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(I am not sure if the entire "The Africans" PBS series discussed in the
obit is available on Youtube but this is part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnr42v3xBN4. I saw it when it first came
out and it is really quite good, in the spirit of Basil Davidson.)
NY Times, Oct. 28 2014
Ali Mazrui, Scholar of Africa Who Divided U.S. Audiences, Dies at 81
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Ali Mazrui, a scholar and prolific author who set off a tsunami of
criticism in 1986 by writing and hosting “The Africans: A Triple
Heritage,” a public television series that culminated in what seemed to
be an endorsement of African nations’ acquiring nuclear weapons, died on
Oct. 12 at his home in Vestal, N.Y. He was 81.
His family announced the death without specifying a cause.
Uhuru Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, where Professor Mazrui was born,
said at the time of his death that he was “a towering academician whose
intellectual contributions played a major role in shaping African
scholarship.”
His books and his hundreds of scholarly articles explored topics like
African politics, international political culture, political Islam and
globalization. He was for many years a professor at the University of
Michigan, and since 1989 had held the Albert Schweitzer chair at
Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Reflecting his habit of provocation, Professor Mazrui wrote an article
in 2012, posted on Facebook, accusing Dr. Schweitzer, the revered
medical missionary in pre-independence Gabon, of being “a benevolent
racist.” He wrote that Dr. Schweitzer had called Africans “primitives”
and “savages,” and had treated Africans in a hospital unit that was
separate from, and less comfortable than, one for whites.
His courage transcended ideas. When Professor Mazrui was a
political-science professor in Uganda in the early 1970s, the country’s
brutal dictator, Idi Amin, invited him to be his chief adviser on
international affairs — “his Kissinger,” Professor Mazrui told The New
York Times in 1986. Instead, he publicly criticized Amin and fled Uganda.
“The Africans,” a nine-part series that was originally broadcast by the
BBC and later shown on PBS, portrayed Africa as having been defined by
the interplay of indigenous, Islamic and Western influences. Professor
Mazrui had acquired the perspective by growing up speaking Swahili,
practicing Islam and attending an English-speaking school in Mombasa, Kenya.
“My three worlds overlapped,” he said in the interview with The Times.
The series glorified the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, saying he
inspired Africans to have a sense of destiny and become actors on the
world stage — a stance that set off storms of criticism. In the last
episode, Professor Mazrui predicted a “final racial conflict” in South
Africa that would end with whites’ shrinking from using nuclear weapons
for fear of killing themselves and then being defeated in an armed
struggle, ending apartheid. Blacks, he said, would inherit “the most
advanced nuclear infrastructure on the continent,” and nuclear weapons
would become a bargaining chip in a worldwide black-white struggle.
He told The Los Angeles Times that he was “uneasy” that the United
States and the Soviet Union could start a nuclear war, without Africa
having the same capability. “I want black Africa to have the bomb to
frighten the system as a whole,” he said.
The National Endowment for the Humanities, which had contributed
$600,000 toward the making of the series, removed its name from the
credits. Lynne Cheney, the chairwoman of the endowment, called the
series “worse than unbalanced,” noting that it included no interviews
giving divergent views.
Professor Mazrui’s answer was that he had intended to represent the
views of one African — “a view from the inside,” he called it. “There
are many parts that are anti-imperialist,” he told The New York Times.
“Africa is concerned with past domination and afraid of redomination.”
Reviewing the series for The Times, John Corry called its scholarship
“empty” and said it was “a vehicle solely for Mr. Mazrui’s feelings.”
But Clifford Terry, writing in The Chicago Tribune, suggested that this
personal perspective was in fact a strength. “It is obvious, through it
all,” he wrote, “that here is a man who deeply cares about what he likes
to call a ‘remarkable continent.’ ”
Tom Shales of The Washington Post applauded the program’s abrasiveness.
“The alternative,” he wrote, “would be an innocuous, safely ‘balanced’
documentary on Africa that made no ripples, provoked no discourse.”
Ali Al’Amin Mazrui was born on Feb. 24, 1933, in Mombasa. His father was
an eminent Muslim scholar and the chief Islamic judge of Kenya.
As a boy he was not a good student and studied typing at a technical
school. He stayed on there as a clerk and kept unsuccessfully applying
to university, he said in a 2009 interview with The Observer, a Ugandan
newspaper.
The Observer reported that the governor of Kenya had heard him give a
speech on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday and had been impressed. That
led to a series of interviews and a scholarship to finish secondary
school in England. He ended up earning a bachelor’s degree from the
University of Manchester, a master’s from Columbia in New York and, in
1966, a doctorate from Oxford.
The next year he published three books on African politics. In 1973, he
began teaching at Makerere University in Uganda. When he fled Uganda, he
went to the University of Michigan to teach political science. In
addition to teaching at Binghamton, he held an at-large professorial
appointment with Cornell and lectured at many schools around the world.
He was president of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North
America and president of the African Studies Association of the United
States. He advised the United Nations and the World Bank.
Professor Mazrui’s marriage to the former Molly Vickerman ended in
divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Pauline Uti; his sons,
Jamal, Alamin, Kim, Farid and Harith; his daughter, Grace Egbo-Mazrui;
three grandchildren; and a sister, Alya.
In editing “The Africans” for American television, Professor Mazrui
deleted his description of Karl Marx as “the last of the great Jewish
prophets” because producers feared it might be taken as anti-Semitic.
In Britain, where the line was used, he had worried that Marxists might
be offended by the reference to Marx as a prophet.
“My life,” he once said, “is one long debate.”
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