Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Kenya Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
The most widely heard African political thinker of his generation, whose television series put his argument in front of millions and caused a row that lasted years.
Ali Al'amin Mazrui was born in Mombasa, the son of a Chief Kadhi — the senior Islamic judge of the Kenyan coast. He failed to get the grades for secondary school in Kenya, took his degrees in Britain and the United States, and ended up at Oxford for a doctorate, which he liked to point out to anyone who thought an examination result settled anything.
His central argument was the triple heritage: that African identity is made of three inheritances — indigenous African, Islamic and Western — which do not resolve into one another and cannot be wished away, and that African politics only makes sense if all three are taken seriously. He made it across more than thirty books, and in 1986 in a nine-part television series, The Africans, co-produced by the BBC and American public television.
The series was watched by millions and provoked a substantial fight. The head of America's National Endowment for the Humanities, which had funded it, publicly disowned it as an anti-Western tract and had the endowment's name removed from the credits — which guaranteed it a far larger audience than it would otherwise have had.
He taught at Makerere, Michigan and Binghamton, was a serious critic of Idi Amin while living under him, argued with Wole Soyinka in print for years about Islam and Africa, and served on UN and OAU commissions. He is among the handful of African intellectuals whose arguments reached general audiences outside universities.
His central argument was the triple heritage: that African identity is made of three inheritances — indigenous African, Islamic and Western — which do not resolve into one another and cannot be wished away, and that African politics only makes sense if all three are taken seriously. He made it across more than thirty books, and in 1986 in a nine-part television series, The Africans, co-produced by the BBC and American public television.
The series was watched by millions and provoked a substantial fight. The head of America's National Endowment for the Humanities, which had funded it, publicly disowned it as an anti-Western tract and had the endowment's name removed from the credits — which guaranteed it a far larger audience than it would otherwise have had.
He taught at Makerere, Michigan and Binghamton, was a serious critic of Idi Amin while living under him, argued with Wole Soyinka in print for years about Islam and Africa, and served on UN and OAU commissions. He is among the handful of African intellectuals whose arguments reached general audiences outside universities.
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