October is a month positioned at a time when the year is ebbing away. With just two months left for the year to come to an end, many use October to tie up the loose ends to their plans. Those who proposed will try to see to it that they get married. Many will try to finish up the houses they are constructing so that they can spend Christmas holidays in their new homes. October also seems to be the month when death picks out some of the region’s finest. After all it was on October 2, 1990 that Rwanda’s Fred Rwigema was killed. It was on October 10 that Uganda’s first Prime Minister, Milton Obote passed away. Burundi’s Prince Louis Rwagasore died on October 13, 1961 while Tanzania’s Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere also died on the 14th day of October 1999. Even beyond the region, Thomas Sankara another African hero died on October 15 1987. This year, the black October harvested one of the region’s finest brains in Professor Ali Mazrui who passed away on Monday October 13. Prof Mazrui was 81 years old but a very accomplished scholar especially on Africa, Islam and Swahili. He wrote numerous books and taught in numerous universities around the world. Mazrui was born in Mombasa, Kenya and had university education first in UK then US and again in UK for a PhD. He lectured at Makerere University in the days when the university lived up to its moniker of an Ivory Tower of knowledge. Mazrui’s lectures were often considered controversial and he was never in good books with Kenya’s first two leaders Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi. For many of us who never had the chance of sitting in a lecture room before Prof. Mazrui, his knowledge would still find us somehow. Mazrui’s TV series, ‘The Africans: A Triple Heritage’ remains one of the most educative TV documentary ever made about Africa. In conjunction with BBC, Mazrui used the documentary to dissect and explain Africa in a new dimension. A three dimensional take on the continent showing how African life has been shaped by traditional African practices, the invasion of Arabs and Western colonialism. Although it is three decades since the documentary aired, the message is still very relevant to this day. Mazrui went ahead to write a book on the same title and I remember borrowing and reading it hardly ever putting it down. A few years back when I saw an old copy on Amazon, I asked a friend to buy it and come back with it. A friend wrote on Facebook that Mazrui had died with a tired brain because he had used it exhaustively to read, research, argue, teach and write books. East Africa and Africa in general will miss Mazrui because he was clearly an expert on many things about Africa. I am writing this piece from Kampala and while riding on the night bus I had the time to watch the controversial BBC documentary about Rwanda. In the documentary there are some ‘experts on Rwanda’ that were interviewed. With the likes of Mazrui giving in to old age, I worry that our current education systems are not good enough to create our own experts and therefore we shall continue having to deal with people based in Washington, London, Paris or Brussels flying in talking to a few people and having a few croissants before flying back and declaring themselves experts on Rwanda, DRC, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi or Tanzania. It is not enough to be angry with shady foreign ‘experts’ owning our story by claiming to be experts on it too. We need to seriously think of authoritatively telling our stories too. We need to nurture more Mazruis to research and come up with a concrete narrative about us. The question therefore is, can our current universities nurture another Mazrui? I know that Mazrui did not study in any university in East Africa but his time at Makerere shaped him into a fine intellectual. If he was in a university today he would probably be more concerned about his pay and how to help students pass and not how they can research. This is what his replacement at Makerere, Prof. Mahmood Mamdani called the market place of education where universities seem to be places where thousands of students flock to, so as to get a degree certificate regardless of whether learning has taken place. In such a situation where will our experts come from?
