Are we together so far? In honour of Prof Mazrui

Prof Ali Alamin Mazrui was the first African to teach my group of Third Year students of Political Science at Makerere as a College of the University of East Africa. The other would be Dr Lawrence Ekpebu, a Nigerian who taught International Relations.

It was he who defended me against a fuming Prof Max Bellof of Oxford University when I suggested that the European Economic Community may be a replica of the 1885 Berlin Conference at which European countries shared out Africa.

The special pride of identity we had with Mazrui was shaken during one tutorial at which we challenged his thesis. He was shaken; his voice trembled with tears. We went silent with shocked disappointment.

His secretary, the late Anna Gurley, would, years later, explain to me that Mazrui came under enormous physical stress when his quest for fame began to take its toll as requests for lectures and contributions to journals and association pamphlets flooded in. Our tutorial group must have caught him at one of those moments of stress when his intellectual muscles were stretched to breaking point.

He announced that he had found me a scholarship to study at Oxford University. I told him I had already been offered a Commonwealth scholarship; and Prof Ken Prewitt had also found me a place at Stanford University.

At the peak of his rising intellectual stature, he travelled regularly and could only teach Introduction to African Politic to First Year undergraduates two hours a week. I handled his tutorials.

His method was well captured by Prof Colin Leys who served as head of department before him. Mazrui, he said, tossed a concept in the air, split it to produce a startling explosion inside heads of his readers or live audiences.

He would follow its effect with the fatherly question: ’’Are we together so far?’’-often following it with a guttural chuckle.

By way of compensation for his nomadic absence from teaching at Makerere, Mazrui invented a bi-weekly public lecture to the whole campus community. At each, he marshalled his melodic voce; articulateness and intellectual fireworks. Verbal explosions like’: ‘’Nkrumah the Leninist Czar’’; ‘’Makerere, Tom Mboya and I’’ lit young minds.

Feeling increasingly frustrated by the absence a local academic staff to counter Mazrui’s ‘’neo-colonial’’ hurricane, the student government of Peter Anyang Nyong’o and Daudi Mulabya Taliwako hauled in Walter Rodney, the Guyanese teacher of History at the University of Dar es Salaam.

A ‘’Great Debate’’ pitched the eloquence of a ‘’revolutionary’’ scholar against that of a ‘’conservative’’ one. Its political ramification beyond campus was expressed in Uganda’s lone government-owned television and radio networks broadcasting it live.

Mazrui’s influence was manifest in the hundreds of letters he received and answered with papers carrying the official imprint of a department at Makerere University. The receipt of such a letter by a secondary school boy would cause a stir of derived stardom across the school. John Ken Lukyamuzi, now a Member of Parliament in Uganda, was an example of a growing fan club. He was employed as a cutter of newspaper reports that would be of interest to Mazrui.

As the one in charge of tutorials for his lectures, I attended the lectures and regularly challenged his lines of argument. I often accused him of cheating by excluding inconvenient data from his argumentation. He showed no irritation; often taking delight in dribbling past my protest. In this, he taught and built vital culture of intellectual tolerance for opposing views. As a prophet for the inviolability of the gifted or rare individual in society, he had to condone dissent.

He defined his role as that of ‘’explaining Africa to Europe and Europe to Africa’’. This was epitomised in his television testament titled: ‘’The Africans: A Triple Heritage’’. A senior American official got its telecast by America’s Public Broadcast Network terminated. In Nigeria, Christian groups complained that it promoted Islam at the expense of Christianity. Prof Wole Soyinka accused Mazrui of inciting Muslim fanatics in northern Nigeria against him.

As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I asked Prof Crawford Young why none of Mazrui’s numerous publications was on reading lists for courses on African affairs. ‘’His writing are rather journalistic’’, was Young’s terse and dismissive reply.

Observing Mazrui deliver his paper at an African Studies Association conference in Washington DC in 1989, I was struck by the overwhelming power of his eloquence and intellectual sparkle when compared with the drab and intimidated deliveries of his fellow panellists. I was sure it was drawing jealousies and panic in many of his peers.

I had contradictory relations with him. Prof James S. Coleman told me that Mazrui was the lone mountain who stood against the department awarding me a First Class Degree on the grounds that Makerere’s University library was too weak in books it held to support indulgence in awarding such a degree.

In 1972, as a member of the International Political Science Association, he obtained air tickets and boarding to the conference for Peter Anyang Nyong’o from the University of Chicago and me at Madison to attend. We honoured him by using the occasion to jointly invent the Association of African Political Science (AAPS).

Since 2009, he supported my pioneer editorship of Kilimanjaro Magazine, published out of Abuja, by sending me articles for publication. He also sent me two chapters for publication in the first two volumes of my ‘’Brain Rain Books’’ series.

Mazrui wrote that he was driven by the challenge to match and overtake the prolific writings of his father as a Muslim cleric based in Mombasa. He was determined to conquer a wider global stage. His father became an authority on Islamic theology.

He took up political theory. While many bashed him for being pro-Western, he was widely celebrated as a flag bearer for Africa in the global battle of ideas.

In 2009 at a breakfast in his hotel room in Abuja, he boasted to me that with the collapse of the Soviet Union I had ended up on the losing side while his side was now triumphant. May he continue to teach in that place he calls ‘’After Africa’’.

Revelled in controversy

In his native Kenya, Prof Mazrui received much criticism from his detractors, who included the late historian Prof William Ochieng. The latter, who died at the end of last year, at one time dismissed Mazrui as simply overrated in one of his famous outpourings of controversial opinions.

A man of small physical stature, Prof Mazrui packed intellectual energy that allowed him to maintain his amazing scholarly production even during his sunset years, when he was already seriously ailing. His works today comprise an enviable personal canon that was meticulously documented right up to the time of his death.

Soyinka went as far as declaring Mazrui non-African, and further referred to him as “a born-again Islamic fundamentalist” comparable to former Libyan ruler Col Muammar Gadhafi.