A rich legacy: The life and times of Ali Mazrui

Ali Al Amin Mazrui died early this week at the age of 81 in New York, where he had been teaching since he went into self-exile in 1973.

The celebrated liberal political scientist, thinker and philosopher was a witty man with broad and diverse ideas. He had many identities--Kenyan, East African, African, Muslim and an internationalist. He regarded Africa, Islam and the West as his triple heritage.

At the time of his death, he was a professor and director at Institute of Global Cultural Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. He held parallel professorships in universities in the US and elsewhere. He deserved the recognition and honour. I doubt that there is an African academic who can match Prof Mazrui’s books and publications.

My close friend and Ali’s academic associate from our Makerere University days, also hailing from Mombasa, Prof Ahmed Mohiddin, told me four months ago on a visit to Dar--where he stayed with Comrade Ngombale Mwiru--that Prof Mazrui had been gravely ill. He had been in poor health for almost two years and finally succumbed to diabetes.

Mazrui was an intellectual icon in the global community and the pride of Africa. Without exaggeration, I can say Prof Mazrui was one of the most respected and revered academics and public intellectuals in the field of social sciences in the past half century.

He was a man of great intellectual power with a rare command of the English language and was thus able to manipulate it and coin original phrases that became part of the social science lingua franca--words such as Afrenaissance, Shariacracy and Afrostroika.

His writings were both of tour de force and of tour de horizon quality. He was at home reflecting on Shakespeare’s Othello and Shylock in the context of modern politics and writing literary pieces such as “On Poets and Politics: Obote’s Milton (of Paradise Lost) and Nyerere’s Shakespeare (in reference to Mwalimu’s translations into Kiswahili of The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar) in 1971.

This should send a message to our education policy makers here in Tanzania that English literature--and not simply literature in English--provides invaluable knowledge beyond language.

Few African intellectuals are endowed with Prof Mazrui’s range and breadth of ideas, literature, music and culture--both its wealth and contradictions and of religion--Islam, Christian and Judaism--along with the confrontations, conflicts and clashes that go with it and which reject the notion of a clash of civilisation and, instead, seek to build inter-faith harmony and understanding and, finally, of the challenges of ethnicity and its implications for violence to the extent of genocide.

Prof Mazrui resigned from Makerere University in 1973 after 10 years of teaching, rising from lecturer in 1963 to full professor in 1965 largely because he put his career on the line by directly attacking Obote’s and Idi Amin’s policies that promoted ethnicity, racial intolerance and religious acrimony.

Though born into a Muslim in a clerical family--his father was an Islamic jurist who became Chief Kadhi of Kenya in the 1940s and died when Ali Mazrui was only 14--he believed in secularism all his life. His numerous publications on Islam in the context of the brave new world of globalisation and terrorism hyped by religious sensitivities vindicate his secularism and respect for religious harmony.

What is of interest about Prof Mazrui’s rise to global intellectual recognition may shock many despairing young students in their early years of secondary education. Using his father’s death as an excuse, Prof Mazrui contended that his school work took a nose-dive.

He ended up with a third class certificate in his Cambridge School Certificate Examinations in 1948 at the age of 15. Rashid Kawawa, Oscar Kambona, George Kahama, Amon James Nsekela and Job Lusinde sat the same examination at Tabora School in 1948. No institution of higher learning would accept Ali Mazrui.

He was then employed by the Dutch Trading Company in Mombasa briefly and then moved to the Mombasa Institute of Muslim Education as a clerk.

The mission of the institute was to produce skilled East African Muslims. In the early 1950s, he wrote newspaper articles and was a sub-editor at the Mombasa Times. He also was a broadcaster at Sauti ya Mvita. When he recited a poem on Prophet Muhammad before the Governor of Kenya on a visit to Mombasa, the die was cast vis-a-vis his future education.

He got a scholarship to England and, in 1960, graduated with a BA with distinction from the University of Manchester followed by an MA from Columbia University, New York, in 1961 and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1966. The rest is history.

Though I studied law at University College, Dar es Salaam, I did not meet Prof Mazrui there. Yet I knew of him and of his academic reputation from my older brother Harith Bakari, my sister Rahma Mark Bomani and my young brother, Wendo Mtega.

They all went to Makerere at different times between 1962 and 1975. They all went through Prof Mazrui’s History of Western Philosophy course, which underpins Western political thought.

My first encounter with Prof Mazrui was through two controversial and widely-cited articles published in Transition magazine in 1966 and 1967 while I was at the University. The first one was Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar, in which he described President Nkrumah as “a great African but fell short of becoming a great Ghanaian”.

What Prof Mazrui was inferring was that while Nkrumah distinguished himself as a great Pan Africanist, he was a dictator at home. Prof Mazrui re-affirmed this chastisement of Nkrumah in 2002 when receiving an honorary doctorate of letters degree at University of Ghana at Legon, where he postulated that “Kwame Nkrumah started his presidency as a democrat and ended it as a dictator”.

In the second article, Tanzaphilia, he writes that Tanzaphilia is neither a disease nor an exotic flower.

Rather, it is ‘the romantic spell that Tanzania casts on so many of those who have been closely associated with her”. He attributes this to Mwalimu Nyerere’s wit and intense intellectualism.

But Prof Mazrui also took Nyerere to task for “a weakness for fellow intellectuals”. It should be noted that Mwalimu’s decision to expel over 390 University students from the University College, Dar-es-Salaam in October 1966--a year after the promulgation of the one-party state--was viewed in some intellectual quarters as a measure to counter the nascent intellectual activism in politics. Prof Mazrui felt so.

But Mwalimu Nyerere was quick to respond. In a speech at the University of Liberia in February, 1968, he quipped that in demanding that intellectuals must be servants of the people he had been accused of turning on his own kind and being an intellectual cannibal. President Nyerere rejected the idea of anti-intellectuals.

Mwalimu Nyerere was not the only Mazrui critic. I recall that in the late 60s and during the 70s he was unpopular among many of his fellow academics and students alike, especially in Africa.

At the heart of this attitude lay the fundamental and ideological question about his benign intellectual posture. His scholarship was interrogated for its indifference to African aspirations.

I recall Prof Mohiddin’s scathing attack in a 1968 article in “Transition” magazine of Prof Mazrui’s Tanzaphilia article as lacking ideological context and analysis. At both the university colleges Dar and Makerere, Prof Mazrui found himself in head-on collisions in debates on the African condition between himself and Prof Walter Rodney--who once remarked that the notion that his ideas were in conflict were those of Prof Mazrui was misplaced because there was no intellectual contact at all between them to start with!

In the 1974 Transition Issue Number 45, James Karioki wrote an article titled “African Scholars versus Ali Mazrui” in which he claimed that African scholars had rejected Prof Mazrui because he was not committed to Africa’s aspirations. They perceived him as an aloof polemicist who was quick to announce and condemn the failures of the continent without suggesting seriously though-out alternatives.

It was probably too strong a condemnation. Indeed, the highly respected academic who taught in East African universities and was involved in the early stages of Kivukoni College, Prof Colin Leys, saluted Prof Mazrui’s intellectual contributions, saying: “Ali Mazrui is incapable of writing a dull paragraph.

No political scientists writing today (1968) exhibit an equal virtuosity in the handling of ideas and images, connections and paradoxes, overtones and undertones and implications. Few have such wide ranging interests in large issues. He breathes enthusiasm and excitement into everything he discusses.

My second encounter with Prof Mazrui was in 1992 in Arusha, where an East African Cooperation Forum appealed for the re-establishment of the East African Community. The group was led by Prof Sam Tulya-Muhika of Uganda, Iddi Simba, myself and Prof Mbathi of Kenya.

Dr Bingu wa Mutharika, then the secretary general of the Preferential Trade Agreement (now COMESA), and Prof Mazrui were the key speakers. Prof Mazrui’s paper was titled The Liberal Revival, Privatisation and the Market in Africa’s Cultural Contradictions. His thesis was that there existed in Africa’s economic behaviour an all-pervasive constraint--that of the prestige motive. Prof Mazrui was concerned that the rise of African capitalism could be frustrated by a culture of ostentatious consumption and what he described as “self-indulgent exhibitionism”.

He expressed serious concern about the West’s pressure on Africa to privatise business enterprises when Africans were not culturally predisposed to controlling and restraining the prestige motive.

Mazrui opened my mind to the contradictions in the indigenisation narrative that was gaining momentum at that time. I was able to argue thereafter that economic empowerment of nationals of African origin had to go hand in glove with changing mind-sets about investments.

My last encounter with Prof Mazrui was in June 2002 here in Dar-es-Salaam. As President of the Society for International Development (SID), I hosted a global conference in Tanzania which President Benjamin Mkapa opened.

Prof Mazrui was invited to deliver the prestigious Barbara Ward Lecture. The title of his presentation was “The Global Hostage Crisis: The South Between Underdevelopment and Counterterrorism”.

President Mkapa returned to the Conference to listen to the celebrated East African. He received a standing ovation and proposed that the SID World Conference Lecture’s name be changed into the Barbara Ward and Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Lecture.

Ali Mazrui is gone. He was a powerful academic, teacher and a simple man who lived by the Islamic creed. May God bless his soul.

Ambassador Mwapachu is the former Secretary General of East African Community and President of the Society for International Development.