Ali Mazrui

Ali Mazrui: The Man Who Argued With Everyone

When Cornell gathered to commemorate him, it borrowed his own line for the title: "My Life is One Long Debate." It was not false modesty. Over five decades Ali Mazrui picked fights with Marxists and capitalists, with Western liberals and African nationalists, with secularists and Islamists, and with a good many of his own colleagues — and he did it in prose so lucid that the arguments travelled far beyond the seminar room. In 1986 he took the argument onto television and detonated one of the loudest cultural controversies American public broadcasting has ever had.

Mombasa, and a Failed Exam

Mazrui was born in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast in 1933, into a family with deep roots in East African Islamic scholarship. That inheritance — Swahili, Muslim, coastal, oriented as much toward the Indian Ocean as toward the African interior — supplied the raw material for everything he later theorised about Africa's plural identity.

His start was not distinguished. He performed badly enough in his examinations to be rejected by Makerere College, then the premier institution of higher education in British East Africa. The rejection is worth pausing on: the man who would become one of the most decorated academics of his generation, holder of honorary degrees in divinity, science, human development, humane letters and political economy, could not get into the local university. He assembled his credentials abroad instead — a BA from Manchester in 1960, an MA from Columbia in 1961, and a doctorate from Oxford in 1966.

Makerere and After

He then went to teach at the institution that had turned him down. Makerere in the 1960s was the intellectual furnace of newly independent East Africa, and Mazrui became one of its most visible figures — a scholar who wrote for the press as readily as for journals, and who took the view that a political scientist who could not be understood by the public had misunderstood the job.

He left for the United States and never entirely came back. His career ran through Stanford, the University of Michigan, Binghamton University and Cornell. At Binghamton he was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and directed the Institute of Global Cultural Studies; at Cornell he was A.D. White Professor-at-Large, later emeritus, and a senior scholar in Africana studies. The output was enormous: somewhere between thirty and forty-odd books depending on who is counting, plus hundreds of articles on African politics, international political culture and political Islam.

The Africans, and the American Backlash

In 1986 the BBC and PBS broadcast *The Africans: A Triple Heritage*, written and presented by Mazrui. Its thesis was the one that became his signature: that modern Africa is the product of three overlapping inheritances — indigenous African tradition, Islam, and the Western legacy delivered by colonialism — and that none of the three can be subtracted without falsifying the whole.

The series made him famous and made him enemies. In the United States it was attacked as anti-Western, and the row over its funding and framing became a set-piece in the culture wars of the late 1980s. What the attacks generally missed is that Mazrui was not a simple anti-colonial polemicist. His argument was structurally even-handed and therefore unsatisfying to everybody: the West was one of three formative forces, neither the origin of all Africa's ills nor the source of its salvation, and Islam was granted a weight in African history that both Western liberals and African secular nationalists preferred not to concede.

The Awkward Positions

Mazrui specialised in propositions his own allies did not want. He criticised Marxism and Western capitalism with roughly equal energy, arguing that Africa's problem was dependency rather than any single ideological failing. He pressed for stronger ties between African Americans and the African continent. He argued that sharia law was not inherently incompatible with democracy — a position that made him indispensable to some readers and unforgivable to others. And during the Cold War he floated the idea that Africa should acquire nuclear weapons as a deterrent, a proposal designed less as policy than as a provocation about who is permitted to hold power in the international system.

He was also, throughout, an insider. He advised institutions including the World Bank, served as president of the African Studies Association of the United States and as vice-president of the International Congress of African Studies. He argued from within the establishment he was arguing against.

Why Ali Is Called a Genius

The specific quality was synthesis at an unusual scale — the ability to hold African, Islamic and Western intellectual traditions in view simultaneously and describe how they act on one another, without collapsing into any one of them. Most scholars of Africa in his era worked from a single frame: Marxist political economy, or liberal modernisation theory, or cultural nationalism. Mazrui's triple heritage was a refusal of that choice, and its durability as a phrase — it entered the vocabulary of people who never read a page of him — is evidence that it named something real.

The public recognition supports the claim as far as such things can. *Prospect* and *Foreign Policy* placed him among the world's hundred leading public intellectuals in 2005; he was ranked among the five hundred most influential Muslims in 2012–13; Michigan gave him its Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 1988 and he took the Distinguished Africanist Award in 1995. These are honours for influence, and influence is what he had.

The honest counter-case is that Mazrui was an essayist and a synthesiser rather than a builder of theory or a producer of new empirical knowledge. The triple heritage is a powerful organising metaphor; it is not a testable model, and critics have argued it flattens enormous variation across a continent into a tidy tripartite scheme. His fondness for the arresting formulation sometimes outran his evidence, and the nuclear-deterrence provocation is the clearest case of an idea launched for its rhetorical charge rather than its plausibility. He built no school of successors in the way a theorist does.

What he did possess, at a level very few academics reach, is the capacity to make ideas about Africa legible to a global public without simplifying them into propaganda — and to remain, for fifty years, genuinely unpredictable about where he would come down. Call it a genius for framing rather than for discovery. On the evidence of how many people still use his frame, that is not a small thing.

Legacy

Mazrui died on 12 October 2014, aged eighty-one, and was buried in Kenya; his family asked that memorial contributions go to Georgetown University's Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, an institution devoted to precisely the conversation he spent his life conducting. His papers are held at Binghamton University Libraries. The concept he coined outlives him in the ordinary way ideas do — detached from its author, argued over by people on all sides, and still doing work. He would have considered that the correct outcome. The debate, after all, was the point.