Pepe (short for Penelope) was an exuberant and lively character who contributed much to the definition of ROAPE’s remit in its earlier years. She was a member of the Editorial Working Group from 1981 until 1997, when she ‘retired’ to an old farmhouse in the South of France. Born in Wales, her parents were teachers who later moved to Southampton. Pepe went to Cambridge to do a degree in Social Anthropology. She became passionate about Africa after working in Ghana for Voluntary Service Overseas. She returned to Ghana to research the outcomes of teacher training courses and the experience of rural schoolteachers. At the University of Ife in the early 1970s she ran and studied a rural development project promoting yellow maize. This had a ludicrous aspect. Local people would not eat yellow maize so in Ife they fed it to the pigs. In Muslim Zaria there were no pigs, so they fed it to the chickens, which actually generated a profitable market!
It was after Pepe returned to England and took up university posts at Reading and later Liverpool that she joined ROAPE’s Editorial Working Group. Her input was particularly seen in co-editorships of several issues of the journal – ‘Peasants, capital and the state’, with Morris Szeftel and Robin Cohen (1981); ‘Capital vs labour in West Africa’, with Gavin Williams (1984); ‘Market forces’, with Gavin Williams (1985) and ‘Socialism, democracy and popular struggles’, with Chris Allen and Gavin Williams (1988). Her most significant contribution was to ensure that ROAPE engaged with debates around gender inequity and the relation of gender to class, the state and imperialism. This was manifested in the important double issue ‘Women, oppression and liberation’ (1983) which she co-edited with Carolyn Baylies and Doris (Jan) Burgess, and in a debates piece which she wrote for that issue, ‘Feminism in Africa, Feminism and Africa’ (1983). This issue was important for the area it staked out at the time and for the encouragement it gave to many subsequent submissions to ROAPE on gender in Africa.
Pepe collaborated with Judith Heyer and Gavin Williams on a study, Rural development in tropical Africa (Heyer, Roberts, and Williams 1981). This edited work brought together many ROAPE-inspired studies to insist that ‘rural development’ had been a colonial state project founded on ignorance and on the generation of profits for international business. It usually failed to achieve its own aims and ran counter to the interests of Africa's agricultural producers in ways which Pepe had observed at first hand in Ghana. Here, she contributed an essay on Niger which drew attention to the idea and the practice of animation feminée in francophone Africa. Pepe saw this as an earnest attempt to involve women in socioeconomic life, whilst ignoring the crucial but hidden contribution which they already made and which all too frequently lent itself to oppressive manipulation. Rural development in tropical Africa was described by Goran Hyden (1984) as adopting a ‘Leftist political economy approach’, which he praised for its ‘relevance’ and the way in which it married ‘theory with practice in a constructive manner’ – though being constructive in the interests of this colonial and post-colonial endeavour was the opposite of what its authors intended!
Pepe had intended to publish her informal research into the local history of southern France but, sadly, her death pre-empted the completion of this project.