Another
important symbol of Africa's past and present, Professor Ali A. Mazrui
has left the scene. He made headlines in East Africa for well over a
decade in the 1960s and early 1970s before moving to the United States,
where he died aged 81, end of last week in New York.
He directed to be buried among his kith and kin in Mombasa on the Kenyan coastline, underlining his undying Africanism even after working in the US since 1974. He lived a life of passion and tragedy, his two sons going blind and his wife leaving him in the sadness.
It is hard to give an epitaph of the late Mazrui as he was everything to everyone, a person for whom it was impossible to ignore on African political and cultural realities, and hard to find a group of students or scholars having the same opinion of his work, or even a proper grasp of what it was all about.
Apart from the late Mwalimu Nyerere, hardly anyone else was an intellectual known at a wide public level for the first three decades of independence and it is equally hard to say if anyone has taken their places since then.
They were unique icons of an epoch where enthusiasm, imagination ruled, testing spirits.
He never had appointments outside strict academic interaction, his being a familiar name among most student circles owed to his greater presence of mind than most of his generation.
What forged his career was a unique ability to bring aspects of reality into contrasts and unseen parallels, such that complicated political events and disturbing cultural patterns became instantly simplified under his uncanny ability to bring innate relationships into focus.
This talent made him at once a figure of hate for many of Africa's radicals, and the most acknowledged demonstrator of Africa's cultural drives.
In the mid-1960s when the old East African Community was on its way to start, as a substitute organisation for more intense economic affiliation during the late colonial period and early independence days, he became a noted critic of Tanzania's positions.
In his article on how both the idea of an East African Federation, the East African monetary zone and other aspects failed due to Tanzania's positions.
He wrote a far-reaching journal piece, 'Tanzania vs East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage,' while current generations of students can check on who sabotages the East African dream even now. That anti-Nyerere view earned him many critics at UDSM.
He was anything between an academic folk hero at Makerere and a nuisance during the presidency of Dr Milton Obote in the manner in which he made interventions at his university platform, which the Ugandan authorities followed with verve.
This was to come to a screeching halt the start of the Idi Amin regime, first because it was not possible to come out clearly on an academic piece on the coup while still in Uganda, and then the massacres that followed he made an effort to stay, but with Asians' passports torn apart and expelled even the Makerere don knew that his days were numbered.
They say a prophet is never accepted in his home place. While he was an exciting voice of nearly everything that happened elsewhere (for instance outlining how the union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was the first case of intra-African colonial take over), he scarcely did anything of that sort on his native Kenya.
Coming from the coastal city of Mombasa, he shared the grief of his province and potential dissidents on the inherent and embedded violence of the post-independence regime, following the daylight assassination of Pio Pinto, a radical leftist voice. He was Kenya's version of Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, around whom a few plots would have swirled.
The late Mazrui's own political leanings and cultural affinities were those of the sultanate of Zanzibar to whom his Mazrui clansmen owed loyalty, an ancestry which psychologically enabled him to peep at Africa inwardly as a native but outwardly as someone without direct affinities with it, culturally. He was no Ngugi or Wole Soyinka, to be embedded completely in an African narrative.
He didn't share much of the fawned pride, captivations. The late Mazrui's shift to the United States in the early 1970s was also a sort of maturity of his own work, as he now started to bring together various themes in a sort of theoretical excursion, at the level of what Sir Karl Popper would describe as 'conjectures and refutations.'
He was always handling one practical proposition at a time; never spawning a theory, save in a book length expression of such proposition.
That is how he wrote two most appreciated works, 'Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Rise of a Military Ethnocracy,’ and at the end of the 1970s, his BBC Reith Lectures, 'The African Condition: A Political Diagnosis.'
The latter theme was finally converted into a major filming expedition for BBC, titled ''The Africans, A Triple Heritage,' that is, the traditional sources of culture, Euro-Christian heritage, and Islamic thrust.
While the late political science don wrote a book length analysis of the Uganda coup, it is Tanzania that most fascinated him in the East African zone, for better or for worse, and given his guarded silence on his native Kenya, about which he wrote nothing memorable.
Kenya would have been a cornucopia for cultural paradoxes that underlined his theoretical explorations, but for some innate fear, like not having to remain in exile permanently and fail to see one's kith and kin, the way it virtually happened to son of the soil Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
He stayed away from Kenya for the better part of 20 years; when he then set foot, hoodlums broke into his house, raped his wife. Scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam were evidently aware that there was something attractive about Tanzania on the regional and international scene, but it was Ali Mazrui who couched the matter in the most poetic terms possible, with an article in Transition, a continental journal, in 1967 titled 'Tanzaphilia,' whose opening line read: 'Tanzaphilia is neither a disease nor an exotic flower but a political phenomenon.
It is the love of everything Tanzanian.' With this testimony he made his peace with Mwalimu, by helping to create the legend around the president, whose own admirers locally and abroad engendered far more intense ideological and sentimental parameters.
Similarly it was Mazrui who put an end to the debate on the merits of Tanzanian socialism in an article in the American Political Science Review, saying it was a 'heroic failure.' Mwalimu had audacity to try to create a new society based on community centredness, and Mazrui believes he did his best.
While in the United States he held the most numerous chairs and academic mentions anyone in that field ever had, with his presence being comparable to Indian-born Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya K. Sen, whose research into the link between famine and political authoritarianism struck global imagination.
He participated in extensive research on world order models at the time that the Soviet bloc still existed and when the idea of non-alignment still made sense, but retained a permanent element in that quest with the cultural dimension of global political order.
That is how he came to epitomise research into the other face of Islam, for instance in the vivid concept of Asian female heirs of male heroes, noticed in the careers of the Gandhi political dynasty in India founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, inherited by daughter Indira Gandhi.
Other claimants to that legend were Begum Nusrat Bhutto and daughter, assassinated ex-premier Benazir Bhutto, who rose from the ashes of executed ex-prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. There were also rival dynastic ladies in Bangladesh, Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina.
All this was public for everyone to see but only with Mazrui did it become a concept, a pattern of culture that is designed in heaven, as it were.
In his wider political philosophy, he remained true to his roots, as a skeptic of radical trends all over the world, moving in tandem with routine campus thinking only after the Berlin Wall had collapsed, and democracy, not the revolution, was now the horizon of debates and conferences around the world.
With the change the now aging he because an academic household that was no longer attracting the earlier controversies, which arose from bashing commonplace radical wisdom prevalent in campuses at that time, whether it was Makerere or Dar es Salaam.
It was in that formal or in a nondescript status that Prof. Mazrui last visited the University of Dar es Salaam on the 26th anniversary of the death of Dr Walter Rodney in 2006.
Eminent personalities he shared a platform with have also quit the world in recent years, specifically South African historian Prof. Bernard Magubane who died last year, and Uganda's theorist of imperialism, Prof. Dan Nabudere having left the world a little earlier after he founded his own campus at Mbale on the north-eastern stretches of the country, his native district.
For Prof. Mazrui to have died close to Mwalimu's anniversary shows who receives him more prominently at his resting place. Not perhaps clan elders, but Mwalimu.
He directed to be buried among his kith and kin in Mombasa on the Kenyan coastline, underlining his undying Africanism even after working in the US since 1974. He lived a life of passion and tragedy, his two sons going blind and his wife leaving him in the sadness.
It is hard to give an epitaph of the late Mazrui as he was everything to everyone, a person for whom it was impossible to ignore on African political and cultural realities, and hard to find a group of students or scholars having the same opinion of his work, or even a proper grasp of what it was all about.
Apart from the late Mwalimu Nyerere, hardly anyone else was an intellectual known at a wide public level for the first three decades of independence and it is equally hard to say if anyone has taken their places since then.
They were unique icons of an epoch where enthusiasm, imagination ruled, testing spirits.
He never had appointments outside strict academic interaction, his being a familiar name among most student circles owed to his greater presence of mind than most of his generation.
What forged his career was a unique ability to bring aspects of reality into contrasts and unseen parallels, such that complicated political events and disturbing cultural patterns became instantly simplified under his uncanny ability to bring innate relationships into focus.
This talent made him at once a figure of hate for many of Africa's radicals, and the most acknowledged demonstrator of Africa's cultural drives.
In the mid-1960s when the old East African Community was on its way to start, as a substitute organisation for more intense economic affiliation during the late colonial period and early independence days, he became a noted critic of Tanzania's positions.
In his article on how both the idea of an East African Federation, the East African monetary zone and other aspects failed due to Tanzania's positions.
He wrote a far-reaching journal piece, 'Tanzania vs East Africa: A Case of Unwitting Federal Sabotage,' while current generations of students can check on who sabotages the East African dream even now. That anti-Nyerere view earned him many critics at UDSM.
He was anything between an academic folk hero at Makerere and a nuisance during the presidency of Dr Milton Obote in the manner in which he made interventions at his university platform, which the Ugandan authorities followed with verve.
This was to come to a screeching halt the start of the Idi Amin regime, first because it was not possible to come out clearly on an academic piece on the coup while still in Uganda, and then the massacres that followed he made an effort to stay, but with Asians' passports torn apart and expelled even the Makerere don knew that his days were numbered.
They say a prophet is never accepted in his home place. While he was an exciting voice of nearly everything that happened elsewhere (for instance outlining how the union between Tanganyika and Zanzibar was the first case of intra-African colonial take over), he scarcely did anything of that sort on his native Kenya.
Coming from the coastal city of Mombasa, he shared the grief of his province and potential dissidents on the inherent and embedded violence of the post-independence regime, following the daylight assassination of Pio Pinto, a radical leftist voice. He was Kenya's version of Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, around whom a few plots would have swirled.
The late Mazrui's own political leanings and cultural affinities were those of the sultanate of Zanzibar to whom his Mazrui clansmen owed loyalty, an ancestry which psychologically enabled him to peep at Africa inwardly as a native but outwardly as someone without direct affinities with it, culturally. He was no Ngugi or Wole Soyinka, to be embedded completely in an African narrative.
He didn't share much of the fawned pride, captivations. The late Mazrui's shift to the United States in the early 1970s was also a sort of maturity of his own work, as he now started to bring together various themes in a sort of theoretical excursion, at the level of what Sir Karl Popper would describe as 'conjectures and refutations.'
He was always handling one practical proposition at a time; never spawning a theory, save in a book length expression of such proposition.
That is how he wrote two most appreciated works, 'Soldiers and Kinsmen in Uganda: The Rise of a Military Ethnocracy,’ and at the end of the 1970s, his BBC Reith Lectures, 'The African Condition: A Political Diagnosis.'
The latter theme was finally converted into a major filming expedition for BBC, titled ''The Africans, A Triple Heritage,' that is, the traditional sources of culture, Euro-Christian heritage, and Islamic thrust.
While the late political science don wrote a book length analysis of the Uganda coup, it is Tanzania that most fascinated him in the East African zone, for better or for worse, and given his guarded silence on his native Kenya, about which he wrote nothing memorable.
Kenya would have been a cornucopia for cultural paradoxes that underlined his theoretical explorations, but for some innate fear, like not having to remain in exile permanently and fail to see one's kith and kin, the way it virtually happened to son of the soil Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
He stayed away from Kenya for the better part of 20 years; when he then set foot, hoodlums broke into his house, raped his wife. Scholars at the University of Dar es Salaam were evidently aware that there was something attractive about Tanzania on the regional and international scene, but it was Ali Mazrui who couched the matter in the most poetic terms possible, with an article in Transition, a continental journal, in 1967 titled 'Tanzaphilia,' whose opening line read: 'Tanzaphilia is neither a disease nor an exotic flower but a political phenomenon.
It is the love of everything Tanzanian.' With this testimony he made his peace with Mwalimu, by helping to create the legend around the president, whose own admirers locally and abroad engendered far more intense ideological and sentimental parameters.
Similarly it was Mazrui who put an end to the debate on the merits of Tanzanian socialism in an article in the American Political Science Review, saying it was a 'heroic failure.' Mwalimu had audacity to try to create a new society based on community centredness, and Mazrui believes he did his best.
While in the United States he held the most numerous chairs and academic mentions anyone in that field ever had, with his presence being comparable to Indian-born Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya K. Sen, whose research into the link between famine and political authoritarianism struck global imagination.
He participated in extensive research on world order models at the time that the Soviet bloc still existed and when the idea of non-alignment still made sense, but retained a permanent element in that quest with the cultural dimension of global political order.
That is how he came to epitomise research into the other face of Islam, for instance in the vivid concept of Asian female heirs of male heroes, noticed in the careers of the Gandhi political dynasty in India founded by Jawaharlal Nehru, inherited by daughter Indira Gandhi.
Other claimants to that legend were Begum Nusrat Bhutto and daughter, assassinated ex-premier Benazir Bhutto, who rose from the ashes of executed ex-prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. There were also rival dynastic ladies in Bangladesh, Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina.
All this was public for everyone to see but only with Mazrui did it become a concept, a pattern of culture that is designed in heaven, as it were.
In his wider political philosophy, he remained true to his roots, as a skeptic of radical trends all over the world, moving in tandem with routine campus thinking only after the Berlin Wall had collapsed, and democracy, not the revolution, was now the horizon of debates and conferences around the world.
With the change the now aging he because an academic household that was no longer attracting the earlier controversies, which arose from bashing commonplace radical wisdom prevalent in campuses at that time, whether it was Makerere or Dar es Salaam.
It was in that formal or in a nondescript status that Prof. Mazrui last visited the University of Dar es Salaam on the 26th anniversary of the death of Dr Walter Rodney in 2006.
Eminent personalities he shared a platform with have also quit the world in recent years, specifically South African historian Prof. Bernard Magubane who died last year, and Uganda's theorist of imperialism, Prof. Dan Nabudere having left the world a little earlier after he founded his own campus at Mbale on the north-eastern stretches of the country, his native district.
For Prof. Mazrui to have died close to Mwalimu's anniversary shows who receives him more prominently at his resting place. Not perhaps clan elders, but Mwalimu.
SOURCE:
GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY
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