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.
Psychology and Corruption: The East African Experience
