Who was Ali Al'amin Mazrui?

THE warrior is dead, and the spear burns still. The faint of heart scatter in fear of the scorching flames. Professor Ali Al'amin Mazrui died on Monday, and death has robbed us of one of Africa’s greatest scholars.

He passed away on Monday morning in Binghamton, New York, USA.

Africa has lost one of its finest sons, a straight talker who frightened corrupt African leaders and their Western corruptors alike. He proved beyond doubt that the human intellect was raceless.

Born on February 24, 1933 in Mombasa, Kenya, Mazrui was an academic and political writer of note, specialising on African and Islamic studies and North-South relations.

His acid tongue did not spare any ruler, insignificant or great.

Mazrui questioned the American policy on the so-called war on terror

“One question which the (Barack) Obama war on terror has posed is whether the drone has become a weapon of ethnic-specific targeted assassinations,” he said in one of his lecture titled Fighting Evil from Nuremberg to Guatanamo: Double Standards in Global Justice.

He posed the question: “If the alleged terrorists against the United States had been Europeans, like Russian communists or Austrian Nazis, would any American President have chosen targeted assassinations as an answer to the problem?”

The question posed was whether the US had found it easy to authorize the killing of Pakistanis and Yemenis because they were neither of European stock nor of Judeo-Christian ancestry.

Mazrui drew comparisons between Obama and one of his predecessors President Harry Truman, who authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Again he asks whether it was easy for Truman to drop such horrendous weapons on Asiatic populations rather than on European cities, because they were the so-called “yellow people”.

In another lecture titled The Sunset of Institutional Racism: From Bismarck to Barack, From Nujoma to Mandela, he tackles the legacy of colonialism and the devastating effects left behind.

“It is one of the ironies of the great German leader Otto von Bismarck that he helped to unify Germany in the nineteenth century and initiated the division of Africa soon after”.

He argued that the unification of Germany led to the emergence of one of the most powerful Western countries in the twentieth century, while the partition of Africa resulted in some of the most vulnerable societies in modern world history.

He says Namibia’s first president, Samuel Nujoma, South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela and Obama are potential icons of a future post-racial age, which is still unfolding.

“Nujoma was the penultimate nail on apartheid; Nelson Mandela has become the most respected Black man, by other races, in world history. Barack Obama is already a great man, but not yet a great President,” he says.

A major cause of this joint success, by Nujoma, Mandela and Obama, lies in their embodying a short memory of racial hate, and in their impressive readiness to forgive historic adversaries, he says.

“They have all illustrated a capacity to transcend historic racial divides. Cultures differ in hate retention. Some cultures nurse their grievances for generations. Other cultures may be intensely hostile in the midst of a conflict, but as soon as the conflict has ended they display a readiness to forgive, even if not always to forget,” says Mazrui.

Armenians are still demanding justice from Turkey nearly one hundred years after the massacres. The Irish also have long memories of grievance. Clashes occur in Northern Ireland every year concerning marches which commemorate “Orange conflicts” in the seventeenth century, he says.

“Jews also have strong collective memories of the Holocaust and earlier outbursts of European anti-Semitism,” says Mazrui.

He argues that Nelson Mandela came from a culture which is illustrative of Africa’s short memory of hate. That culture is far from being pacifist.

“Wars and inter-ethnic conflicts have been part of Africa’s experience from before European colonization and decades after independence. What is different about African culture is Africa’s relatively low level of hate retention,” he says.

Mazrui says we need to place Nelson Mandela in the context of other African leaders as well as African Americans.

“Postcolonial Africa had produced other leaders who had illustrated Africa’s short memory of hate. Jomo Kenyatta was condemned by a British colonialist as “leader unto darkness and death”—and imprisoned in a remote part of Kenya. He emerged from imprisonment on the eve of independence and proclaimed “suffering without bitterness.” He transformed Kenya into a staunchly pro-Western country. A short memory of hate indeed,” says Mazrui.

He also makes example of former Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, who unleashed a civil war in Zimbabwe when he unilaterally declared independence. He lived to sit in a parliament of Black-ruled Zimbabwe and was not subjected to post-war vendetta or trial.

“By the time Nelson Mandela was having afternoon tea with the unrepentant widow of the founder of apartheid, Mrs. Verwoerd, he had tough acts to follow in African,” he says.

Mazrui argues that the partition of the continent unleashed unprecedented changes in African societies—political, economic, cultural and psychological.

“... the seeds of the post-colonial wars themselves lie in the sociological mess which the post-Berlin partition created in Africa by destroying ancient boundaries of identity and old methods of conflict-resolution without creating effective substitute ones in their place,” he says.

Mazrui says African governments have tended to be possessive about colonial borders and have not only failed to challenge them but discouraged those who did.

“The borders generate conflicts within them, but have not normally generated conflict across them. While Black against White in Africa is a clash over resources, Black against Black is more often a clash of identities,” he says.

He says Bismarck helped to change the history of a whole continent.

In the 1970s, Mazrui's criticism of the then Kenyan and Ugandan regimes led to his exile in the US.

At the time of his death, he was an Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.

Mazrui rose to prominence when he challenged the accepted orthodoxies of African intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s.

He argued that communism, just like capitalism, was a Western import unsuited for the continent’s conditions.

He described himself as a proponent of African liberalism, and opposed Western interventions in the developing world.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un, (may God keep and bless his soul now and on the day of judgement).

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