The colossus with the
feet of steel joined his ancestors in the early hours of October 13, 2014. Ali
Mazrui was larger than life! The most prodigious scholar of African politics,
his multiple talents combined creative work in elegant prose and poetry with polemics.
A teacher, orator,
journalist, filmmaker, and public intellectual, he was arguably the most
connected and best known African scholar for over half a century. There will be
a legion of tributes in his honor all over Africa and elsewhere. My tribute
will be limited to the place of language in his long writing and scholarly
career.
Growing up in
Christian homes, many Africans believe that they would hear about Babel
only in Christian parlance—or, if you will, in Christendom—where it refers to
the countless tongues when the “Tower of Babel” was being built.
However, in this
tribute, I crave your indulgence to allow me to use the opportunity of Mazrui’s
death to re-introduce The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in
the African Experience published by the University of Chicago Press in
1998.
This seminal book was
co-authored by Professors Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui (two Mazruis,
needing only one more to create a triple heritage of names!). I would like to
use this book to pay tribute to a legend, to talk more broadly about the power
and ambiguity of languages, how word choice connects you and me to society, and
how language opens a window into the world of politics. Baba Mazrui used
languages to distinguish himself.
Autobiography is
connected with language. Mwalimu Ali Mazrui (also honorifically called Nana
in Ghanaian royal parlance) was born and raised in East Africa, where he
learned English, Swahili, and Arabic. He was a Creolite, that is, one who had
the capacity to mix languages, and became entangled in the cultures as well as
the identities of these languages.
Years later, when he
became a respected scholar, he formulated his eclectic language background into
what he called Africa’s “triple heritage”: indigenous, Islamic, and Western.
That triple heritage, as he defined it, has a foundation in language.
Undoubtedly, the Creolite in Mazrui came across very forcefully in this
articulation of the triple heritage in a successful documentary film series on
Africa.
Orality is critical,
and it is sometimes presented as the use of African languages or their revival
to advance the agenda of modernity. The endorsement of the creative power in
orality becomes a sort of theatrical performance itself. The people whom he
wrote about are grounded in orality, and they represent this orality in
conversations and text. Mazrui was able to capture their imaginations and
reality.
To Mazrui, English
was a vehicle to mobility, modernity, and intellectual power. His prolificity
was facilitated by the infrastructure of the English language. His works are
focused on African politics and economy, the search for change agents, and the
understanding of processes in the longue durée.
The languages
of Mazrui, a Creolite, embedded the narrative of the self in that of the
nation. Although he did not pursue his work in a chronological fashion, the
genealogies are clear. There was the autobiography of childhood in the TV
series, one that talked about his family, and how that family was connected to
an identity.
This is how orality
structures a narrative. He possessed a nostalgia for Mombasa, Kenya, and
lamented the passing of many of its cultural elements into oblivion, just as
the Griot in Senegal would present a storyline. Mazrui was fond of placing
stress on space and memory which, although presented in the colonial language
of English, he always grounded in orality.
Orality recognizes
the organic relationship between the environment and human beings, as humans
use the powerful animals in the jungle to describe themselves. Human beings
developed a strong understanding of everything around them, from insects to
trees, and call upon the resources of the environment to organize their
religions and rituals.
This connection with the environment can be
characterized as sensing nature itself, and in doing so, using a language that
draws heavily on all available objects and elements and working them into
idioms, proverbs, and parables.
Moving into the
school system, the language of orality is not discarded but expanded upon.
English and Swahili become juxtaposed, and indigenous languages may be added to
create a creolization. One sees in a number of Mazrui’s writings this
juxtaposition. Strikingly, he also brought in poetic stanzas, woven into prose,
stylistic choices that embroidered an argument or were used as transitional
connecting points in building an assembly of ideas.
In Mazrui’s work,
poetry reveals creolization, the unconscious recourse to the multiplicity of
languages and creative genres. This brings the otherwise estranged languages of
the farmers and the professor closer to a mutual understanding. Mazrui was a
language bargainer, shopping for the appropriate genre in which to negotiate in
the marketplace of ideas. He was indeed a smart bargainer, as he drew from so
many diverse sources.
Orality is about
dialogue, and Swahili is conversational. Thus, Mazrui often wrote as if he were
engaged in dialogue, with a few sentences forming short paragraphs. These
shorter paragraphs tended to invite another set of dialogues, a style not drawn
from the European languages but from East African oral culture. When you “call
out” in orality, it takes the form of a performance.
Orality does not
encourage monologue. Orality is spontaneous and creative, and one sees the
deployment of both aspects in the way Mazrui answered questions in seminars and
conferences. He could be theatrical, using imaginative and figurative language.
Mazrui’s intellectual
assembly was a combination of the plurality of issues, the plurality of
subjects, the plurality of perspectives, and the plurality of languages. But
that plurality of languages was enfolded in what I have identified as the
recourse to orality, the constant references to fragmented histories and
memory.
But as Mazrui
deployed the English language, he needed to fracture and fragment himself, that
is, his own being and body; his presentation of the past, grounded in orality,
sometimes became “mythical.” Indeed, he often took the Islamic as “indigenous,”
thus casting its impact in mythical ways as well.
This is where Mazrui
not only betrayed his preference but his transparency: the Western and the
Christian became patriarchal and masculine, in opposition to the innocence and
femininity of the mythical.
The dominance and
status of the English language in Mazrui’s work are clear. The English language
was used to present Africa to Africans and to the world, and to re-Africanize
Africans in drawing from lost traditions. A blended language, the “Englishes”
with doses of Swahili and Arabic revealed creativity but drew attention to
curiosity as well.
Creativity and
curiosity raised questions not just about intellectual innovations, but the
content of ideas. A language has such a powerful linkage with culture that
writing in English does not mean a rejection of one’s cultural immersion. Let
me illustrate this point with a citation from The Power of Babel:
Where do the ‘pronouns’
come in? Languages betray the cultures from which they spring. Pronouns are
part of that story. In referring to a third person English is
gender-conscious—so the pronoun he refers to the male and the pronoun she
refers to the female.
In many African languages pronouns are gender-neutral.
The words for ‘he’ or ‘she’ are fused into one. To the present day many
Africans competent in the English language sometimes refer to a third person
female as ‘he’ when speaking in English because of the linguistic influence of
their own mother tongues. [210.]
And there are
cultural nuances:
Most African
languages do not have separate words for ‘nephews’ and ‘nieces’ because your
sister’s children are supposed to be equivalent of your own biological
children. The same word which is used for your child (mtoto in
Kiswahili) is used for your niece or nephew. Very few African languages have a
word for ‘cousin’. Your uncle’s daughter or son is the equivalent of your
sister or brother, so cousins are counted almost as siblings. Once again
language betrays the tightness of kinship ties in the African extended family.
[The Power of Babel, 210.]
Identity is central
to this language use: how Africans see themselves, how others gaze upon them,
how they are represented. Mazrui had to define himself, and language enabled
him to do so. Then he had to define his continent, again falling on the power
of language to do so.
Turning again to The
Power of Babel, specific elements emerge in how Mazrui and his co-author
presented language in terms of its acquisition and usages, its universal
nature, its connections to ethnicities, and its linkages to identity and
nationalities. The way and manner that words are used can reveal a lot about people
and places.
Mazrui presented the
creative aspect of language in many ways. He used language to inspire heroism,
as in his celebration of the career of poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor,
who was nominated many times without success for the Nobel Prize for his
command of French (written and spoken), and his poetry and philosophy.
To Mazrui, the love
for John Milton’s Paradise Lost is said to have influenced Apolo Obote
(1925—2005), president of Uganda, to adopt Milton as his first name. Mazrui was
full of praise for Julius Nyerere, the late president of Tanzania, who
translated William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and The Merchant of
Venice into Swahili. Mazrui valued these translations for advancing the
modernist agenda of African languages.
Politics was always
central to Mazrui’s philosophy. Indeed, just as he saw politics as influencing
language, he saw language as also influenceing politics. He linked the end of
the Cold War and the fall of apartheid to the possible decline in the use of
French, Russian and Afrikaans. Charting the rise and fall of European languages
in Africa was like playing “a chess game with African cultures. Will the
African languages be Europeanized or will the European languages be
Africanized?”
This “chess game,” as
Mazrui explained, dealt with choices and options, negotiations, and brokerages.
The game was played in the context of globalization. Power had to be extended,
as part of imperialism, which involved the imposition of language. Power, too,
had to be resisted, in the nationalism that called for self-assertion, for
which, as Mazrui saw, language, too, was crucial. To him, no matter how the
issue of control or resistance is resolved, language becomes the critical part
of that resolution: the very possibility of co-existence within national
frontiers and of cooperation between frontiers involves language.
Back to Mazrui and
the “chess game”: as individuals struggle for influence, resources, money,
power and more, we are drawn to those very institutions and structures that
society puts in place to resolve our struggles. The state’s structures and its
coercive apparatuses use the language of law and order to legitimize their violence.
In the fabric of
society itself, where these conflicts play out intensely, language mediates the
struggles between men and women, matriarchy and patriarchy. The language of
respect recognizes boundaries between the youth and the elderly, resolving
conflicts of interest in favor of older men. What we call persuasion is
grounded in idioms, metaphors and similes that appeal on the basis of culture.
The language of persuasion is of course different from that of threat.
To an extent, my
point is that at the very heart of politics and political discourse is the
deployment of language. This language, in words and texts, communicates
processes and actions. Each action has its own characteristics.
The word, as
Professor Ademola Dasylva of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, is fond of
reminding me, can be transformed into a spirit—as in words of prophecy, of
curses, of wishes, of incantations. If many political scientists ignore
language, Mazrui recognized fully its association with political discourse,
both in the context of politics itself and the texts used to communicate its
contents.
I began with
autobiography as foundational, and I want to close with a celebration of this
genre. Mazrui deployed various first-person narratives in his presentations. He
defended the preservation of traditional institutions, but he was not a
traditionalist. He was a man of multiple cultures, but he celebrated identity.
Amazingly, he lived in the West, but he translated Africa.
He was, on the one
hand, an autonomous scholar but, on the other, he was imbricated in the
“arrested development” of Africa. Mazrui was a Creole, with a style that showed
how to accept the cultures of the West while retaining an African identity.
Mazrui was the Griot
of critical narratives, an agent provocateur of deeply-rooted intellectual
discourses. Never before have we seen an African intellectual so
controversial, yet so loved by the same critical mass that pointed to his
“controversiality.” What he wrote about, what he spoke about, how he wrote
about them, and how he spoke were often the bones of contention—a fact that
underscored the power of the spoken (and the written) word as observed in the
life of this departed giant!
As a Creole, he
maintained a stream of dialogue with the colonizers and the “globalizers”: he
rejected de-personalization; he rejected de-culturalization; and he rejected
de-Islamization. In sum, that is our Mzee—our Nana—the
indomitable Ali A’lamin Mazrui, the teacher, scholar, global citizen, the
embodiment of refined African-cum-Western cultural being, and, above all, a
tireless and incurable pan-Africanist.
May Allah forgive his
failings
And reward his
contributions to the human spirit
May Allah (SWT) grant
Mwalimu Mazrui Jannat
May the Mzee
be received by all our ancestors
May Allah provide
those of us he has left behind
The fortitude to
continue the Nana’s work.
Let us proclaim today
as the beginning of a new ideology: Pax Mazruiana!
Jazakumu Allahu
Khayrain!
Prof Falola is with the Department
of History, the University of Texas at Austin, USA.
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