The Last Embers Are Burning: On Ali Mazrui and the scholarship we forgot to save

When Soyinka is angry, hell itself hath no fury to match the intensity of his rhetoric — examples abound. But two suffice: read his responses to dogmatic Marxists that he was too mired in Yoruba traditions. I suggest 'An Autistic Hunt' and 'Who is afraid of Elesin Oba?' In that kind of red-hot rage, Soyinka had described Mazrui's eccentric tendency to be introduced by listing all the professorships he held, twenty-eight or so at one point, as the boorish conduct of a cheap used car salesman. Stung, angered, infuriated, Mazrui was not to be outdone. He charged at Soyinka. He described Soyinka as a dictator, just like his own creation, Kongi. He alleged, bitterly, that Soyinka had never liked him because in 1986, when he, Soyinka, would have monopolised the international stage as an African scholar by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mazrui's Triple Heritage series was released. Mazrui accused Soyinka of trying to discredit his African credentials since then, pointing out to him that he, Mazrui, was married to a Nigerian and was a father to Nigerians. This, to my limited knowledge, was the first major public clash of African scholars using the then novel facility of the internet. It was, as should be expected, delightful in its erudition, but juvenile in how it was expressed. At the centre of the angry discharges had been Louis Skip Gates trying to 'democratise' responsibility for the transatlantic slave trade in a documentary. I have argued at length in prior expressed positions that Gates is wrong on that. If participation by some from the victims' side installs culpability on all, no mass-scale crime in history against humanity would have any guilty oppressors, not even Hitler's Nazis. And no historical record should ever mention victims at scale, for there are always internal collaborators among the oppressed. In some frustration at the banality of the argument, deliberately orchestrated by powerful revisionists of the present age, that everyone must bear equal guilt for the Transatlantic Slave Trade because there were some African collaborators, I often say, even Jesus had Judas among his chosen twelve. But Gates was a Soyinka protégé. Soyinka leapt to his defence when Mazrui went after him. The African earth itself shook from the ensuing tremors caused by this clash of titanic scholars. To his eternal credit, it was Ali Mazrui who eventually reached out to Wole Soyinka to make peace. In a later leaked letter, Mazrui appealed to Soyinka that, for the sake of the many young Africans distressed by the tone of their debate, it should end. He praised Soyinka's work and memorably said, words to the effect, 'If you cannot love me any longer, please do not hate me; if we cannot be friends, let us not be enemies.' Moving on from this episode to another, one of the deepest regrets of my amateur interests in African history is that I can find no digital recording of the famous debates between Ali Mazrui and Walter Rodney. Walter was a master orator. In challenging him to a public debate, Mazrui — by his own admission — probably overstepped. Walter Rodney, in signature fashion, appeared for the debate without any prepared notes. Speaking ex tempore entirely, Walter Rodney dazzled the assembled audience with his brilliance and riveting eloquence. To Mazrui's tendency to say 'on the one hand this, on the other hand that,' Rodney landed one of his best shots ever by describing colonialism as a 'one-armed bandit.' He mocked Mazrui's both-sides-ism ruthlessly. Mazrui was later became a 'Walter Rodn Professor' at some university. And would graciously, after Walter was assassinated, say publicly that he lost that debate to him. Many, especially dogmatic ideologues, forget that Mazrui could be a gracious scholar. It seemed to me that sometimes Mazrui drifted towards controversy for its own sake, because he enjoyed it. He paid a heavy price for that reputationally, not that he seemed to care. A man who could call the then very highly revered Kwame Nkrumah — an icon of Pan-Africanists everywhere — a 'Leninist-Czar,' only weeks after the 1966 coup; who at the high noon of the Dar es Salaam University project could write as critical an article as 'Tanzaphilia'; who could 'try' a secular martyr such as the iconic Christopher Okigbo so soon after his tragic death; publicly disagree with Ngugi's attitude to the usage of African language in his literary works, and more, was not likely to escape scars, some deep. Though it enraged him, Ali Mazrui was therefore never able to completely shut down the whispering campaigns by his opponents that he was a tool of the CIA. I saw him furiously reject that once when someone levelled the charge. Not even the later harassment by the same institution dimmed completely some of the suspicions. What will be, will be, in this life and after. My last physical encounter with Ali Mazrui was to happen again in Accra, at the British Council Hall. He was excitedly projecting the view that Jerry Rawlings had completely transformed, from a military dictator to a democrat, by organising the elections of 1996. Claude Ake, Wole Soyinka and some others had taken a very different view which I shared. Historical antecedents, skewed institutional precedents, etc., made Mazrui's enthusiasm seem incredibly naive to me. I told him robustly. I challenged him to apply the same criteria to Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, to then tell me whether he would now call him a democrat, because Moi had also fulfilled all the criteria Mazrui applied to Rawlings. The great Mazrui looked at the ceiling, paused for just a moment and simply said he saw my point. After the event, he posed for pictures with my wife, some of my friends and me. He was a gracious man. If he could be a combative intellectual, he was a very tolerant person too. He had patience even when engaging people way his juniors in age, achievement and intellectual capability. Will all the erudition of the earlier days, or most of it, be lost to later generations because we have not digitalised it? The seminal debates of the CODESRIA scholars; the African scholars taking on Trevor-Roper; Kwame Gyekye going after the universalist philosophers, some African, who were succumbing to the mistaken notion that Africans had no philosophy because it was not written; and the many battles for Africa's discursive autonomy and epistemic independence, fought with courage and at great cost, will they be lost to the so-called Gen Zs and after? Simply because we do not adapt to embrace new technological channels of communication? Which people have ever developed while so badly neglecting their history? Digitalising our knowledge is an important priority. We are here too, putting the future at risk, but now I must pause. I have never thought that for anyone to be considered a great scholar or distinguished intellectual, he or she must have said or written only things we can agree with. That is such a nonsensical expectation. We are not termites; diversity of thinking is an essential part of intellectual engagement. No one is infallible. No human has final epistemic authority to say, 'That which I have put together, let no man put asunder.' Alas, only God — however we perceive God — is allowed to be immortal. Mazrui should not be deified, but he deserves to be celebrated for his contribution. That is the true spirit of democratic intellectual commitment.