ON the 13th October 2014, Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s finest brains, stopped to think. However, his ideas and ideals continue to live on because Ali Mazrui was larger than life. Professor Ali Mazrui was born on 24th February 1933 in Mombasa, Kenya. He was an academic professor and political writer on African and Islamic studies as well as an expert on North-South relations.
Upon completing his PhD at Oxford University in 1966, Mazrui joined Makerere University (Kampala, Uganda), where he served as head of the Department of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences until he was forced into exile by Idi Amin in 1973. Mazrui served at many universities but his last stint was at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York where he served as an Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies. As a scholar, Mazrui was consummate and very versatile and therefore a bit difficult to peg in terms of a specific academic discipline. The broad range of his intellectual thought cannot be captured in a short article like this one.
However, one of the central threads in his writings is the role of culture in world politics, mainly in the context of the North-South asymmetric divide. This is brilliantly captured in his book “Cultural Forces in World Politics.”
This theme has also been widely debated by other leading scholars like Herbert Marcuse in his seminal book, “One Dimensional Man” as well as Edward Said in “Culture and Imperialism.” The contribution of a scholar of Mazrui’s repute to this debate is very fascinating because culture as a weapon of imperial oppression is covert and subtle and therefore very difficult to pin down and to oppose. Culture as a weapon of oppression is invisible. However, this is exactly where the problem lies because the victim of cultural imperialism is, for the most part, not “an informed and substantive global citizen” who can transcend his/her own condition to interrogate the circumstances which have trapped him/her. In other words, he/she does not know that he/she does not know; and he/she is therefore robbed of the intellectual capacity to challenge the status quo. The sad thing in life is being a victim without you knowing that you are a victim; and that is exactly what cultural imperialism does to most of the global citizens.
The western political socialisation, in which the mass media plays a pivotal role, has come to define and portray the sectoral interests of big capital as the common interests which all sensible men and women must support. A good example of how the Western powers have used the media to shape international public opinion is the situation in Iraq. At the time when George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in 2003, about 67% of American citizens (who were polled) supported the invasion; and so did many people in different parts of the world. This invasion ended up in the overthrow and killing of Saddam Hussein – a president of a sovereign country. The pretext was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he was “a threat” to world peace; and it was therefore “common sense” or “reasonable” for all sensible men and women to support that invasion.
A few years after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and killed, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. It must be noted that an invasion of a sovereign state by another – without the official declaration of war by both parties – is contrary to the United Nations (UN) principle of sovereignty of states as equal subjects in International Law.
By invading Iraq, America, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, with a veto power and thus a moral obligation to defend and protect the UN Charter, was violating the very Charter in broad daylight. The interests of the American military-industrial complex; and especially the interests of the oil oligarchy were presented by the western media as the common interests of all the world citizens. And what happened? The majority of the world citizens swallowed that propaganda lock, stock and barrel.
A few years after Saddam Hussein was overthrown and killed, Iraq is close to becoming a failed state. It must be remembered that the Sunni Muslims (who are a minority in Iraq) were the dominant group under Saddam Hussein and now after he was overthrown, they feel that they are being marginalised by the Shite majority. This was how a groundswell of Islamic militancy, as perpetuated by the Islamic State or ISIS, was fomented. It therefore follows that ISIS was created by an ill-conceived American foreign policy when they set out to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Today ISIS is presented as a common enemy which all sensible men and women must fight. The bottom line here is not that Saddam Hussein was an angel or that I agree with what ISIS is doing. The point is that the interests of American imperialism are, more often than not, presented as the common interests of all the world citizens and that lie is usually fabricated, refined and “sold” by the western media; which serves as the spin doctors of big capital – albeit covertly so.
Through his active and engaging scholarship, Ali Mazrui was a man given to advocating an alternative narrative as a way of counter-acting the dominant western mode of cognition or definition of social reality. Many of us are perhaps not aware how important ideas are in defining social reality which, many times, is accepted as the “norm” or “common sense.”
What we do not understand is that social reality is never neutral; it is usually shaped and defined by those who are powerful after which it is then packaged and presented as “common sense.” That was why Karl Marx was to remark that “…the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas.” He could as well have said that “…the ideas of the dominant nations are the dominant ideas…” As a celebrated African scholar, the mission of Professor Ali Mazrui was to help cultivate an alternative narrative, through active scholarship, which would echo the voice of developing countries on the global stage.
In other words, he was trying to help re-define social reality in a way that would bring in developing countries’ perspective at the global level. To paraphrase another beloved African son, Amilcar Cabral, in reference to himself, Ali Mazrui was perhaps ‘…a simple African trying to do his duty for the citizens of the developing countries in the context of his times.’ Rest in peace fellow African.
• Gerson Tjihenuna is a Senior Lecturer in Labour Relations at the International University of Management (IUM), however the views expressed in this article are his own and not necessarily those of IUM.