“The Kenyan political thinker who was unafraid to confront contentious issues.” “The African political scientist who sparked controversy.” This was how The Guardian and The Times of London respectively described Ali Mazrui shortly after his death in October 2014.
That Mazrui thrived on controversy is widely known. The image of Mazrui portrayed by Malawian scholar Paul Zeleza in his intervention at the Ali Mazrui 10th anniversary virtual webinar last month is, however, quite different. Just as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
have often been shorn of their radicalism in much of contemporary analyses, Zeleza’s Mazrui seems to be ideologically compatible with an eclectic motley crew of diverse scholars, revealing a cardboard cutout of the Kenyan scholar. Precisely because Zeleza is a widely respected academic and administrator whose work could have a great impact, particularly on younger scholars, we wish to challenge the portrayal of the Kenyan academic in his 18-page essay “The Enduring Legacy of Ali Mazrui: Commemorating an Intellectual Griot.” Zeleza purports to discuss comparatively Mazrui’s scholarship and that of 28 other thinkers: his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.
The task could not be nobler, but Zeleza unfortunately largely fails to achieve his stated goals of placing the Kenyan intellectual within the context of his ancestral and contemporary influences. We might classify Zeleza’s sins into two parts: sins of commission and s.
