News coming in indicates that Ali Al'amin Mazrui an academic, professor, and political writer on African and Islamic studies and North-South relations has died. Born on February 24, 1933 in Mombasa, Kenya Mazrui studied in Columbia University, University of Oxford, University of Manchester, Nuffield College, Oxford. Professor Mazrui died on October 13, 2013. May Almighty Allah accept his soul and grant him Al Janah firdraus. Credit: http://www.newvision.co.ug/news/660657-prof-ali-mazrui-dead.html 
|
Ee-ey-yah! May his soul rest in peace.  He did the documentary film "Africa : The Triple Heritage".Bio for Professor Ali Alamin Mazrui:
Professor Ali A. Mazrui was the International Global and Cultural School Director and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities/Professor in Political Science, African Studies and Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at the State University of New York at Binghampton.
Prof. Mazrui was born in Mombasa, Kenya, on February 24, 1933. He was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
He is also Albert Luthuli Professor-at-Large at the University of Jos in Nigeria. He is Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large Emeritus and Senior Scholar in Africana Studies at Cornell University. Dr. Mazrui has also served as Chancellor of the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya — an appointment made by Kenya's Head of State. Mazrui was Ibn Khaldun Professor-at-Large, Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, Leesburg, Virginia (1997–2000). He was also Walter Rodney Professor at the University of Guyana, Georgetown, Guyana (1997–1998). Mazrui obtained his B.A. with Distinction from Manchester University in England, his M.A. from Columbia University in New York, and his doctorate from Oxford University in England. For ten years he was at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, where he served as head of the Department of Political Science, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences as well as Dean of the Faculty of Law. He once served as Vice-President of the International Political Science Association and has lectured in five continents.
Professor Mazrui also served as Professor of Political Science (1974–1991) and as Director of the Center for Afro-American and African Studies (1978–1981) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has also been Visiting Scholar at Stanford, Chicago, Colgate, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Oxford, Harvard, Bridgewater, Cairo, Leeds, Nairobi, Teheran, Denver, London, Ohio State, Baghdad, McGill, Sussex, Pennsylvania, etc. Dr. Mazrui has also served as Special Advisor to the World Bank http://www.judiciary.go.ke/portal/assets/files/NEWS/BIO%20FOR%20PROFESSOR%20ALI%20Mazrui.pdf He once said " "..... In one sense, I identify with all African countries and with the African Diaspora. But it is true that there are some particular African countries which have intersected with my own life more than others.
Kenya is the birth place of my academic career and the initial engine of my rise to professional pre-eminence;
Nigeria is the land of my African wife’s birth [Pauline Uti] and the country which inspired the emotions of my only novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo. Nigeria is also the country which made it possible for me to combine an appointment in Africa (University of Jos) with an appointment in the Western world (University of Michigan). The Nigerian Television Authority also joined forces with the BBC in Britain and the PBS in the US to produce my television series, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage”.
Ghana was the country which had a greater impact on my Oxford doctoral dissertation, and Tanzania is the vanguard of my own Swahili culture. Kiswahili is my mother tongue."
Mazrui therefore comes forward as a diasporan whose ideas are generated within the context of Africa’s multifaceted cultural, socio-political and economic challenges. Yet, it is not difficult to confer the honour of a Nigerian citizenship on him less for his marriage to a Nigerian, but more for his contributions as a political scientist to the understanding, resolution and revival of Africa, nay Nigeria, as a force in global affairs.
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/ali-mazrui-and-the-challenge-of-africa-s-triple-heritage/130281/ |
