Mazrui’s legacy
will live forever
I will
remember Mazrui as a hero who left indelible footprints in the sands of time.
His legacy will live on
BY MUSYOKA NGUI
Last Monday morning I was attending
a 7 a.m. lecture on Kiswahili Seminar. My lecturer Mr. Enoch Bitugi Matundura
received a rather sad call from a colleague in Germany confirming bad news.
Matundura does not pick calls in class. This one was exceptionally important
given the way he excused himself to answer the call. Just like that he broke
the sad news that Prof. Ali Mazrui, renowned scholar had passed on.
We knew the news before the media
confirmed it. Now, many scholars and
students mourn the death of the Kenyan international intellectual who not only
pushed the Kenyan story but also peddled the African narrative.
INTERNATIONAL
INTELLECTUAL
I celebrate and admire Mazrui for a
number of things. First of all is his intellectual prowess that saw him named
among the top 100 intellectuals in the world by Prospect Magazine (UK)
and Foreign Policy Magazine (US). He was the 73rd most
intelligent individual according to the in 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll.
Mazrui came across as a deeply
patriotic son of Kenya given that he resisted pressure from the US to denounce
his Kenyan citizenship and take up American one. This should be a lesson to our
athletes who discover greener pastures elsewhere and dump their Motherland for
good.
Mazrui was born in Mombasa and in his
will he stated that he would wish to be laid to rest in Mombasa Old Town where
he was born. Clearly, Mazrui is connected to his roots in life and death.
The political science professor and
writer on South-North relations, African and Islamic studies will be immortalised
by the publications he has left behind.
DEEP PATRIOT
The fact that he served as the first
non-president Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Science and Technology under
Kibaki regime and despite having a busy international schedule speaks of a
patriot who slotted his country high in his priorities. It is a challenge to
Kenyans in Diaspora to emulate him.
Another interesting turn of Mazrui’s academic life was that he was
denied entry into Makerere University for “not meeting the entry marks”.
Despite this setback he bounced back by studying in Manchester University in
1960 where he graduated with a distinction and studied hard enough to come back
to Makerere not as a student but as a lecturer. He further did his masters at Columbia
University in New York in 1961, and his
doctorate (DPhil)
from Oxford University
(Nuffield
College) in 1966.
It is
after obtaining his doctorate degree that Mazrui returned to Kampala, Uganda to
teach Political Science as well as heading the Faculty of Social Sciences.
INDELIBLE
FOOTPRINTS
As I pick
his 1995 book Swahili, State and Society: The Political Economy of an
African Language [with Alamin M. Mazrui] (Nairobi: East African Educational
Publishers) to do my Kiswahili Seminar assignment, I will remember Mazrui as a
hero who left indelible footprints in the sands of time. His legacy will live
on. The challenge is for the current and future generations of Africa to take
up the mantle and advance his intellectual prowess for posterity.
Rest in
Peace Professor Ali Mazrui.
The
writer is a Final Year BA Communication and Media student at Chuka University
and a blogger at musyokangui.blogspot.com (Youth Issue)
No comments:
Post a Comment