Carolyn Baylies (1947-2003)
The editors of ROAPE are sad to have to mark the death of one of its longest-standing editors. Carolyn Baylies died on 1 November 2003 aged 56. Below we include a number of tributes to her memory and a bibliography of her work.
Lionel Cliffe writes:
Carolyn Baylies’ death from cancer was a source of great sadness to the many who thought of her as a colleague in so many endeavours, and as a comrade and friend, as she was for many of us in the ROAPE family. She achieved that rare combination of being both scholar and activist; a sociologist of health, a development specialist, one of the first feminists to link gender and development issues, an active trade unionist, a dedicated and respected teacher – and crucially an investigator and campaigner on the social impact of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa. For us she will be remembered as one of the longest standing and most committed and conscientious members of the ROAPE editorial working group. Her loss will be keenly felt, and the sadness is all the greater as she was still at the peak of her so active life.
She and her husband, Morris Szeftel, have been active editors of ROAPE for over 20 years, playing a major role in its consolidation. She was always one of the most industrious and devoted editors, taking on – as she did in all walks of her life – more than her share of chores and commenting helpfully and at length on submissions. She herself edited special issues on AIDS, gender, cultural production and democratisation and had a major hand on several other issues. Her own contributions covered a wide range of articles, from the effects of AIDS to political conditionality.
She was raised in California and was a student at Berkeley during the heady days of its free speech movement. She moved to the prestigious and then equally radical University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s for graduate studies. These took her to Zambia in 1973 for her Doctoral research on class relations in the new state, focusing her investigation at grassroots level in Luapula Province. She combined her studies with a teaching appointment at the University of Zambia, when it was going through its own radical phase. She was at the forefront of developing new, inter-disciplinary courses specifically related to the challenges facing the country and skills training programmes for undergraduates. Her teaching influenced many of the first generation of radical Zambian intellectuals. These experiences, and what she learned from Africans at all levels of society, exerted an influence throughout her working life.
After a year teaching in California, she began a long association with Leeds University, initially working with Vic Allen on the official history of the National Union of Mineworkers in Yorkshire, which was published in 1993 under her authorship as The History of the Yorkshire Miners, 1881-1918. In 1983 she became first Lecturer, later Senior Lecturer and then Reader in the Department of Sociology, where she was based until her death. She was known as a rigorous and highly dedicated teacher and an endlessly helpful supervisor of many overseas graduate students. One of her lasting contributions was to the Centre for Development Studies at Leeds. She was an indefatigable member of the committed inter-disciplinary team that founded it, and was Director from 1990-93 and again 1997-99. She built up the original MA programme to become one of the largest in the University, with students from across the globe. An undergraduate programme was started on her watch – one of only a handful offering this vital specialism in Britain. Indeed, typical of her commitment to her students, she was supervising post-graduate work through last summer and even began a course in October despite her illness.
Most staff at Leeds knew Carolyn for over 20 years as an indefatigable representative on their behalf, as Secretary and finally in her last year as President of its Association of University Teachers. Characteristically she spearheaded efforts to improve the lot of the more disadvantaged, particularly women staff and those on short-term contracts. She was on the University's joint bargaining body, and an elected member of its Court, Council and Senate. A mark of the tremendous, wide respect for her across the campus was the flying of the University flag at half mast on the day of her funeral.
From Leeds, she continued research on Zambia and its changing politics from the 1980s until the last months, publishing The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia (1984) with Morris, and later studying democratisation processes following multiparty elections in 1991. Path-breaking work on AIDS with Janet Bujra, who documents its great significance below, culminated in the publication of AIDS, Sexuality and Gender in Africa: Collective Strategies and Struggles (2000).
Through all her different roles what shone out was her commitment to what mattered most: the debilitating impact of AIDS on the fundamentals of life, even of the survivors, of the most vulnerable, although incomparably better off than them, the predicament of less privileged academic workers and the intellectual needs of disabled and overseas students, and to the big issues of the last decades in Africa – the struggles for democracy, development and survival of the poor. In this last respect she helped set the ROAPE agenda, and in her work embodied its priorities. That commitment was always so much more than a verbal subscription to a list of topics. It was evidenced in her taking on responsibilities for getting things done, and pursuing them with determined hard work, above and beyond the call of duty, and in the last years by remarkable courage – never making an issue of her long illness or allowing it to rule her priorities about what needed to be done.
She is survived by her husband Morris, their children Andrew and Hannah, and by her father and brother – to whom these tributes are dedicated.
Leeds, January 2004
Janet Bujra writes:
Carolyn and I worked together on several projects, the most significant of which was driven by our despair at the devastation being wreaked in Africa by the AIDS epidemic, both of us having lived through an earlier period of hope and political excitement following independence, both having lived and worked for many years in east and central Africa. Collaborative research and writing is never easy, but Carolyn was one of the best to work with, always calm and reassuring, always shouldering an equal or greater share of the load, ever inclusive of others and always generously giving credit where it was due. She became one of my most valued friends and trusted colleagues as well as a comrade in many struggles. The work itself was innovative in its vision as it aimed to uncover what is generally invisible – the myriad ways in which ordinary people in Africa struggle to protect themselves and others from the ravages of AIDS and the way in which these struggles are gendered. With African colleagues we investigated and participated in this at grass roots level, working with people in villages and squatter settlements in towns. Carolyn's contribution was carried out in Zambia, in the capital Lusaka, in Western Zambia and in Luapula province, where she worked with women who had got together against tremendous odds to fight the spread of AIDs and to mitigate its devastating consequences for those infected. She believed passionately that without some recognition and validation of these struggles and the strategies that women were devising to promote them, there was no prospect of reversing the epidemic or protecting young people in particular from its tragic reach. For Carolyn, this built not only on her work with Morris on the politics of post-independence Zambia, but also on a long standing commitment to disability research both in the UK and in Africa and to the politics of solidarity with all those who fight against injustice and exclusion.
Carolyn was tremendously proud of her family who were with her to the end. Her love of her two children, Andrew and Hannah, was intense. In one of our last conversations she spoke movingly of her trust and pride in them but also asked about each of my children too – typically reaching out, even in her own suffering. She was teaching and looking after personal grievance cases for the AUT (Association of University Teachers) up to two weeks before her death. A woman of enormous personal courage and quietly passionate dedication to principles and standards of personal and public service who would push herself to the limits in her commitment to students, colleagues and friends and to whom the politics of fighting injustice, whether in everyday life or at international level was second nature. Some words from Brecht, spoken at her funeral, sum up her own perspective on life and work as a social analyst, a feminist, a writer and a teacher:
Long I have looked for the truth about the life of people together
That life is criss-crossed, tangled and difficult to understand
I have worked hard to understand it and when I had done so
I told the truth as I found it.
Bradford, January 2004
Elly Macha writes:
Words cannot fully express what Carolyn Baylies meant to me from the time I came to Leeds University from Tanzania to work as her research student. She tirelessly encouraged and advised me throughout my four year journey doing a PhD. In her I found more than a teacher; also a friend, a mentor and a sister. By nature she was a caring person. My access to her was unlimited; she was always available to see me or speak on the phone whenever I needed help and no matter what problems she faced personally.
She was committed to defending and bringing change to the lives of poor and vulnerable people in her own society and in Africa, something reflected in her engagement in gender, HIV/AIDS and disability issues. These concerns took her to different developing countries to share her knowledge, skills and experience, to India, for example, and also as one of the link team from Leeds who contributed towards the establishment of disability studies programme at the University of Cape Town, a trip on which I accompanied her. One of her important achievements was to initiate a Disability and Development Study Group, which ushered in a disability and development module taught at Leeds University. She also successfully influenced the extension of support to international disabled students by the Equal Opportunity office at Leeds.
The death of this charismatic woman leaves a gap that will take me a long time to fill. The best way to honour Carolyn is to uphold all that she fought for during her life.
Tanzanian Disabled Women Development Network, Dar es Salaam, January 2004
Sarah Bracking writes:
Carolyn was the first female academic and feminist in whom I had absolute trust. Any social struggle has its elements of group and personal conflict, which inevitably leave their scars, for good or ill, on the participants. For ill, it can be said that too many of the oppressed learn the ways of their oppressors. So also, too many of the vanguard of feminists of the 1960s were changed by their experiences, becoming impatient of those that followed, harsh in their judgements, mean with their patronage, and enclosed in their privilege. The past, indeed, weighed (in Marx's words) ‘like a nightmare on the brain of the living’. But not with Carolyn. She played a role in giving me a faith and confidence I had found difficult to build.
Carolyn had those rare qualities of intellectual courage, self-reflection and grace of spirit to mend wounds against herself and treat with generosity those that followed behind. She could write off the costs of struggle and wear its legacy with honourable dignity. In short, she became an inspiration to those who would treat her as a mentor, as I did, without exacting a price for it. Her integrity could not be bartered, nor her dignity eroded, by those who would leave privilege unquestioned or status unearned. And in this she was rare: few of us have such determination and purpose, and the purity of spirit, to move through life without demanding tribute from those who owe them the debt of struggle. And from this I glimpsed, with my own young eyes, the real value, and not just the price, of freedom.
Manchester, January 2004
Brooke Grundfest Schoepf writes:
Remembering Carolyn: we had not seen one another for nearly 20 years, but our interests converged in AIDS research and prevention. Carolyn led community-based team research in Zambia that supported and assessed local initiatives, with all the contradictions that participatory work involves. Her perspective on gender, class and global inequality, her commitment to furthering the opportunities for the oppressed to exercise agency, developed over a lifetime of research, led her to an activist stance in AIDS research. She wrote reflexively about the experience, pointing to ways that international inequalities structure not only the experience of AIDS for the sufferers – a matter of life and death - but also the research process, including relations between researchers and their collaborators in community organisations. Her last published article applied a discourse of human rights to support her argument that ethical social science practise in AIDS research of necessity includes not only activism at the community level, but advocacy in the international arena on behalf of access to treatment and to further gender sensitive poverty alleviation and equitable development. Carolyn was not only brilliant in her own exemplary analyses. She was a sharp, yet unfailingly kind critic of the work of others.
Boston, January 2004
Morris Szeftel writes:
Carolyn was a committed socialist and feminist who managed to integrate these beliefs into her personal and private life more successfully than just about anyone I’ve ever met. For her, not only were socialism and feminism inextricably bound up together, neither adequate without the other, but they imposed obligations for how one tried to live and how one treated others. Not only was the personal political, the political was also personal. Even in debate and dispute, she always treated people with courtesy. In the twenty-eight-and-a-half years we were together, I never knew her to behave with less respect towards office cleaners or rural villagers than, say, vice-chancellors or cabinet ministers. In her work, she was always happy to share her research and to encourage others. In particular, she invested an enormous amount of time in supporting and advising female graduate students and young academics. And, through her union, she worked hard to support and represent fellow academics experiencing personal hardship.
Not surprisingly, then, this extremely reserved and intensely private woman came to touch many lives. Most of the hundreds of condolences sent to me, many from people I’ve never met, acknowledge some perceived debt of gratitude to Carolyn. Whether the message recalls the inspiration derived from her teaching, or help coping with personal problems, or even just that she helped find someone a better office at work, all express much warmth, friendship and respect. If others felt fortunate in knowing her, she also always acknowledged how fortunate she felt in her friends, her family and her life circumstances. Carolyn was always optimistic about people, always preferring to find what was positive, and people returned that confidence. ‘We (always we, never ‘they’ or ‘people’) … we are not just our mistakes, we’re more than that’ she would say.
She and I collaborated on many projects about Zambia over 28 years but it is the work she did with Janet Bujra, her close and trusted friend, on HIV/AIDS and gender in Africa that will live longest. The work touched Carolyn deeply in many ways. First, as with few other subjects, it was an issue where the personal was political. Second, it gave a voice to the most excluded and powerless people – always at the heart of her commitment. And, third, I think it gave her a chance to give something to those who, like herself, faced almost certain death from incurable disease.
Carolyn's struggle with cancer lasted nearly 15 years but, from 1999, it had become invasive and we knew she was going to die. It was only her incredible strength of will that kept her going as long as she did and made her as productive as she was in her last years. She made few concessions to the illness, working harder and writing faster as time ran out. She was fierce in her determination not to let others (even her closest friends) know that she was dying, not least because that would change the way people treated her and thus make it harder for her to live normally in whatever time was left. She would become angry if I even hinted to anyone that she was seriously ill, wanting no sympathy: ‘I will not be clucked over’, she would berate me, chief clucker. She never could stand to seem vulnerable or weak. Few people knew that she suffered from an eye condition which made her virtually blind without specially cut lenses which were a torture to fit each day and often caused her considerable pain. Instead of sympathy, she sought to pour her energy into supervising disabled students, helping others find strength and self-confidence.
Carolyn's greatest happiness came from family ties. She remained close to her father and never stopped missing her mother (who died of cancer aged 58). Her brother, a doctor, guided her and kept her informed, gently and without evasion, through the course of her illness. She loved and encouraged her children and was intensely proud of them. The family into which she was born gave her many of the values which later infused her political beliefs. (Just about the only thing she could think of to complain about her childhood was that she had never been allowed to mow the lawn as a girl; this had been reserved for her brother. Ever after, it took courage to try to prevent her mowing the grass in her own garden. From such a puny acorn, this feminist oak did grow.) The family she created, and of which she was the centre, gave her the absolute and unconditional love and security from which came the self-confidence with which she faced the world in that characteristically calm and good-humoured way. She became a woman of rare grace – gentle, courageous, principled and determined. Rest in peace, my Carolyn.
Leeds, January 2004
Carolyn Baylies: a bibliography
Publications
1978 ‘Zambia: class formation and détente’ Review of African Political Economy, 9: 4-26
1979 ‘The emergence of indigenous capitalist agriculture in Zambia’ Rural Africana, 4, 5: 65-81
1980 ‘Imperialism and settler capital: friends or foes?’ Review of African Political Economy, 18: 116-26
1982 (with M Szeftel) ‘The rise of a Zambian capitalist class in the 1970s’ The Journal of Southern African Studies, 8, 2: 187-213
1982 ‘Zambia's economic reforms and their aftermath: the state and the growth of indigenous capital’ Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, XX, 3: 235-63
1984 (with C Gertzel & M Szeftel) ‘The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia, Manchester: Manchester University Press
1985 ‘The state and class in post-colonial Africa’ in M Zeitlin, ed., Political Power and Social Theory, 5, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1-34
1986 ‘The meaning of health in Africa’ Review of African Political Economy, 36: 62-73
1992 (with C Allen & M Szeftel) ‘Surviving Democracy?’ Review of African Political Economy, editorial, 54: 3-10
1992 (with M Szeftel) ‘The fall and rise of multi-party politics in Zambia’ Review of African Political Economy, 54: 75-91. Earlier version presented to Conference on ‘Human Rights in Zambia’, Centre for African Studies, York University, March 1991
1993 (with C Wright) ‘Female labour in the clothing and textile industry in Lesotho’ African Affairs, 92,(369: 577-91
1993 (with J Bujra) ‘Challenging gender inequalities in Africa’ Review of African Political Economy, editorial, 56: 3-10
1993 The History of the Yorkshire Miners 18811918, London: Routledge
1995 ‘ “Political conditionality” and democratisation’ Review of African Political Economy, 22, 65: 321-37
1995 (with J Bujra) ‘Discourses of power and empowerment in the fight against AIDS in Africa’ in P Aggleton, P Davies & G Hart, eds., AIDS, Safety, Sexuality and Risk, London: Taylor & Francis, 194-222. Earlier versions presented to British Sociological Association Conference, University of Central Lancashire, 29 March 1994; and Conference on ‘Gender Research and Development: Looking Forward to Beijing’, University of East Anglia, 9 September 1994
1996 ‘Diversity in patterns of parenting and household formation’ in E Silva, ed., Good Enough Mothering?, London: Routledge, 119-48
1997 (with M Szeftel) ‘The 1996 Zambian elections: still awaiting democratic consolidation’ Review of African Political Economy, 24, 71: 11328
1997 (with J Bujra) ‘Social science research on AIDS in Africa - questions of content, methodology and ethics’ Review of African Political Economy, 24, 73: 380-8. Another version presented to Conference on HIV/AIDS in Africa, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 14-17 July 1999.
1997 (with J Bujra et al) ‘Rebels at risk: young women and the shadow of AIDS’ in C Becker, JP Dozon, C Obbo & M Touré, eds., Experiencing and Understanding AIDS in Africa, Dakar & Paris: Codesria/Editions Karthala/IRD, 319-41. Earlier version presented to 1996 International Colloquium on the Social Sciences and AIDS in Africa, Saly Portudal, Senegal, 4-8 November 1996
1999 (with J Bujra) ‘Solidarity and stress: gender and local mobilization in Tanzania and Zambia’ in P Aggleton, G Hart & P Davies, eds., Families and Communities responding to AIDS, London: UCL Press, 35-52. Earlier version presented to Social Aspects of AIDS Conference, May 1997
1999 (with M Szeftel) ‘Democratization and the 1991 elections in Zambia’ in J Daniel, R Southall & M Szeftel, eds., Voting for Democracy: Watershed Elections in Contemporary Anglophone Africa, Aldershot: Ashgate, 83-109
1999 ‘International partnership in the fight against AIDS: addressing need and redressing injustice?’ Review of African Political Economy, 26, 81: 387-94
2000 ‘The impact of HIV on family size preference in Zambia’ Reproductive Health Matters, 8, 15: 77-86
2000 ‘HIV/AIDS in Africa: global and local inequalities and responsibilities’ Review of African Political Economy, 27, 86: 487-500
2000 (with J Bujra & the Gender and AIDS Group) AIDS, Sexuality and Gender in Africa: Collective Strategies and Struggles in Tanzania and Zambia, London: Routledge, 222pp.
Includes
‘Perspectives on gender and AIDS in Africa’, 124
(with J Bujra) ‘Responses to the AIDS epidemic in Tanzania and Zambia’, 25-58
(with A Sikwibele & C Shonga) ‘AIDS in Kapulanga - poverty, neglect and gendered patterns of blame’, 59-75
(with T Chabala & F Mkandawire) ‘AIDS in Kanyama - contested sexual practice and the gendered dynamics of community interventions’, 95-112
‘Reconciling individual costs with collective benefits - women organising against AIDS in Mansa’ 132-52
(with J Bujra) ‘The struggle continues -some conclusions’, 174-97
2001 ‘Safe motherhood in the time of AIDS: the illusion of reproductive “choice” ’ Gender and Development, 9, 2: 40-50
2001 (with M Power) ‘Civil society, kleptocracy and donor agenda: what future for Africa?’ Review of African Political Economy, editorial, 28, 87: 5-8
2002 ‘HIV/AIDS and older women in Zambia: concern for self, worry over daughters, towers of strength’ Third World Quarterly, 23, 2: 351-75. 1999. Earlier version presented to Development Studies Association Gender and Development Group, York University, May 1999
2002 ‘The impact of AIDS on rural households in Africa - a shock like any other?’ Development and Change, 33, 4: 611-32. Earlier version presented to International Conference on the Role of Civic Organisations and MPs in the Struggle for Human Security and Peace, Maison de Parlementaires, Brussels, 1-2 March 2000.
2002 ‘Disability and the notion of human development - questions of rights and capabilities’ Disability and Society 17, 7: 725-39. Earlier version presented to Conference on Human Rights in Africa in the New Millennium, University of Central Lancashire, 14-16 September 2001
Forthcoming
‘Precarious futures: the new demography of AIDS in Africa’ in B Trudell, K King, S McGrath & P Nugent, eds., Africa's Young Majority, Edinburgh: University Press. Earlier version presented to Conference on Africa's Young Majority, African Studies Centre, University of Edinburgh, 23-24 May 2001
‘Community based research on AIDS in the context of global inequalities: making a virtue of necessity’ in E Kalipeni et al., eds., HIV/AIDS in Africa: Reviewing the Past, Understanding the Present and Changing the Future, Oxford; Blackwells
Special and thematic issues of Review of African Political Economy edited
1980: No. 19: Consciousness and Class (with D Bolton & G Williams)
1983: No. 26: Sudan
1984: No. 27/28: Women, Oppression and Liberation (with J Burgess & P Roberts)
1986: No. 35: The Struggle for Spoils (with R Cohen & G Williams)
1987: No. 39: Workers, Unions and Popular protest (with R Cohen)
1990: No. 47: Education and Culture (with J Bujra)
1992: No. 54: Surviving Democracy (with C Allen & M Szeftel)
1993: No. 56: Gender (with J Bujra)
1993: No. 58: Setting an agenda for change in Africa
2000: No. 86: HIV/AIDS in Africa (with J Bujra)
2001:No. 87: Civil Society, Kleptocracy and Donor Agendas (with M Power)
Research Reports & Working Papers
1993 The Nature of Care in a Multi-Racial Community (with I Law & G Mercer, eds.), Social Policy and Sociology, Research Working Paper 8, University of Leeds
1995 Women's Organisations as a Resource in Campaigns of Protection Against HIV/AIDS in Africa, GAPU Working Paper, University of
Leeds. Presented as a paper to the Workshop on Gender and AIDS, to inaugurate the ESRC funded research project on Gender and AIDS in Tanzania and Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia, 10 October 1994. An earlier draft presented to Gender and AIDS Project Workshop, Lusaka, Zambia, 10 October 1994
1996 Fertility Choices in the Context of AIDS Induced Burdens on Households and Environment, Report on the findings of a research project carried out in Minga, Eastern Province and Chipapa, Lusaka Province Zambia. Links Between Population and Environment Research Programme, ODA, London, August 1996
1996 Responses to the AIDS Epidemic in Zambia, CDS Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Studies, University of Leeds
1997 Cultural conflict and mental disorder among young Asian women in West Yorkshire, (with S Choudry). Final report to Northern and Yorkshire Regional Health Authority, August 1997.
1997 ‘Gender relations as a key aspect of the fight against AIDS in Tanzania and Zambia’ (with J Bujra). Final report to ESRC, January 1997
1998 ‘Gender and Development Studies’, chapter in Working Paper 1, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, University of Leeds (online)
1998 ‘Democratisation in Zambia – the case of the 1996 parliamentary and presidential elections’, Report to DFID, November 1998
Selected Conference Papers
1994 ‘Prospects for democratisation in Zambia’, Food Studies Group Seminar on ‘Achieving Growth with Equity in Zambia’, Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford
1996 ‘Gender issues and the struggle against HIV/AIDS in Mansa - a case study from Zambia’, Gender and AIDS Project Workshop, Dar es Salaam, August 1996
1999 ‘Changing ideas about preferred number of children in the context of high HIV prevalence’, XI International Conference on AIDS and STDs in Africa, Lusaka, 12-16 September 1999
1999 ‘Factors affecting successful community initiatives around HIV/AIDS’, XI International Conference on AIDS and STDs in Africa, Lusaka, 12-16 September 1999
1999 ‘Welfare considerations affecting family size preference in the context of high HIV prevalence’, Fertility in Southern Africa Workshop, SOAS, London, 22-24 September 1999
2000 ‘Counting the cost of AIDS on households and communities: whose responsibility?’ Centre for African Studies, University of Leeds and ROAPE Millennium Conference on ‘Africa: Capturing the Future’, 28-30 April 2000