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Professor Ali Mazrui was one of Kenya’s outstanding intellectuals. He will be remembered for his path-breaking synthesis of history, economics, and governance to find coherence in the Kenyan and ultimately African experience. He presented his analyses with persuasive eloquence. The impressive body of publications and lectures he has left behind is a catalogue for an enquiry into what it means to be an African in our time.
Ali Mazrui was introduced to the world outside academia through his landmark series, ‘The Africans’, which was aired for television audiences in the United States in 1987 sub-titled ‘The Triple Heritage’. Night after night Professor Mazrui took his audience through the history, economics, and governance of different peoples on the continent to present Africans as the heirs of three streams of experiences. First and foremost we are the embodiment of our indigenous institutions, from family to government. Onto this foundation came the seven-hundred-year long overlay from the Arab-Moslem world. Finally, since the Fifteenth century, came the third and final heritage, the European-Christian stream. We carry the good and the bad of all these three streams of experiences, he argued.
Professor Mazrui was praised and condemned in equal measure for his effort. Some Africans thought he underrated the adaptability and genius of Africans and their institutions. Other Africans accused him of sanitizing the brutality of the Arab-Moslem entry into Africa which devastated communities across north and sub-Saharan Africa and whose scars are still visible and fresh. To others Professor Mazrui was guilty of overstating the redemptive aspects of European colonization which has destroyed our institutions making us almost aliens in our own landscape.
But most will agree that late Professor Mazrui was a pioneer, a trail-blazer. Before the appearance of ‘The Africans’ there were scholarly studies on the African experience, a few by African scholars but most by non-Africans who assessed us through their eyes, usually reducing us to caricatures in the form of ‘tribes’ and ‘natives’.
Professor Mazrui argued that Africans are possessed of a vitality that could not be destroyed by millennia of predation by non-Africans.
That he went to great lengths to make his case also served to warn us that if we assume our rightful place on the world stage dressed only in the institutions bequeathed to us through the Arab-Moslem and the European-Christian overlays, we as a people are lost. In ‘The Triple Heritage’ Professor Mazrui made this case with passion and dignity. He used both familiar and obscure data to offer fresh insight and, most of all, to present Africa to the world on our own terms, having something that is unique and valuable to bring to the rest of the world. In this sense, Professor Mazrui was an early spokesperson for Africa’s ongoing renaissance.
I had the honor of sharing a panel at a conference with the late Professor Mazrui during which I witnessed his almost self-effacing demeanor even as he presented arguments that showed profound insight. His voice will be missed especially as Africa resumes its rightful place on the world stage. He would have been a good commentator as we make this journey.
Dr. Mwangi Wachira | mwangi.wachira@verizon.net