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‘There could not have been a more fitting tribute to the late Professor Ali Mazrui than A Giant Tree Has Fallen, with a tree being the appropriate symbol for a man born and bred in Africa: resilient, proud, gifted and of formidable intellect.
Here friends and family, academics and politicians offer a glimpse into the life of a man committed to making the world a better place.
There is no denying that this proud African left a mark and brought to the minds of many all over the world the injustice done to vulnerable peoples, especially Africans, by the colonial powers. This compilation is a must-read, especially in these times of debate and discussion on decolonisation and transformation.’
...and it goes without saying that, I am, forever, most grateful and honoured that, I was invited to contribute to this project and book (see below).
A Giant Tree has Fallen: Tributes to Ali Al-Amin Mazui
‘This book memorialising the life and work of Ali Al’amin Mazrui comprises more than 130 tributes written by people ranging from heads of state to journalists. Presented here are those tributes for which copyright permissions were received from among the hundreds that appeared online and print.
In preparing this book, it was made very clear that, unlike other books of tributes to great men and women, there would be no segmentation of the sections based on writers’ and speakers’ positions in life. Instead, it was decided that the tributes be presented in alphabetical order based on writers’ and speakers’ last names.
The decision hinged on the fact that Mazrui would not have opposed any segmentation of people by class, race, ethnicity and gender etc. Nonetheless, out of great respect for Mazrui’s immediate family members, their tributes are presented first, followed by those from his global family members. Also included at the beginning of the book are three chapters that comprise an introductory essay, a brief biography of Mazrui, and an essay on metaphorical-linguistic analysis of the tributes that follow.
The book also has a preface by the co-editors and a forward by Salim Ahmed Salim, the former Prime Minister of the United Republic of Tanzania and Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now known as the Africa Union. Dr. Salim, who served as the Secretary-General of the OAU from 1989 to 2001, was Mazrui’s friend and contemporary. Mazrui once described Salim as “Mr Africa” and the “first real postcolonial Secretary-General of the OAU.’
Ali Mazrui (1933-2014): An Intellectual Giant Whom I Met in Kericho, By Kamran Mofid, in A Giant Tree has Fallen, pp. 373-383
Below is a brief introduction to my contributory chapter:
Ali Mazrui (1933-2014): An Intellectual Giant Whom I Met in Kericho --Kamran Mofid
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Renowned Pan-Africanist, scholar and teacher,Ali Al’amin Mazrui, 81, died peacefully on October 12, 2014 of natural causes at his home in Vestal, New York. I was blessed and honoured to meet Prof. Mazrui at our Fourth Globalization for the Common Good Initiative (GCGI)Annual International Conference, which was held in Nairobi and Kericho in 2005. Prof. Mazrui gave the Keynote Address: ‘Can Africa Tame Globalization? Moral Lessons from Cultural Experience’.
During the Conference I was able to spend some precious moments with him. We were able to talk and debate, both in public and private. I found him endlessly warm, generous, kind and gracious. I value and cherish those moments and memories. I can only say that Africa and the world have lost a great intellect, teacher and ambassador of peace for the common good. I am praying in my own way for Ali Mazrui. May God grant him eternal rest; he was, in the old idiom, a lovely man, who if required may still be a peacemaker in heaven.
‘Africa in the twenty first century is likely to be one of the final battlegrounds of the forces of globalization—for better or for worse. This phenomenon called globalization has its winners and losers. In the initial phases, Africa has been among the losers as it has been increasingly marginalized. There 374 a giant tree has fallen are universities in the United States which have more computers than the computers available in an African country of twenty million people. This has been the great digital divide.
The distinction between the haves and havenots has now coincided with the distinction between digitized and the “digiprived ”. Let us begin with the challenge of a definition. What is globalization? It consists of processes that lead toward global interdependence and the increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances. The word globalization is itself quite new, but the actual processes toward global interdependence and exchange started centuries ago. Five forces have been major engines of globalization across time: Religion, technology, warfare, economy, and empire. These have not necessarily acted separately, but often have reinforced each other.
For example, the globalization of Christianity started with the conversion of Emperor Constantine I of Rome in 313. The religious conversion of an emperor started the process under which Christianity became the dominant religion not only of Europe but also of many other societies later ruled or settled by Europeans. The globalization of Islam began not with converting a ready-made empire, but with building an empire almost from scratch. The Umayyads and Abbasids put together bits of other people’s empires (e.g., former Byzantine Egypt and former Zoroastrian Persia) and created a whole new civilization. The forces of Christianity and Islam sometimes clashed. In Africa the two religions have competed for the soul of a continent...To read more about the book see: A Giant Tree has Fallen
“Africa and Globalisation for the Common Good: The Quest for Justice and Peace”
Nishkam St. Puran Institute and Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha Complex, Kericho, Kenya, April 18-28-2005
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The Enduring Shame of ‘Bastard Economics’ , Neoliberalism and Crony Capitalism
The catastrophic fire that killed at least 72 innocent people in London was the inevitable byproduct of an ideology that vilifies the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, the disabled and the disadvantaged, blaming them for their plight, whilst celebrating crony, feral capitalists, tax-dodgers and tax-avoiders, offshoring their steals and more.
‘...But Grenfell is more than a story of negligence—a tragic coalescence of a dozen discrete moments of hubris and greed. It is also an awful fable of our time. Pundits often describe it as a “Hurricane Katrina moment,” a catastrophe that exposes a rich country’s contempt for its poor. “The charred remains of Grenfell Tower have become a shocking symbol of inequality at the heart of the capital itself,” the New York Times declared in a story on London's atomization earlier this week. “They have changed the national narrative.” Grenfell has become a grisly metaphor for all that is squalid about the British capital, unfettered free-market capitalism, and society at large.’+
Some of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed the lives of 72 people
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‘One year ago, the worst high-rise fire in British history in Grenfell Tower cost the lives of 72 people.
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‘The truth about capitalism is out as Marx’s magic cap starts to slip’
‘A century after the rise of the Bolsheviks, the young are reading Karl Marx again – and faith in the superstitious beliefs that underpin market economies is faltering’
Capitalism in Disgrace, Karl Marx’s Magic on the Rise Again
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‘Some criticise Marx as anti-environmental, but understanding his ecology is essential to grasping his critique of capitalism.’
‘Marx does not simply claim that humanity destroys the environment. Rather, his “materialist method” investigates how the reified movement of capital reorganises the trans-historical metabolism between humans and nature and negates the fundamental material condition for sustainable human development’ (Kohei Saito, in Karl Marx's Ecosocialism. Capitalism, nature and the unfinished Critique of Political Economy)
Karl Marx the ecologist
By Simon Butler*
As the world economy spirals down into its deepest crisis since the great depression, the writings of Karl Marx have made a return to the top seller lists in bookstores. In his native Germany, the sales of Marx's works have trebled.
His theories have been treated with contempt by conservative economists and historians. Yet, in the context of the latest economic downturn, even a few mainstream economists have been compelled to ask whether Marx was right after all.
Marx argued that capitalism is inherently unstable, fraught with contradictions and prone to deep crises.
Exploitation, war, hunger and poverty were not problems that could be solved by the market system, he said. Rather, they were inescapable outcomes of the system itself. This is because capitalism is dominated by the wealthiest corporations and devoted to profit above all else.
Only a move to a democratic socialist society, where ordinary people are empowered to make the key decisions about the economy and society themselves, can open the path to genuine freedom and liberation.
Famous for their critique of capitalism and for advocating social revolution, Marx and his co-thinker Frederick Engels are far less known for their concern for the destruction of the environment and the need for sustainability.
Taken together, their views on the relationship between human society and the environment rank them among the most advanced environmentalists of their day.
According to Marx, capitalism is an economic system profoundly at odds with a sustainable planet. The exploitation of nature is as fundamental to the profit system, he argued, as the exploitation of working people.
One of the key goals of socialism is to liberate the natural world from the anti-environmental impacts of corporate greed. "From the standpoint of a higher economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men", Marx wrote.
He was scathing of the capitalist economic notion that the air, rivers, seas and soil can be treated as a "free gift of nature" to business.
"Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations."
The market system is incapable of preserving the environment for future generations because it cannot take into account the long-term requirements of people and planet. The competition between individual enterprises and industries to make a profitable return on their investment tends to exclude rational and sustainable planning.
Engels explained this destructive dynamic: "As individual capitalists are engaged in production and exchange for the sake of the immediate profit, only the nearest, most immediate results must first be taken into account.
"As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers.
"The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions."
In Marx and Engels's time, this feature of capitalism was especially apparent in farming and agriculture.
"The way that the cultivation of particular crops depends on fluctuations in market prices and the constant changes in cultivation with these price fluctuations — the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits — stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations", Marx wrote.
Capitalist farming is unsustainable because it inevitably starves the soil of nutrients. It is nothing less than "an art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil".
Furthermore, Marx held that "all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the foundations of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the more rapid is this process of destruction.
"Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology … only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker."
Marx and Engels understood the Earth's ecosystem as dynamic and complex — an intricate, delicately balanced process of interacting components where any changes that occur feed back with new, and often unpredictable, effects.
We disrupt the natural ecosystem at our peril, Engels warned. "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each victory nature takes its revenge on us.
"Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel out the first."
Many times Marx described the normal interaction between human society and the natural world as a kind of "metabolism". Capitalist production creates a "metabolic rift" — a sharp break in the relationship — between humanity and the Earth.
The environmental results of this deepening rift have proved devastating.
"The development of civilisation and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison", Marx pointed out.
Engels added: "At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature." On the other hand, "we have the advantage of all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." That is, we can organise society in step with nature's limits.
Marx and Engels held that socialism aimed to end class exploitation and also re-establish the "metabolism" between people and the Earth.
This is impossible unless the profit motive is removed from determining production in human society and a system of participatory democracy and rational planning is built in its stead.
Engels argued that only the working people organised as "associated producers" can "govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way". This "requires something more than mere knowledge. It requires a complete revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order."
Today, with climate change threatening life itself, the ecological contradictions of capitalism have reached truly dire proportions. The environmental crisis will undoubtedly play a far larger role in the demise of the system than Marx and Engels realised 150 years ago.
Along with their contribution to ecology, another neglected fact about Marx and Engels is that they were not merely political theorists or philosophers — they were also dedicated activists who participated in the revolutionary movements of their day.
They insisted that theory must be made "real" — it must be enriched and developed through revolutionary practice — to have any real significance.
Marx reached this conclusion in 1845 when he was still very young. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways", he wrote. "The point, however, is to change it."
*This article by Simon Butler was first published in green left weekly on 21 February 2009.
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