Customer Reviews

The Global African: A Portrait of Ali A. Mazrui

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Is it true that the Mazruis were slavers? This puts a bit of a twist to Ali Mazrui's claims to be a spokesperson for Africa and especially his call for reparations for Africa!

This book is an embarrassing collection of hagiographic nonsense written about one of the most over-rated "scholars" ever to exist. How on earth they can take someone serious who demands reparations from the West for slavery, yet who comes from the infamous Mazrui family of Omani slavers active on the Swahili coast for centuries is beyond me.....

No mention of Mazrui's notorious call for the re-colonisation of Africa; his claim that Nigeria is overwhelmingly Muslim; or his repeated and pathetic attempts to picture Islam as somehow indigenous and beneficial to Africa. Tell that to the circumcised 12 year old females in Egypt...

Avoid like the plague unless you like ridiculous self-indulgent festschrifts in honour of intellectual light-weights.

As a former student of Dr. Mazrui, and a current professor of African Studies, I can vouch for two things: 1) Dr. Mazrui's contributions to the study of Africa have been immense. He is widely respected. 2) His family has no links to slave-holders. These allegations are false.

As the book is a collection of essays, it is an easy read. Students and experts of Africa and global politics will find his writings both thoughtful and unique.

An excellent collection of articles about a living great world thinker. Of course, people who are familiar with Mazruis's extensive work know that Mazuriana is much more deeper and broader than the collection of articles on Mazrui. Having known little about the ccontrubutors to the collection, my decision to read the book was based merely on its subject. Now I am convinced that it was worth the while.

Ali Mazrui has got one string on his (by now) very old banjo: Islam is good and beneficial for Africa. Mazrui even claims that islam is indigenous to Africa due to the geographic bridge between the M. East and Africa at Suez. In all of his writings, Mazrui downplays islam's cultural genocide which has created Sudanese, Mauretanians, Somalis etc who think they are and claim to be "Arabs". This mental enslavement is only matched by the (continued) slavery of Africans by Arabs. Mazrui always avoids this and instead tries to talk up Islam as "African". He has got a very pernicious agenda in this sense. His scholarship is alos weak and not well thought through.

Wasn't the Mazrui family a notorious slaving clan that the British had to fight with in the 19C to stop them selling Africans to Arabia? How ironic that one of their descendants is now celebrated as an African scholar! As for "Mazruiana" - whatever.....