Mazrui’s culture of intellectual tolerance

Prof Ali A. Mazrui was the first African to teach my group of third-year Political Science students at Makerere when it was a college of the University of East Africa.

The other was Dr Lawrence Ekpebu, who taught International Relations.

However, the special pride of identity we had with Mazrui was shaken during one tutorial in which we challenged his thesis. He was shaken and his voice trembled.

His secretary, Anna Gurley, would, years later, tell me that Mazrui was under enormous stress when the quest for fame began to take its toll on him as requests for lectures and contributions to journals and association pamphlets flooded in.

Our tutorial group must have caught him when his intellectual muscles were stretched to breaking point.

At one time, Mazrui announced that he had secured me a scholarship to study at Oxford. I told him I had already been offered a Commonwealth scholarship and Prof Ken Prewitt had found me a place at Stanford.

'NEO-COLONIAL' HURRICANE

At the peak of his rising intellectual stature, he travelled regularly and could only teach Introduction to African Politics to first-year students two hours a week.

I handled his tutorials. His method was well-captured by Prof Colin Leys, who served as head of department before him. Mazrui, he said, tossed a concept in the air then split it to produce an explosion in the heads of his readers or live audiences. He would follow its effect with the question — “Are we together so far?” — often with a guttural chuckle.

By way of compensation for his absence from Makerere, he came up with a biweekly public lecture to which the whole university community was invited. His explosions like: “Nkrumah the Leninist Czar” and “Makerere, Tom Mboya and I” excited young minds.

However, feeling increasingly frustrated by the absence of local academics to counter Mazrui’s “neo-colonial” hurricane, the student government of Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o and Daudi Mulabya Taliwako invited Walter Rodney, the Guyanese teacher of history at the University of Dar es Salaam.

'REVOLUTIONARY' VERSUS 'CONSERVATIVE'

A “Great Debate” pitted the eloquence of a “revolutionary” scholar against that of a “conservative”. Its political ramification beyond campus was expressed by Uganda’s only state-owned TV and radio networks which broadcast the debate live.

Mazrui’s influence was manifest in the hundreds of letters he received and which he replied on the letterheads of a Makerere department. The receipt of such a letter by a secondary school boy would cause a stir of derived stardom.

John Ken Lukyamuzi, now a Ugandan MP, was an example of a growing Mazrui fan club. He was at one time employed to cut and compile press reports that would be of interest to Mazrui.

As the one in charge of his tutorials, I attended the lectures and regularly challenged his lines of argument. I often accused him of cheating by excluding inconvenient data from his argumentation. He showed no irritation. In this, he taught and built a vital culture of intellectual tolerance.

He defined his role as that of “explaining Africa to Europe and Europe to Africa”. This was epitomised in his television documentary The Africans: A Triple Heritage. A senior US official got its telecast by America’s Public Broadcast Network terminated.

In Nigeria, some groups complained that it promoted Islam at the expense of Christianity. Prof Wole Soyinka accused Mazrui of inciting Muslim fanatics in Nigeria against him.

MAZRUI'S PUBLICATIONS

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, I asked Prof Crawford Young why none of Mazrui’s publications was on the reading list for courses on African affairs.

“His writings are rather journalistic,” was Young’s dismissive reply. Observing Mazrui deliver his paper at an African Studies Association conference in Washington, DC, in 1989, I was struck by his eloquence and sparkle compared with the drab and intimidated delivery of other panellists. I was sure it was drawing jealousy and panic.

I had contradictory relations with him. Prof James S. Coleman told me that Mazrui was the lone mountain that stood against the department awarding me a First Class Degree on the grounds that Makerere’s library was too weak in books to support indulgence in awarding such a degree.

FLAG BEARER

In 1972 as a member of the governing International Political Science Association, he obtained air tickets and boarding to the conference for Anyang’ Nyong’o from the University of Chicago and me at Madison.

We honoured him by inventing the Association of African Political Science. Since 2009 he supported my editing of Kilimanjaro magazine by sending articles. He also sent me two chapters for publication in the first two volumes of my Brain Rain Books series.

Mazrui wrote that he was driven by the challenge to overtake the writings of his father as a cleric. His father was an authority on Islam.

Mazrui took up political theory. While many bashed him for being pro-Western, he was celebrated as a flag bearer for Africa in the global battle of ideas.

In 2009 in his hotel room in Abuja, he boasted to me that with the collapse of the USSR, I had ended up on the losing side. May he continue to teach in that place he calls “After Africa”.

Prof Oculi is a political scientist based in Nigeria