Ali A. Mazrui (1933-2014)
Ali A. Mazrui is a Kenyan-born global academic, public intellectual, and a leading political scientist on Africa, Islamic Studies and the North-South relations.
About Ali Mazrui
Mazrui's personal biography links us to the long history of the East African coast. His family was a central player in religious, political, cultural, and economic activities on the East African coast since the early modern period. One of the prominent events of East Africa's history is the conflict between Ali Mazrui's family and the Portuguese.
Mazrui, therefore, plays the role of a legend in the sense that he connects us to that history. His life allows us to look inside East Africa. Importantly, his intellectual biography covers the entire period of East Africa's independence, and following his intellectual trajectory, we find a kind of sociology of East Africa; one that significantly connects East Africa to other influences and to other global debates.
“Africans are not necessarily the most brutalized of peoples, but they are almost certainly the most humiliated in modern histories. Africa is by no means the smallest of the continents physically, but it is almost definitely the most fragmented politically. people denied of history is a people deprived of dignity.”
- Ali Mazrui, The African Condition
Mazrui’s Newsletters
Mazrui’s Poetry
Videos
Photography
Ali Mazrui: A Walking Triple Heritage
Ndirangu Wachanga, Professor of Media Studies and Information Science, is the first person to receive the 2015 Book Award for a documentary film.
The documentary, titled “Ali Mazrui: A Walking Triple Heritage,” was a seven-year long project that highlights the life and works of Professor Ali Mazrui, a prominent African scholar from Kenya.
“[Mazuri] was regarded as an African intellectual sage,” Michigan State University Associate Professor Dr. Folu Ogundimu said. “He was a foundational scholar for Africa… he left a tremendous footprint on many areas of African studies.”
The Book Award is a prestigious award given by the New York African Studies Association and previous recipients are some of the leading figures in Africana scholarship.