1 week Ago By Contributor
Ten years ago, in the early morning hours of October 12, 2014, the news broke in the town of Vestal in Upstate New York. The Kenyan political scientist Ali Mazrui had passed away. The news quickly spread around the globe.
It was instantaneously echoed by international media outlets and leading newspapers of the world. The New York Times proclaimed: “Ali Mazrui, Scholar of Africa Who Divided U.S.
Audiences, Dies at 81.” In his obituary, the Washington Post also described Mazrui in the headline as a “controversial scholar.” The Guardian and The Times in the U.
K. similarly announced his death. In short, it felt as if a global celebrity had died.
Mazrui never considered himself a global celebrity, but he was indeed anything but. Mazrui’s influence persists a decade after his death. He continues to inform, inspire, and stimulate even today, as a minute of Google search shows.
His contributions to scholarship and policy debates are being recognized as universities in, among other places, Africa (University of Johannesburg), the Middle East (U.A.E.
), and North America (University of Michigan; the University of Texas at Austin) have begun naming their awards, professorships or institutes after him. What is it that gives Mazrui such durability? The answer should provide us with inspiring and useful clues about Mazrui’s continued relevance. I think the main reasons pertain to the substance of Mazrui’s discourse and its style.
The latter goes beyond his literary sophistication. In his public and academic discourse, Mazrui had correctly anticipated or foresaw some of the major social theories of our time. In addition, and this is even more evident, he had predicted significant international events with pinpoint accuracy.
Mazrui’s predictions have been the least remarked upon (but not necessarily the least remarkable) aspect of his prolific scholarship. Let us, therefore, begin with only a fraction of what he had foresaw and predicted. A question has been raised by this writer, among others, whether Mazrui was a social constructivist before social constructivism emerged as a formidable paradigm in the study of international relations (IR).
It can be argued that in the late 1960s, Mazrui was breaking new ground in social theory by bringing culture to the center stage in the analyses of global processes. This was long before the “return of culture” to IR in the 1990s. Also, as early as the 1960s, Mazrui sharply critiqued modernization theory, which he saw as “a dynamic, if somewhat mistaken, intellectual theorizing.
” It was only in the 1990s that Samuel Huntington, the articulate proponent of modernization theory, admitted, in effect, that modernization theory was indeed a mistake. Subsequently, Huntington became preoccupied with conflicts of cultures and clashes of civilizations. It was this that prompted Mazrui to ask, rhetorically, in 1995: “Is the Huntington of modernization not at odds with the Huntington of the clash of civilizations?” In 1967, Mazrui invented the term “neo-dependency” in his doctoral dissertation, which was later converted into a book.
This was long before dependency theory became popular among leftist African intellectuals. Mazrui wrote in 1984: “[g]lobal capitalism is much more obstinate and resilient than its critics assume.” This was long before there was any clear sign that Soviet Communism was about to collapse and about ten years before Francis Fukuyama popularized the idea of the end of history.
Even more intriguing are Mazrui’s specific predictions. In 1972, Mazrui wrote: “When the hold of the white minority in Rhodesia is one day broken, we will almost certainly have a country called Zimbabwe.” Rhodesia gained independence in 1980 and was renamed Zimbabwe.
In 1973, Mazrui maintained: “...
before long, the question was bound to be asked whether China belonged to the ranks of the weak and underprivileged or was about to join the ranks of the powerful.” This was at least half a decade before Deng Xiaoping opened up China for business—a process that unleashed it as a rising global power. In 1975, Mazrui lamented: “.
..we are nowhere near an international police force strong enough to keep the Russians out of another Czechoslovakia.
” Mazrui was referring to the 1968 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. The purpose was to crush what was then called the Prague Spring. So, in 1979, the Russians invaded Afghanistan.
In his 1986 TV series The Africans (Program 5), Mazrui asserted that South Africa would be free from the white minority rule in the 1990s. In 1994, the white minority rule ended in South Africa. In 2013, I asked him what he thought regarding his predictions about South Africa.
Mazrui said: “I was vindicated about the schedule of the end of Apartheid, but I was wrong about the method or strategy of ending it. I was glad Apartheid ended with less violence than I predicted..
.” In 1989, Mazrui predicted: “If Islam gets nuclearized before the end of the century, two regional rivalries are likely to have played an important part in it. One is the rivalry between India and Pakistan; the other is the rivalry between Israel and the Arabs.
” In 1998, Pakistan exploded a nuclear device and joined the nuclear club. In 2007, Mazrui wrote in a paper titled “Africa’s Modern Pharaohs”: “In this new millennium, some African presidents are seeking immortality by grooming one of their sons to succeed..
.It seems conceivable that Kenya will have a younger President Kenyatta before very long [Uhuru Kenyatta].” In 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta was elected and became the president of Kenya.
Also in 2007, Mazrui wrote: “There is a possibility that South Sudan would secede from the North by the end of this decade.” In January 2011, South Sudan seceded, becoming the newest state in postcolonial Africa. What should also be remembered about Mazrui’s predictions is that he was not a big fan of the scientific method.
He never aspired nor claimed to be its practitioner. In fact, he was critical of it. In 1969, he said: “.
..only a thin dividing line separates scientific prediction from fortune telling.
” He said this at least twenty years before many of his scientifically oriented colleagues, with their sophisticated game theories, large data sets, and complex statistical methods were humbled by their inability to correctly predict two major international events of our time: the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and rise of China as an aspiring global hegemon. The second explanation of why Mazrui continues to be relevant today is the style of his discourse. It was a style he cultivated from the mid-1960s.
It was this style that helped propel him to public prominence from an early age. Apart from his artistic use of the English language, the style consisted of some essential elements. Mazrui would identify a public issue that could generate debate.
He would then relate that issue to his conviction. Mazrui enjoyed the contradictions of any public discourse, which, after breathing enthusiasm into it, he proceeded to highlight them in a dialectical manner. But Mazrui’s interest in the dialectic was in the Platonic sense of contradictions as a guide to truth.
Mazrui’s style of discourse also recognized challenging realities as they are while constructing a radical response to them. It was, therefore, a style known to stimulate and inspire some and irritate many others. Ali Mazrui is sorely missed today when the international system is experiencing what Mazrui would call its imminent instability for the first time in five hundred years.
The world is in flux. During such times, some might ask themselves, how would Mazrui have interpreted this or that event? What would he have said about this or that? With his dialectical style of analysis, he would have enlightened us about the meaning and significance of, for example, the rise of Trump (whom he would have probably compared with Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev and Uganda’s Idi Amin—Mazrui once described Idi Amin as a peasant bull in the china shop of diplomatic history); the potentially first black and woman president of the US, Kamala Harris; and the wars in the Middle East as well as in Ukraine, among many others. Comparing Nikita Khrushchev and Idi Amin, Mazrui wrote in the 1970s:“.
..both brought to the refined diplomatic world.
..the rustic embarrassment of inadequate inhibition.
Khrushchev was capable of shouting loudly at another head of government or of taking off his shoe and banging it on the table at the United Nations. Amin was capable of sending a cable to Richard Nixon wishing him a speedy recovery from Watergate and another cable to Prime Minister Golda Meir telling her to pull up her knickers against the background of the October War in the Middle East in 1973.” Mazrui would have also saluted Cyril Ramaphosa, whom he had described as the “potential president of South Africa” more than ten years before Ramaphosa assumed that position, for taking Israel to the International Court of Justice over the war in Gaza.
However, Mazrui would probably be puzzled by South Africa’s, at best ambivalent, position vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Of course, Mazrui is no longer with us. He can no longer impress us with his predictions, which he formulated based on deep comparative historical knowledge, exercise of judgment, and intuition rather than strict standards of scientific verification.
Neither can he mesmerize us with his evocative stories, bold predictions, insightful comparisons, interesting paradoxes, and colorful phrases. But all is not lost. In fact, almost nothing has been lost.
Mazrui’s supermarket of ideas had already been passed on to us through the meticulous work of the South African librarian and bibliographer A. S. Bemath.
In his only work of fiction, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo (1971), Mazrui wrote: “Death is one more ceremonial transition. It constitutes a passing in some ways no more fundamental and certainly no less fundamental than the transition from pre-adulthood to the full status of the adult. Death is a continuation and not an interruption.
” This means Ali Mazrui is not dead after all. He only changed his address. Seifudein Adem is a research fellow at JICA Ogata Research Institute for Peace and Development in Tokyo, Japan.
He has a Ph.D. in International Political Economy, researches Africa–Asia relations, and is the intellectual biographer of Ali Mazrui publishing ten books on, with, and about Ali Mazrui, including, more recently, Postcolonial Constructivism: Mazrui’s Theory of Intercultural Relations (Palgrave, 2021).
He has previously served as the associate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in New York from 2006 to 2016. Contributed by Seifudein Adem (PhD).
