The origin of my beef with Mazrui

Ali Mazrui, our best known political theorist, reached that “bourne” from which – according to William Shakespeare and Mark Twain – “no traveller ever returns”. ILLUSTRATION | JOHN NYAGAH 

In Summary

• Ali Mazrui, our best known political theorist, reached that “bourne” from which – according to William Shakespeare and Mark Twain – “no traveller ever returns”. And, for the umpteenth time, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, our most celebrated novelist, missed the literature Nobel.  
• But I must confess that, in world outlook, I was always much closer to the literary artiste than to the political analyst. My preference for Ngugi was intensified when Mazrui published The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, a work of fiction which finally fixed Mazrui unmistakably as a liberal in the traditional Anglo-Saxon mould.
• Mazrui’s view was and — all the way to his death a few weeks ago — appeared to remain typically Western liberal. It is that art is art and life is life and never the twain shall meet.  Far from being a mirror of the contradictions of real social life, he seemed to tell Okigbo, art is a category of its own seemingly celestial domain.

By PHILIP OCHIENG
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This is not a positive year for Kenya’s literatteurs.

Ali Mazrui, our best known political theorist, reached that “bourne” from which – according to William Shakespeare and Mark Twain – “no traveller ever returns”. And, for the umpteenth time, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, our most celebrated novelist, missed the literature Nobel. 

I was privileged to know both minds fairly closely. Ngugi was my high school classmate for four years and, thereafter, we have shared thoughts on many national and international issues. In 1982, Ali was among those who helped me out of Kenya into a Californian exile as a result of the robustness of the early years of the Moi-Njonjo regime.

But I must confess that, in world outlook, I was always much closer to the literary artiste than to the political analyst. My preference for Ngugi was intensified when Mazrui published The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, a work of fiction which finally fixed Mazrui unmistakably as a liberal in the traditional Anglo-Saxon mould.

In the liberal Western view, a work of art is a category above any of the often fiercely conflicting religio-moral and econo-political interests that have characterised the human society ever since the rise of socio-economic classes and, with them, the political state as a means of keeping those conflicts from getting out of hand.

POETRY OR POLITICS

Mazrui’s view was and — all the way to his death a few weeks ago — appeared to remain typically Western liberal. It is that art is art and life is life and never the twain shall meet.  Far from being a mirror of the contradictions of real social life, he seemed to tell Okigbo, art is a category of its own seemingly celestial domain.

Okigbo, said he, must make up his mind to serve either the interests of poetry or the interests of politics. For the dyed-in-the-wool liberal, it is as if architecture, cuisine, dance, drama, fiction, haute couture, music, painting, poetry and other fine arts are about anything else but life as it is really lived by real human beings in the umbrella of politics.

War is among the realest activities by which human beings have tried to resolve their contradictions ever since the rise of civilisation and the political state. And art has been the most effective methods by which talented hands have captured those contradictions into an artefact to suggest the best solution.

But  –  contrary to what the liberal intellectual proposes – only a person who takes a direct part in the solution to real contradictions – such as war – can see the elements of those contradictions most clearly and depict them (in, for instance, poetry) most objectively.

Yet many artists and art critics in the West itself affirm that only from a certain angle – that is, only as a partisan – can one see one’s situation fully and objectively. In short, without participation in any the often conflicting activities which define the human society and determine human history, there can be no objectivity.

All objective natural scientists assert something of the same sort. They affirm that you cannot maintain aloofness to any natural object or phenomenon and yet hope to understand it fully. Only by grabbing hold of the object, putting it through an experiment and observing  the experiment from a certain standpoint – only then can you eventually discover the atomic difference between oxygen and hydrogen and appreciate their union as water.

That is why Ernst Fischer (in The Necessity of Art) points out that only from a certain angle — such as an ideology — can you see a real situation objectively.  If, from your subject, you insist on maintaining aloofness, distance, disinterest, un-committed-ness, “objectivism” – that kind of liberal chatter – you will never really come to grips with any object or phenomenon of nature and society.

Christopher Okigbo could never have fully understood the cause of  Biafra — could never have written a single objective stanza on that cause  — unless he had taken a direct part in the historical process that had brought the conflicting causes to a head, namely, the martial confrontations into which the conflicting causes had exploded.

Thus, in a series in his Weekly Review, Hillary Ng’weno, the Kenyan publicist whose thought-structure most resembles Mazrui’s liberalism, once laid it on the line:  Never commit yourself to any social, moral, aesthetical, ideological, political or religious cause or take any side if you want your work of art to come out “objectively” and in “fairness” to all the parties concerned.

Yet any real artist will tell you that “objectivity” of that kind is never his or her aim. His or her real aim is to record a social contradiction, to suggest a solution and to urge the audience to take part in that solution — which, of course,  is an  impossibility for all those who seek to “detach” themselves from all social encounters and conflicts.

TOOLS OF WAR

Mazrui and Ng’weno have always ordained that “detachment” from, “disinterest” in and “absence of ideological commitment” to the subject of one’s art is what defines “objectivity” in the production of artefacts and technologies and in journalism and other media of social interaction and criticism.

But the truly objective critic knows that only if you stand under something can you also understand it. The English verb to understand and its German counterpart verstehen literally mean just that — to “stand under” or to “stand through” a thing or phenomenon in order to come to grips with its composition and fully appreciate how it functions internally. 

If human beings had always stood “aloof” to nature and society — if we had strictly maintained our “disinterest” in and our “un-commitment” to our surroundings, where would we now be in terms of science and technology? Could we ever have passed beyond the stage of spear-making into laser beams, astronautics, cybernetics and nanotechnology?

It was upon the outbreak of Nigeria’s Biafran War — when Okigbo laid down his tools of poetry in order to arm himself with the tools of war on Biafra’s side — that Mazrui revealed his anarchistic liberalism by putting Okigbo to an imaginary trial in a liberal court which, quite naturally, found Okigbo guilty of violating the normative postulates of the Western critical tradition.

At Kenya’s Alliance High School, Ngugi and I were taught that all world literature begins with Geoffrey Chaucer, goes through William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens and ends with T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender. From Uganda’s Makerere College to England’s Leeds University, Ngugi was still steeped in the idea of art being too chaste to concern itself with any of mankind’s filthy ideo-moral substratums.

Yet ideology is what cements any human society. Education is the struggle to commit young minds to a society’s present set of moral values. This is the only possible pedestal for and purpose of upbringing. Whether your chosen specialty is only as abstract as mathematics, it is always served up in an ideal container, an ideological template.

Liberalism is the only ideology which pretends that it can dole out any social food outside an ideological container. This is what a liberal Western politician means whenever he declaims that we should avoid “ideology” in all our professions and utterances. It is a call which makes liberalism not only a “non-ideology” but also – because of it – the acme of all human thought.

Yet any slight analysis reveals liberalism to be nothing but a struggle to keep at bay such historically hostile non-liberal or illiberal ideologies as aristocratic feudalism and bourgeois fascism (both to the right)  and working-class socialism (to the left).

This liberal middle-of-the-road-ism is what Mazrui and Ng’weno advocate as detachment in social reportage – disinterestedness, un-commitment, that kind of chatter.