Some months ago, as part of the publication process of this journal, I was asked to review Peter Lawrence’s revised version of his keynote address to the Colloquium in Cape Town in honour of Lionel Cliffe. I thought it offered a good description of Lionel’s position on a number of important issues relating to politics and, particularly, rural development in Africa. It also acknowledged the absolute connection in Lionel’s eyes between intellectual study, practical change in people’s lives and the political dynamics which affect both. This short contribution is intended to expand on how I think these connections contribute to an understanding of the role of intellectual labour and its relation to both politics and method. This was partly because I believe his understanding of how intellectual labour could contribute to political progress was central to Lionel’s life and work, but also because it has massive contemporary relevance as we grapple with the political economy of, and political choices within, knowledge societies. This was of course a subjective judgement. The parts of Lionel’s work which I found most important were, not surprisingly, the bits I either agreed with the most or thought most relevant to my own work. The times when I interacted most with Lionel were not the same as those when Peter did and there is also no reason to assume that Lionel’s own focus was the same throughout. Indeed there was a time, when he was the hard-working, some might say hard-nosed, head of a university department manoeuvring for survival in a hostile political and financial climate, when the intellectual passions of his youth – and of his subsequent ‘retirement’ – were less obvious. I also couldn’t help but think that if his many colleagues from all the different episodes of his life got together, we would, for all a real fondness for Lionel the person, be able collectively to draw up a list of the things which irritated us about him in about 15 minutes. Doing justice to the full range of his contributions is harder and requires input from the many that knew him in different situations over a long and productive life. This is one such contribution.
Writing in 2015, it is tempting to draw a clear distinction between academia and politically engaged intellectual labour. Such a distinction would ignore the extent to which the relation between the two, and the extent to which they can support each other, has long been contested. As Mark Duffield has recently reminded us in ROAPE’s 40th anniversary special issue,
By 1968, there were two main ideologies competing within the university system. One claimed to embody the disinterested discovery and dissemination of value-free knowledge that, in practice, was linked to a system of class advantage and exploitation. The universities were training academic elites in the use of intellectual labour power to transform knowledge into saleable commodities and tools for exploitation by the private sector and the state. (Duffield 2014, S78)
Duffield then quotes a colleague of Lionel’s, whom he respected very highly, to offer a description of the alternative:
The other ideology – which is winning in Vietnam and other theatres of war – and which is even gathering strength in the universities and elsewhere in our society, takes the position that there can be no freedom in the university or anywhere else while class privilege and exploitation exists. It produces and makes use of knowledge unashamedly in order to end oppression of all kinds. (Girling 1973, 2, cited in Duffield 2014, S78)
Clearly the market-led vision of academia is currently in the ascendancy in the heartlands of imperialism, but this does not mean that the dispute is not continuing. This applies at the strategic level. For example, the question ‘what sort of institutional arrangements are most likely to produce the strongest intellectual input to socio-economic progress?’ produces a range of answers even from the ‘powers that be’ in European, African and East Asian contexts. It also applies to the detailed contexts in which such politics are played out. These are both important loci of dispute and offer insight into and evidence of the actual workings of the political economy of knowledge production. Thus, as described in Peter’s contribution, the founders of ROAPE saw real value, as well as necessity, in being directly involved in the production process of the journal. Later, as ROAPE, for reasons of financial sustainability, adopted more commercial approaches, it tried not to do so uncritically. Thus, whilst the front cover of the journal advertises its presence in the Social Sciences Citation Index, Lionel on several occasions expressed his deep suspicion of the methodologies by which such badges of academic value are produced as well as his dislike of the tendencies towards self-referentialism and to the exclusion of important knowledge from non-academic (and particularly African) sources such devices encourage.1
None of which meant that Lionel rejected academia, even as he contested the directions of its values and purposes. He became a distinguished academic and, I believe, took justified satisfaction from his achievements. He was always interested in what else academia could offer his work, co-operating with colleagues in other departments and innovating, from the very beginning of their possibility, with geographic information systems (GIS), desktop data analysis and computerised delivery of meteorology reports for farmers. He also, somewhat unfashionably in UK universities, took a real interest in his teaching. Speaking at Lionel’s funeral, his colleague and co-author of the book The politics of lying: implications for democracy, Maureen Ramsay told of a time their department at Leeds was undergoing an external assessment of the quality of their teaching. Asked what objectives lay behind their work, many colleagues mentioned the various commercially applicable skills they taught, which they thought would meet the criteria of their assessors. Lionel thought a bit longer than most and answered ‘to teach my students a sense of empathy for the people whose lives they are studying’.
In my view, this does not simply illustrate attractive facets of Lionel’s personality – the genuine interest he took in other people and his willingness to listen to them – but also offers us a clue to understanding his approach to his work. His interest, growing up as a very bright student from a modest Sheffield family, was in how to make the world a better and less exploitative place. He believed that detailed knowledge of the processes of such exploitation and of their vulnerabilities would contribute to such progress. However, he never conceived of such knowledge as being separate from or superior to the realities it addressed. At one level, this made him careful to think about what work he took on and why. He felt that as an activist scholar he had a responsibility for what he did. He sought work which could make a useful contribution to political and economic progress and not to do work which was likely to obfuscate issues or serve other interests. I recall at one ROAPE gathering Lionel arguing with someone who wanted to publish a controversial article on some aspect of the post-apartheid government’s record because it was ‘interesting’. Lionel was saying ‘Why in ROAPE? Why now? What do you expect to happen as a result of ROAPE engaging in this argument in this way?’ These were questions about taking responsibility for an involvement in a process which had clearly never entered that particular academic’s head. At the same time, he had no truck with censorship or, whilst being sensitive to how open they should be depending on the circumstances, with avoiding difficult debates even when, as in his very early critique of Frelimo’s approach to the peasantry, making contrary arguments distanced him from processes he would have loved to be part of. He had a profound mistrust of ideological diktat and of the potential for self-serving demands of politicians to prioritise ‘discipline’ over intelligence. In the same vein, he saw academic rigour as having the potential to contribute to a valuable and shared knowledge, but made no claims as to its inherent superiority or correctness. He expected to have to argue his case within political processes which, of course, themselves formed part of the realities he was studying.
This of course was anathema to some academic colleagues, not just to their own self-image as ‘experts’ but to deep-rooted claims about the separation between the observer and the observed which form the philosophical base for positivist science. How, it was argued about Lionel – and about other founder members of ROAPE such as Basil Davidson and Ruth First – is it possible to trust the work of such avowedly partisan researchers? There have of course been long arguments, strongly reinforced in recent years by feminist theory, about whether anyone is ever working from a position of the supposedly complete detachment so lauded by positivists. However, when research is aimed specifically at being of service to practical decisions being made by poor people or others acting on their behalf, these arguments are almost beside the point. Just as for the doctor or the engineer whose solutions have to work, so for the committed researcher the evidence upon which they work has to be as good as it can be. There is no point in the whole process otherwise and no possibility of retaining credibility with the people with whom you are engaged.
Therefore Lionel practised what he preached to his own students when it came to engaging with others, both in conducting research and in seeking to make use of it. He directed a number of large surveys, notably in Eritrea and southern Africa. These included collecting and analysing masses of data as one might have expected, but also pioneering participatory approaches and questions which sought to understand the details of people’s lives – their diets, their coping strategies – far more than was the norm for that type of work. He also sought to maximise the value of the exercise to local researchers and their institutes, using them both for data collection and analysis. One Eritrean colleague of his that I met described working with Lionel in the field as ‘a complete revelation’ as to what research was and how it could be done. Another long-standing colleague (and former member of the ROAPE Editorial Working Group), Gary Littlejohn, said Lionel approached research as a ‘form of activism’.
This activism and engagement with people extended also to the fora and processes through which research led to action – the question, as Peter put it, of ‘What is to be done?’ Lionel asked this question time and time again in both a practical, programmatic sense – as he made his research valuable for the programmes and policies of UN agencies for example – and in a political sense. In the same way, as he got involved in UK politics in relation to Southern Africa Solidarity, the Labour party position on Eritrean independence or even Yorkshire cricket, he did so fully conscious of and engaged with the changing realities and interests of the other participants involved – be they functionaries, politicians, steelworkers or members of the African/Caribbean diaspora. In the process, he was very open to valuing and learning from knowledge from non-academic sources hence the explicit conception, right from the outset, of ROAPE as not being just an academic journal and his encouragement of the participation within it of many non-academic colleagues, including myself.
Lionel’s work on context and method both offers a comprehensive critique of the failure of most current intellectual practice to realise its potential contribution to either liberation or ‘development’ and a record of exploring how things could be done differently. His own thought and practice in respect to the relationship of academia to wider knowledge processes and the political contexts in which they operated and in respect to the political economy of knowledge production were exemplary. He demonstrated the central importance of attention to such issues to whether social value is realised from any research, however exciting and profound the research subject itself might be. Such attention to the context of application and use may also have shaped the value he put on grounded and empirical work and on the importance of the relationships between the researcher and the researched. Writing this piece, however, has reminded me that these elements, so well embedded in Lionel’s work, were in fact an intrinsic part of the whole ROAPE project. Gary Littlejohn who, as far as we could work out, is the only person to have collaborated in research projects with both Ruth First and Lionel Cliffe, tells of Lionel becoming excited by a particular research approach which he had seen being used in Mozambique and then being delighted to be told that it was based on protocols developed years earlier by Ruth at the Centro dos Estudos Africanos of Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. Such similarities were not a coincidence. Similar cross-referencing can be found in Lionel’s comments on the career of Gavin Williams, quoted by Peter, and in his speech at the memorial for Basil Davidson, held at SOAS, University of London, in January 2011. Lionel concluded the latter by reminding the packed audience of how the questions Basil had posed about popular political organisation in Africa were not just of historic interest but remained central to future organisation and study. Likewise, Lionel’s approach to the political economy of knowledge production and the need to create spaces for collaborative and progressive intellectual labour remain vital challenges for the future, even as we celebrate Lionel’s contribution to their past.