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scholar rather than a Black
African due to Mazrui’s own self-proclaimed Arabic cultural heritage. The Arabic bias permeates in Mazrui’s documentary where his allegiance to Islam (him being a Muslim) made him an Arabic apologist describing “Western enslavement as more extensive and brutal than that of the Arab slave trade”. As such, Mazrui, grouped himself with the perpetrators of violence against Black persons rather than the victims of external oppression.
323:, and died October 12, 2014. During his lifetime he was a distinguished academic, a prolific scholar, and an incisive political commentator on African politics, international political culture, political Islam, and North-South relations. At his death, Mazrui was considered one of the top 100 thinkers in the world. He first rose to prominence as a critic of some of the accepted orthodoxies of African intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. He was critical of
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206:, which portrays North America as one and a half times the size of Africa. This geographical misrepresentation intentionally dwarves Africa in relation to other continents, misleading people on the continents true size and geographical potential. An effort to rectify this distortion highlighted by Ali Mazrui was made by Arno Peters’ 1967
331:, that communism was a Western import just as unsuited for the African condition as the earlier colonial attempts to install European type governments and capitalist economic principles. He argued that a revised liberalism could help the continent and described himself as a proponent of a unique ideology of African
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commercial entities to be killed and exploited for their value. In
Senegal, Muslim butchers are depicted slaughtering pigs – going against their religious dictates – to fulfil market demands for pork. However, nature remained true to the Africans with the forest offering cover for independence fighters such as the
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which was used to promote racism by insisting that different racial groups evolved at different rates with the white races more advanced than black races. Instead, it is Africa that is the birthplace of human culture responsible for developing “the etiquette of eating, the ethics of mating, the rules
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Halfway throughout the documentary, Mazrui introduces the colonial period and its lasting impact on the continent. Motivated by political, economic and climatic reasons, Europe’s sights were set on the
African continent prompting a scramble for Africa, as different political entities sought to claim
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which is the most central continent in the world, a reality which is not reflected by cartographic representations. Instead, contemporary maps position Africa underneath Europe as if to echo the latter’s lower income and geopolitical standing relative to the former. In his companion volume to the TV
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The companion volume to the TV series by the same name is thought-provoking for the author's frank and outspoken manner of presenting the facts as well as for the facts themselves. The book is chock full of information and unique ideas, has beautiful pictures, and should be read both by experts and
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Although the colonial period was relatively brief in comparison to Africa’s entire period, its impact was deep as shown by its enduring impact on human-nature relations. For
Africans, nature became a servant rather than a partner as humans lost their spiritual reverence for animals and saw them as
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hosting early human ancestors such as: Paranthropus “Australopithecus” boisei (Zinjanthropus), Homo habilis, Homo erectus and prehistoric Homo sapiens – refuting racist
Western ideologies which viewed Africans as backward people. Ali Mazrui describes these archaeological findings as
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At the same time Mazrui was a prominent critic of the current world order. He believed the capitalist system was deeply exploitative of Africa, and that the West rarely if ever lived up to their liberal ideals. He opposed
Western interventions in the developing world, such as the Iraq War. He was
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in
Mombasa where his family once ruled the city from that fort, establishing a dynasty that lasted a century. From the Port of Mombasa, Mazrui introduces one of the Triple Heritages of Africa – Islam – which arrived from the ocean by Arabic traders; using the city as a springboard into the region
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wrote extensively against Mazrui’s documentary. Soyinka’s criticism was mainly targeted as Mazrui’s positionality within the documentary. criticised Mazrui’s efforts to speak on behalf of Black Africa based on the latter’s Arabic lineage. Soyinka views the documentary as a product of an Arabic
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a slice of the continent. Describing Man as ‘Homo aestheticus’ Mazrui describes the innate human appreciation for beauty as partly responsible for the migration of
Europeans from their native lands to the continent of Africa in the 18th century. Azri also identifies the
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and the ugliness it spawned as another motivating factor for
European settlers on the continent. With fair weather and picturesque views, settler colonies take root in the South of the continent in South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi amongst a host of states.
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and evangelism. The negative effects of this history have yet to be addressed by independent
African leaders, while the West has tended to regard Africa as recipient rather than as transmitter of effects. Yet Africa has transformed both
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In his introduction, Ali Mazrui describes geography as “a mother of history”, for the significant role it plays in Africa’s historical and contemporary development. It is nature that made Africa the cradle of mankind, with the
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project, is a product resulting from three major influences: (1) an indigenous heritage borne out of time and climate change; (2) the heritage of eurocentric capitalism forced on Africans by European
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A Gall-Peters projection of a Visible Earth image collected by the Earth Observatory experiment of the U.S. Government's NASA space agency. The reticle is 15 degrees in latitude and longitude.
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through jihad and evangelism. Islamic infiltration into Africa also came through the Sahara via camel caravans that served as desert superhighways; enabling trade and spread Islam.
137:. A book by the same title was jointly published by BBC Publications and Little, Brown and Company. The film series premiered in 1986 on BBC and controversially on local
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Michalopoulos, S., Naghavi, A., & Prarolo, G. (2018). Trade and Geography in the Spread of Islam. Economic journal (London, England), 128(616), 3210–3241.
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Michalopoulos, S., Papaioannou, E. (2016). Scramble for Africa And Its Legacy, The. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
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Mathews, N. (2013). Imagining Arab Communities: Colonialism, Islamic Reform, and Arab Identity in Mombasa, Kenya, 1897–1933. Islamic Africa, 4(2), 135–163.
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finds itself today (economically dependent, culturally mixed, and politically unstable) is the price it has had to pay for Western development.
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also long been a critic of Israeli militarism, being one of the first to try to link the treatment of Palestinians with South Africa's
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Njau, J.K. (2014). Olduvai Gorge Archaeological Site. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY.
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in the early 1980s and jointly produced by the BBC and the Public Broadcasting Service (WETA, Washington) in association with the
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Ali Mazrui weaves his own family history in the episode with mention of his family’s connection to the Portuguese built
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series of the same name, Ali Mazrui blames “European ethnocentrism”, reflected in the contemporary map; based on the
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Map which depicted a more accurate measurement of the respective surface areas of the continents.
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Ali Mazrui’s colourful documentary has not been without criticism as African literature icon,
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Bate, P. (Senior Producer). (1986). The Africans: A Triple Heritage . BBC TV& WETA
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combatants who sought refuge from British Imperial forces in Kenya’s many forests.
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Rose S. (2009). Darwin, race and gender. EMBO reports, 10(4), 297–298.
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In the prologue to this episode, Ali Mazrui questions the positionality of the
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Soyinka, W. (1991). Triple Tropes of Trickery. Transition, 54, 178–183.
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Mazrui, A. A. (1986). The Africans: A Triple Heritage. BBC Publications.
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In his later years, Mazrui became a well-known commentator on Islam and
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in the past, Mazrui points out, and the difficult situation in which
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The series is in nine parts, including the following programs:
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See Michalopoulos, S., Naghavi, A., & Prarolo, G. (2018)
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Professor Ali Al'amin Mazrui was born February 24, 1933, in
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Wilson, Caitlin; Janes, Gillian; Williams, Julia (2022).
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of behaviour all evolving out of basic human needs”.
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important in rebutting Charles Darwin’s 19th century
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