Is Ali Mazrui a visionary or a "vacuous" intellectual? Is he reactionary, revolutionary or essentially a radical pragmatist? These questions were the focus of a special plenary session of the Conference of African Association of Political Science that took place in Durban, South Africa in June 2003. The forum was intended to interrogate Ali Mazrui’s contributions in the last forty years or so of his career as an academic. The questions themselves capture the magnitude of the polarization among different sections of Mazrui’s audiences generated by his often provocative propositions and prescriptions on a wide range of issues—from the role of intellectuals in Africa’s transformation to the imperative of pax-Africana, from Tanzaphilia to Islamophobia, from the condition of the Black woman to the destiny of the Black race. It is some of the exchanges, sometimes intense and even acrimonious, arising from Mazui’s ideas on continental and global African affairs, from the 1960s to the present, that constitute the subject matter of these two volumes. Together, they are not only a celebration of Ali Mazruo’s own intellectual life as one long debate, but also an intellectual mirror of the contours of some of the hotly contested terrains in Africa’s quest for self-realization.

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