ABSTRACT
Passionate controversies surround Africa’s new public cosmopolitans. Being activists, often in human rights movements, they usually expect to fight for their causes against entrenched opposition. Becoming veterans, they take pride in bearing battle-scars from many campaigns against abuse of power, whether by state tyranny or through the petty disenfranchisements of everyday bureaucracy or even in domestic violence. It is a matter of some pride also that they talk the talk of local as well as transnational actors and walk widely, too, in Bombay, Beijing, Geneva, Rome, London, New York or other metropolitan centres as well as in African big cities. Issues of values – how they differ, cannot be taken for granted, and may be negotiable – are the everyday concerns of these public cosmopolitans. That is because their consciousness is often heightened by ongoing debate among themselves and with global interlocutors about ‘in-depth democracy’, neo-liberalism, globalism and other perhaps less trendy ‘isms’, including a once popular Marxism.
