Of Cameroonian Intellectual and the Making of Public Intellectuals #IssueOfTheWeek

Thomas Sowell once said that "some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.” But I will contextualize what Thomas said by adding that there are plenty of people who have spent alot of time thinking over nothing yet mock the assumed self importance that must surely accompany not only the willingness to be "public intellectuals", but also abuse the term "public intellectual". It is their ignorance and prejudices that is allowing false ideas and bad values to work. I may not be an expert in the Queen's language but this issue has come up lately over CRTV Debate Club. I am a good poet and i adore my critics. However, when an intellectuals transforms self to a songbird of a political order, it creates the disaster that may befell society. It may not only be to the type Cameroon has produced but to one who may go on a public space at the drum beats of a chorus to be viewed as a self-proclaimed expert. Society relies on their elite(s) to get things right but I am wondering whether in Cameroon we can rely on some intellectual elite because theirs is to get things wrong. (Abeg, I need one expert to help me. Probably the panelist who quoted me). Nevertheless, I think the figure of such a person should be one that is endowed with values that can describe and analyse situations and issues from this point of view inorder to proscribe what need to be done or for its realization to progress. What i am wondering is the meaning of what it is to be an intellectual and to do intellectual work. To me, the idea of having some thinkers in Cameroon today, or intellectuals has been proclaimed dead and done away with ever since some of them joined the chorus of social guards to defend the interest of x and or y. To cut the story short, I think the intellectual needs the promise of another in order to actualise the process of the struggle  and desire which produces the intellectual itself. So, the beginning of the end of the intellectual as someone puts it is already inhabited by the end.  

When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)