Africa is a Country

I am not a fan of “top 100…of ” anything lists because, as a friend of mine reminded me “they are like hit parades, attracting popular and loud voices but seldom the more nuanced or subtle ones.” That said Foreign Policy and Prospect, respectively two policy magazines aimed at mainstream government elites in the USA and Britain, recently published the second edition of their “Top 100 Intellectuals” list. The first list was published in 2005. Noam Chomsky came out tops. He made the list again. According to Foreign Policy the people on the list

… are some of the world’s most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights… we reveal the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time.

Those nominated had to be alive when included on the list. For now they’ve only made public an alphabetic list of the “Top 100 Intellectuals.” The two magazines’ readers were asked to rank those on the list and the result will be published in two weeks (23 June). The list includes a number of dubious entries: Pope Benedict XVI, Ian Buruma, Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Samuel Huntington, Salman Rushdie, Bernard Lewis, Robert Kagan, among others. As for my obsession, the Africans (of whom none actually live on the continent) on the list are: the Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (born in Ghana); the conservative economist George Ayittey (from Ghana who now lives in Washington DC); the writer J.M. Coetzee (from South Africa and who now lives in Australia), the Columbia University anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani (from Uganda), the Egyptian-Qatari cleric (really an American style Islamic tele-evangelist) Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the cleric Amr Khaled from Egypt (another “Muslim televangelist”) and the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka (from Nigeria who mainly lives between the US and the UK). A number of Westerners who often “speak” on Africa are also included: the New York-based British researcher and human rights activist Alex de Waal, economist and “aid skeptic” William Easterly, the former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power, economist Jeremy Sachs and Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (who has an obsession with Lagos). The full list is here.