If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take you there

Drawn from Alice in Wonderland, this curious line has accompanied me for more than thirty years. I first encountered it as the opening of a policy paper written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall—a time when Western policymakers were more focused on claiming victory than on making sense of what lay ahead. As one U.S. President put it, the Cold War had been “won” by the United States.

The result was a policy climate in which whatever the U.S. thought—or did—was presumed to serve the goal of “ordering” the world. This perspective looked back to the end of the Second World War and the creation of what later came to be called the “liberal world order.”

My early exposure to this view of the future came through a series of exchanges hosted by one of the world’s premier think tanks, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. The group convened regularly under the glittering lights of Washington, DC. Suggestions to meet elsewhere—South Africa, then a major global story—were quickly dismissed. Still, this snub was minor compared to what slowly became clear: the powerful American participants had no intention of moving beyond the Friend versus Foe that had underpinned the Cold War.

To illustrate the point: one of the more vocal figures in the discussions was the late Samuel P. Huntington, of Harvard University. He was the author of the influential “Clash of Civilizations?” thesis which suggested that coming conflicts would be driven by cultural struggle. It sounded bonkers at the time, but isn’t this what contemporary America has become? It certainly is if Trump believes that ‘Christian’ America’ has been cheated by an ‘immoral and conniving’ Europe and that the US has been “invaded” by “dark-skinned hordes”. 

Little intellectual diversity marked the Washington proceedings beyond American pragmatism and reverence for the Founding Fathers. And, without wanting to sound overly harsh, even gentle critique was unwelcome. I attempted to raise the growing concerns of the Global South—but, to my chagrin, I was quickly shut down.

This memory returned to me recently when I was invited by a dean and senior faculty to participate in a “School on Theory” hosted by a Faculty of Humanities at the Nelson Mandela University and the institution’s Centre for Philosophy in Africa.

All in all, the two-day gathering was an affirming experience.

Young members of staff, shaped by the decolonial turn and animated by thinkers like Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Mazrui, and Mbembe, actively engaged in probing the world they’ve inherited.

Saleem Badat, former Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University, delivered the keynote address in a creative team-teaching format. He encouraged a dynamic conversation on the role of critique in reshaping social relations. His message was clear: without critique, there can be no progress —let alone deep-seated change.

The young questioned, challenged, and explored their world through a lens of emancipation. But this was a version of emancipation distinct from older, state-centred models. Instead, it leaned toward Pan-Africanism and was suffused with ideas of community and humanism. This is, of course, where Desmond Tutu’s cri de cur, Ubuntu, might have found its place.

Interestingly, the notion of Ubuntu did not surface in the discussions. One session made clear why: language—and even a single term—can lose its power. And once lost, it may never fully return. Can it be recovered?

As the gathering drew to a close, participants paused to acknowledge the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—novelist, theorist, and advocate for writing in African languages. Will his 1986 work Decolonising the Mind help shape the future, or will it fade?

Given my agonising response to the daily news, my enthusiasm for the deliberations of the young was tempered more than a little when I remembered Hannah Arendt’s juncture of the inter-generational responsibilities of education – this, too, has rattled around my memory for fifty-odd years. 

Here it is: “It is in the very nature of the human condition that each new generation grows into an old world so that to prepare a new generation for a new world can only mean that one wishes to strike from the newcomers’ hands their change at the new.”

So, whatever my cohort may think: Each generation makes the world anew notwithstanding the lessons the old and the wise (?) believe that they can teach.