Reply to Mr Laurent Enoga Concerning My Article ‘Hexis and Elite Formation in Africa’
Abstract
Knowledge becomes an emancipatory hexis only when it is embodied, socially mediated and capable of resisting the autonomous market of credentials.
Education, intellectual life and transmission · Full reading edition
Extending a demanding dialogue
The reply thanks Laurent Enoga for a critical reading that grasps the central passage from possessing knowledge to embodying it—the Aristotelian concept of hexis. His questions extend the moral, political and ontological implications of intellectual formation.
The exchange is presented not as praise or refutation, but as a collective effort to rethink African education.
Speech does not act by itself
Fabien Eboussi Boulaga criticised the African intellectual’s detached discourse, but language has no intrinsic power to transform society. Following Pierre Bourdieu, a statement becomes effective only through institutions and active social forces.
French expanded through administration, church, school, literature and political power. Lingala similarly moved beyond its original region through the army, commerce and churches. Intellectual speech also requires a social vehicle.
Creative appropriation rather than imitation
Exogenous models need not be rejected, but their mimetic and unsituated reproduction must be. Reterritorialised and incorporated into lived being, they can become instruments of emancipation.
Byung-Chul Han’s account of shanzhai shows how imitation becomes creation when it varies a model in response to a local need.
The symbolic market of credentials
African education operates within the economic field. Families invest in prestigious schools and diplomas as capital expected to yield employment, mobility and status. Today, however, labour markets cannot absorb all certified graduates.
The diploma circulates increasingly within an autonomous symbolic market, disconnected from practical action like a financial bubble. Truth does not impose itself when dominant forces neither carry it nor require it.
Against technocratic neutralisation
International expertise often gives African intellectuals a technical, standardised and ahistorical language. Mbembe and Bourdieu show that claims to pure autonomy or neutrality can reproduce the established order.
An intellectual hexis must resist this depoliticisation. Thinking is not only producing true statements but making another political order possible. The response ends by inviting further dialogue with Hountondji, Bidima, Sarr and the legacy of Eboussi Boulaga.
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