ABSTRACT
Prior to his death in 2014, Prof. Ali Mazrui was perhaps the most prominent African scholar in the global academy. Hailed as Africa’s gift to the world, account of the breath and profundity of the corpus of his scholarship, Mazrui was celebrated, feted, and awarded by multiple institutions across the globe and recognized as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world. An outstanding feature of Mazrui’s scholarship is his creative employment of the dialectical method in his analysis of social phenomena. This chapter focuses on the creative uniqueness of Prof. Mazrui’s analytical style. It proceeds by discussing the essence of the dialectical method whose central feature is the notion of opposites and internal contradictions in phenomena, both social and physical. It then turns to an exposition of Prof. Mazrui’s creative utilization of the dialectical method in a sample of his works. The main objective of the chapter is to underscore Prof. Mazrui’s analytical prowess and intellectual creativity as a dialectical thinker with a view to highlighting the analytical potency and explanatory clarity represented in his scholarship. The chapter argues that this penchant for the dialectical style put Mazrui in a class of his own among his peers.
