| BOOK REVIEW TITLE: THE GLOBAL AFRICAN
A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui
EDITED BY: OMARI H. KOKOLE
PUBLISHERS: Africa World Press, Inc. P.O. Box 1892, Trenton, NJ
08607
1998
PAGES: 367
PRICE: US79.95
REVIWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG in Ottawa, Canada..
Prof. Ali Mazrui is a well-known African writer and teacher
for the past 30 years. He said to be one of Africa’s leading social scientist and
prolific writer, haven’t taught in Africa, Europe and the United States with
occasional lectures in other parts of the world. In his long academic and quasi-journalist
career he has dined and wined with global notables, made controversial statements and
write-ups and made friends and enemies. Like most people think he has been understood and
misunderstood.
The Global African, is in a way, a birthday present when he
was 60 and a proclamation of Prof. Mazrui’s long-running production and contribution
to Africa.
In a continent as complicated and diverse as Africa, Prof. Mazrui
has been able teach us what is Africa. It is in this light that in November 1992 in
Seattle, Washington, USA four panels of the annual African Studies Association devoted to
his large body works affectionately called Mazruianan. The result is The Global
African, a collection of Prof. Mazrui’s colossal works written by a team of
well-informed academic investigators in stimulating, literary and intellectual phenomena.
There are 17 writers, spanning the corpus of the social sciences, who have known Prof.
Mazrui over the years.
The editor of this volume, Dr. Omari H. Kokole, a Ugandan social
scientist who was former associate director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at
SUNY-Binghamton, died unexpectedly in September 1996. In an appreciation Prof. Mazrui
says, "African studies lost one of its emerging stars on political culture."
Like Prof. Mazrui, Dr. Kokole offered the thesis that post-colonial Africa was suffering
from the curse of the ancestors because the current generation of Africans has grandly
"ignored the lessons of cultural continuities."
Mazrui’s publications, herein called Mazruiana, reveal
him more as a of student political culture than political economy—culture here
meaning not just aesthetics but its wider sociological strands. But this cultural
phenomenon is seen both as weakness and strength. The book also reveals that Mazrui uses
comparison analogy, parallels, and historical precedent for illustration in his writings.
Added to this is Mazrui as student of power and its application
reflecting in his study of power at the local, national, regional, and world levels. But
above all these it is pre-eminent as an essayist the Mazrui made his mark. "The use
of this genre has allowed Mazrui to examine critically, even passionately most of the
important issues of his day as they unfolded."
More catching of these interpretation of Mazrui’s works is
Dunstan M. Wai’s piece, Mazruiphilia and Mazruiphobia: Democracy, Governance and
Development, which looks critically of the influence of culture in determining
development, the continuities in African political history, and Africa’s place and
role in the international system. Wai wraps this around Mazrui’s personal experience.
Mazrui says African economic culture is different from the universal
behavioural traits that Western economic developmental formulas assume. Mazrui says this
because he offers that "since independence, Africa has been the laboratory for a
sequence of "universalist" theories: that is, theories, which posit universal
laws of human behaviour in either the political or economic realm."
For Wai, as Kokole reviews, "culture is not necessarily the
autonomous and all-powerful force Mazrui seems to suggest: he contends instead that
culture is mediated and moderated by a variety of other social forces." For Mazrui it
is insufficient to speak of technical solutions to Africa’s development troubles
without looking deeply at the cultures that oil Africa.
Mazrui has come under attack for his prolific writing. He is accused
more of quantity than quality; that his work is not detailed; that he jumps from one topic
to another without fully exploiting the first one; that "his extremely high speed of
literacy creativity is more of a deficiency than an asset."
Kokole says he is misunderstood that his work can be divided into
serious and light-hearted, which is as a result of being "obscenely productive
essayist who combines study of the self, or personal experiences, with the study of the
wider society. And partly because of the quantity, the quality of Mazrui’s work is
uneven." Kokole also offers that Mazrui sees the big picture than the minute details. |