There is no way Mazrui, the towering academic, could have been overrated

I have one major weakness as an academic. After close to 20 years of reading numerous other writers extensively, I have a few whom I read for the sake of enjoying and not to be critical.

The one academic I decided very early on to read for the sake of enjoying their style of writing, logic and approach to argumentation was Prof Claude Ake. He was a fine thinker, who crafted his argument in clear prose and logical argument.

His untimely death in a plane crash off the coast of Lagos in 1997 robbed me a personal hero and Africans of a role model.

I raise this anecdote because I think Evan Mwangi’s take on Prof Ali Mazrui regarding his strange defence of the Islamic identity in Africa’s dehumanising history of slavery needs a context. Islam and Muslim identity was the subject of some of Prof Mazrui’s most animated debates with many leading scholars.

SOYINKA-MAZRUI DEBATE

In the famous Mazrui-Soyinka debate, this issue was broached with respect to the treatment Soyinka once experienced from northern Nigeria.

But closer home, it is, in fact, Prof Bethwell Ogot who took on Prof Mazrui on the issue of reparation for the Arab enslavement of Africans.

The debate, which took place in the pages of the Daily Nation, in the early 1990s, exposed Mazrui’s soft underbelly just like that with Barrack Muluka on the Trials of Christopher Okigbo left Muluka wondering if Mazrui had misread his own book.

It is not disputable that Prof Mazrui was often at his weakest in the debate around ills the Islamic heritage did to Africans. Many found his argument on this pillar of Africa’s triple heritage partial and weak.

But to jump from this argument to conclude that “Mazrui was simply overrated” is to make a wild claim that, to use Evan Mwangi’s own words cannot “withstand a modicum of conceptual scrutiny”. For beyond this particular area where Mazrui’s subjectivities influenced his analysis, he made bigger and more enduring contributions to knowledge.

BYGONE GENERATION

Thus, with all these weaknesses, even those who were his greatest critics have not underrated his contribution to knowledge, his towering influence on the academy. The younger academics who think “Mazrui belonged to a bygone generation of insufficiently theoretical dons who believed in the infallibility of their creed”, just need to re-read Prof Mazrui, this time removing their youthful blinkers.

For me, the measure of the worth of an academic or a leader is never based on a single weakness or an accolade thrown your way through some honour, award or prize.

How often have you come across leaders with numerous honours but who cannot stand the simplest scrutiny? How many times have you come across self-proclaimed professors masquerading in the pages of some obscure publication?

In fact, this is why I find it laughable that we have wasted time choreographing Ngugi wa Thiong’o for the Nobel Prize. What can be better for Ngugi wa Thiong’o than the long shelf life of his books?

Many of Ali Mazrui’s works have a long shelf life; two of them touched me as an undergraduate student and several years down, I hardly go back to re-read them.

These are Cultural Engineering and Nation-Building in East Africa published in 1972 and Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa, published in 1978. These are studies you go back to for illumination and inspiration. They remain as relevant in 2014 as they were in the 1970s and they are just a small selection of the many contributions of Prof Mazrui.

Add the fact that Ali Mazrui’s contribution was not just in books and you begin to see why he was literally a Professor-at-Large.

His The Africans: A Triple Heritage is vintage Mazrui, a piece of work that surpasses in relevant and longevity many others. One, for instance, cannot say the same of Henry Louis Gates’ The Wonders of the African World.

Godwin Murunga is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. [email protected]