Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan-born political scientist who was one of Africa’s leading public intellectuals and whose nine-part 1986 television documentary, “The Africans,” was praised in some corners but criticized in the United States as a diatribe against the West, died Oct. 12 at his home in Vestal, New York. He was 81.
His death was announced by Binghamton University, the State University of New York, where Mazrui was a faculty member. The cause was not disclosed.
Mazrui, the scion of a prominent Islamic family in Kenya, had been one of the foremost scholars of African politics and society since the 1960s. He published more than 30 books and was a longtime commentator on African affairs in popular media outlets.
After teaching in Uganda for 10 years, Mazrui publicly clashed with the country’s dictatorial strongman, Idi Amin, and left the country in 1973. Since then, Mazrui had been based in the United States, first at the University of Michigan and later at Binghamton.
Mazrui defined one of his principal intellectual themes in his 1967 book “Towards a Pax Africana,” in which he built a case for African empowerment free of the influence of the continent’s colonial past. He used the term “racial sovereignty” to describe a broad movement in which Africans could take charge of their future.
He often spoke of how his life embodied what he considered the three interconnected strands that make up modern Africa: indigenous traditions, Islamic faith and Western cultural influences.
He explored those ideas in “The Africans: A Triple Heritage,” his documentary jointly produced by the BBC and the Washington-area public television station WETA. A $600,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities helped pay production costs for the documentary, which took Mazrui to 16 African countries to explore his views of Africa’s past and future.
The documentary was well-received in Britain, where the companion book became a bestseller. Washington Post television critic Tom Shales described “The Africans” as “biased and preachy and didactic and fascinating” and noted that “the program arrives with the highest commendation: It was condemned in advance by a bureaucrat.”
Then-NEH chairman Lynne Cheney demanded that the NEH’s name be removed from the film’s credits. She criticized the series as “one man’s soapbox” permeated by “the idea that the West is to blame for all of Africa’s problems.”
In the documentary, Mazrui made what some considered anti-Semitic comments and praised Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi as someone who could “turn Africans and Arabs into masters of their own destiny” and “global players in our own right.”
In another passage, Mazrui predicted that South Africa would erupt in civil war — he called it “the final racial conflict” — in which “blacks will inherit the most advanced nuclear infrastructure on the continent. Out of the ashes of apartheid will emerge a black-ruled republic with convincing nuclear credentials.”
When “The Africans” aired in the United States in 1986, the Nigerian author Wole Soyinka suggested that Mazrui had been “brainwashed.” Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in literature that same year, said the Kenyan scholar did not fully understand tribal traditions in other parts of Africa and, with his professed Islamic beliefs, dismissed the Christian influence on that continent.
“I was invited to look at Africa as an African,” Mazrui told The Washington Post, defending his views. “I wasn’t trying to run for election in the U.S. . . . The last thing I wanted to do was pander to Western prejudices.”
Ali Al’Amin Mazrui was born Feb. 24, 1933, in Mombasa, Kenya. His father was Kenya’s chief judge of Islamic law.
Mazrui graduated in 1960 from the University of Manchester in England and received a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York a year later. He was already teaching at Uganda’s Makerere University when he received a doctorate in political science from the University of Oxford in 1966.
Throughout his career, Mazrui criticized the dictatorial tendencies of African leaders. Those views put him at odds with the mercurial and often violent Amin, and Mazrui left Uganda for the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1974 to 1989. Since that time, he had been at Binghamton. He also taught at the University of Jos in Nigeria and held academic appointments at Cornell University and other colleges, advised the World Bank and served on many academic boards.
His first marriage, to Molly Vickerman, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 23 years, the former Pauline Uti; six children; a sister; and three grandchildren.
Mazrui’s wide-ranging scholarship included studies of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela of South Africa and the ancestral roots of President Barack Obama, whose father was from Kenya.
In recent years, he examined the connection between terrorism and Islam. He argued that the West should pay reparations to African countries, which he called “the cradle of mankind.”
“We are the people of the day before yesterday,” Mazrui said in 1986, “and the people of the day after tomorrow.”