As Ali Mazrui joins ‘Hereafter’

The email came from Jakky Amadu, a former basketball player, who worked as a post-doctoral fellow under Professor Ali Mazrui between 2002 and 2005 at the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, New York. Though I have never met Jakky, who is now an Associate Professor of Sociology at Seton Hall University, we have […]

The email came from Jakky Amadu, a former basketball player, who worked as a post-doctoral fellow under Professor Ali Mazrui between 2002 and 2005 at the Institute of Global Cultural Studies, Binghamton University, New York. Though I have never met Jakky, who is now an Associate Professor of Sociology at Seton Hall University, we have kept good contacts since 2005. When I opened the mail, the message in it was terse: “Mazrui has passed on.”
 I knew Mwalimu Ali Mazrui had been ill for quite some time but I did not suspect that the end was nigh for him.
As an undergraduate at the University of Nigeria Nsukka in the 1980s, I read Ali Mazrui and was impressed with his facility with the English language and the breadth of his knowledge of world history and politics. I had memorised several phrases from his books. Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, one of my lecturers at Nsukka, told us about an epic debate between Mazrui and the late Walter Rodney at the University of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and how Rodney, a Marxist, intellectually battered the erudite Mazrui.
My path crossed Mazrui’s in 2005. I had set up a publishing firm in London, Adonis & Abbey publishers (www.adonis-abbey.com), in 2003, and the following year had founded the journal African Renaissance.  It was a period of intense Afro-pessimism. The journal not only got leading Africanists to discuss the African condition, but also to challenge theories and assertions which ruled out developmental and democratic possibilities for Africa. Even in the maiden edition in June 2004, we had great Africanists like Gamal Nkrumah (the late Kwame Nkrumah’s son), Helmi Sharawy, Marcel Kitissou, Mammo Muchie, Bankie Forster Bankie and Kimani Nehusi as contributors. Professor Mammo Muchie, an Ethiopian scholar, who like me, was a regular contributor to the London-based New African magazine – gave me Professor Mazrui’s number to call him and persuade him to become a contributor to the journal.
He was quite friendly when I called and I was pleasantly surprised that he was very generous with his time, given how big an intellectual he was and that I was just an unknown quantity who had started an innocuous book publishing company and a journal he had not even heard of. I reeled out his books that I had read and some of the quotable quotes I had memorized from them.  Without knowing when I said it, I told him that of all his books I read the only one I did not like was The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1971), in which, in a fictional ‘Hereafter’; he had tried and found the late poet Christopher Okigbo guilty of abandoning his craft as a poet to fight for Biafra.  I said something like: “Prof, how can you judge a poet in the hereafter and found him guilty for supposedly subordinating his art to the imperative of the survival of his community? Which one is precedent: art or community? Art outside a commitment to one’s community is just art for art’s sake. I just threw away the book after reading it. I was just disappointed.”
As soon as I blurted out the statements over the telephone my heart started to pound: Was I saying these to the great Ali Mazrui? Had I abused his listening ears? Had I come across as rude? Had I abused the trust of the person who gave me his number? I quickly tried to do damage control by rephrasing what I just said in more polite ways.  I believe Mwalimu Mazrui sensed my panic. He laughed and asked how old I was when I read the book and I told him I was about 18 years old. He asked if I thought I was old enough to understand the book and I replied that literature was actually my first love, that in fact I did postgraduate studies only because I was a failed novelist.  I didn’t need to tell him that as an undergraduate  I had published my first novella with Fourth Dimension – before self-publishing became the vogue in Nigeria –  but then went ahead to hold the record of the highest rejection slips from the defunct MacMillan’s Pacesetter series and the Longmann’s Drumbeat series – novels for young adults. As I mentioned the words “failed novelist”, memories of how I visited several publishing houses to challenge them for their apparent love for rejecting my manuscripts flashed through my mind.  From Pacesetters in Ibadan, Longman’s Drumbeat in Lagos, Fagbamigbe and Ilesanmi in Akure, Tana Press and Delta Publications in Enugu, I visited them all.  As an undergraduate I had read so many works on literary criticisms that felt I could hold my own on discussions of the literary merits of a work – even against the great Mazrui.
Mazrui challenged me to read the book again but I politely maintained that I found the idea that a writer’s art should be superior to his commitment to his community difficult to accept. By the time the telephone conversation ended, Mazrui had given me his home telephone number and encouraged me to call whenever I felt like. From that telephone conversation, I came to confirm what I had read about him – he loved debates. I knew of his public spat and debates with other intellectual giants – Walter Rodney, Louis Gate jnr, Kwesi Prah, Abiola Irele, Biodun Jeyifo, Ochieng’ Odhiambo  Wole Soyinka and others. I did not know he would have the patience to debate an upstart like me. How wrong I was. Over the phone or emails, I felt the great Mazrui was surreptitiously encouraging me to debate him. Mazrui was an intellectual octopus and the intellectual slingshots I fired occasionally from a respectable distance were more like goading the master to open more his fountain of knowledge.
 Mazui became an honorary adviser and regular contributor to African Renaissance. In 2006, my publishing firm published his very important work, A Tale of two Africas: South Africa and Nigeria as Contrasting Visions. Again in a book I edited in 2009  – Who is an African?: Politics, Identity and the Making of the Africa-Nation –  Professor Mazrui not only graciously wrote the preface but also contributed two other chapters  to the book. Ironically a number of Mazrui’s critics – Wole Soyinka, Kwesi Prah and Ochieng’ – had consistently questioned Mazrui’s Africanity because part of his ancestry was Arab. In 2011 we also published Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Global Africa: Essays in Honour of Ali A. Mazrui which was edited by Seifudein Adem, Associate Director of Mazrui’s Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University. Professor Mazrui was also to introduce me to his former student and scion, the eminent emeritus Professor of Political Science, Isawa J Elaigwu, arguably one of Nigeria’s best in the field. Professor Elaigwu has remained “my oga at the top” since then.
The last time I met Mazrui was at the African Studies Association (ASA) Conference in Philadelphia, USA, in November 2012. Mazrui was a one- time President of ASA (USA Chapter) and regularly attends the Association’s annual conferences.  Though he was already wheel-chair bound by then, he was still intellectually alert, still ebullient, still looking to stir up a debate or dabble into controversy.  Together with Seifudein Adem, we spent time chatting over lunch.  
When I received invitation from his office to attend his 80th birthday celebration last year in New York, I sought to hide my worsening aversion for flying by joking that I would stay away from the celebration as protest that in the menu Mazrui asked his invitees to select from, African cuisines were not included – no egusi soup, no amala, no tuwo!
Ali Al’amin Mazrui was born in Mombasa, Kenya on 24 February 1933 and studied at schools in Mombasa before travelling to the UK where he obtained his B.A. (with Distinction) from Manchester University (1960). He later obtained an M.A. from Columbia University,  New York (1961) and  capped this with a doctorate (DPhil) from Oxford University (Nuffield College) in 1966. Until his transition, he was an Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.
A teacher, orator, journalist, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Mazrui was arguably the most connected and best known African social scientist for over half a century. His research interests included African politics, international political culture, Political Islam and North-South relations.
In addition to the over 20 books he published,  Mazrui was also the creator of the television series, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, (1986), which was jointly produced by the BBC and the  Public Broadcasting Service, WETA (Washington DC).  A book by the same title was jointly published by BBC Publications and Little, Brown and Company. Mazrui was in 2005 voted Number 73 in a list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers compiled jointly by Prospect magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy magazine (US).
I was told that Mwalimu Mazrui, who in his last days was being fed intravenously, decided at a point that he no longer wanted to take food or drugs. He was ready to meet his Maker. He died on Sunday, 13 October and had left instructions that his remains should be buried at the family cemetery at Fort Jesus, Mombasa, the city of his birth. Adieu, Mwalimu.