A Tribute to Ali Mazrui

Ali Mazrui. Photo by Seifudein Adem. ©2011

Let me speak briefly to Mazrui’s love of writing, his commitment to scholarship, and his position on issues of justice in general. Mazrui loved writing, and in 1974, he told us why:

[T]his tremendous urge to communicate . . . This is why I write at all, why I write so much, why I write on such varied subjects. I have a constant urge to try and share with others what I think are glimpses I have had . . . When I want to communicate any particular thought that has occurred to me, a) I want to work it out and b) I want to communicate it to others. I have to work it out. I work it out in the writing. Having worked it out, I want somebody else to know what occurs to my mind, to my being.

In order to play Boswell to Mazrui’s Samuel Johnson someday, hopefully, I kept more than 5,000 pages of handwritten correspondence with him. This collection bears testimony to Mazrui’s love of writing, a collection that includes his instantaneous thoughts and immediate reactions in writing when he was pleased and when he was less-than-pleased.

Ali Mazrui had a solid commitment to scholarship. When we were preparing a manuscript for one of the volumes in the Mazrui and His Critics series, it was suggested that we should perhaps exclude those critiques of Mazrui that were “rude and unpleasant.” When he learned about the idea, his reaction was quick and emphatic. He said, “Excluding from the volume some of the critiques because they are too unfavorable to me is good manners, but it is not good scholarship!” And we obliged.

Mazrui’s favorite quotation was from his mentor at Oxford, John Plamenatz: “The sins of the powerful acquire some of the prestige of power.” How do I know this? The answer is simple—he used it more frequently than any other quotation in his writings. But sometimes he made sure to add the following: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Mazrui never chastised anyone, even when he was displeased, without first saying good things about that person. I think Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel Laureate for Literature, was onto something when he once likened Mazrui’s style of debate to “the (fabled) habit of the African rodent that blows soothing air on the wound in the flesh of its human victim after every bite.” The only quibble I have with this depiction is in the sequencing. Mazrui blew soothing air before every bite—not after.

Incidentally, Mazrui seemed to appreciate the artistic expression in some of what Soyinka had disapprovingly written about him when the two bitterly debated each other in public in the 1990s, but Mazrui was done taking it when Soyinka went on to compare his behavior to that of an “ageing Minotaur afflicted by muscular dystrophy.” He told Soyinka, “You used to combine rudeness with art. Now there is only rudeness.”

Mazrui came from a great family. But, I think, it is not incorrect to say that he achieved greatness rather than being born with it. In 2008, I asked him if he had any advice for his younger followers. His answer was short: “I have vindicated the old English adage, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.’” He was alluding to a 1949 incident in Mombasa. He nearly failed the Cambridge High School Certificate Examination. Because the result he obtained—a third-class grade—was not good enough for admission to Makerere College in Uganda, Mazrui became, in his own words, “a ‘school leaver’—someone who had failed to get beyond secondary education.” The Kenyan government nevertheless had a different idea. Suspecting that Mazrui had more potential than the result of the exam showed, the government gave him a second chance in 1955, sending him to England to complete his secondary education. Mazrui did not disappoint. He went on to earn his first degree with distinction from University of Manchester in...