Ngugi wa Thiong'o: How Ali Mazrui, the global Kenyan, charted my path

Late Prof Ali Mazrui

Ali Mazrui and I were not social friends; and we did not always see eye to eye on politics and Art. In the analysis of African politics he emphasised ethnic conflicts where I saw class conflicts as the prime mover. But our lives interacted in the most amazing of ways. In a documentary that Dr Ndirangu Wachanga has made of the Life of the late Ali Mazrui, he asked me what I thought of my fellow countryman.

Mazrui, I said, is primarily a political scientist with a literary bent; and I, primarily a literary artist with a political bent. I knew he had this bent because, way back in the early 60s, as a guest editor of a special issue of Ghala, then the literary arm of The East African Journal, I had published one of his short stories. Later he would write the novel, The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, that would confirm this bent.