Sharp Afropolitan had continent’s best interests at heart
handika Mkandawire, who died on March 27 aged 79, was the ultimate Afropolitan intellectual. He was not only a dyed-in-the-wool panAfricanist but a cosmopolitan citizen of the world.
Born of a Malawian father and Zimbabwean mother, he grew up in both countries before spending the rest of his life in the US, Zimbabwe, Senegal and Europe.
As a young firebrand who came of age under colonial rule, Mkandawire was involved in Malawi’s independence struggle. He was arrested in 1960 after protesting against
TBritish prime minister Harold Macmillan’s visit to Blantyre on his “Wind of Change” tour.
Mkandawire won a scholarship to study at Ohio State University in the US and was then exiled from Malawi for three decades by the country’s erratic dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He headed the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies from 1982 to 1985, helping to train the country’s first generation of social scientists.
From 1985 to 1996 he directed the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, which produced some of the best research on the continent on issues of militarism, class struggle, social movements and socioeconomic development.
But critics complained that this rich harvest was not well disseminated and thus did not directly challenge literature on Africa in Western policy and academic circles.
Others regarded the council as a cult of heretical leftist scholars who lacked ideological diversity. But the effect of the think-tank in promoting panAfrican discourses was never in doubt.
Mkandawire spent 1996 to 2006 leading the Geneva-based UN Research Institute for Social Development, before occupying the chair in African development at the London School of Economics.
He was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Town and a great admirer of Nelson Mandela.
One of his most celebrated articles was his magisterial 2013 Julius Nyerere lecture, “Fifty years of African independence”.
In it he stressed the commitment of African nationalism in driving the continent’s successful liberation struggle while bemoaning more contemporary ahistorical approaches to assessing Africa’s challenges, which often dismissed the effects of slavery, colonialism and the Cold War. Mkandawire was, however, equally unsparing in his criticisms of African civilian and military autocrats who manipulated fears of disunity to justify tyrannical rule.
He highlighted that African countries grew rapidly between 1960 and 1975, hugely expanding education and health, but wondered why Africa had not been able to produce “developmental states” that effectively promoted industrialisation. He consistently insisted on the importance of democratic governance, bemoaning the failure of African leaders to diversify their economies, and particularly castigated their failure to embrace genuine regional integration.
Mkandawire was one of the most eloquent critics of the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment programmes from the 1980s.
He noted that these reforms often undermined democratic governance and fuelled social unrest, highlighting their main features as having produced huge increases in social inequality, neglect of infrastructure, lack of indigenous ownership of development programmes, technological dependence and the retrenchment of the state.
Mkandawire was a public intellectual, courageously confronting the stereotyping of Africa by leading Western scholars who produced “heavily footnoted travelogue” that often lacked an empirical basis.
His career was devoted to restoring Africa’s humanity.
Many have remarked on Mkandawire’s sardonic wit. Despite his sharp academic jabs, he was an amiable bon vivant. Having lived most of his life in the global diaspora, Mkandawire was a strong believer in rebuilding bridges between Africa and its scattered descendants, noting that “a detached diaspora would be like a head without a body”.
Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji offered perhaps the most fitting tribute to his friend in 2013: “For Thandika the whole continent is his country … He is an African first, an African last and an African always. The pan-African spirit resides in him.”