A RECENT symposium in Nairobi honoured the legacy of one of Africa’s most renowned intellectuals, Kenya’s Ali Mazrui, who died in October 2014. He published more than 40 books, and scores of journal and newspaper articles, and contributed more to shaping perceptions about contemporary Africa than any other scholar.Incredibly, this was the first such symposium to be convened in Mazrui’s home country on his intellectual contributions. The meeting was billed as an intergenerational dialogue and saw some impressive contributions on the "Global African’s" intellectual canon from prominent scholars and several of Mazrui’s younger protégés.The conference started with an address by the recently retired chief justice of the Kenyan Supreme Court, Willy Mutunga, who has written about and edited works on Mazrui’s intellectual contributions. He described him as a "courageous debater", "original thinker", and "poetic writer".Jamaican scholar Horace Campbell outlined Mazrui’s contributions to the ...
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