Rejection and bans paved Mazrui’s path to greatness

Early this week, Ali Mazrui, that iroko of African scholarship and persuasive eloquence, crashed down to Mother Earth with a thud that resounded throughout the world. Inna lillahi!

It’s natural to be saddened at the departure of such a pillar of inspiration.

At Makerere, where Mazrui first rose to scholarly eminence, and where he last made an emotional “homecoming” just about two years ago, his death was initially received with a kind of stunned silence.

But Ali Mazrui was over 80 years old, and there was hardly an academic honour in the world that hadn’t been conferred upon him.

So, his departure should, rightly, be an occasion for celebration of the man’s achievements, his phenomenal contribution to African Studies and our own part, as Africans, to his success.

Rising eyebrows? Yes, one cannot help wondering what part we played in Mazrui’s fame when Makerere denied him undergraduate admission, Idi Amin hounded him out of Uganda and Kenya banned his TV series, The Africans: a Tripartite Heritage.

First, we must dispel a misperception. Most of us have known Mazrui only as a celebrity, and we may be tempted to concentrate only on the glamour, ignoring the man’s colossal struggle to make it even to the lowest ranks of Kenyan colonial society.

Though nobly descended from the famous Mazruis, Ali was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was a Mswahili and a Moslem, and that was not an easy combination in East Africa under British colonialism.

BRILLIANT SCHOLARS

The colonial system was based on strict divisions of society along racial lines, like: Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Africans. Of the Waswahili, there was no mention, meaning that officially they “did not exist”. For people like Ali Mazrui, it was left to the observer and policy-maker to decide whether they were “Arabs” or “Africans”, depending on the colour of their skins.

As for Mazrui’s faith, a little narrative may help to illustrate the point. Early in his lecturing days at Makerere, Mazrui went to teach, clad in a kanzu and a skullcap. He dug into his topic with his characteristic fluency and enthusiasm.

Soon, however, a little crowd had gathered outside, gazing at the rostrum through the windows of the lecture hall. Apparently a cleaner had spotted Mazrui in action and he had called his colleagues to come and see the marvel of “a Muslim who spoke English”!

This tale may well be apocryphal, but it’s symbolic of the expectations that society had of people of Ali Mazrui’s background, even as late as the early 1960s.

Anyway, when I first got up close to Ali Mazrui in 1968, he was already a well-established academic at Makerere, the very institution that had rejected him for undergraduate study many years earlier.

He was our Director of Postgraduate Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Mazrui was at that time one of a crop of brilliant young scholars at the Political Science Department, including Yash Tandon, Ahmed Mohiddin, the Sudanese Abu Zayd and my relative Apollo Nsibambi, a future Prime Minister under President Museveni.

But Mazrui was already the most prominent among them, mainly because of his gutsy and outgoing engagement with scholarly activity. And this brings us to his view of scholarship and the role of the intellectual.

REFUSED TO CONFORM

At the height of a heated academic debate on the role of intellectuals, Mazrui defined an intellectual as a person fascinated by ideas and with the ability to operate some of them.

For Mazrui, fascination meant a voracious and limitless alertness to and interest in all matters human and social. Indeed, some critics of his work have faulted it for being too “eclectic”, difficult to place as either history, sociology, political science or even literature.

We in Literature had no problem with that, and we accepted Mazrui’s creative work, like his speculative novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, and his verse contributions to our student poetry journal, Makerere Beat, seriously, subjecting it to rigorous evaluation.

But that was not always the case with our colleagues in other disciplines. Water-tight compartmentalisation was common among scholars of Mazrui’s generation.

This was due to narrow professional interests, ideological “closures” (scholars labelling themselves with one “ism” or another and refusing to look at anything beyond), or simple intellectual limitations.

Mazrui rose above these by refusing to be pigeonholed. Being a political scientist would not prevent him from writing on language, religion or interracial marriage.

In the last two decades, he teamed up with his nephew, the literary scholar Alamin Mazrui, to produce a precious corpus of scholarship on East African coastal history and culture.

Indeed, the rise of the “super-discipline” of Cultural Studies has fully vindicated his approach. It’s thus little wonder that one of his last full-time appointment was as Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton.

But fascination without propagation is sterile, and this is where Mazrui’s “operation” of ideas comes in. Throughout his long career, Mazrui was a producer and a sharer of discourse: always writing and publishing, always debating and always delivering lectures and talks beyond his specific teaching commitments.

Again, some critics have faulted Mazrui for this approach, calling it “populist” and likely to “dilute intellectual debate”. But academic studies that cannot be shared with the public are vain and selfish, and Mazrui led the way in countering this.

Endowed with spellbinding eloquence and oratorical skills, he set out on an almost ceaseless campaign to illuminate the African condition and experience, to his fellow Africans and to the world.

CONTROVERSIAL ARTICLES

Significantly, the authority, passion and persuasiveness with which Mazrui spoke and wrote about Africa arose primarily from his personal experience as an East African, growing up under British colonialism and witnessing the momentous early decades of African independence.

It was probably Mazrui’s awareness of this need for first-hand experience that led him to return to Africa to work, despite his long sojourn in England, his distinguished academic performance there, and even his marriage to Molly, an Englishwoman.

By the time Mazrui wrote and published his early “controversial” articles, like “Nkrumah: the Leninist Tsar”, that exposed the tragic contradictions between the rhetoric and the actions of the first generation of independent African leaders, or “Tanzaphilia”,  lampooning the gimmicks of Western apologists for African political foibles, he was speaking confidently from inside Africa.

This is where our claim of a share in Mazrui’s triumph comes in. The iconic articles mentioned above, and many others by him, were first published in Kampala, in the prestigious Transition monthly.

The East Africa Journal, mentioned earlier and published in Nairobi, also had a fair share of Mazrui’s articles.

Even Makerere redeemed itself by hiring Mazrui and hosting him for a decade in the 1960s and 1970s. Mazrui, too, duly acknowledged Makerere’s contribution to his career.

Inshallah, I’ll one day tell you about the grand Mazrui memorial service held in the Main Hall on Friday, October 17, 2014.

Incidentally, Makerere plans to build a Mazrui Centre, which will house a “Mazruana” collection of his works and other memorabilia. I wonder what Mombasa will do.