Ali A. Mazrui & Alamin M. Mazrui, The power of Babel: Language and governance in the African experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Oxford: James Currey; Kampala: Fountain Publishers; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers; Cape Town: David Philip, 1998. Pp. xii, 228. Hb $40.00, pb $15.25.

Abstract

To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.