectual work could mean: analysis that doesn't sit above society, but participates in its transformation.
Later, at university, I encountered Marx directly, reading him as an instruction manual for intellectuals: move beyond interpretation and critique, and engage in changing the world. Still later, when I came to the United States, I discovered the archives of “Transition,” first published in Uganda by Rajat Neogy in the 1960s. It was a forum where Wole Soyinka, Ali Mazrui, Nadine Gordimer, Kwame Nkrumah, and others debated Africa’s futures. Transition wasn't just a magazine; it was a space of contestation and imagination, proof that intellectual life could be a site of political struggle and future-making.
It was this combination—the Marxist insistence on transforming the world, Alexander’s model of the intellectual as educator and activist, and the Transition vision of a transnational African forum—that led me to found Africa Is a Country in 2009. I edited the site until 2023, when our staff writer Will Shoki took over. Throughout, I tried to capture the voices Alexander taught me to value: critical, grassroots, transnational, and unapologetically left.
The goal was always to reclaim and expand African narratives: to amplify writers across borders and languages; to challenge the reductive portrayals of Africa as homogenous and crisis-ridden that dominate Western media; and to fill the absence of explicitly left African perspectives in the global conversation. On the continent, and especially in South Africa, my focus was on highlighting the structural divides between insiders—those integrated into formal political and economic systems—and outsiders, working-class and marginalized populations excluded from political contestation. In the United States, where I currently reside, the project aimed to influence elite discourse by making African scholarship and political analysis accessible beyond the confines of academic jargon. This is the tradition, I hope my successors will retain.
So in all these ways, Africa Is a Country stands in a lineage: from Marx’s injunction to change the world, to Alexander’s racial-capitalist analysis and his commitment to education and movement-building, to the wider post-independence intellectual culture of Transition. This lineage shaped what voices I wanted to amplify, what absences I wanted to fill, and what kind of public intellectual work I wanted to pursue.
sean jacobs is Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School and editor of The New Context.