THE PROBLEM WITH YOU, ALI MAZRUI! RESPONSE TO ALI'S MILLENNIAL "CONCLUSION"

You are of course an adept at the anticipatory deflection tactics. You are practised in the craft of crying “Foul” even before the stone that was first cast by you ricochets and turns you into a target. You know full well that the sustained intensity of your attack on the Gates’ series would sooner or later lead to a questioning of the originator, and his motivation. Was I surprised when, in your response to Biodun Jeyifo, you accused him of trying to shift the focus of discussion from Skip Gates to Ali Mazrui? I could not help smiling to myself; it was all so predictable.

But as Jeyifo responded, it is you yourself, as always, that make such an outcome inevitable. You bring it on yourself, since you have never yet learnt to take the ego of Ali Mazrui out of straightforward, intellectual exchanges. What is truly behind this single-minded but relentless pursuit, on that gives a new meaning to Leavis’ The Critical Pursuit? Credibly an avowal of love for the black race? – “not because I love you less, but that I love Black America more” (Urgh!). Or is it some purpose far less corny but no less stomach- churning? What stake does Mazrui have in the reception (positive or negative) of the Gates’ series? Why does he resolutely ignore the genre of the series, and thus its aesthetic options, its presentational mode, which of course is a de rigeur consideration for any serious critic of the video arts, made for a wide but varied audience - as much intended for “leisure viewing” as for enlightenment? Why does Mazrui distort, extrapolate, slander, indeed - lie, yes, lie - against the actual content of the series? We shall not bother with evaluation, of the attribution of ideological impulses - these remain fair terrain of exploration for the critic but are also, quite often predictably subjective. Why, above all, has Ali Mazrui turned this into a personal, relentless crusade - jihad, lest I be accused of eurocentricity! - a battle taken into town meetings, extended into radio interviews and insinuated into literary conferences?

Your Millennial epistle, one that cynically invites a conclusion to the “dialogue” with your own summary, repetition and even further expansion of earlier pronouncements, narrates the travails of THE AFRICANS and your own experience at the hands of unenlightened, or simply misunderstanding groups of critics. You do not appear to have learnt the right lesson from that experience; on the contrary, you are determined to take upon yourself, single- handed, the combined roles of these varied ideological detractors of THE AFRICANS. Why are you, Ali Mazrui so evidently resolved to demonize Skip Gates, to accuse and convict him, in effect, of race treachery? Whenever the dispute appeared to slacken off, you could be trusted to find an excuse to stoke up the flames of cyber space, taking the discussion to new depths of absurdity, of distortions, of sheer - no other expression for it - syruppy malevolence – “I am prepared to believe that you think like a genius....you write like a distinguished author....your natural brilliance.....Nature has made you a great wit, but......!” You permit yourself, Mazrui even the perverse pleasure of falling through the trap door of a passing era, to invoke the Millennial spirit yet ensure that this dispute follows us into a new era - why? Of all the hyperboles that I have ever encountered in the world of criticism, or historic projections, none has been so gratuitous, so arrogant and self- preening as your proposition that:

This surely, represents the outer limits of afflatus and presumptuousness, of a total loss of perspective and sense of proportion. You quote Alexander Pope; a pity yet again that you do not recall Pope’s deep contempt for humbug, and his fulminations against what he termed “enthusiasm” - that is, the lack of a sense of proportion, of balance. We may permit ourselves to think of a pyrotechnic who sets fire to a warehouse of disused tyres. It smoulders on for days and weeks and months, as with such fires that give off lots of smoke, stench and pollution, expends the time and energy of relays of firemen seeking in vain for a source, casts a pall, indeed a smokescreen indeed over the entire city, sets off an epidemic of pulmonary and allied diseases etc. etc. Then our little man goes around with a billboard round his neck proclaiming that he has set off the greatest conflagration of the century. At least the nerd in that sit-com whose name I cannot recall has the bewildered grace to coin the refrain “Did I do that?” after each comic - not cosmic - disaster. Just what is happening to Ali Mazrui, and how much longer are we to be afflicted by this ingenious smokescreen that has induced so much phlegm, distorted so much vision, generated so much heat but has offered scant illumination?

I am on record as cautioning you - from your very first salvo – to disqualify yourself from this debate. Oh yes, I know that I now stand poised to be accused by you of attempting to deprive you of your freedom of expression but, I shall not rehash those arguments here, though I am willing to take them up in another place. In any case, you yourself did concede the possibility of inappropriateness of your participation in, or more accurately, of your inauguration of the assault, so you do admit it is a debatable issue. The African American world that you love so much is not without minds as perceptive and pens as articulate as yours, and you certainly should have left the field of demolition to others. You have a vested interest in the failure of the series, and you cannot escape the charge of self-promotion – and please do not reduce this, as you have tried to do in your Millennial encyclical, to dollars and cents. There is what we call the marketplace of ideas, of authority and reputation, an arena in which the instruments of competition often prove far more deadly, and are wielded far more unscrupulously than in the struggle over material goods. My charge of self-interest has become even more sustainable after your clear demonstration of a lack of professional self-discipline and lack of fidelity to facts in this crusade, your rabble-rousing tactics, suitably smothered in treacly accents of pain, sorrow and thwarted admiration.

I am more than gratified that you have yourself evoked the spectre of your performance at the ASA conference in Philadelphia; I have sent for a tape recording of that event, since I do want to obtain the direct flavour of the atmosphere that has been conveyed to me by quite a number of colleagues who witnessed your performance, one or two of whom, while sharing some of your views on the Gates’ series, were troubled by your obsessive need to bring down a colleague and render him a racial pariah within his intellectual community. There is still something called decorum even within the dog-eat-dog politics of academia - it is my view that you have long abandoned the constraints of that word, which of course goes beyond a mere word and defines a code of conduct. The result of your lack of professional self-discipline - rushing to rubbish on a “preliminary” basis, a work that, from planning to final execution has taken at least a year of intense research as well as creative labour, a gruelling process with which you are yourself very familiar - has been a cruel revelation -not of the maker of the series, but of Ali Mazrui. What has become glaring is that you have sought to buttress a private warfare with a series of deliberate falsifications that should shame any claimant to disinterested criticism. We shall proceed to examine some of these.

It so happened that, a few days before your “preliminary” review, I attended the event that was, in effect, the formal outing of the series. This was in Boston where I was able to see the clip of the “clitoridectomy” sequence. Later of course came your outburst in which you accused Professor Gates of calling its practitioners “barbarians.” (Oh, I know how you phrased that accusation, so shall we save each other the trouble and change my “accused” to “insinuated”? Just leave it as evidence the smear tactics with which we are so familiar?) When I read that comment, I immediately telephoned Skip Gates. Was there another section of the series in which he returned to the subject, during which he used such an expression? Skip’s response was exactly the same as he has detailed in his own “preliminary” response. What he actually said was that the practice was barbaric. Now, we all use the same medium of the English language in which, you Professor Ali Mazrui, multiple chair-holder in numerous institutions and triple Professor-at- Large, must be considered an adept. I certainly do not consider it merely incidental that you should have chosen to insinuate that Skip Gates employed a loaded, emotive, “euro- attitudinal” derogatory expression. This was no careless or sloppy listening. You were consciously playing the race- emotive card, and deliberately manipulating the responses of your black readership. I find this not merely dishonest, but intellectually criminal. There are millions of people in the world who hold the view that the tradition of slitting the throat of a ram, considered central to the African ritual of sacrifice, as well as Moslem and Jewish usage, is barbaric. Will you next claim that this accuses the holder of such an opinion as describing the practitioners as barbarians?

And what do we make of your descent into outright defamation: “The Ghanaians I have spoken to since Gates’ television series are convinced that the Ghanaian guide at the slave fort was given an “inducement” to blame the slave trade on Africans.” There is no other word for this desecration of critical discourse - it is simply contemptible. Only an agenda outside the merits and demerits of the material in question could have driven a university professor to stoop to such low tactics in his attempt to discredit a colleague by ascribing to him such a despicable recourse in order to buttress a point of view. Since then of course, we have been presented with testimonies - uncontested by you - to the effect that the statement credited to the Ghanaian emerged from the guide’s regular tourist rap, and was not delivered to the filming crew alone. Do tell us, did Professor Gates also travel to Ouidah in the neighbouring Republic of Benin earlier that same year to “induce” President Kerekou to make the pronouncement which I had posted, without comment for this debate? I cite just a portion of it to refresh your memory:

Kerekou went on to propose a “Grand International Conference of Forgiveness and Reconciliation on the eve of the Year 2000.” Those who remained in Africa, he insisted, “have a duty to ask for forgiveness.” Just how much did Skip Gates pay Kerekou to say those words, and would Gates have been within his rights to interview Matthew Kerekou, if he had known of the Colloque at Ouidah at which that pronouncement was made

This was another moment for you to have retreated. A critic with an iota of self-discipline would have realized that he had crossed the bounds of propriety - but not the great Ali Mazrui, the academic Double-O7 with licence to libel. It is either we abandon all pretence to civilised discourse completely or we demand a certain minimum standard of respect for one another - oh yes, I know that the word ‘disrespect’ is very much in vogue especially in the Mazrui armoury of indictments. This and that is ‘disrespectful’ of our continent, of our culture, of our brothers and sisters. But we are speaking, for now, about a far more manageable territory of respect - respect for truth with regards to one’s colleagues. Avoidance of cheap gossip or sleazy fabrications in order to paint a colleague in mercenary colours. That is a wide enough territory for a beginning.

Dear Ali Mazrui, you refer to yourself - that familiar Ali Amazrui condescending signature - as “a senior and elder Africanist” of Professor Gates. And again in this latest communication, you describe yourself as “an old man and your elder brother” in relation to your victim. I regret to inform you that your conduct over these series has been more one of an ageing minotaur afflicted by muscular dystrophy, thrashing about in a self-created maze of confusions. Africanist you may be but - mentally African? I wonder. And this is because the elder’s position in most African cultures that I know of - mine, very definitely - precludes the market mother from leading the prayer against a rival, invoking the gods to guarantee, in effect, “May your wares find no buyer on the market.” The coy preamble to this blasphemous prayer only made the event even more distatesful: “I know that maybe I should not be involved in passing judgement in this case, but.....!” The quintessential Uriah Heep! The beginning and end of your supplication are summed up in the passsage: “I have no doubt that there is a significant market for ‘Wonders of the African world’, but probably not at many African Studies Centres in major U.S. Universities” (my emphasis). You raised the issue of markets yourself, and thank goodness you always manage to give yourself away. Defend your turf by all means, but do not subsume your real objectives under any Ralph Naderite championship of the consumers’ health and bill of rights. There is only one other series by an African or Africa/American “Africanist” contending for attention in those markets - of popular or “academic” authority - and that erstwhile monopoly is held by none other than you.

Have you offered the public apology that you guaranteed you would if your accusation against Gates that he was against Reparations was proved wrong? Of course not. Mazrui may know the word, he does not understand the gesture of apology or its meaning. An apology is a product of grace, of humility but not of self-abasement. It does not diminish; on the contrary it confers integrity. It also carries with it the burden of avoidance of the initial error, of greater caution in negotiating the minefield that originally blew up in one’s face. As with many other careless, or deliberate distortions or Gates’ views, this one has been easily exploded with verifiable evidence. But why was the error committed in the first place? Why was it necessary to attempt to foist on Skip Gates a position that he has never held, never articulated? Simply for the gratification of somehow equating Skip Gates with the arch-conservative Jesse Helms and the self- hating Keith Richburg. Your capacity for yoking incompatibles is already notorious but, in this instance, you have truly excelled yourself. In a moment, I shall demonstrate that you are in fact closer to Jesse Helms than you attempted to make Skip Gates appear.

Tears from a Consummate Crocodile

But first I must frontally address the question, preferably as you confront your mirror: who, or what is Ali Mazrui? Who is this scholar who feels the need to precede every communication - snail mail, email, faxes, newsletters etc. - with a bunting of his academic positions - triple Professor-at-large, all meticulously detailed, plus Emeritorial and Distinguished Scholar hats piled one on top of another - giving off the image of an insecure salesman of dubious intellectual wares? Since you are constantly into politics - politics of race, politics of culture and even politics of history - it is time that you frankly demand of yourself - what exactly are your politics? Fortunately, you have yourself offered many public cues, but are you truly conscious of the summation they offer? Here follows what has provoked this interrogation.

Of the many astonishing interjections involved in your wholesale resolve to undermine any and every aspect of this series – including what is not there - a quite legitimate exercise, since this involves editorial choices - I find myself personally aggravated by your reaction to a question in Philadelphia referring to Gates’ omission of Nigeria in the series and his reason for doing so. Skip Gates had of course stated quite clearly on several occasions that he would not film in Nigeria because of the political situation there at the time, specifically citing the fact that the writer Ken Saro-wiwa had been hanged by Sani Abacha after a travesty of judicial process that was roundly condemned by the entire world - African governments included - we need to emphasize that, to anticipate charges of western conspiracies! Among such leaders of integrity, let us simply mention Nelson Mandela. Skip Gates also referred to this Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka, a personal friend and former teacher, who had been forced into exile, placed on trial in absentia for alleged treason with a price placed on his head. At this rapid execution panel which – we have to take your word for it, I suppose - was convened independently of your will - during the ASA meeting in Philadelphia, you contemptuously dismissed Skip Gates’ right to invoke such a political and personal judgement. Even your captive audience found your response so glib and ridiculous that they laughed. Your supporters were embarrassed.

Next perhaps, we shall be instructed that the campaign for the cultural and sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa was wrong, that the province of Art and scholarship should remain sacrosant and impervious to any political considerations. Now, this time frankly employing your favoured process of extended sequiturs - just to give you a taste of your own medicine - our revered Professor Ali Mazrui must now be counted as the soulmate of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Hastings Banda etc. etc. - all those reactionary rationalisers black and white, who insisted that a cultural boycott of a tyrannical regime was wrong-headed and counter-productive. Dennis Brutus was wrong, Nelson Mandela and the ANC were wrong, the galaxy of principled playwrights, film stars, singers and other artistes of every genre were wrong. American universities which proceeded to disinvest in South Africa were of course wrong and the krugerrand should have been allowed free circulation in the world of commerce.

Your ’fatwa’ Predisposition

My reports indicate that you gave a performance that was worthy of the fundamentalist culture that has become a scourge in the body of most worthwhile religions in contemporary times. From the floor came the question: should we now declare an “infantida” - or was it pronounce a “fatwa”? (my informants were somewhat uncertain about which it was but were agreed that it was one or the other) - should an infantida/fatwa ¹ be promulgated against Skip Gates. That question was of course an inevitable product of your inflammatory zeal and lynch- mob rhetoric. Your answer, Professor Mazrui, was a kind of generous concession that it need not go that far. Skip, you are quoted as saying, was your friend, that you were really good friends despite disagreements, and that you were not really advocating such extreme measures against him. Need I tell you that my white hairs crackled with static electricity during the narration of this episode? (Despite the fact that this is intended for private circulation - private, along the parameters of the family quantification of Ali Mazrui - I shall apologise to you openly if you can produce reliable witnesses who testify to the contrary.) I do believe this account of your reaction however both because of the absolute reliability of my informants – far more credible than your mythical Ghanaians, and because I have had a personal encounter of this nature with you in the past.

Do you recall how you took the trouble to transfer to the pages of the local newspapers in the predominantly moslem Northern Nigeria a portion of the exchanges which took place between us on the pages of the journal of ideas, TRANSITION, taking that exchange out of its immediate context? In that specially selected part of your own response, you accused me of being a hater of Islam, this being published at the very time when I had come to the defence of Salman Rushdie and condemned, as murderous incitement, the fatwa placed on his head by the Ayatollah Khomeini. You knew damned well that after my defence of Salman Rushdie, religious extremists in that part of Nigeria (including some university student fundamentalists) had demonstrated in the streets of Zaria and Kaduna, carrying placards with slogans reading DEATH TO WOLE SOYINKA. Several had written to Nigerian newspapers that a fatwa be placed on my head in turn. You picked that time to publish, in a highly charged religious atmosphere, a portion of an intellectual exchange that was taking place in the United States. The account of your response to the infantida/fatwa comment from the floor in Philadelphia is therefore one that is totally in consonance with the obvious but unpronounced jihad that you have launched against the creator of WONDERS OF THE AFRICAN WORLD. Just what kind of a scholar do you claim to be, really?

Since you were so eager to shed crocodile tears on behalf of Nigerians who were deprived of their place in the cultural limelight of television - they of course needed this cultural exposure to enable them survive Sani Abacha’s terror - let me simply offer you a Nigerian proverb: please do not dye your mourning weeds deeper than the indigo of the bereaved. We, the bereaved, knew where the rain was beating us in Abacha’s time, and we did not then inhabit a world of wonders but a mundane environment of horrendous realities.

Stirring up murky waters

I began the preceding portion by inviting you to truthfully demand of yourself just what politics you truly believe in - I have even more urgent reasons than WONDERS to invite you onto this path of self-interrogation, since you are determined to make a habit of fishing in troubled waters. Your latest adventurism is both typical and instructive: just when Nigerians appear to be groping fitfully along the road to some potential mending, a state within that nation (since followed by two more) declared itself a theocratic state and imposed the sharia as the official law of that state. Now, this was again the moment that you considered most appropriate to publish, in our local journals, a two-part article extolling the tolerance and secular virtues of the religion of Islam over that of Christianity, and debunking the “secular” claims of western democracy. Let me rush to state quite clearly that the issue is not whether you are right or wrong. I hold no brief for the claims of western democracy or Christian or Islamic tolerance, although I cannot resist warning you not to expose your flanks so masochistically by the carefully selective illustrations that you permitted to buttress your thesis! A primary schoolboy can make mincemeat of such gratuitous selectiveness in mere minutes, so will the women of Afghanistan, or the Ba’hai of Iran. I merely ask myself, as other Nigerians have done - why has Ali Mazrui picked this moment to dabble in Nigerian affairs, and in this manner? This is my personal constituency, my troubled, fragile and frustrating constitutency and I find myself obliged to demand of you - what really goes on in Ali Mazrui’s mind?

Now of course, it is all cleverly done. By now we do know the modus operandi of Ali Mazruish incursions into the politics of African cultures and religions. Take issues with him over this dangerous intervention and of course you are labelled, with impeccable logic, a defender of Judeo-Christian, European values, and a hater of Arabs and Islam alike. Cunning gamester that you are, you pretend that the issue of liberty of thought and the tolerance virtues of a secular ideal are posed exclusively between the Islamic world and the Christian west. Conveniently forgotten is the famous “triple heritage” and thus, the profound and antecedent question: what of the tolerance virtues of precedent African religions and religions over which both Islam and Christianity contemptuously trampled? How does the uncorrupted indigenous spirituality view the political intrusion of religion into secular life? The trouble with scholarly lip service is that once it is paid, its implications in real life are forgotten. In this case we have a structural ploy that never really took hold of your mind but served merely to erect a systemic framework for the seduction of the unwary. I shall be dealing at greater length - this time, openly - with your essay, but within the Nigerian media on which you chose to inflict it.

Suffice it to advise at this point - and to implore your internet family to caution you - that you should tread very gingerly in this explosive situation that may actually signal the disintegration of the nation still known as Nigeria. Secure in this “hypocritically secular,” deeply flawed democratic environment in which however you are not at risk for any infractions of the sharia, such as wine-tippling with the rest of us, it is perhaps beneath you to empathise with those who face the dehumanising consequences of the theocratic insanity going on in other places. In Zamfara state for instance - just a little taste of actualities - a local chieftain has given all the women in his local government three months to get married or else! - all in the name of sharia’s moral requirements. This is therefore not an academic exercise; it is an issue of human dignity, respect for individual choice, and even, as you know very well - a life and death issue in many parts of the world. It transcends the presumed “witticism” that is contained in throwaways such as your favourite (and frankly now boring) remark that no presidential candidate in the United States has ever presented an Islamic spouse - proof of course that the western secular state is hypocritical in its claims to tolerance. And you accuse Skip Gates of sophomoric humour? “Irrepressible boy,” “mischievous boy” - I find these condescending expressions of a cultivated geriatricism in addressing a colleague rude and offensive. They fail in their attempt to be patronising because they are signs of a lack of confidence in the claimed objectivity of your position. And they suit you ill as you have yourself a penchant for the very kind of “jokes” that supposedly make Skip Gates deserving of such responses. (I refer you to your article in Nigeria’s Tempo and other public performances of yours at which I have been present.) Why don’t you simply try locking up Bill Clinton with an attractive Islamic female and see what happens - oh yes, I could not resist that either! This level of reductionist games may go down very well in the populist game of the western put-down - we all indulge in it from time to time, it is known as playing to the gallery and sometimes it helps to lighten the burden of the real issues that weigh down our immediate existence, and our impotence in dealing with the real causes. I only ask you to try and be more serious when you wade into the crisis of secularism and theocracy in volatile nations like Nigeria. If you cannot help with the problem, kindly do not trivialise it. More of this later however, and in the appropriate place.

Your profession of love for Black Americans makes one begin to understand why you cannot begin to understand Skip Gates’ protestation of “tough love” for one’s community, close or extended. Of course you are probably more acculturated here now than many of us are, those of us for whom this remains a strange, outer- space society in which everybody “loves” everybody else, including the ones they gun down the next moment, where entertainers bounce onto the stage with that opening embrace for all of the teeming, faceless audience – “I love y’all” - and conclude on the same refrain. You must forgive me therefore if I find the invocation of “love” nauseating. I find it yet another department of the competitive debasement of language in (mostly) white American society. Do you really LOVE all of Black America, Mazrui? Is it the concept, the culture, the people, the politics or what? Has it anything to do with what values they represent? Do you LUR-UR-URVE the Kweisi Mfumes same as the Carole Mosely-Browns? Congressman Donald Payne same as - who was that President of the Baptist Convention who took Abacha’s money but found the Nigerian gods of Apportionment waiting to serve for him back home? Love Randall Robinson same as the Idi Amin-loving and Abacha-loving Roy Innis? Congreswoman Maxime Waters same as Congressman Donald Jefferson? Ambassador Walter Carrington same as Keith Richburg? The Congress of Black Mayors same as the Association of Black Publishers? I have of course deliberately utilised here the subjective parameters of a Nigerian from that nation’s recent travails. I doubt very much if a Nigerian would readily spread the same accommodating cloak of love as you appear capable of materialising from the permissiveness of your personal computer.

Enough please, of this “I am much more prepared to criticize the West than you are” credentials! If you must go Shakespearian, do avoid the Coriolanus syndrome, the competitive display of the wounds of confrontation with the enemy. Criticism has the same texture as love. There are criticisms that merely play to the gallery but also criticisms of conviction and action. At the very beginning of the sixties (and much, much earlier for others) some of us, barely out of college, were already in the United States, seeking out our black artist kinfolk embattled for their rights and dignity to demand what help we could offer in their liberation struggle - Ed Bullins, Ernie Maclintock, Imamu Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Ethelridge Knight and others. Make enquiries today in Nigeria and discover which pioneers from which university first injected Black American literature and history - including the history of the Nation of Islam and the Black liberation movement - into our colonial university curriculum. You may then begin to understand how the political and cultural bond has been manifested since those turbulent days till the present, with all its passages of mutual criticism, fall-outs but always - solidarity. Go through the pages of TRANSITION and tell me what other journal on the African continent denounced Governor Rockefeller to the world for his crime against humanity during the Attica riots. Find out how TRANSITION lost its sponsorship from an American Foundation of some convoluted origin - but of course you are already aware of that history. (Skip Gates, incidentally, was part of that history. Still is.) This is the nature of engagement that I understand as “love,” meaningful love, critical love, creative love, “tough love,” very different from marshmallow love that turns the object of love into a namby-pamby, lacking in resilience, a hibernating mole incapable of sustaining the searchlight of truth, or simply unpalatable ideas. The African America that you speak of needs less and less of that kind of love. And the African continent is much better off with none. Of course there is also the cobra love, but I believe that Skip Gates is perfectly capable of deciding what value to place on any protestations of love that his series have generated from many quarters.

“Since I am myself descended from both slave owners and slaves.....” A-ah! Is this perhaps where we shall find the critical clue to your hidden angst, the genie in the bottle that periodically forces itself out? Others, like myself, have attempted to maintain a delicate silence over this - not that it is any secret - but I am glad that the “outing” has been done by you in this specific context. Of course, you knew that it was bound to happen sooner or later, and your preemptive throwaway is quite in character. I am certain that, as you acquire greater self-confidence and internal peace, you will take us into the fullest dimensions of “slave owning” by your illustrious family. For now, I only wish to propose that, in many of your statements and much of your public conduct, this Mazrui is ingeniously but compulsively attempting to deflect a background of racial guilt. You are playing a game of transpositions, foisting on others a typology that derives from a lineage history that you wish to exorcise. Yes, I agree with your sociological observation: “the lineage system in Zanzibar...does permit people to continue to be Arab or Persian generations after their Arab or Persian forebears.” What choice, within this permissive lineage usage, has Ali Mazrui truthfully made, and does it matter in this discourse? Is he at peace with that choice? What we, black Africans with no hang ups in this respect must do to help you find peace, is to constantly reassure you that we do not hold you responsible for the sins of your forebears. That your ancestors did enrich themselves in the enslavement and merchandising of black peoples does not detract from your credentials as a human being and a credible and quite fascinating scholar (I really should interject some lur-urve at this stage, even of the cobra kind!). So let me offer you, privately - later, I shall also do so publicly - full absolution, asking in return only that you now conduct himself as befits a true African elder. Avoid, as another saying goes, the conduct of an elder who “takes his tongue to lick his plate clean after a feast, then thinks he can summon a child to bring him his walking stick, claiming the authority of an elder.”

Do stop and take a deep breath, Professor Ali Mazrui. Dry off the phony lather of race indignation. Our continent is burning. Its humanity is daily impoverished by bad or indifferent leadership, its cultures and communities devastated by AIDS. Our peoples could do with a tenth of the energy you have devoted to spreading the gospel of hate against an intellectual colleague and organizing lynch mobs that are reminiscent of the very racial conduct you claim to condemn. We all age, our acuity of judgement loses its edge, our capabilities diminish, but there is no need to create for ourselves an old age crisis. If we can no longer be productive, or be combative in truly worthy causes, let us at least try not to miseducate those who follow us, and endeavour to cultivate the art of ageing gracefully.

*NOTE: In response to Ali Mazrui’s challenge, the pages of TRANSITION will be open either from the next issue, or in one single issue (to be editorially decided) to further debate on the Gates series. I have reserved, as more appropriate, the second part of my contribution, which will be restricted to a formal review of the series, for the pages of TRANSITION. W.S.


	Wole Soyinka’s informants may have meant “Intifada,” after the Palestinian uprising that began in December 1987 and lasted until close to the Gulf War. [Editors]

West Africa Review (2000)

ISSN: 1525-4488

THE PROBLEM WITH YOU, ALI MAZRUI! RESPONSE TO ALI'S MILLENNIAL "CONCLUSION"

Tears from a Consummate Crocodile

Your ’fatwa’ Predisposition

Stirring up murky waters