Ali Mazrui died a despised literary giant by a number of African scholars because of what they perceived as Mazruis non commitment to the aspirations of Africa. Some saw him as an aloof polemicist who was quick to announce and condemn the failures of the continent without suggesting seriously thought-out alternatives. It is well documented, for instance, that Wole Soyinka and the late Mazrui did not see eye to eye. When Mazrui offered a preliminary critique of Henry Louis Gates Africa series, Soyinka, in his response to Mazrui, went for the jugular, and said: Ali Mazrui and I, let me frankly acknowledge, are ancient adversaries. With this level of indecorous conduct, I am reconciled to the fact that we are likely to remain so for a long time to come. In 1966, Ali Mazrui would publish an article in Transition in which he discussed the contributions of Dr. Kwame Nkurumah. His essence was that although Nkurumah had been a great African, he had fallen short of becoming a great Ghanaian. His title of the article was Nkurumah: the Leninist Czar, a comparison of Nkurumah with the Russians leader known for horrors and human exploitation. Mazrui would not spare Julius Nyerere, discrediting him for the collapse of negotiations for an East African Federation. According to Mazrui, by Tanzania withdrawing from the East African currency board of 1965 and establishing its own currency, it stopped the flow of labor in East Africa by restricting immigration of labor from Kenya. Ali Mazrui would also, in most of his lectures, exhort the Ibo of Nigeria as the Jews of Africa and the Kikuyu of Kenya as the most progressive people in Kenya. He would attribute the success of the Kikuyu to both hard work peasant capitalism. On one occasion, Mazrui reported he had the personal pleasure of witnessing a group of Kikuyu women at work, carrying stones on their backs to build a water-well collectively. Each member of the community was expected to contribute a share of labor to the well building. Mazrui would point out that the same attitude and practices was behind the construction of Harambee schools which had been built by the communities themselves without the government assistance through out Kikuyu-land
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 06:25:13 +0000
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