In Memory of Sam Moyo (1954-2015) Patrick Bond

“We just received this evening the sad news of the passing away of Professor Sam Moyo, former President of CODESRIA. Sam was in India for a conference and got caught up in a bad car accident and got seriously injured. We’ve been getting regular updates about his condition all day from our colleagues in Delhi. Unfortunately he didn’t survive the serious injuries he sustained. May his soul rest in peace.”

Sam was from a peasant background and rose to become one of Zimbabwe’s – and Africa’s – most respected intellectuals. You will all remember him from Hong Kong and Chongqing/Chengdu:

Chongqing Chengdu video in commemoration of Vinod:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJoDhMGTtkA&feature=youtu.be

At 10:30 in this wonderful video tribute to Vinod, you find Sam, briefly expressing gratitude for the experience. The skillful film-maker found him in several other places which bring back such warm memories.

At our Centre for Civil Society here in Durban, Sam played such a wonderful role, especially since he started visiting in 2012 and co-supervising our PhD students in 2014. He was one of our Honorary Professors, and there is some information about his career here:  http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za/default.asp?10,86,8,164

It was the trip to Chongqing that allowed us to arrange that position, one of many many reasons I always look back four years, with such admiration for our hosts.

I was last with Sam in Harare in August, at an excellent talk he gave about Zimbabwe’s agricultural sector:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Y6iBl3BOE and this is a great explanation of his theory of the tri-modal land structure in Africa:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5–ZntJGh4

In June, he was awarded for his enormous contributions to Marxian political economy at the World Association for Political Economy conference in Johannesburg; he was also made a vice-chairperson of that organisation.

For those interested, see a list of Google Scholar citations of his most popular works and more YouTube links (http://our-global-u.org/oguorg/en/?page_id=1161).

This is all very rough, just a chance to say that we are losing an exceptionally important intellectual and comrade this weekend, and we owe it to ourselves and our tradition – and to all who struggle to fuse knowledge and social progress, wherever we may be – to keep reminding ourselves of Sam’s legacy. And his generosity of spirit. We will be posting further memorial statements about his work and remarkable life at http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za this week.