Reflections on Prof Ali Mazrui’s legacy

Prof Ali Mazrui passed away on October 13, 2014 in Binghamton, New York in the United States. FILE PHOTO  

By Ken Walibora

In Summary

• More than two years after the passing of Prof Ali Mazrui, that illustrious son of the continent, scores of scholars from all over the world gathered in Nairobi on July 14-16, to commemorate and analyse his academic works.

On October 12, 2014 a great academic tree of East African origin fell at Birmington city, in the United States.

The passing of the iconic global scholar Prof Ali Mazrui sent the global academic community into mourning.

Prof Mazrui, born in 1933, (the same year as my mother) died at the age of 81, unlike my mother, who died in 1984 at the tender age of 51.

The distinguished scholar had been quite frail in his last few months and at one point, months before his death, a journalist colleague had contacted me to confirm a rumour that Mazrui had passed on after someone had posted a pernicious celebrity “killing” news item on social media.

But months later when the great scholar actually passed on, we were all in pain and anguish.

The metaphor of a giant fallen tree aptly captures the depth of the shock and loss of an academic who was one of a kind, sui generis, as one would say. And as the Swahili adage goes, “Mti mkuu ukianguka ndege wa mashakani,” [It is a disaster for the birds who have made it home].

More than two years after the passing of Prof Mazrui, that illustrious son of the continent, scores of scholars from all over the world gathered at a Nairobi hotel on July 14-16, 2016, to commemorate his works and intellectual legacy.

His two sons, Farid and Harith, and his nephew Prof Alamin Mohamed Mazrui of Rutgers University in the US, were also in attendance.

Prof Kimani Njogi, Prof. Alamin M. Mazrui and Prof Micheal Cross during the Ali Mazrui International Symposium in Nairobi Kenya. PHOTO | COURTESY

As I sat there, listening to speaker after speaker, I marvelled at the fresh insights and fascinating analyses that flowed from the platform on one of the world’s greatest thinkers.

The participants extolled Prof Mazrui’s love for the number three, hence his concept of the African Triple Heritage, his elegant rhetorical skills, his capacity to classify just about anything, (nothing was unclassifiable to him), his ingenuity in coining phrases such as “Afrobia,” “enthnocracy,” “horizontal counterpenetration,” “Swahilistics,” etc.

Others described him as an intellectual gadfly (a person who annoys or criticises others in order to provoke them into action) and even more importantly as one who was deeply fascinated by ideas, which he articulated in newsletters, lectures, academic and newspaper articles, books, television and radio talks, just about any platform available.

I was beset by a flurry of questions, some of which I talked about at the conference.

For instance, was Prof Mazrui the African Edward Said, and Edward Said the Palestinian Ali Mazrui? How does Prof Mazrui’s towering intellectual stature compare with other critical thinkers of modern times such as Karl Marx, of whom he was highly critical?

What does the life and death of such an exceptional global scholar mean for East Africans? Does his death portend the end of great scholarship in East Africa?

And as Mugambi Kiai, a participant at the conference asked, is East Africa capable of producing another Ali Mazrui? What is the current condition of scholarship in East Africa compared with the 1960s when Prof Mazrui rose to prominence at Makerere University?

In his keynote address, Prof Horace Campbell traced Prof Mazrui’s history from Mombasa at the Kenyan Coast where his life journey began.

As a boy in colonial Africa, he was destined to eke out a living by learning a trade, hence the technical school that the colonialist educators chose for him.

Yet somehow, Mazrui would end up at Oxford University, in the United Kingdom and then Columbia University, in the US, and forged for himself career course that would depend more on his mind rather than his hands.

In 1963, he was hired at Makerere University as a lecturer and rose quickly through the ranks to become the youngest professor in the institution’s history.

He would later move to Michigan in the United States and then Birmington. He would go on to never have become the prolific scholar extraordinaire, scaling the heights in political science and cultural studies.

Prof Mazrui was fascinated by ideas, a habit that marks a true intellectual.

It is the dichotomy between using one’s hands or using one’s head that preoccupied me during this conference as I pondered the condition of education in East Africa, scholarship in particular.

I do not know that in proposing this dichotomy, Prof Campbell meant that those who use their hands, like my mother who was a seamstress, do not use their minds and vice versa.

This artificial dichotomy is only for purposes of emphasising the difference between tradesmen and the academic elite.

When Mazrui was a student in colonial East Africa, the emphasis in education was on apprenticeship. The system then produced far more electricians, masons, carpenters, drivers, plumbers and ironsmiths, than it produced university graduates.

The practical value of having more skilled tradesmen than highly educated elite was self-evident. East Africa then had very few universities, with Makerere in Uganda reigning supreme as having the best and brightest intellectual stars, followed by the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.

Today, East Africa is bursting at the seams with universities, most of which are not worth their own names, churning out graduates who cannot spell their names.

East Africa has fallen for the egregious lie that everybody must have a university degree and so the education system pushes into institution sof higher learning droves of individuals and groups that would be better off learning some trade, like my mother.

Moreover, those who choose to be fascinated by ideas and to use their intellectual prowess barely manage to meet their basic needs in East Africa. This is a catastrophy of monumental proportions. Scholarship and intellectualism have lost their appeal.

We cannot today say we value education because we have gradually and decidedly succumbed to a vicious culture of mediocrity. It is bad enough that primary and secondary school teachers do not get paid well.

But to think that pseudo university graduates with below par reasoning capacity are earning more than university lecturers is one of the greatest ironies of our time. Who can blame university dons for their extensive moonlighting and apathy towards academic research?

Time was when university lecturers earned more that Members of Parliament.

But that was back then, when Mazrui taught political science at Makerere University. There are more universities in East African now, but the quality of pedagogy and research is appalling.

Does East Africa need more universities or polytechnics and trade schools?

The condition of intellectualism in particular and education in general is that of deep trouble. We do not have the conducive environment in which another Prof Mazrui can be produced and nurtured. We never had it even in his youth.

Neither should we be obsessed with the idea of creating another Prof Mazrui, because it is an impossibility. Prof Mazrui was sui generis.

Yet we need to make our universities institutions of excellence, not the education market places they are today, by limiting the number of people enrolled and rewarding those who genuinely excel, as Prof Mazrui was rewarded by the American universities at which he taught.

At the same time, we should learn to respect all trades and professions and therefore produce and nurture more non-Mazruis, who like my mother, would work with their hands with pride.

Prof Mazrui’s trademark pithy statements such as, “We are the people of the day before yesterday, and people of the day after tomorrow,” demonstrated his optimism about a brighter future for himself and the African people.

He loved his African ancestry and stated in his will his wish to be buried at the family cemetery on the island of Mombasa.

The intellectual lights have since gone out; Africa in general and East African in particular has plunged into an intellectual pitch darkness.

Two years ago, since a great intellectual tree of East African origin fell, the birds are in dire straits.

In this era of celebrity and hero worship, we have sunk so low as to think it is not a good idea to be fascinated by ideas.

Ken Walibora is Kiswahili quality manager at Nation Media Group.