The good Prof Mazrui has rested, may the lessons guide his many students

What you need to know:

  • With the demise of Ali, the curtain has fallen on a generation of African social science that he dominated with his global approach to social analysis, philosophical insight into social phenomena, and the use of the English language that was uniquely Mazruic - Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o

A prominent African son has fallen, and the continent is weeping. Renowned Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui passed away Monday morning in Binghamton, New York, in the United States.

The silver-haired, soft-spoken professor died aged 81 after ailing for several months. At the time of his death, he was an Albert Schweitzer professor in humanities and the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in New York.

Born on 24 February, 1933, in Mombasa to Al’Amin Ali and Safia Mazrui, he wished, upon his death, to be interred in his family graveyard near Fort Jesus, Mombasa.

Accordingly, his body was first scheduled to be flown back into the country yesterday for his burial today, but on Tuesday, former Chief Kadhi Hamad Kassim, the chairman of the burial committee, said the arrangements to bring the body home had been complicated by the fact that Monday was Columbus Day, a public holiday in the United States. As such, said Kassim, the body is likely to arrive tomorrow or Sunday.

While his personal life was overshadowed by his academic prowess, Prof Mazrui married his first wife, Molly Vickerman, a Briton, in 1962 but divorced her in 1982. They had three sons: Jamal, Al’Amin, and Abubakar.

He married his second wife, Pauline Uti, a Catholic and Nigerian teacher, in 1991, and they had two sons, Farid Chinedu and Harith Ekenechukwu. He later adopted a daughter, Grace Jennifer.

Mazrui’s academic journey started in 1955, when he was awarded a Kenya government scholarship to complete his secondary education in Great Britain.

Decades later, he would serve as chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology from 2003 to 2009, when he resigned. He founded the Institute of Global Cultural Studies in 1991 at Binghamton University.

The don, both in life and death, will be remembered as a Pan-Africanist who, while he believed in Africa and its development, was critical of its belief on adopted cultures from its colonisers.

He examined Africa’s myriad problems through the controversial BBC series, Triple Heritage, in the 1980s in which he sought to interrogate the background of these problems and how their essence had impacted on the continent’s evolution politically, socially, and even economically.

He said that on the global stage, Africa was a victim, villain, and victor; a victim for being humiliated by enslavement and colonialism, a villain as it was the home of post-colonial corruption, greed, and military coups, and a victor because of its historic achievements.

Called to prayer in Arabic

It was these three ideas of Africa, alongside his own background as an African, Muslim, and the Western influence in his life, that informed his writings and lectures.

“My native tongue is Kiswahili, but I was educated in the West in English, and was called to prayer in Arabic,” he once said.

Prof Mazrui wrote more than 35 books and lectured in five continents. In the book, Islam Between Globalisation and Counter Terrorism, he explained how the religion was entrapped in the danger of rising extremism.

In the 1970s, Prof Mazrui criticised the then Kenyan and Ugandan regimes, led by Daniel arap Moi and Idi Amin, respectively. The reactions led to his exile in the US, where he took on top African political leaders such as the late presidents Mwalimu Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Milton Obote of Uganda.

He viewed his life as one long debate as “there are many people who do not agree with me”.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, for instance, declared Mazrui non-African and referred to him as “a born-again Islamic fundamentalist” comparable to former Libyan ruler Col Muammar Gadaffi. This vitriol prompted counter-arguments from Mazrui, which degenerated into a row of gigantic proportions.

Prof Mazrui claimed that Soyinka turned against him in 1986 “because I had dared to share the limelight very briefly with you” during that year. In an open letter to Soyinka, Mazrui said: “I will even settle for the aphorism of Thomas Szasz (The Second Sin, 1973): The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. Let’s settle for the silent wisdom of forgiving...”

Another is Ugandan author and poet Prof Taban Lo Liyong, who has been quoted as saying “Prof Mazrui wrote very little against the misdeeds of his native Kenya. Perhaps there were no fascinating ideas emanating therefrom?”

The historian, Prof William Ochieng’, who served in former president Moi’s regime and died last year, also criticised Prof Mazrui, saying: “In the early days I used to criticise him a lot, that even though he is a very good English user, perhaps better than any white man I have read, at the end of the day there wasn’t anything much that he wrote that lasts.”

Nonetheless, this did not dampen Prof Mazrui’s urge to write on Africa, which he did, and on which he lectured, until his sunset years.

Interestingly, the professor was technology-shy. In the 2009 issue of the annual Mazrui newsletter, he commented on his hesitant use of computers, saying that “with regard to the computer revolution, I have been more fascinated by its cultural consequences than by a personal desire to use computers”.

Further, in spite of his acclaim, Mazrui never learnt to drive and throughout his life depended “on the women in my life” to drive him around.