Critical Capacities: Facing the Challenges of Intellectual Development in Africa Amina Mama* African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town Abstract The lecture will present a critical analysis of the challenges that have inspired and constrained African intellectual development in the changing postcolonial context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. African intellectual identities have been hard to articulate and institutionalise within formal educational institutions reluctant to move beyond the universalising premises of the scholarly paradigms developed in post-industrial capitalist contexts. These include particular globally hegemonic organisations of power and knowledge – intellectual regimes that have constrained the emergence of African-focused intellectual culture within the formal structures of African universities and which are currently being propagated through the globalisation of higher education policy in a manner insensitive to the meaning and impact of higher education reform in African contexts. African intellectuals have responded to the situation in a variety of creative ways, both within and outside African universities in a manner that offers useful insights and strategies for the future. The present scenario underscores the need for the establishment of strong, creative, intellectually productive institutions equipped to address continental knowledge needs in a manner grounded in the political and cultural aspirations of Africa’s diverse societies. This requires African intellectuals responsive to the challenges of democratisation, gender equality and social justice. *) Inaugural Lecture Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity, Institute of Social Studies, 28 April 2004