|
Guy C. Z. Mhone (1943 - 2005) |
|
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 |
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. |
|
|
