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| Guy
Mhone: The Humble Giant of African Development Economics
(1943 -2005) |
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Guy C. Z. Mhone (1943 - 2005) |
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The leading
African development economist Guy C. Z. Mhone
passed away at Pretoria, South Africa, on 1
March, 2005. He was the former Director of the
Graduate School of Public and Development
Management at the University of Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg.
IDEAs had a long association with Guy Mhone and he was
a member of the Programme Advisory Board of IDEAs. Most
recently, we at IDEAs remember him gratefully for his
immense contribution at the |
Agrarian Conference organized by IDEAs at Addis
Ababa, during last December. The intellectual clarity of the message which he put
across throughout the Conference was compelling and
stimulating. This is the critical need to extend a
developmental paradigm within which the all the disparate
discourses on rural economy, agriculture, industrialization,
unemployment, and poverty; the underlying macroeconomic
processes with the dynamic interaction between the
internal and external sectors; and the relationship
between social policy and economic policy; all need
to be located and analyzed. He also reminded us of
the need to address the problems of underdevelopment
and development both in its generality as well as
within the specificity of each country.
Any one who has met Guy Mhone cannot help remember
having been taken in by his simplicity and humility.
But, the agenda he has put before us, to conceptualize
the developmental issue in a holistic manner and to
increase the depth of the development economics discipline,
is not a humble one. It is a challenging task that
we must take on and carry forward to fruition.
Guy Mhone will be deeply missed by progressive economists
around the world.
Personal tributes by Thandika Mkandawire and Patrick
Bond follow.
Personal Reflections on Guy
Mhone, Thandika Mkandawire, Director, UNRISD, Geneva.
Guy Mhone's death is a great loss. It is difficult for
me to talk about Guy without getting personal. Our lives
were so intertwined that we often joked about how often
we found ourselves in the same places. "Tawonanaso"-
"Here we meet again"- was what we often said when we
met. I also recount the story in a personalised way
to acknowledge my great intellectual indebtedness to
Guy, with whom I have maintained the longest intellectual
conversation.
Guy and I were brought up in the same town, Luanshya,
on the Copperbelt of Zambia,and we lived in the same
"sections" of the mining township. We were also relatives.
Guy's father was a great administrator and award-winning
gardener. One consequence of Guy's father being a gardener
was that Guy and I were once sent out to sell vegetables
in the then exclusively white residential area. It was
an eye-opening experience. As children living in the
"locations", we were shielded by family and neighbourhood
from the ravages of the racial order. This walk through
the white area just across the river confronted us not
only with unimaginable opulence, but also with the insults
of children our age who happened to be white and the
boundless curiosity of other white kids who wanted to
reach out to us but were prevented by the "colour-bar"
from doing so. This must have left a mark on our understanding
of the world. I believe this was probably a significant
source of Guy's abiding interest in "dualism" and racial
injustice.
Like all Nyasa migrant workers, Guy's parents were deeply
concerned with giving their children the best possible
education. While we others went to the local mining
school, Guy was sent by his father to a boarding school
in the then Southern Rhodesia where he did his primary
school. My own father, also unhappy about the mining
school education, decided to send his children to Malawi
for our primary education. I went to Mzimba Primary
School and then to Zomba Catholic Secondary School.
During one of my school vacations, I was grilled by
Guy's father on education in Nyasaland. I believe he
was also interested in finding out what good it had
done to me. I believe I gave a sufficiently good impression
of education in Nyasaland that he, too, decided to send
Guy to Malawi for education. Guy went to Livingstonia.
Guy and I met again when he came to visit me in Blantyre,
where I was at Malawi News. Guy then came to the United
States, where I had gone in 1962. He frequently came
to visit me at Ohio State University, in Columbus. We
spent hours discussing the future of Africa-from literature
to politics to music, especially jazz and South African
music.
In 1965, we were both made persona non grata in our
own country. I was in Latin America when this news reached
me, and I eventually ended up in Sweden as a political
refugee. We continued our intense conversation through
incredibly long letters on a whole range of subjects.
For a while the subject was literature, with me taking
a more "social realist" perspective and Guy a more existentialist
view. Guy wrote great poetry and it was only his modesty
that let me continue pontificating on the arts and literature.
His poetry was engaged. When Guy was in Belize he sent
me a poem that so poignantly captured underdevelopment
that its imagery is permanently etched in my mind. He
described a situation of such extreme poverty that dogs
were so starved, they had to lean against a tree to
support their barking.
Through our correspondence, we came to the conclusion
that we did not have to spend our exile years out of
Africa waiting for Malawi's liberation. In 1978 I moved
to Senegal. We were to meet again when I visited him
in Oneanta, New York, where he was teaching. We spent
hours together comparing notes, engaging in some of
the most rewarding discussions I have ever had with
anyone. Once again the subject matter of our late discussions
ranged wide. By this time Guy had become an accomplished
saxophonist, deeply influenced by John Coltrane and
Ornette Coleman. Something became clear to me: Guy was
definitely not happy working outside Africa. He had
also decided to move back to Africa. And although he
was professionally doing well in the United States,
he longed to return to the continent.
In 1982, I moved from Senegal to Zimbabwe on secondment
to the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies. To
my absolute delight I learned that Guy was coming to
join the University of Zimbabwe. During the two years
together in Harare we were closely associated and spent
huge amounts of time together. This was as close to
home as we could get. This was also at the time when
Kamuzu Banda's security services roamed freely in the
region, assassinating Banda's enemies.
One thing that was striking to many who knew Guy was
his devotion to his teaching. I first noticed this during
one of his lectures at the New School in New York. I
was to be privileged later to observe him in action
while teaching in the same department of economics at
the University of Zimbabwe. He was respected by both
his colleagues and students, and across the racial divide.
It is this devotion to teaching and to students that
explains his anger at the fact that so little self-examination
had taken place within the white university establishment
in South Africa, and that so little was being done to
facilitate the lives of black faculty and students in
South African institutions of higher learning.
In his scholarship, Guy was convinced that the struggles
against poverty and injustice were served best by rigorous
analysis and disciplined work. He disliked name-calling
and uninformed polemics.
Guy's major intellectual concern was the problem of
poverty and inequality. He was most particularly interested
in the "dualistic" manifestation of poverty in the Southern
African region. For Guy, capitalism in Southern Africa
emerged as "racial capitalism", which was superimposed
over pre-capitalist social relations. These structural
features did not suddenly end with liberation. Policy
initiatives that failed to address this legacy were
condemned to reinforce and reproduce the legacy of racial
discrimination. His Ph.D. thesis addressed the problems
of dualism in an original manner, suggesting clearly
that the dualism of Southern Africa was not the benign
one recounted in development economics texts, but a
malicious one that was premised on racism and exploitation.
Guy's understanding was that to the extent that the
new governments in the region adopted the existing economic
structure and logic of the "economies of discrimination"
that underpinned them, they would produce "enclave economies",
with all that entailed. He later took up this idea while
looking at Malawi's agricultural performance. As was
usual with Guy, this position was formulated in a rigorous
matter. In his article on Malawi agriculture, he demonstrated
how the "bimodal" mode of agricultural development pursued
by Banda would lead to the great impoverishment of the
peasants. This was the time when the Malawi economy
was being treated as a success story by the World Bank.
Guy also demonstrated this argument in a chapter on
"Social policy in Zambia", part of a collection I edited,
in which he argued that attempts to simply "Africanise"
the racist "welfare regime" that had been set up for
whites in the copper mines would simply reproduce the
social order and would be fiscally unsuitable. Guy extended
scholarship to gender analysis, where again he insisted
on understanding the structural underpinnings of gender
discrimination.
It was from this perspective that Guy looked at the
failure of agricultural development in Africa. For him,
the issue was not simply producing more for export or
"food self-sufficiency", but the institutions and agrarian
transformation that would do away with the immiserising
tendencies of dualism that would produce a mutually
beneficial dynamic of interaction between the sectors.
His point was: "We need development strategies that
absorb the economically marginalized and excluded-the
vast majority of the population-into a dynamic, growing
economy."
The dualism that interested Guy was not merely that
within each country, but that of the entire region where,
just as within each of the countries, the development
of the "modern sector" tended to lead to greater immiserisation
in the "traditional sector". He noted that the "white"
economies of the region tended to have similar effects
on the "resource labour economies". The structural features
of these "enclave economies" were such that even in
the post-liberation phase of these economies, they would
continue to play this role unless they were able to
do away with their internal dualism.
Virtually everyone who has conveyed condolences to friends
and family has remarked on Guy's modesty and generosity
of spirit. They have all recognized how principled he
was as a person. His generosity extended itself to intellectual
debates. However, there was a naughtiness to his humility.
I was always impressed by how Guy would, in any argument,
give the other side close attention and even grant it
the benefit of doubt. He would go so far as to help
the other side to more rigorously reformulate its position
before embarking on the demolition of that position.
He often joked about this as giving the rope to the
adversaries with which to hang themselves.
Guy, like many African scholars, was preoccupied with
the link between democracy and development, and with
the need to think about "developmental democracies".
He was appalled at the turn in economics which had led
to the displacement of developmental economics with
a discipline concerned with static allocative efficiency
and stabilization. He rigorously stated his argument
in a major "summing up" he was preparing for CODESRIA,
and told me that he wanted to extend it into a full
monograph.
One thing that may not have come out clearly is his
immense love of life and sense of humour, which was
often directed at the pompous and repressive.
Guy and I went back to Malawi in 1994 after more than
30 years in exile. We were there to attend the launch
of the book (Malawi at the Crossroads: The Post-Colonial
Economy) that he had edited for SAPES. He was so moved
by the event and by the opportunity to finally participate
in an intellectual event in Malawi that he broke down
in tears and was not able to complete his speech. We
planned to come back on a less emotionally charged trip.
During our last meeting, when he and Yvonne spent some
time with us in Geneva, we planned on spending holidays
together in Malawi. In the event, this did not happen.
We definitely did not plan for this tragic journey back
home to honour a great African scholar and a great human
being.
Yvonne has lost a loving husband and devoted companion;
Tamara and Zimema have lost a caring father;
Many of us have lost a brother, friend and comrade;
African scholarship has lost one of its best and most
committed minds;
This loss is difficult to understand given the vitality
of the man.
Tribute by Patrick Bond,
University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.
The renowned development economist Guy Mhone, a Wits
University professor, passed away at a Pretoria hospital
on Tuesday, at the age of 62.
Born in Luanshya, Zambia and raised along the border
with Malawi (the country of his citizenship), Mhone
resisted colonial Central African Federation repression
and then the brutality of the Banda era. His early
education was at Gloag Ranch Mission in Zimbabwe and
Livingstonia Secondary School and Junior College in
Malawi. He excelled, winning both the national student
essay competition and a scholarship to the Ivy League's
Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA. His masters
and doctoral degrees in economics were awarded by
Syracuse University in New York.
While completing his thesis on 'The Legacy of the
Dual Labour Market in the Copper Industry in Zambia'
(1977), he also served as associate professor at State
University of New York. He later lectured at the New
School for Social Research in New York City, Howard
University in Washington DC, and the University of
Zimbabwe, before coming to Wits Graduate School of
Public and Development Management as a full professor
in 1998. He was also director of the school during
the early 2000s.
In the meantime, Mhone earned a reputation as a prolific
and insightful analyst of social and economic problems
across Southern Africa. He worked for the International
Labour Organisation in Lusaka, Harare and Maseru;
the Southern African Political Economic Series Trust
in Harare; and the South African Department of Labour,
where he was chief director for research in the first
post-apartheid government. He also worked for numerous
international agencies, for the Belize Ministry of
Finance, and for the City of New York's Treasury.
His books included The Political Economy of a Dual
Labour Market in Africa (1982); Malawi at the Crossroads
(edited, 1992); The Case for Sustainable Development
in Zimbabwe (coauthored, 1992); and The Informal Sector
in Southern Africa (1997). He published dozens of
articles and chapters in major journals and academic
books, on structural adjustment, labour markets, agriculture,
industrialisation, the informal sector, women workers,
HIV/AIDS, and other facets of socio-economic policy.
He worked in and wrote about every country in the
region. The Council for the Development of Social
Science Research in Africa also commissioned a book-length
study of African economies, which Mhone completed
late in 2004 in spite of illness.
Throughout, Mhone's gentle temperament, quiet dignity,
extensive experience, courage and powerful intellectual
contributions - especially his theory of Africa's
dysfunctional 'enclave' economies - inspired colleagues
and students. He explored the limits of neo-classical
economics applied to African conditions and in the
process questioned dogmas associated with labour and
capital market theory.
His last major address to his professional colleagues
was ten weeks ago, as a concluding plenary speaker
at an Addis Ababa conference of the Ethiopian Economics
Association, the Dakar-based Council for the Development
of Social Science Research in Africa, and the New
Delhi-based International Development Economics Associates.
With characteristic humility and patience, he carefully
balanced social-justice instincts and rigorous economic
analysis, fusing conference themes on rural development
with his own long-standing inquiries into linkages
between workers and peasants; capitalism and non-capitalist
spheres; the capital-intensive sectors and the mass
of underutilised labour; and inputs and outputs.
In the process, Mhone revived the best of the 1950s-era
development economics subdiscipline, and merged into
it highly sophisticated critiques of mainstream economic
theory established during the 1960s-70s, and policy
lessons of neoliberal failures from the 1980s-90s.
His contributions will be valued for generations to
come.
He is survived by his wife Yvonne Wilson and two children,
Tamara (1970) and Zimema (1978).
March 03, 2005. |
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