The Controversial Ali Mazrui
Ali Al’amin Mazrui (24 February 1933 – 12 October 2014), was a Kenyan-born American academic, professor, and political writer on African and Islamic studies, and North-South relations. He was born in Mombasa, Kenya. His positions included Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and Director of the Centre for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan.
Mazrui first rose to prominence as a critic of some of the accepted orthodoxies of African intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. He was critical of African socialism and all strains of Marxism. He argued that communism was a Western import just as unsuited for the African condition as the earlier colonial attempts to install European type governments. He argued that a revised liberalism could help the continent and described himself as a proponent of a unique ideology of “African liberalism”.
At the same time, he was a prominent critic of the current world order. He believed the current capitalist system was deeply exploitative of Africa, and that the West rarely if ever lived up to their liberal ideals and could be described as global apartheid. He opposed Western interventions in the developing world, such as the Iraq War and was also historically opposed to many of the policies of Israel, being one of the first to try to link the treatment of Palestinians with South Africa’s apartheid.
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