Memories of Prof Mazrui, the passionate intellectual

Professor Sheikh Ali Alamin Mazrui, my late mwalimu at Makerere, has been intimately on my mind all this week. As you read this, eminent scholars from all over the world are holding a symposium in Nairobi, the first one in Mazrui’s homeland, to discuss and evaluate his scholarly significance.

I have been invited to the distinguished gathering of intellectuals, convened by my friend and colleague Kimani Njogu of Twaweza. But since I am neither a scholar nor an intellectual but a mere academic workman, I have been wondering what to tell the scholars there. Maybe I will just regale them with personal memorabilia like the following. I might get away with it.

Ali Mazrui wrote me a letter once. This was way back in 1969. He was our director of postgraduate studies at Makerere’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and he had had the impression that I had missed classes that I should have attended. He kindly alerted me that the end-of-year examinations were just around the corner, and he wished me good luck.

Dr Mazrui, as he was then, was, however, mistaken. I wrote back to him, politely reminding him that I was registered as a “Research and Thesis Only” Master of Arts student and, as such, I was not required to attend any classes or submit coursework.

PLENTY OF OPTIONS

Things were pretty flexible then and, although entry to post-graduate study was strictly reserved for the best performers, once you got in, you had quite a number of options, including that research and thesis one, without coursework.

Anyway, I cannot remember what happened to Mazrui’s letter after I replied to it. I wish I had kept it. It would have been a precious personal souvenir of this unique man, would it not?

Maybe there is a copy of it somewhere in the archives of what is now Makerere’s College of Humanities and Social Studies. If I ever find it, I will insist that it be prominently displayed in the University’s planned “Mazruiana”. After all, there is no harm in wanting to bask in the glory of one’s illustrious director of studies.

I also have another gem of semi-private writing from Mazrui. It is a little piece of verse which he submitted to our student poetry rag, called the Makerere Beat. Edited by our colleague Amar Kapoor, of whom I have lost track since Amin’s expulsion of Asians, this cyclostyled occasional publication was devoted to our creative efforts that we shared at meetings of the reading groups we organised at the campus.

I do not remember Ali Mazrui attending any of our readings, but apparently Kapoor had managed to persuade him to contribute to the Beat. His poem had lines reading, in part, something like: a girl on the shelf/unread/a book on the bed/unwed... (I quote from memory).

'CULT OF COMPLEXITY'

I guess the verse is about the many unfinished projects in our lives and the confusion arising therefrom, as suggested by the unexpected verbal collocations. But I cannot be sure. Mazrui was, unlike me, enthusiastic about abstract verse and he engaged in several debates of the time regarding its viability.

Remember those were the tumultuous days of luminaries like Christopher Okigbo, who rejected the “African writer” label and gleefully declared that he only wrote for poets, and Wole Soyinka, with his “mathemagical” circles in Idanre and Other Poems.

I call these poets ministers of “the cult of complexity”, and I contrast them with Okot p’Bitek and Achebe’s “genius of is and was”, the virtue of creative simplicity.

But back to Mazrui, why do I mention these apparent trivia of his letter to me and his casual verse in the students’ homemade pamphlet? The reason is that they might throw some fresh light on the approach that made this infinitely fascinating Kenyan arguably the greatest humanities scholar to come out of Africa in the 20th Century.

First, we note his meticulous commitment to professional scholarship. Why should a senior academic spend his time chasing up an apparently errant young post-graduate, like me, who was not even directly in his discipline? But that was the scholarly ethic of Mazrui and the other Makerere men and women of those distant days.

SCATTERED ATTENTION

For Mazrui was only one of the fine crop of scholars and teachers at Makerere then, including John Mbithi, Margaret Macpherson, Ahmed Mohiddin and Joseph Ouma Muga. To these lovers of knowledge, no student was too unimportant, no activity was too peripheral to deserve their full attention.

Much as present-day dons face a host of challenges, ranging from traffic jams to tactics of financial survival, they would do well to remember that scholarly greatness is never achieved through scattered attention. Single-minded and totally selfless pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake, is what makes the Mazruis of this world.

Mazrui’s contribution to our verse pamphlet is symptomatic of his insatiable eagerness to share with all and sundry his fascination with experiences and ideas. This scholarly generosity is also rather rare today. Our academe is impoverished by a mercenary tendency to hoard ideas with vague intentions of using them for personal profit.

Reflecting on Mazrui’s career at Makerere, I was struck by his readiness to use every available platform to share his experiences, impressions and ideas with, not only his peers, but also with lesser mortals, like us then-struggling post-graduates and undergraduates.

The platforms were not only the highly respected journals of the time, like Transition, the East African Journal or the Makerere Journal of Social Sciences, but also newspapers, radio talks and ‘Main Hall’ debates.

If I can make it to the learned assembly, I will tell the scholars that, while brilliance matters, it is that willingness to share and interact that distinguishes the Mazruis of this world from run-of-the-mill academics.

Certainly, whatever I failed to learn from Mazrui, the eagerness to share is the best lesson I learnt from him.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and Literature in East Africa. [email protected]