Famed Pan-Africanist scholar Ali Mazrui has passed away after suffering for several months from a protracted illness. Professor Ali Al’Amin Mazrui, the author of some 30 books and the creator of the 1986 television series “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” died Monday, Oct. 12 in Binghamton, N.Y., at the age of 81.
Mazrui’s body will be flown to Kenya for a burial that will take place Saturday, Oct. 18 at his family’s cemetery, which sits across from the Fort Jesus museum in Mombasa, Kenya.
Mazrui was born Feb. 24, 1933, in Mombasa, Kenya. In the 1940s, his father served as the chief kadhi of Kenya, the nation’s lead judge regarding Islamic inheritance rights. Mazrui wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and also become a jurist in Islamic law, but his grades were initially not up to par, and he ended up having to look for employment instead.
Even while working, though, Mazrui maintained his intellectual pursuits, and after delivering a celebrated speech about the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday in 1952, Kenya’s colonial governor, Sir Philip Euen Mitchell, recommended Mazrui for scholarships that allowed him to attend university in England.
While in England, Mazrui began writing articles for Kenyan newspapers such as the Mombasa Times and the Arab Guardian. He eventually met and married Molly Vickerman, with whom he had three sons. Mazrui and Vickerman divorced in 1982. In 1991, Mazrui remarried after meeting Nigerian teacher Pauline Uti. They had two sons. Mazrui’s five sons are named Jamal, Al’Amin, Kim Abubakar, Farid Chinedu and Harith Ekenechukwu.
After attending Oxford University in England, Mazrui served as head of the Department of Political Science and dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He later served as professor of political science and then director of the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 1989, he was appointed to the faculty of Binghamton University in New York and named the Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies.
Mazrui’s books include “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest” (2002); “The Trial of Christopher Okigbo” (1971); “World Culture and the Black Experience” (1974); and “Black Reparations in the Era of Globalization” (2002). In the United States, he is most widely known for his television program “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” a nine-part series funded by PBS, the BBC and the Nigerian Television Authority. The series was described as controversial because of its reinterpretation of how U.S. residents should view this nation’s relations with the African continent.
Mazrui’s scholarship proposed that the continent be seen through the lens of the three major forces that have had the widest influence on Africans: indigenous African cultures, Islam and Western-based Christianity. The professor looked at how Christian missionaries, Western secularism, Muslim sects and native religions have played a role in the exploitation of Africa’s human and natural resources.
But even before the program was aired, Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who was serving as the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, protested that funding should not have been provided for the making of “The Africans” because it was anti-American.
In the book “The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui” (edited by Omari H. Kokole; Africa World Press, 1998), Betty Jean Craige writes: “Mazrui [told] audiences around the world about his people, and in presenting Africa’s history as he saw it, he told a different story from that which the strong had told. It was not a story likely to please the strong; it did not please Lynne Cheney, who … accused the series of lacking ‘balance and objectivity,’ saying that it blamed ‘every technological, moral and economic failure of Africa on the West.’ She called it an ‘anti-Western diatribe.’
“To this Mazrui replied that the series was not ‘anti Western but anti-imperialist.’”
The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, has stated that the death of Mazrui was a loss for the entire continent. Mazrui was “a towering academician whose intellectual contributions played a major role in shaping African scholarship,” Kenyatta stated.