posted by Cilas Kemedjio
Chinua Achebe, in There Was a Country. A Personal History of the Biafra, claims that his generation has been referred to as the lucky one. Achebe’s generation bore witness to dramatic social and economic changes thanks to the modernization introduced by European colonizers. Besides the material changes that were transforming the African landscape, there was “a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.” They stood in-between the crumbling walls of tradition and the surging demands for independence. They witnessed and became, in their own right, « midwives » for the great cultural and political renaissance that vanquished the remnants of what Fanon termed a dying colonialism. The lucky generation is made of fraternity of great writers, artists, activists, and intellectuals who have brought African voices in the global village. This generation, as of late, is becoming more and more a disappearing act, thanks to the laws of biology. The members of this fraternity—for it was mostly a fraternity—were recruited from the best students of the colonial schools. The trajectory of the brilliant pupil of the colonial school, to borrow this expression from literary scholar Lydie Moudileno, was familiar: “the gifted young student of the colonial school evolves in a world imprinted with both the classics of French literature and black diaspora movements of the beginning of the century, which lead him to a political awareness of his people, and translates into a political and literary engagement for a form of independence.”
Ali Mazrui, born on February 24, 1933 in Mombasa belongs to this exceptional fraternity of the brilliant student of the colonial school. As many of his fellow Eastern Africans, he went to Makerere, then a branch of the University of London as Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells us in his memoirs. A great scholar, activist, and public intellectual of the panafricanist tradition formulated by Kwame Nkrumah, he made significant contributions to the story, after completing his advanced studies in Great Britain. The duty of this great generation was to respond to the call of history, by returning home to teach. Frantz Fanon, in the Wretched of the Earth, charges the intellectual in an oppressed society to abolish the history of colonization and start writing the history of the liberation. Ali Mazrui told the story of Africa, and the many tributes that we are making available here seem to agree on this point. The CIHA Blog salutes a great panafricanist whose ground-breaking scholarship has been instrumental in challenging unequal power relations en route to seeking equality, justice and, ultimately, respect for others’ desires, beliefs and practices.
See below for a roundup of works commemorating Mazrui.
http://www.democracynow.org/
http://www.counterpunch.org/
http://www.brookings.edu/