Mazrui

Abstract

In the checkered history of Africology, from early colonial endeavors to the brave new world of postcolonialist dissections, few scholars elicited the excitement and adoration that Professor Ali Al-Amin Mazrui (1933-2014) did. On the very continent that he studied so intensely, libraries, educational centers, and roads have been named for him posthumously in recognition of his manifold contributions. And yet, although rare by the standards of academic aloofness, the adulation of his defenders was matched by the abrasive disdain and aberrant hostility of his detractors, some of whom were undoubtedly driven by intellectual or political opposition to his underlying project of reviving non-western consciousness during an era so marked by the supposed universalism of western finance, culture, and militarism. To be certain, though, Mazrui was not fazed by such criticism or challenge; instead, it would appear that he rather thrived on controversy, relishing each emergent opportunity to provide correctives to the received wisdom. Indeed, when writing, Mazrui was often schooling. His deliberately provocative pronouncements, in prose and speech, would question and rattle, but always make, in demonstrative (rather than didactic) terms, poignant points about errors perceptual and praxeological. In so doing, Mazrui – clearly inspired by the finesse of his Oxford doctoral training – was not shy to adopt riveting rhetorical devices: irony, hyperbole, and simile abounded. Such devices, however, did not obscure the structured ways, even if implicit, through which his analysis unfolded. When he took the time, he would reason as well as argue in clear schemata by employing binaries, triads, dichotomies, and juxtapositions. His eye for detail was as pronounced as his mastery of history: microhistory could give way to longue durée in a paragraph, the local and the global would intertwine, and the ideational and the ...