Ali Mazrui's is a labor of love. A romance. An article of faith. An ode to hope. Or is it a celebration of decay? Such was my instant reaction as a woebegone African. For Mazrui's book left me with awe, woe, and answers that beget other questions. Awe because of Africa's splendor. Woe because decay beneath that magnificent exterior offers a gruesome picture. And the questions are legion....What is wrong with Africa? Or rather, who is wronging Africa? How is it wronged? Is there hope for the future? Will it change for the better?
Ali Mazrui peregrinated the lengths and breadths of Africa for The Africans in quest of answers. And he found Africa's structures in tatters, but its soul unscathed. He attributes the survival of Africanity, despite the odds, to the resilience of African culture. He believes that the ongoing anarchy is the result of a war of cultures being waged, a struggle between Western ideology and indigenous culture.
The Kenyan scholar says Africa is balancing between the "chasm of anarchy and the brink of tyranny." It must now seek salvation in its culture.
Not long ago, the father of Guinea-Bissau independence, Amilcar Cabral, underscored the significance of culture. "In the beginning," he wrote, "it was culture, and in the end it is also culture." Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah before him advocated the revival of "African Personality." Why then has Africa become the favorite abode of the three cardinal d's - decay, degradation, and death? Why is it carrying a stigma to the doorstep of the world?
Mullahs, Marxists, and Mafutamengi
Ali Mazrui leaves little to the imagination, although he sometimes stretches his arguments too far if he is not overstretching himself to drive home his points. Inspiring and provocative, he reaches parts of the African psyche other scholars have failed to reach. Will he be relegated to the rogue's gallery of "reactionaries" as he was in the 1960s as editor of Transition magazine at Makerere University (Uganda), or will he be honored as a visionary of tomorrow's Africa?
"The ancestors of Africa are angry," warns Mazrui. "Their anger is all around us." It is anger at our failure to refer to their wisdom and emulate their tenacity.
"There is as yet," observes the Kenyan scholar, "no revolutionary government which stands for the defense of indigenous values and customs. Yes the giant of Africa's indigenous legacy continues to sleep! And when it dreams, it dreams of dances complacently - while mullahs, Marxists, and mafuta-mengi (the fattened ones) take over Africa."
A revivalist, Mazrui gives the genesis of the mafuta-mengi - the urban sophisticates - who are "dis-Africanizing" Africa in the name of "modernization. "If the Jews in the Diaspora," he says, "had scrambled to change their culture as fast as Africans in their own homelands seemed to be doing until recently, the miracle of Jewish identity would not have lasted those two or three additional millennia in the wilderness."
Is Mazrui calling the virtue of "modernization" a vice? Not at all. He advocates assimilating modern techniques without being
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