Ali A. Mazrui, the futurologist

Was Ali A. Mazrui a latter-day Nostradamus? I seek to demonstrate below that Mazrui had done well in predicting some of the major global events of the last half a century or so. True, Mazrui’s style of intellectual discourse attaches less value to the predictive power of social scientific theories. Indeed, Mazrui had said in 1969: “…only a thin dividing line separates scientific prediction from fortune telling.” He uttered those words at least twenty years before “empirical” political scientists were humbled by two major international events of our time, the “sudden” collapse of communism and the rise of China as an aspiring global hegemon. Let us briefly review a few of Mazrui’s specific “predictions” and show how, retrospectively, he seemed to have been substantially vindicated.

Mazrui wrote in 1972: “When the hold of the white minority in Rhodesia is one day broken, we will almost certainly have a country called Zimbabwe.” Rhodesia gained independence in 1980 and was renamed Zimbabwe.

In 1973, Mazrui maintained that “before long the question was bound to be asked whether China belonged to the ranks of the weak and underprivileged, or was about to join the ranks of the powerful.” This was at least half a decade before Deng Xiaoping opened up China for business and people began to debate about, for instance, whether China was a partner or a neo-colonial power in the making in Africa.

Mazrui lamented in 1975 that “we are nowhere near an international police force strong enough to keep the Russians out of another Czechoslovakia”. Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

In 1986, in his TV series, The Africans, Mazrui asserted: “South Africa will be free from the white minority rule in the 1990s.” In 1994, the white minority rule came to an end in South Africa.

Mazrui predicted in 1989: “If Islam gets nuclearized before the end of the century, two regional rivalries are likely to have played an important part in it. One is the rivalry between India and Pakistan; the other is the rivalry between Israel and the Arabs.” Pakistan exploded the nuclear device and joined the nuclear club in 1998.

Mazrui wrote also in 1989: “Islam in despair could be pushed to a nuclear terrorism as a version of jihad…And a future case of Islamic nuclear terrorism—aimed probably against either Israel or the United States or both—may well be the outcome of the present Israeli-American insensitivity to the sense of honor of Islamic civilization.” Mazrui made those observations more than a decade before the issue of “terrorism” and “clash of civilizations” became principal categories of discourse in the West. In 1994, Mazrui rhetorically asked: “Will Islam replace communism as the West’s perceived adversary?” This was long before the “war on terror” entered the political vocabulary.

In 1998, Mazrui wrote: “While the first industrial revolution of capitalist production and the Christian reformation became allied to the new forces of nationalism in the new Western world, the third industrial revolution and any Islamic reformation will be increasingly hostile to the insularity of nationalism of the state…Islam and the information revolution will be allies in breaking down the barriers of competing national sovereignties. The new technology will give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of transnational universalism.” Does this in any way relate to what is going on in Iraq and Syria in the year 2014?

In 2000, Mazrui wrote: “Behind the Western fear of the spread of nuclear expertise to Third World countries is the fear of nuclear weapons proliferation. There is anxiety in Western capitals that what begins as the peaceful use of nuclear energy may become something more ominous—thus the repeated attempts by the United States to pull back Russia from any kind of nuclear cooperation (however peaceful) with a country like Iran.” This passage could have as well been written in 2014.

Mazrui said in May 2001: “If Americans are going to spend money only to listen to views which they regard as “balanced”, they had better brace themselves for international shocks in the future at least as “bewildering” as the Iranian and Cuban Revolution!” Three months later, it was 11 September 2001, or 9-11 as it more commonly known in the United States.

As he told us in 1980, Mazrui’s predictions are not limited to international affairs. He said: “In 1967, in a lecture at Makerere, I predicted that the future of Swahili in Uganda depended on the decline of the Baganda and the rise of the military. The Baganda had been the greatest opponents of Swahili; the soldiers (mainly from Northern Uganda) were the greatest champions of the language. It turned out to be true that one of the very few cultural gains brought about by Idi Amin’s rule was the greater use of Swahili in national affairs in Uganda”.

In 2004, Mazrui wrote: “The United States stands the best chance of achieving before the end of the twenty-first century a historic compromise on race, ethnicity, and religious differences. The struggle for this historic compromise is likely to be led by African Americans, joined by other Americans of good will”. Four years later, the United States elected its first African American president: Barack Obama.

In 2007, Mazrui wrote: “There is a possibility that the South of Sudan would secede from the North by the end of this decade.” As it turned out, in January 2011, South Sudan officially seceded, becoming the newest independent state in Africa.

Mazrui wrote in July 2011, just after Hosni Mubarak of Egypt resigned and when the dominant discourse centered around the quite optimistic theme of the “Arab Spring”: “I think because Egypt is a very ancient civilization, it may have to overcome a lot of older traditions, if you like, the pharaonic impediments to democratization. Egypt has had five thousand years of bureaucracy.” Mazrui added: “I’m worried that these ancient tendencies of accepting power at the center which go back in Egypt thousands of years and not just centuries, may themselves prove an impediment to rapid democratization. Egypt’s ancient political culture of deference to authority is dying, but not fast enough. I hope I am wrong. If Egyptians become democratic within the next fifty years, I hope my children will celebrate, because that will be faster than I was expecting it to happen due to that built-in lethargy of pharaonic traditions.”

Now let us turn to some of Mazrui’s broader generalizations. His first major scholarly work was about collective identity formation, published in 1963, decades before this topic captured the attention of many political scientists.

In his 1980 essay, “Technology, International Stratification, and the Politics of Growth,” Mazrui seemed to have anticipated some of the arguments Jared Diamond brilliantly articulated more recently in his ground-breaking 1998 book, Guns, Germs and Steel. The question both Mazrui and Diamond asked was: why did industrial revolution begin in Europe and not in Africa or Latin America? In formulating the tentative answers, Jared Taylor, of course, also had the benefit of new insights on the subject in various disciplines.

Did Mazrui also anticipate some of the elements of Susan Strange’s theory of structural power? In her well-known book, States and Markets published in 1988, Strange introduced what she called the four structures of power in global political economy—namely, the security structure, the production structure, the financial structure, and the knowledge structure, which she defined respectively as: the framework of power created by the provision of security by some human beings for others; the sum of all the arrangements determining what is produced, by whom and for whom, by what method and on what terms; the sum of all the arrangements governing the availability of credit plus all the factors determining the terms on which currencies are exchanged for one another; what is believed (and the moral implications and principles derived from those beliefs); what is known and perceived as understood; and the channels by which beliefs, ideas and knowledge are communicated—including some people and excluding others.

Mazrui laid down the elements of his theory of structural dependency in 1985: production, consumption, currency or liquidity, technology and (the English) language. Apparently, this was an elaboration of what he had articulated in 1976: “structural dependency concerns the organizational aspects of political, economic and technological imbalance. A lack of symmetry in power relations, captured in institutional framework, lies at the heart of structural dependency. The phenomenon of multinational corporations constitutes one of the latest structures of dominance emanating from the Western world and operating elsewhere. Financial institutions, certain types of technological transfers, as well as large-scale military alliances involving major powers, are all forms of dependency structurally defined.” Mazrui’s theory was concerned more with North-South relations or, specifically, the relationship between the United States and the Third World.

Does Mazrui’s theory of “mature interdependence” which he formulated in 1980 have an affinity with what international relations scholars Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye called in 1989 the theory of “complex interdependence”? Mazrui defines “mature interdependence” as a form of interdependence between groups which combines sophistication with symmetry. The sophistication comes from enhanced technological capabilities and expanded intellectual awareness; the symmetry emerges out of a few egalitarian morality combined with a more balanced capacity for mutual harm. The other forms of interdependence in Mazrui’s arsenal of categories are primitive interdependence and feudo-imperial interdependence.

Mazrui had elaborated some of the major social constructivist postulates as well in a language strikingly similar to that of contemporary social constructivists. Was he a social constructivist before social constructivism emerged as a formidable paradigm of thought in the discipline of International Relations? Consider the following examples. Alexander Wendt, a well-known social constructivist scholar today, thus wrote in 1999 about the role of ideas versus distribution of capabilities in the international system: “US military power means one thing to Canada, another to Communist China.” One decade earlier, in 1989, Mazrui put the same idea in this way: “Although Brazil is much larger than Iraq, Brazil’s nuclear capability would be less of a global shock than Iraqi nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s explosion of nuclear device would carry with it greater fears than a successful explosion by China.” In 1999, Wendt also unveiled his concept of “ontological security,” defining it as “the human predisposition for a relatively stable expectation about the world around them.” Wendt clarified the concept thus: “…along with the need for physical security, this [predisposition"> pushes human beings in a conservative homeostatic direction, and to seek out recognition of their standing from their society.” In a very different context, Mazrui elaborated a roughly similar idea in 1971, calling it “the sense of security afforded by the familiar.”

Mazrui had advocated at least since the 1970s what he called “horizontal nuclear proliferation” which is designed to shock the original nuclear powers to ban nuclear weapons for all. At the time, his idea was either ignored by the mainstream discourse, or was generally criticized and rejected by his peers. One prominent scholar who had rejected Mazrui’s idea was J. David Singer. Methodologically, Mazrui and Singer were also in opposing camps even though, paradoxically, the two scholars were colleague on the same campus at the University of Michigan for a number of years. Singer, in his 1969 essay titled “The Incompleat Theorist: Insight without Evidence”, challenged Mazrui’s method which Mazrui espoused and shared with his contemporary Hedley Bull, or the other way round. Singer came out in 2008 and suggested, somewhat reluctantly, that it was worth seriously considering Mazrui’s old idea that “the vaccination of horizontal nuclear proliferation might be needed to cure the world of this nuclear malaise, a dose of the disease becomes part of the necessary cure.”

Ali A. Mazrui is indeed the ultimate futurologist in my view, the man who saw the future. The question is: how did he do it?

* Seifudein Adem (PhD, Binghamton University) was a colleague of the late Ali Mazrui.

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