Ali A. Mazrui

The African diaspora : African origins and New World identities

Introduction by Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui The Diaspora: Orientations and Determinations Michael J. C. Echeruo, An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project Maureen Warner-Lewis, Cultural Reconfigurations in the African Caribbean Elliott P. Skinner, The Restoration of African Identity for a New Millenium Addressing the Constraints Joseph E. Inikori, Slaves or Serfs?: A Comparative Study of Slavery and Serfdom in Europe and Africa Richard Price, Modernity, Memory, Martinique Peter P. Ekeh, Kinship and State in African and African American Histories Jack Blocker, Wages of Migration: Jobs and Homeownership Among Black and White Workers in Muncie, Indiana, 1920 Ira K. Blake, The Significance of Cognitive-Linguistic Orientation for Academic Well Being in African American Children Sharon Aneta Bryant, The Relationship of Place of Birth and Health Status Race, Gender, and Image Celia M. Azevedo, Images of Africa and the Haiti Revolution in American and Brazilian Abolitionism Kimberly Welch, Our Hunger is Our Song: The Politics of Race in Cuba, 1900-1920 Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Role of Music in the Emergence of Afro-Cuban Culture Sally Price, The Centrality of Margins: Art, Gender and African American Creativity Eliana G. Ramos Bennett, Gabriela Cravo e Canela: Jorge Amado and the Myth of the Sexual Mulatta in Brazilian Culture Patience Elabor-Idemudia, Gender and the New African Diaspora: African Immigrant Women in the Canadian Labor Force Sandra L. Richards, Horned Ancestral Masks, Shakespearean Actor Boys, and Scotch-Inspired Set Girls: Social Relations in Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Jonkonnu Creativity, Spirituality, and Identity Oyekan Owomoyela, From Folklore to Literature: The Route from Roots in the African World Jean Rahier, Blackness as a Process of Creolization: The Afro-Esmeraldian Decimas (Ecuador) Omoniyi Afolabi, The (T)Error of Invisibility: Ellison and Cruz e Souza Adetayo Alabi, Recover, Not Discover: Africa in Walcotts Dream on Monkey Mountain and Philips Looking for Livingstone Ali A. Mazrui, Islam and the African Diaspora: The Impact of Islamigration Pierre Damien-Mvuyekure, From Legba to Papa Labas: New World Metaphysical Self/Refashioning in Ishmael ReedOs Mumbo Jumbo Robert Elliott Fox, Diasporacentricism and Black Aural Texts David Evans, The Reinterpretation of African Musical Instruments in the United States Nkiru Nzegwu, The Concept of Modernity in Contemporary African Art LeGrace Benson, Habits of Attention: Persistence of Lan Ginee in Haiti Andrea Frohne, Representing Jean-Michel Basquiat Charles Martin, Optic Black: Implied Texts and the Colors of Photography Keith Q. Warner, Caribbean Cinema, or Cinema in the Caribbean? Reconnecting with Africa Laura J. Pires-Hester, The Emergence of Bilateral Diaspora Ethnicity Among Cape Verdean-Americans Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Black Americans and the Creation of Americas Africa Policies: The De-Racialization of Pan-African Politics Joseph McLaren, Alice Walker and the Legacy of African American Discourse on Africa Joyce Ann Joyce, African-Centered Womanism: Connecting Africa to the Diaspora

From Social Darwinism to Current Theories of Modernization: A Tradition of Analysis

Much of the most interesting work in political science in the last decade or so has been concerned with processes of modernization, institution-formation, and sociopolitical change at large. In fact, modernization and political development have been, along with system analysis, the most important themes of the new political science. In this article we are addressing ourselves to this developmental revolution in political science. We propose to argue that the idea of analyzing and classifying nations on the basis of the stage of modernization reached has long-standing historical connections with a tradition that goes back to social Darwinism and beyond. But it must be emphasized from the outset that this argument is not intended as a criticism of the new political science.

Islamic and Western Values

is a complex undertaking, and that distance is narrower than they assume. Islam is not just a religion, and certainly not just a fun damentalist political movement. It is a civilization, and a way of life that varies from one Muslim country to another but is ani mated by a common spirit far more humane than most Western ers realize. Nor do those in the West always recognize how their own societies have failed to live up to their liberal mythology. Moreover, aspects of Islamic culture that Westerners regard as medieval may have prevailed in their own culture until fairly re cently; in many cases, Islamic societies may be only a few decades behind socially and technologically advanced Western ones. In the end, the question is what path leads to the highest quality of life for the average citizen, while avoiding the worst abuses. The path of the West does not provide all the answers; Islamic values deserve serious consideration.

The Resurrection of the Warrior Tradition in African Political Culture

Increased attention has recently been paid to the phase of ‘primary resistance’ when Africa first had to confront western intrusion. The arguments of scholars like Terence Ranger for Eastern Africa and Michael Crowder for Western Africa identify those early armed challenges by Africans against colonial rule as the very origins of modern nationalism in the continent. By this argument, Tanzanias ruling party and its function as a liberating force has for its ancestry both the Maji Maji and earlier rebellions against German rule from the 1880s onwards. African struggles against colonial rule did not begin with modern political parties and western trained intellectuals, but originated in those early ‘primary resisters’ with their spears poised against western military technology. 1

Black Africa and the Arabs

BLACK Africa and the Arab world have been linked by a fluc tuating pattern of economic and cultural connections for at least 12 centuries. In the secular field the Arabs have up to this time played two major roles in black Africa: first as accom plices in African enslavement, and then in the twentieth century as allies in African liberation. In the past several years they have built this alliance into a comprehensive political partnership, aimed at maintaining a solid front, particularly with regard to the Middle East and Southern Africa. The critical question for the future is whether the Arabs will also become partners in African development. The relationship between Arabs and black Africans has always been largely asymmetrical?with the Middle East usually the giver, and black Africa usually the receiver. Throughout the history of their involvement in black Africa the Arabs have been both conquer ors and liberators, both traders in slaves and purveyors of new ideas. Trade and Islam have been companions throughout, with the crescent following the commercial caravan, the muezzin calling believers to prayer from the marketplace. The Arab slave trade was a significant part of this commerce from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries. While the transatlantic slave trade on the West coast of Africa was certainly larger and more important, the activities of Arab slavers on the Eastern seaboard lasted a few decades longer?until they were officially outlawed in the late i8oos. Thus Islam may have been somewhat compromised in East Africa by the nature of its purveyors (who, in addition to slaving, also created Arab city-states along the East coast). European colonization did, at any rate, arrest the spread of the religion in East Africa more effectively than in the West. In the East African countries of Kenya, Uganda and Malawi, Islamization came to an almost abrupt halt in the face of the Euro-Christian challenge.1 In West Africa, on the other hand, Islam has continued to expand in spite of the impressive coun tervailing efforts of Christian missionaries and of the technological prestige of European civilization. A number of West African coun tries, including Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and Niger are now predominantly Muslim, as is the northern part of Nigeria.

THE LUMPEN PROLETARIAT AND THE LUMPEN MILITARIAT: AFRICAN SOLDIERS AS A NEW POLITICAL CLASS*

How much of a revolution in Africa’s political experience do military coups signify? This paper starts from the premiss that however conservative Major-General Amin might have been in January 1971, the very fact that a soldier had captured political power constituted a basic revolution in Uganda. Changes of a profound political and psychological significance have arisen out of the modernization of military skills in Africa, and out of the impact of these skills on society. The case of Uganda is to be seen in this wider perspective. In terms of political sociology, the most important consequences of the emergence of modem armies in Africa are reducible to two areas of impact. The first area concerns the consolidation of statehood and the second concerns the diversification of the class structure. Our first hypothesis here is that the emergence of the modem army in African countries is a critical variable towards the centralization of power in the polity, and, therefore an important stage towards the emergence of state structures of authority. Our second hypothesis is that the emergence of the modem army in African countries has broken the correlation between political power and western education by interrupting the trend towards the dictatorship of the educated class in modem African history. The lumpen proletariat is a mass of disorganized workers and ghetto dwellers in the developed world; but the lumpen militariat is that class of semi-organized, rugged, and semi-literate soldiery which has begun to claim a share of power and influence in what would otherwise have become a heavily privileged meritocracy of the educated. Related to this second hypothesis of this essay is the third hypothesis that the history of modernization in independent Africa might well be a gradual transition from a political supremacy of those who hold the means of destruction, as might be the trend in the first two or three decades of independence, to a future political supremacy of those who control the means of production, Modem military technology in a relatively backward society tends to widen the gap of power between the unarmed citizenry on one side, and those who hold control over the new means of war, on the other. It is only after the society has become more technologically complex, and factories and laboratories have generated their own power-holders, that the means of production become critical enough to the survival of national systems to provide a countervailing balance to the power exercised by the military. Those who control the means of production-workers, managers and owners-are at their most powerful in relation to the soldiers in situations of technological complexity. They are a t their weakest in relation to the soldiers in situations of rudimentary technology, manifested both in the new cotton mill in the midst of rural backwardness, as well as symbolized by the machine gun in a society which still experiences cattle raids with spears. Let us take each of these three hypotheses in turn. If we can establish these, we shall have established that General Amin’s assumption of power was a revolutionary event irrespective of his own ideological position. We shall then discuss the embourgeoisement which awaits his men.

Global Africa: From Abolitionists to Reparationists

I am greatly honored to be giving the first Bashorun M.K.O. Abiola Distinguished Lecture. I am grateful to the African Studies Association (ASA) of the United States for giving me this role. Although the first Abiola Lecture is being given today, the decision to launch such an annual event was taken by the ASA more than a year ago. That was of course before Chief M.K.O. Abiola entered the presidential race in Nigeria from which he seemed to have emerged the victor-but the results were never officially confirmed. But there is another side to Chief Abiolas concerns. This is the

Soldiers as Traditionalizers

as a whole. Much of what occurred in West Africa was regarded as evidence of likely trends elsewhere in the continent. Such predictions were sometimes vindicated. The growth of modern nationalism in West Africa from the 1930’s onwards did spread to other parts of Africa. The emergence of one-party systems in West Africa found imitators within a few years in other African countries. Even the application of a particular analytical concept to a West Africa situation like David E. Apter’s analysis of Kwame Nkrumah as a &dquo;charismatic leader&dquo; soon led to a more dubious scramble to identify other &dquo;charismatic&dquo; figures in Tanzania, Zambia, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and elsewhere.I 1

Anti-militarism and political militancy in Tanzania

zania under Julius Nyerere. One is a marked distrust of men professionally under arms at home and in inter-African relations. The other is a faith in military or quasi-military solutions to some of the remaining colonial problems in Africa. The distrust of &dquo;pure soldiers&dquo; has, in part, resulted in Tanzania’s experimentation with new forms of civicmilitary relations. The faith in quasi-military solutions to the remaining colonial problems

Islam and the United States: streams of convergence, strands of divergence

This article identifies four historical phases of relations between Islam and the Western world, as led by the United States. The first phase was a convergence of values coinciding with a divergence of empathy. The second phase reversed the order – Islamic and Western values diverged, but intercommunal relations became closer. The third phase is after September 11 when intercommunal relations once again diverged while differences between Western and Islamic values were greater than ever. The futuristic fourth phase of Islams relations with the U.S.‐led Western world is when the power of the new American Empire is circumscribed, Western values become less libertarian, and Islam reconciles itself to modernity.