PeeCeeJay By Jideofor Adibe

Remembering Ali Mazrui

pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe

 How do you go about immortalizing a man whose works already immortalized him while he was alive? That was precisely what Twaweza Communications of Kenya and Binghamton University of New York sought to do  when they organized a symposium entitled ‘Critical Perspectives on Culture and Globalization: The Intellectual Legacy of Ali A Mazrui.’ The symposium, held in Nairobi, Kenya from July 14-17, attracted nearly 100 Africanists from all over the world.  Those who honoured the invitation included Prof Horace Campbell, who gave the keynote address, Mahmood Mamdani, Kimani Njogu and Seifudein Adem  (who were among the conveners of the symposium) Hamdy A. Hassan, Chris Wanjala,  Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, Macharia Munene, Alamin Mazrui, Cassandra Veney, N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba, Timothy Shaw and Paul Zeleza, (the Vice Chancellor, United States International University, Nairobi).  It was gratifying that among the invitees to the symposium were three Nigerians – eminent Nigerian political scientist J Isawa Elaigwu, who chaired a session and also gave the concluding remarks, Prof Adekeye Adebajo, who presented a paper on, ‘Who Killed Pax Africana?’ and my humble self who also presented a paper on, ‘Who is an African? Reflections on Mazrui’s notion of the African’

Mazrui had a rich academic life. With a Kenyan government scholarship, he studied at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom and graduated with Distinction in 1960. He subsequently obtained an MA in 1961 from Columbia University, and a doctorate (DPhil), from Oxford University in 1966. He began his academic life at the University of Makerere, Uganda, where he quickly rose to become a professor. He left Makerere after Idi Amin’s military coup and was in 1974 hired as a professor of political science by the University of Michigan, USA. In 1989, he accepted the Albert Schweitzer professorship at the State University of New York, Binghamton where he became the founding director of the Institute for Global Cultural Studies. Mazrui has about 35 books and numerous academic articles to his name. He was also a renowned essayist and polemicist. Mazrui was equally famous for producing the TV documentary, The Africans: A Triple Heritage, which was later also published as a book. Mwalimu Mazrui transited to the Hereafter on October 12 1914.

Who is an African?

On face value the above will seem like a stupid question. Certainly all of us know who the African is, it would seem. However, the answer to this apparently stupid or elementary question becomes less obvious once other probing qualifiers are added to the question. How is the African identity constructed in the face of the mosaic of identities that people of African ancestry or people who live within the geographic space called Africa bear? How does African identity interface with other identities that people of African ancestry or those who live within the geographic space called Africa bear?  For instance is Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, who had a Kenyan father but a white American mother, African? Is Jerry Rawlings, the former military ruler and former President of Ghana whose father was Scottish and his mother a Black Ghanaian, truly an African? Are people like Horace Campbell, Samir Amin, Walter Rodney,  Mahmood Mamdani  and even Ali Mazrui who have done perhaps more than most scholars in articulating African perspectives in global discourses, really African? Are all who proclaim themselves Africans accepted as such? And by the way who allots this ‘Africanness’ and why? The above are some of the questions one inevitably encounters when one tries to academically delineate who is an African and who is not. How did Mazrui try to grapple with these questions?

My Interest in Mazrui’s notion of the African

As a young undergraduate at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in the 1980s, we were exposed to the works of Ali Mazrui. One of our lecturers, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, was a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam at the time Mazrui was teaching at Makerere. Professor Nnoli would tell us stories about the epic debate between Mazrui and the late Guyanese historian Walter Rodney and how Rodney thoroughly “messed Mazrui up”. Rodney was the author of the famous book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

As an undergraduate, we admired Professor Mazrui for his firm grasp of the English language and for the fact that it was impossible to read any of his works without coming out with several quotable quotes. One of my fond quotes from him in those days was his definition of an ‘intellectual’ as someone who was fascinated by abstract ideas and had acquired some capacity, through formal education, for handling such ideas.  He also defined an ‘ex intellectual’ as an intellectual who has ceased to be fascinated by abstract ideas or has lost the capacity for handling such ideas. We would often label academics who went into government and began talking in sound bites like professional politicians as ‘ex intellectuals’.

While we admired Mazrui, many of our lecturers were very critical of his works.  They criticized his weaknesses in theory construction and his apparent inability to remain focused on a research theme to mature with the conversations in the field. Other critics accused him of being excessively defensive of the Arabs, including their role in the trans-Saharan slave trade. Several African academics questioned his Africanness. Mazrui had Arab ancestry.

I later found that while non-academics and non-political scientists were fascinated by Mazrui’s works, several political scientists and Africanists were dismissive of him as at best an aloof polemicist with questionable commitment to Africa. Whatever the criticism, no one denied that Mazrui had a big voice in global affairs. You may disagree with him but it will be difficult to ignore him.

My interest in Mazrui’s notion of the African

I had the first direct contact with Ali Mazrui in 2005. I had founded the publishing company Adonis & Abbey publishers (www.adonis-abbey.com) in London in 2003. The following year, I also founded the theme-based journal, African Renaissance. Our maiden edition was on ‘Afro-Arab Relations: Co-operation or Conflict’. We had assembled an array of Africanists – Gamal Nkrumah (Nkrumah’s son), Mammo Muchie, Helmi Sharawi, Kwesi Prah and others as contributors. The Ethiopian scholar Mammo Muchie gave me Professor Mazrui’s number and suggested he might be interested in the sort of intellectual engagements we were pursuing.

Given his global stature, I wasn’t exactly full of confidence that an obscure scholar like me who had set up a nondescript publishing company and an unknown journal would get much of his attention. Surprisingly when I called expecting that he would be so busy that he wouldn’t give me more than a few seconds, he was quite generous with his time.

I told him of his books I had read and proudly recited some of the quotes I memorized from some of those books. However rather irreverently I told him that I didn’t like his allegorical work – The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1972). I told him that I threw it away in disgust after reading it.  Mazrui was silent for a while and then asked me if I thought I was old enough to understand the message of the book since I said I read it as an undergraduate when I was still a teenager. I argued that it was wrong for Okigbo to be found guilty in the Hereafter apparently for subordinating his art as a poet to his community (Biafra). I argued that a writer’s community preceded his art and that a writer who subordinates his art to his community is only celebrating art for art’s sake.

There was a long silence through which my pounding heart told me I had blown the opportunity. When Mazrui finally spoke, it was to give me his home telephone number and ask me to call at my convenience. This was quintessential Mazrui – humble and tolerant of criticisms in a way his critics never were.

 Mazrui later became the Editorial Adviser to African Renaissance. Our publishing company, Adonis & Abbey Publishers, also became one of his European publishers. Additionally Mazrui introduced me to his former student, eminent Nigerian political scientist J Isawa Elaigwu, who, when I finally relocated to Nigeria in 2011 found a University teaching job for me.  In 2009, Professor Mazrui contributed three chapters to a book I edited entitled: Who is an African? Identity, Citizenshp and the Making of the Africa-Nation.

Next week I will interrogate Mazrui’s notion of the African based on those three contributions. I will also raise the question of whether Mazrui should really be called an African.

Obviously one cannot talk of the African without a prior conception of what Africa is all about. In the documentary, Africa: A Triple Heritage, written and narrated by  Ali Mazrui in the early 1980s Mazrui argued that Africa (or Africa’s identity as we know it) is formed by a triple heritage - “an indigenous heritage borne out of time and climate change”; the heritage of eurocentric capitalism forced on Africans by European colonialism and the spread of Islam by both jihad and evangelism.

In a paper  ‘Who are Africans?’, which  Mazrui  published in a book I edited in 2009 entitled  Who is an African?  Identity, Citizenship and the Making of the Africa-Nation,  Mazrui wrote: “If Africa invented man in places like the Olduvai Gorge and the Semitic invented God in Jerusalem, Mt. Sinai and Mecca, Europe invented the world at the Greenwich Meridian.  It was the Europeans who named all the great continents of the world, all the great oceans, many of the great rivers and lakes and most of the countries.”

He argued that Europe created the African or consciousness of being African through two inter-related processes – the triumph of European cartography and map making and through racism and the related imperialism and neo-imperialism.

Following from the above, Mazrui believed that what we call African identity is largely a fiction as it was merely a creation of European map makers, colonialism, racism and imperialism. The implication of this for Mazrui is that any attempt to define Africa and by extension delineate the African will inevitably bring one into the tension between Africa being an “accident of history” and “geographical facts”.

While Mazrui might have been factually right about Africa being a fiction, his notion of Africa in this sense is static. One could argue that if Africa is a fiction, so also are several successful modern nations like Germany and France which at different points in their histories were made up of different peoples and principalities. We can therefore argue that  Mazrui’s notion of ‘Africa’ appears to have ossified history in time and space because several countries that are today successful nation-states today were once diverse, often warring nationalities and hence also fictions as nation-states.

Mazrui’s delineation of the African

From his theoretic notions of Africa and the African, Mazrui in an article on ‘Comparative Africanity: Blood, Soil and Ancestry’, (published in the same book I edited in 2009), sought to move into the more empiric exercise of how to delineate or identify the African. He identified the following types of Africans:

a)     Africans of the blood who are defined in “racial and genealogical terms” and are identified with the Black race.

b)    Africans of the soil who are defined in geographical terms and are “identified with the African continent in nationality and ancestral location.”

c)     Mazrui regarded White Africans such as F.W, de Klerk as “Africans of the soil by adoption”. He said this also applied to East Africans of Indian or Pakistani ancestry.

d)     Mazrui equally had another category of Africans: African-Americans and American- Africans. He argued that the  ‘American African’, is “conscious of his indigenous Africanity, is aware of his immediate continental ancestry, is in contact with relatives in Africa, is bilingual (speaking at least one African language) and is at home with much aspects of indigenous African culture as cuisine” while the “African Americans are descendants of the Middle Passage, are not in contact with relatives in Africa, are not native speakers of the African language and are seldom socialized into African cuisines even when they are pan African.”

Following from the above Mazrui argued that Barrack Obama, whose father was Kenya,  has an intermediate identity between being an African American and American African.

Convergence

Mazrui talked about the remarkable history of convergence between the Arab people and the African people. He argued that there are today more than 100 million Arab Muslims in North Africa, which has created a new identity he called ‘Afrabians’. He defined this group as “Africans of the soil in North Africa who are Arab without intermarriage with Africans of the blood.” He had different types of Afrabians:

Geographical Afrabians – Africans of the soil in North Africa who are Arab without intermarriage with Africans of the blood (black Africans).

Genealogical Afrabians: who are products of intermarriage between Arabs and Black Africans such as the majority of Northern Sudanese, half of Mauritanians and “Swahilized dynastic Afrabian families like the Mazrui of Kenya.” 

Ideological Afrabians: Mazrui defined this category as Africans who refuse to recognize the Sahara as a divide and insist that all people indigenous to Africa (be they Arab or Black) are one people such as the late Kwame Nkrumah.

Cultural Afrabians - These are, according to Mazrui, usually Black Africans who have no Arab blood whatsoever but are highly Arabized culturally. He argued that many Sudanese – both Northern and Southern- are deeply Arabized in speech and values without being Arab genealogically.

Mazrui posed the question of where to locate the Hausa and Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria and answered it rhetorically: “Indeed, are not the majority of Islamized Africans of the blood (Black Muslims) automatically cultural Afrabians?”

Was Mazrui an African?

For some, the answer to this is obvious: Mazrui is generally regarded as a leading African intellectual.  But there are several Africanist  (such as our own Wole Soyinka and Chinweizu) who questioned Mazrui’s Africanness and even his commitment to Africa. Among the reasons for this were Mazrui’s Arab ancestry, his excuse (if not defence) of Arab slavery of Africans (Trans-Saharan slave trade), which he argued was for domestic purposes while condemning Trans-Atlantic slave trade (which he argued was for commercial purposes) and his strong condemnation of nationalism in Africa as a mask for dictatorship in the early years of his career. Many Africanists also did not forgive Mazrui for his critical article on Nkrumah  shortly after  he  was overthrown as the President of Ghana. The article was entitled: ‘Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar’. Mazrui was also said to have called for the recolonization of some African countries.

Does Mazrui see himself as an African on the same level of Africanity with say, my humble self? This brings us back to the question of whether identity should be a choice or an imposition – or both.

As we saw from the discussion in the preceding section, Mazrui identified his family and himself as part of  “genealogical Afrabians” who are, according to him, bridge builders between Black Africans and Arab Africans. An interesting question is whether Mazrui’s ‘Afrabian’ is a category in the hierarchy of Africanness, and if so, where he placed himself in relations to those he called Africans of the blood?  Did Mazrui invent  the Afrabian typology  to show that as a bridge builder between African Arabs and ‘Africans of the blood’ he was morally superior to his critics, who continued to question to his death his Africanness or commitment to Africa?

Critique of Mazrui’s delineation of the Africans

While Mazrui’s has successfully called attention to the inadequacies of each of the traditional taxonomies for defining or delineating the Africa – race, geography and consciousness of being an African -  his own notion of an African is also fraught with major weaknesses. For instance the notion appears so universalist and elastic that virtually anyone one can fit into one category or the other (or can stretch the elastic to create a new category for himself or herself - after all Africa is the original home of man!).

In fact the elasticity of  Mazrui’s  notion of the African reminds one of the  ‘cosmopolitans’ whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the   Francophone Genevan philosopher,  accused of trying to “justify their love of their country by their love of the human race and make a boast of loving the entire world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one.”

Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com

Twitter: @JideoforAdibe