Manifestly, Professor Ali Mazrui had a rendezvous with greatness.

A glimpse into his five-decades-long intellectual voyage calls to mind the sagacious words of the American author, Stephen King: “Some birds are not meant to be caged …Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.”

Mazrui, who died on October 13, was a bird born to ride the wind.

This made him a classic avatar of intellectual controversy in post-colonial Africa.

In a historic sense, Mazrui’s battle-ridden academic career mirrors the warrior spirit of his family that battled the Portuguese (1498-1699), the Al Bu Sa’id dynasty in Zanzibar and resisted British rule in the late 19th century.

But his life mantra was straightforwardly simple: “If it matters, it produces controversy.” Arguably, controversy was his pathway to greatness — not conformity with the schools of thought or reigning paradigms.

Mazrui debated, angered, touched and inspired many African scholars.

Paradoxically, he became an enigmatic subject of extensive scholarly probe and books by other academics.

But what exactly made Mazrui tick?

In his book, Ali Mazrui: The Man and his Works (1981), Sulayman Nyang of Howard University views Mazrui’s greatest intellectual asset as his adeptness to deploy the technologies of language.

His mastery of the ancient art of rhetoric enabled him to use words like a loaded pistol, to borrow Sam Leith’s apt title (2012).

This enabled him to “negotiate between the realms of serious issues and the province of provocative words and concepts.”

It also “divided his readers between those who took him seriously, and those who took him lightly.”

THREE GENERATIONS

Mazrui’s intellectual legacy should be seen through the prism of what Malawian scholar, Thandika Mkandawire, theorised as the “three generations” of African academics.

He belonged to the first generation, produced abroad through cold-war induced “airlifts” of African students who studied at some of the best universities in the West.

In 1955, Kenya’s colonial Governor, Sir Phillip Mitchel, impressed by Mazrui’s brilliance, facilitated his scholarship to study in England.

Attracted home by the “intoxicating mystique of emergent Africa” and well-paying university jobs, the Mazrui generation returned to their respective countries after completing their post-graduate studies.

In 1963, upon completing his doctoral studies at Oxford University, Mazrui joined Makerere University.

Here, buoyed by the favourable political atmosphere, he honed his debating abilities through the pages of Transition magazine — which he helped found in Makerere.

Mazrui shared his generation’s decidedly self-conscious anti-neo-colonial stance and championed the decolonisation of African institutions and cultures.

This became clear from his inaugural lecture, Ancient Greece in African political thought, delivered on August 25, 1966, where he argued that Africa was the well-spring of human civilisation.

But Mazrui did not conceal his disdain for experiments with socialism and strands of Marxism.

He derided Julius Nyerere’s “Ujamaa socialism” and Milton Obote’s “Common Man’s Charter” as “square pegs in round holes”.

Their collapse proved him right.

Mazrui stoked controversy when he parodied Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah as “the Leninist Czar”.

He was irked by the one-party era argument that development required a trade-off between human rights and despotism.

Again, his view that liberal democracy and development are compatible is validated.

Mazrui helped train Africa’s second generation of scholars — who joined their national universities as undergraduate students in the 1960s before later going abroad for their graduate studies.

Sadly, in 1973 he was forced into exile by the kleptomaniac regime of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He could train Africa’s third generation of academics.

Visibly troubled, Mazrui fiddled with the idea of coup-prone and coup-proof countries.

But he soon discovered that this divide was merely academic. In Kenya, he learnt from the then University of Nairobi Vice-Chancellor, Dr Joseph Karanja, who had the courtesy to take him for lunch at the Norfolk Hotel, that a controversial academic could not be hired, even in coup-proof countries.

Mazrui joined the continent’s academics trooping out to America and Europe to escape repression or in search of greener pastures in Africa’s first wave of brain-drain.

My academic generation — which entered the academy in the 1980s — only encountered Mazrui’s fabled debating prowess during his episodic public lectures in hotels, in the pages of newspapers (mainly Daily Nation), Transition magazine and Codesria Bulletin, based in Dakar, Senegal.

When we went abroad for further studies in the 1990s, we schmoozed with him during the annual conferences of the African Studies Association (America), listened to his lectures — some of the most well-attended.

Soon we met him in pan-African research networks such as the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (Codesria).

In addition to over three-dozen books, hundreds of articles and lectures across the globe, three epic battles set Mazrui apart as an iconic scholar. Writing in 2008, he reminisced: “The debates … were brutal.”

The first duel was with Prof Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and was mainly about Africa-Muslim/Arab relations.

Conducted in Transition magazine, the debate centred on Mazrui’s television series, 'The Africans: A Triple Heritage' (1986), based on the thesis of a convergence of three civilisations in contemporary Africa: Africanity, the penetration of Islam and the impact of Western civilisation.

Soyinka decried “triple heritage” thesis as a Trojan horse for Muslim colonisation of Africa.

The second battle was with the late eminent South African anthropologist, Archie Mafeje.

Conducted through Codesria Bulletin in the 1990s, the debate was provoked by Mazrui’s controversial thesis that Africa’s failed states should be “recolonised”.

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive of the Africa Policy Institute