Summary
Kenyan Muslim scholar and professor of political science at the University of Michigan who wrote and narrated the BBC television documentary The Africans, whose 1986 broadcast Edward Said uses as an example of the imperial axiom that non-Europeans should not represent their views of European and American history as those histories impinged on the colonies (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.65-66 / printed p.38-39).
Details
- Mazrui’s competence and credibility as a first-rank academic authority were unquestioned; his series, originally commissioned and mostly funded by the BBC, had two premises: that for the first time an African was representing himself and Africa before a Western audience whose societies had pillaged, colonized and enslaved Africa, and that African history is made up of three concentric circles — the native African experience, the experience of Islam, and the experience of imperialism (PDF p.65 / printed p.38).
- The National Endowment for the Humanities removed its financial support for the broadcast, although the series ran on PBS anyway; The New York Times television correspondent John Corry attacked the series in articles of September 14, October 9 and 16, 1986, accusing Mazrui of “ideological” exclusions — nowhere mentioning Israel, and vastly exaggerating the evils of Western colonialism — and challenging his figures for the deaths in building the Suez Canal and in the Algerian war of liberation (PDF p.65 / printed p.38).
- Said reads Corry’s attack as speaking for a reconstituted imperial ideology: an African on prime-time television daring to accuse the West, speaking well of Islam and commanding “Western” historical method, reopened a file considered closed (PDF p.66 / printed p.39).