Africans and Ali Mazrui life

We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui on Monday 13th October in Binghamton, New York, following a brief illness. He was age eighty-one.

Mazrui was one of the idols of my youth. I grew closer to him in Jos in1986 when the university appointed him Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large. Mazrui was Professor Jonah Elaigwu’s teacher at Stanford. Elaigwu was instrumental in bringing him to Jos. Elaigwu was also my teacher and mentor. He and the late Aaron Gana, Eghosa Osagie and Eme Awa of blessed memory, wrote the references which won me a fellowship to Oriel College, Oxford.

I recall enrolling at Elaigwu’s class Pol.201 Nigerian Government and Politics at ABU. Elaigwu was an electrifying performer who made us peruse the magisterial tome by James Coleman on the development of nationalism in Nigeria. Elaigwu is perhaps the best living intellectual stepchild that Mazrui has sired.

Ali Mazrui was born in Mombasa, Kenya, on 24 February 1933. The Mazruis were an influential Afro-Arab family that had held sway over Mombasa for centuries. His father, Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui, who had been Grand Khadi of Kenya, passed away when Ali was only fourteen.

Ali Mazrui was a late bloomer, having failed to get into Makerere, which was the only university in East Africa in those days. He worked as a clerk in a local academic institution in Mombasa. Debating and current affairs were his hobbies. It was in pursuit of that avocation that he came under the notice of the British Governor, Sir Philip Mitchell, in 1952.  Before long, a scholarship was arranged for him to go to England. He attended Huddersfield College in Manchester for his A’ Levels. It was during his time in Huddersfield that he met Molly Vickerman who later became his wife. Mazrui attended University of Manchester where he majored in Government, graduating with distinction. He crossed the Atlantic to do a Masters at Columbia in New York, before returning to Britain, where he completed his PhD at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Ali Mazrui had the singular distinction of being one of those rare scholars who went from being a freshly-minted PhD to directly occupying a professorial chair. The distinguished political scientist Colin Leys was retiring from Makerere when the lot fell on him to recommend someone to take over his chair. To the astonishment of the intellectual world community, he had recommended the young Mazrui who was barely thirty-two.

Ali Mazrui authored 30 books and hundreds of articles in scholarly journals. He held visiting professorships across several continents, from Tehran to Khartoum, Georgetown and Jos. Until his death he was Albert Schweitzer Professor at State University of New York at Binghamton and Andrew White Professor-at-large at Cornell. He had several honorary doctorates to his name. In 1979 he gave the BBC Reith Lectures, a great honour for a scholar and public intellectual. He was also Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. His television series, The Africans, won worldwide acclaim. President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya awarded him his country’s highest honour, Commander of the Order of the Burning Spear (CBS).

Ali Mazrui was dogged by controversy throughout his long and illustrious career.  He had dismissed Kwame Nkrumah as a “Leninist Czar”. He glossed over the tyrannical antics of Kamuzu Banda of Malawi and the treacheries of Moise Tshombe in Katanga. His book, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, caused quite a stir when it first came out in 1971. Mazrui criticised Okigbo for sacrificing his calling as a great poet at the altar of the parochialism of his recalcitrant Igbo people. Mazrui picked up a rather pointless quarrel with Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates in 2000 over the film series that Gates, a professor at Harvard, had made on Africa.  Mazrui described Soyinka as being a victim of “poetic hallucinations”. Soyinka, on his part, dismissed Mazrui as a scion of Arab slave drivers.

The political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin divided great thinkers into foxes and hedgehogs. The foxes are into a myriad of ideas and quick fixes. The hedgehogs are dominated by a big idea. Mazrui was a fox whose eclecticism was sometimes exasperating.

Mazrui was very much a child of the English liberal tradition, an “Afro-Saxon”; a term he himself invented. The world of the French Enlightenment philosophers was a closed book to him, as were, surprisingly, the great Arab thinkers such as Al-Farabi and Ibn Khaldun.  For all his shortcomings, Ali al-Amin Mazrui was the most outstanding scholar of his generation.

He was also a great mentor to younger scholars. In 1970, his Secretary frantically walked into his office in Makerere, wailing, “They have taken away Okello”. Okello Oculi was a young lecturer in his department and also one of the budding young poets in East Africa. Okello would most probably have been killed by Amin’s goons, but for the timely intervention of Mazrui, who then arranged a scholarship for him to attend graduate school in Wisconsin. After his PhD Okello came to teach at ABU Zaria. I was privileged to have been one of his students.

Those of us who knew Ali Mazrui can testify that he was a humanist and a deeply compassionate human being. He was also a profile in courage. Two of his sons contrived a genetic illness that left them completely blind. It led to the breakdown of his first marriage. He was later to marry a Nigerian woman from Jos, Pauline Uti. Although he was Kenya’s most outstanding scholar, he was never given an academic post in his own country. In 2003 he was detained and questioned by American security authorities on suspicion of terrorist connections while returning from a lecture tour in Trinidad and Tobago. He bore the humiliation without bitterness.

Ali Mazrui will be interred this week in Fort Jesus, Mombasa, in the land of his ancestors. He leaves behind his wife and six children and several grandchildren. May Allah look upon him with mercy.