I was honoured to be asked to deliver the keynote address to the Colloquium in October 2014 in Cape Town in celebration of the life and work of Lionel Cliffe. His passing left a personal and intellectual hole in the lives of his family, friends and colleagues around the world and especially on this continent. When in August 2013, Lionel was diagnosed with myeloma, typically, he told his friends: ‘the “face” I want to see must be unfailingly happy – and serious about the world, not me.’ But this special issue of ROAPE that mainly comprises papers delivered at the Colloquium, can I think, be serious about the world and Lionel’s contribution to understanding, and, if only a small way, changing it.
I got to know Lionel when I went to Tanzania in 1968. We worked together on the Development Studies course at the University of Dar es Salaam, collaborated when we were both back in the UK, especially on starting ROAPE, and remained firm friends through his life. He helped me through the Leeds bureaucracy and became my ultimate PhD supervisor, encouraging and often cajoling me to get it finally done. Throughout his life, Lionel gave many people, including most of the contributors to this issue, such help to develop, encouraging them in their projects and suggesting directions in which to pursue their own research. When he was in Tanzania in April 2013, those of us who were there with him witnessed his active encouragement of a young British researcher, then working in Kilimanjaro district, to get involved in taking up the story of land disputes which had begun in neighbouring Meru under colonial rule. Lionel himself had been involved in investigating these disputes in the 1960s and they were still unresolved after five decades of independence. On that same trip, a man approached us on the street and said to Lionel: ‘You were my teacher 40 years ago.’ Such an encounter was not unusual: Lionel is well remembered by his many students, who include two current African presidents and numerous other politicians, activists and academics.
This journal is now 40 years old. ROAPE was Lionel’s idea from the start. He proposed a radical journal on Africa which would reflect the socialist ideas and analysis that had produced such exciting debates on ‘the Hill’ (the University of Dar es Salaam) and provided such stimulus to research and teaching there. It was not to be an academic journal, but one devoted to the service of those active in not simply analysing social formations but seeking to change them. This idea became a proposal which immediately grabbed participants at an African seminar at Sussex, including some exiles from South Africa – Ruth First, Gavin Williams and Robin Cohen. We debated a name endlessly until we settled on its title which gave RAPE as its acronym. ‘It’s a model (of imperialism and Africa),’ Lionel exclaimed with a characteristic mixture of seriousness and slightly mischievous humour. When the pressure emerged to change the journal’s acronym because of its perceived offensiveness, Lionel typically hit on the pragmatic solution: inserting and capitalising the ‘o’ of ‘of’ to produce ROAPE.
Lionel devoted a large part of his life to ROAPE. He drafted the first editorial (ROAPE 1974) which introduced the Review as ‘providing a counterweight to that mass of literature’ proposing that colonial history is not a cause of Africa’s poverty and dependence, and that foreign capital and integration in the international market, led by a ‘Western-educated modernising elite’ would bring development (Ibid., p. 1). The editorial then set out the alternative analysis the journal would make, cautioning that this ‘could be just as emptily “academic”’ (Ibid., p. 1). Contributors were asked ‘to address themselves to those issues concerned with the actions needed if Africa is to develop its potential’ (Ibid., p. 1). Recognising that ‘questions of tactics and strategy can be answered finally only by those struggling in Africa itself’, it was hoped that the journal would ‘provide a forum which will assist in sharpening analysis and facilitate the fruitful accumulation of experience’ (Ibid., p. 1).
In those early days, we not only edited the journal collectively but pasted up the typeset copy before it went to the printers, stuffed the journal into envelopes, stamped and posted them to subscribers, took block orders to bookshops and kept the accounts. For Lionel this was an example of the need for intellectuals to get their hands dirty in the process of production and to do this cooperatively.
Lionel’s own politics and beliefs were, I think, formed by his experience at Nottingham University where he became a friend and comrade of Ken Coates, an ex-miner who later helped establish the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (and would help ensure the survival of ROAPE during its early days), but who was also instrumental in Lionel’s becoming a committed socialist and British Labour Party member in the days when those two terms were still synonymous. After university, Lionel spent some time working for Oxfam (a permitted substitute activity for compulsory military service for those, like Lionel, who were conscientious objectors). During that time in Oxford, he was elected to the City Council and gained practical experience of politics at work. I suspect that during that time Lionel discovered there were more questions than answers in politics and development and he then began to map out an agenda of questions he wanted to answer coming out of his work with Oxfam and the Council.
His lifetime involvement with Africa began at Kivukoni College in Dar es Salaam, an adult education college set up to educate the then Tanganyika African Union (TANU) party cadres. The students he taught and the contacts in the governing party that he made during his time there, gave him a valuable insight into the workings of the politics of the time. The major study he undertook of the 1965 Tanzanian General Election, of which a little more later, was his first academic study of democracy at work, and included case studies undertaken by students of Kivukoni.
But it was while at the University College, later University, of Dar es Salaam that he extended his research interests, first as a lecturer in Politics and then as Director of the interdisciplinary Development Studies programme which all students in the University had to follow, and on which many lecturers in the University sympathetic to such a programme were happy to teach. By then Lionel had fully embraced interdisciplinarity, not only through his increasing adherence to the method of Marxist political economy, but also to the importance of science and the history of science, which increasingly featured in the course. Not that Lionel neglected literature either, most notably acting in a Brecht play put on by students and staff mainly from the Literature department (I think it was the Life of Galileo – if my memory is correct then this is a play which would have resonated with Lionel’s emphasis on the importance of evidence in the face of dogmatism).
After leaving Tanzania, short periods at the University of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center and later in 1972 at the Nordic Africa Institute at Uppsala cemented his lifetime interest in land issues, and began his study of Ethiopia, later to extend to the Horn as a whole. However, during this period, Lionel did not confine his activity to Africa or to ‘straight’ academia.1 While on a short-term visiting fellowship at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University, he was actively involved in starting and contributing to a newsletter on Indochina, providing information to students and staff of the University and the Institute on the struggles of the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia against US imperialism. When in 1973 the IDS and the University invited Professor Samuel Huntington to speak, the Indochina newsletters had already marked him out as an apologist for US action in Indochina. (It was from Lionel that I learned of Huntington’s memorable justification of the carpet bombing of Vietnam’s rural areas as ‘forced draft urbanisation’). Sussex students then prevented Huntington from giving his public lecture, while the IDS smuggled him into a private seminar with a selected few. Lionel was on the side of the protesters of course, and the Huntington affair drew battle lines within the IDS that destroyed friendships and certainly all but removed Lionel’s chances of further employment there!
Lionel’s subsequent period at the University of Zambia (UNZA) further progressed his work on land, now extended to the so-called labour reserve areas, and widened his concerns, especially regarding the role of women. However, his stint there was cut short by a dark episode, probably the first thing all who knew him will remember about his time there. This was after independence had been won in the Portuguese colonies, but when forces in favour of détente with South Africa were gaining strength in the front-line states. By 1976, the students at UNZA were angry about what they saw as the Zambian government’s intriguing between the various liberation movements and supporting an organisation – UNITA – that clearly had South African backing. Some students supported MPLA but most of them probably did not.2 Lionel was one of four foreign lecturers who were conveniently accused of fomenting student revolt, and were detained for varying periods – Lionel for the longest spell of two months, during which time he came into contact with Zimbabwean freedom fighters, also detained for different, though related reasons.3
After an international campaign, Lionel was released and deported, spending the next two years in temporary appointments at Sheffield and Durham Universities. He moved to Leeds, where he extended his research activity to other parts of Africa: Eritrea and Somalia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and finally South Africa, concentrating largely on land tenure and land reform, post-conflict liberation and its aftermath, and democratic institutions, especially electoral democracy. But he should not be forgotten for his work on ‘complex political emergencies’ and on the ‘politics of lying’, the latter on US and UK politics. As a result of his deep knowledge of specific African countries, he was often called upon to give expert advice on asylum applications, and there are many successful applicants for asylum who will not forget him for that. And then there was his passion for cricket. Not only was he an accomplished cricketer himself, but in his latter years he applied his academic skills to research racism in the sport and, especially, the failure of his beloved Yorkshire to include Yorkshire-born non-white cricketers in the county team.4
It seems to me, reading across the many different aspects of Lionel’s writing – and I have by no means been able to cover all of it – that there are six main features. First, it is about finding out, as much as is possible, what is actually happening on the ground, understanding the dynamic and where it might lead in a progressive direction; and for rural areas, what specific policies might be employed in varying ecological zones with different social formations. For Lionel, Africa comprised ‘a multiplicity of peasantries’ and each case required particular examination of the concrete situation and history. Second, his work is about answering questions, such as: what is to be done? (a question he asks frequently) or, when policies are proposed or particular actions taken by governments – who benefits? – a question given some prominence in such different areas as the analysis of Zimbabwe’s land reforms or UK and US government’s ‘dissembling or deception’ (Cliffe, Ramsay, and Bartlett 2000, xi). Third, his work is about being acutely aware of the balance of political forces and how that might affect the implementation of policy. Fourth, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, always making connections where they heighten understanding, and in particular using the broadly Marxist political economy framework to make the analysis while at the same time avoiding a dogmatic form of that framework. Fifth, there is often, if not always, a comparative aspect: what can be learned from one experience to inform another? Finally, there is the evident commitment to a socialist and democratic outcome and, where this is not the outcome, an emphasis on discovering the reasons rather than leaping to judgement. I can hear Lionel quoting Mao at this point with a smile on his face: ‘no investigation, no right to speak’. Let me point to some examples of these features.
Lionel’s analysis of the 1965 Tanzanian elections in One Party Democracy (Cliffe 1967, see Figure 1) pays careful attention to historical context and especially, the rise of the nationalist movement in the face of land disputes. But in many respects, this is a fairly conventional, though still fascinating and rich analysis of this unusual case of competitive elections between members of the same party in a one-party state, dealing with issues of ethnicity and localism, of adherence to the election rules, bribery and corruption, and the genuineness of political competition – in other words, did it work as it was supposed to and what did the evidence on the ground reveal? The importance of holding leaders to account and advancing the interests of the peasants and workers are clearly at the centre of his judgements on its effectiveness as a functioning popular democracy.
For Tanzania, he develops his analysis of class formation and class interest in the context of the Arusha Declaration and the Leadership Code. He asks the question of how effective is making rules which require party leaders and popular representatives to give up business interests when they can maintain the position of that class to which they still belong. He examines the politics of TANU and raises the issue of the type of party required to effect Tanzania’s socialist strategy, asking the key questions about the nature of the party and its historical roots and the degree to which these determine organisation and adherence to the ‘official’ ideology by its cadres at all levels.
Lionel and authors present President Nyerere with a copy of their 1967 book on the Tanzanian General Elections of 1965.
Reading Lionel’s own contribution to a ROAPE forum celebrating the 50th anniversary of Tanzanian independence, intriguingly entitled ‘Fifty years of making sense of independence politics’, it is striking how much, as he challenges a simplistic (left) critique of Nyerere, he points to the complexity of politics in African states (Cliffe 2012a). He lists several historical moments in the 50 years of Tanzanian independence which were never properly investigated (another research agenda!) but depended too much on anecdote. One to which he refers in the article is Nyerere’s resignation as prime minister in 1962. Was that about the preparation for the switch to a republic and a presidency, or to devote his time to strengthen TANU (which was I think the official explanation), a reflection of internal divisions in party and government, and if so between whom, or which groupings? He raises all these questions but, being consistent in his implicit criticism of political analysis by anecdote, clearly feels unable to tell his own story of a meeting with Joan Wicken, Nyerere’s personal assistant. During that meeting, Nyerere himself entered her office and talked about his current task – translating Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Swahili. So Lionel speculated that Mwalimu’s5 year off had nothing to do with Tanzanian politics at all, other than maybe a device to avoid the fate of Caesar.
Lionel’s work on democracy was not only confined to Africa. Based on a course he co-taught at Leeds, he jointly authored The politics of lying, a book which both documents and tries to explain ‘the seeming pervasiveness’ of ‘government dissembling or deception’ (Cliffe, Ramsay, and Bartlett, 2000, xi) . The analysis is, as we might expect, about history, and concludes that the usual explanation for such deception – realpolitik – is not borne out by proper investigation, but is systemic to the protection of the interests of private capital. And, as quite often was the case in Lionel’s writing, he couldn’t resist poking fun at political pretence. In the middle of a serious discussion about the myths of Britain having a constitution underpinning the rule of law, a myth that ‘contributes to a climate where deception is commonplace but also tolerated’, we are informed that:
Other mythical trappings relate to the role of the monarch, in whose name much is justified: it is the ‘Queen in Parliament’ that is ‘sovereign’; each new session of Parliament opens with the ‘Queen’s Speech’ a term that refers not to an intervention by the titular, non-partisan head of state, but to a highly partisan policy statement written by the Prime Minister and performed by a ventriloquist’s dummy. (Cliffe 2000a, 84)
Turning to Lionel’s work on land and rural development, he early on demonstrated the importance he attached to history, noting the continuities between colonial policies of enforcing agricultural practices, and policies post-independence which show that when ‘leaders of government are naturally impatient to achieve the most rapid economic development there is a tendency to resort to enforcement’, and he asks the questions of ‘how far this reversion to the use of regulations will be tolerated? Or will it be possible for a popular government operating in a different environment to get away with what in a practical sense led to the downfall of an alien government?’ Bringing this into the post-Arusha socialist period he considers what this might mean for a socialist rural transformation and the danger of seeing resistance to change as the result of peasant ‘conservatism’. He concludes that ‘peasant “conservatism” is often a healthy scepticism of bad plans, and that, therefore, rural development, and above all socialist rural development, necessitates effective mass participation’ (Cliffe 1972, 23).
Cliffe’s work on ujamaa in rural Tanzania sees his querying of the official characterisation of a strataless rural social formation, suggesting that rural class formation was emerging, and that ‘positions of local political influence’ tended ‘to be occupied by the better-off farmers’ (Cliffe 1973, 196). So nipping this process in the bud would be helped by the practical advantages of ujamaa vijijini as against ‘individual production’, namely, ‘economies of scale and a more specialised division of labour’, ‘easier access to and reception of advice and services’, and ‘a wider spread of improvements to all strata of society’ (Cliffe 1973, 197). He suggested there would have to be moves towards the ‘expropriation of large private holdings’, as rural class formation had possibly ‘gone beyond a “point-of-no-return” in some areas’ (Cliffe 1973, 199), but also towards the organisation of work to ensure that other strata of the peasantry cooperate and that the poorer strata had control – here recognising the complexity of rural social formations, which was to be a recurring theme in his later work. Characteristically, he sets this in a wider context. He sees the ‘ujamaa transformation’ as a central part of a strategy to mobilise the mass of the population against the continued domination of Tanzania’s economy by international capital. Briefly engaging with the theorisation by Issa Shivji in his Silent class struggle of the central contradiction being between the Tanzanian masses and international capital and its local agents, Lionel argued that the struggle against rural class formation should not be seen as secondary but as central to the resolution of that contradiction (Cliffe 1973, 196).
When Lionel turns to the Horn for the first time in the very first number of ROAPE, he starts with documenting the concrete developments on the ground: the rise of commercial capitalist agriculture, the consequent displacement of small farmers and their conversion into landless labour. The roots of famine are to be found in fundamental changes to people’s traditional rights to land and not as the result of drought, then the conventional view. He shows that the result in the northern highlands of Ethiopia has been to combine ‘almost all the worst features of capitalism and feudalism’: authoritarian officialdom, new and more intensive surplus extraction from the peasantry, and agricultural involution ‘because of land shortage and neglect’. Meanwhile a few rich landowners have ‘benefited at the expense of the security of the poorest peasants’ (Cliffe 1974, 38). Lionel then asks his regular question: ‘what is to be done?’ His likely sources of radical change rested on the potential of peasant movements and uprisings already taken place leading to ‘the peasantry … taking their future into their own hands’ (Cliffe 1974, 40).
Although more interested in the practical issues which led from analysis of rural social formations, Lionel spent some time in the ’70s teasing out the usefulness of some of the theorisation on modes of production and their ‘articulation’. For he argued that the point of analysing the relationship between modes of production and the class categories that formed them lay
not in their intrinsic merit but in their ability to illumine the social whole to which these rural groups and individuals belong and the manner of their fitting into it. It is these interrelationships which define the kind of future that African peasants (and other rural and urban dwellers) can make for themselves. (Cliffe 1977, 196)
The articulation of the different pre-capitalist modes of production to be found across Africa with the capitalist mode of production, as well as the experience of China and Vietnam, suggested that alliances between the exploited peasantry and the industrial proletariat could be forged and ‘sweep away both capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation’, though I suspect Lionel would now draw up an agenda for research to explain how capitalism swept back.
By now the issues of class and class struggle, built on an analysis of class formation, were a constant theme in Lionel’s work. The potential for an alliance of peasants and industrial workers was brought out in an analysis of the Zambian peasantry’s interaction with the capitalist world economy largely through the supply of labour rather than marketed commodities. Once again, he draws out the complexity of social relations as they change in the labour supply areas and especially the consequences for the position of women. Characteristically, he presents what is again a very detailed analysis of available research with the implications for the defeat of exploitation (Cliffe 1978).
In an article in ROAPE, two decades later, we can still find Lionel’s continuing emphasis on trying to understand what was happening on the ground and especially the need in effecting land reform in South Africa for ‘working out appropriate approaches to specific areas and their physical and social environments’ (Cliffe 2000b, 285), a lesson learned from his early work on Tanzania and the laying out of different strategies for developing agricultural cooperation depending on the ecological zone and major rural activity in that zone (Cliffe 1973, 199). It continued to be a feature of his analysis of land reform in Southern Africa, which occupied much of the later part of his life.
Lionel liked to make comparisons of experiences across countries where he thought this would inform future policy in these countries and elsewhere. He did this in 2010, comparing the experiences of power-sharing in Kenya and Zimbabwe and its consequences for land issues, themselves critical in the politics of both countries (Cliffe 2010). He argues that power-sharing is not an interim form of ‘incomplete’ democracy’ but rather ‘a model of temporary conflict prevention or limitation’, and that ‘in order to contemplate the future it is not helpful to debate the democratic credentials of power-sharing, or even debate how far the sharing is fair, but instead to look at how it is working out in reality.’
He presents a thorough analysis of power-sharing in both cases, noting the similarities and differences, but also offering explanations which expose the complexities of each case, answering his two key questions: what are the conflicts about, and who are the groups fighting each other? The answer to the first is usually a struggle over land, other resources or both, and to the second, different and complex in each case. In Kenya, there are ‘leaders, parties, clusters and coalitions, militias recruited (from the top) on the basis of tribal identity, and of alliances between such groups’; in Zimbabwe, ethnicity sits alongside other factors: class, strata, region and race, so the key question is: ‘who shares power? Is the struggle between leaders, parties, regions and/or tribes?’ (Cliffe 2010). Lionel concludes by presenting four possible scenarios for the future. In the period since he did this, there were elections in both countries, the results of which were heavily contested. One of his scenarios is ‘status quo’ which, with the end of power-sharing, is more like ‘status quo ante’ and is probably the nearest to what actually happened. In analysing how power-sharing has been functioning and the alliances and cleavages that have been exposed, Lionel shows what can be done with such an approach in providing an insight into possible future outcomes.
I have found the tributes Lionel wrote to others and published in ROAPE often revealed much about his own thinking. On Gavin Williams’s retirement, he gave the keynote to a two-day conference in July 2010 much like the Cape Colloquium. Lionel admired Gavin’s willingness to critique conventional left positions and agreed with his position on the role of intellectuals and their critiques: that is, we have a responsibility not simply to critique policy on the basis of rigorous analysis, but also to have an alternative to which the analysis is relevant, a point Lionel made elsewhere in respect of critics of South Africa’s land reform performance. Lionel then takes up much of the rest of the tribute discussing the relationship between ‘understanding’ and ‘changing’ and uses it to critique ROAPE as moving from a journal that was intended to help understand and change Africa, to one which just tries to understand in such a way that it can be measured by its ‘impact factor’ and rank in the journal league tables. Despite a serious discussion of serious issues, Lionel cannot resist injecting some humour noting that he had also followed Gavin’s research into the Western Cape wine industry:
But whereas my more recent efforts were concentrated as much in participatory research in the uncorking end of this commodity chain, his several writings on this case characteristically took on an agenda that set the industry in a globalising market context, related it to the emergence of black capitalists, and explored labour relationships as a crucial part of agrarian structure. (Cliffe 2012b, 214)
And these issues were of course at the heart of Lionel’s own concerns, and had Gavin been able to come to the Colloquium, he would have given a paper on his wine research, mainly, though not exclusively, at the pre-corking end of the chain.
Lionel achieved international stature for his large body of published research on African political economy and politics, recognised when he received the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association of the UK in 2002. There is no better way of concluding this tribute than with Lionel’s conclusion to his own tribute to Gavin, who received the same award at the UK ASA in 2014. Lionel offers the following ‘exhortations’ to others, but which so much reflect how he saw himself:
For individuals, old and young, who earn their living in academia: consciously or not we are making choices about our work agenda and our approach. Let’s seek to make it our choice, and not one forced upon us by institutional pressures and intellectual fashions. Let’s examine our ‘vocation’ and be prepared to rebel. In making choices, such polarisations as serving science or policy, and becoming legislator or interpreter, should not be seen as exhausting the options. They are not necessarily either/ors. Some individuals may pursue both paths. Not all intellectuals earn their bread as academics, and not all academics deserve the title intellectuals. And for those that pursue one or other distinct role, networks for interchange, whether publications, electronic or face-to-face contact, need to be constructed, especially with African or other scholars/activists.
In making choices about responsibilities and roles, abstract philosophical or ideological positions that can provide definitive guidance for all times and places can only take us so far. Context is crucial: we are at a turning point of new and major crisis, although it is not yet a new revolutionary era. Africa’s new position in a changing global division of labour, and its relations of production and reproduction and its politics are being reshaped. And networks of new discourse among Africans are emerging to which we need to attend. (Cliffe 2012b, 222)