Sam Moyo and the Struggle for Intellectual Decolonization

Introduction

Sam Moyo was blessed with rare, rare gifts: a sparkling and generous intelligence emanating from a radiant persona. It was a combination he shared madly with friends and colleagues across many continents. News of his parting led to an immediate outpouring of testimonies to an extraordinary life, from Bella Matambanadzo’s (2015, p. 11) thrilling account of his impishly brilliant childhood in the townships, to David Johnson’s (2015) vivid depiction of his dazzling young scholar days in exile, to his fellow scholars’ many renditions of his brilliance, inspiration and ability to forge a global network in pursuit of a more equitable, African-rooted existence. ¹ No one who crossed his path could doubt that here was a compelling intellectual leader. Indeed, Sam’s life has much to teach us about efforts to decolonize -----the production of knowledge in and about Africa. Tracing his passage not only renders sharply major epochs and inequalities in the study of Africa: such an exercise points towards the possibility of disrupting and replacing the coloniality that structures our intellectual work. It is this legacy, among the many he left, that I want to address here.

One would not know of this struggle from the dominant, northern scholarship on the production of knowledge, which largely remains focused on the self-possessed problems of the divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, the need for crossing the boundaries of Western disciplines and, more belatedly, the process of appropriating those excluded by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and the West’s focus on the ‘Other’. Even in the latter field, there is little probing of the distribution of resources and institutional power that structure the global polarization of higher education and research.

Far along the margins of the dominant disciplines, Western scholars of Africa, the ‘Africanists’, ² have on rare occasions at least noted the issue. Over 40 years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, pp. 9–10), the leading Africanist, sociologist and world-systems scholar, argued that objectivity in the production of knowledge would only obtain under conditions of equal resources across the North and South. Few social scientists picked up the challenge that such observations raise; it would be only in the 1990s and later that serious studies on North/South inequities in the study of Africa would emerge, largely from black scholars. ³

Work on the history and inequalities of the study of Africa was not central to Sam’s agenda. Yet to attend a summer school in Harare, visit his African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS) or read the journal Agrarian South was to witness concretely a growing network that offered an alternative to the self-enclosed schools of African Studies. Remarkably absent was the Global North; one did not find senior representatives of the Euro-American managerial class of African Studies. Less noticed was a new aim: to move beyond long-standing calls to create independent African institutions and reach out with formal links to Asia and Latin America. Something new was afoot, breaking with past patterns of how and where the knowledge of African economies, cultures and political systems was produced and consumed. Even the focus on local land struggles was a rupture: this subject had been long abandoned by scholars of ‘development’. Loudly proclaimed was an alternative formulation: the necessity of focusing on problems, data and theory posed not by the paragons from the North but by the scholars and people of Africa and the Global South.

The Colonial Construction of African Studies

Zimbabwe could easily claim to be the homeland of African Studies, which traces its lineage back to 1938 and the establishment of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) in the then sister colony of Northern Rhodesia. There was no question whom the RLI served: it was chartered in the service of the settler state and mining companies, with direct funding from the Northern Rhodesian government, the British South African Company, Rhodesia Railways and a half-dozen mining companies. Its first director, Godfrey Wilson, reported to its trustees that the RLI research mission was ‘systematic analysis’ of ‘social problems of urgent practical interest’ (Wilson, 1937). ⁴ Ethnology could provide, it was trumpeted, an understanding of increasingly disruptive native subjects, and, more specifically, the reasons for the massive strikes on the copper belt mines. RLI was but one node in a growing colonial network, with close relations with the International African Institute in London (itself founded in 1926), and the evolving school for African Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT), established in 1920 with government funding (van der Merwe, 1979, p. 62). ⁵

Indeed, these nodes were so deeply part of the hubris of British and settler rule that few remarked upon the colonial hierarchies of their conception, staffing and research findings. At the end of World War II, it was blithely assumed by victors in the war that settler and colonial rule would continue, and new regional research institutes would be established in East and West Africa—the East African Institute of Social Research in Makerere (1948) and the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research in Ibadan (1950). ⁶ Such hopes were disrupted by the unruly winds of change, and as African states emerged, British scholars retreated to their mother country or the white dominions, taking their funding, journals and scholarship with them. What was not anticipated was the reconstruction of the study of Africa from above as the far, far wealthier US academy usurped British leadership. African and American initiatives would henceforth lead to a new era in how and where knowledge of Africa was produced.

Independence and Decolonization? The Africanist Enterprise and the African Response

This was most apparent in the US core of the Africanist enterprise. In the 1920s and 1930s, American foundations emerged as major supporters of British scholarship on Africa. A fellow white-settler state, South Africa, became the focus for this effort, with US funds flowing to the Institute of Race Relations, the Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem in South Africa (Grosskopf et al., 1932) and hundreds of visits of South African scholars and officials to the United States. In the 1950s, US foundations led a charge to move beyond funding British initiatives, such as the Journal of African History, to the creation in the United States of multiple, federally funded African Studies centres. ⁷ Americans would do, it was proclaimed, what European colonizers had not done: promote development and the training of African students in modernity. It was the golden age of academic Africanists: funding chased Euro-American scholars all over the planet, multimillion-dollar grants established new institutes, new journals flourished, every major US research university had its array of Africanist positions and students flocked to the field. Conceptions of development and their application to Africa by US scholars reigned supreme. Africanists in the jet age became ‘academic tourists’ (Ochwada, 1996, pp. 123–140; Zeleza, 1983, pp. 9–42), flying across the Atlantic to conduct their studies, collate local resources and theses and return home to publish monographs in the service of progress and modernization.

Propelled by nationalist movements and extensive state investment in higher education, African scholars countered by setting up their own institutions, journals and schools (especially notable in Ibadan, Dar es Salaam and Kenya). This led to continental associations of which Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), founded in 1973, and the nurturing of Sam’s generation of new and rambunctious students, was the most notable. The task was, simply stated, a radical one: to seize control of developmental prospects from Northern scholars, governments and institutions. As a summary, signal collection titled it ‘Our Continent, Our Future’ (Mkandawire & Soludo, 1999).

Academic tourism and the response to it pointed to a fundamental polarization of knowledge production across the North–South divide. Americans might promise development, but it would be on their terms—as the rise of the US Africanist enterprise generated the centralization of journals, publishers and lucrative teaching positions in the North. A patron–client division of labour was promoted, with concepts, models and theory to be generated in the North and applied to empirical data collected in the South. Research organized and conducted by Africans was largely invisible in the North; African-authored or published journals and books were rarely read in the North and even more rarely cited. There were few tenured Africans at African Studies centres, the African Studies Association or as teachers in US classrooms (beyond African languages and culture).

These divisions became more entrenched in the 1980s, as structural adjustment weakened the drive to establish self-reliant centres of knowledge production on the continent. At the behest of the World Bank, which argued that returns were higher for basic education and that Africa really did not need state universities, funding for higher education was sharply reduced. Efforts to decolonize knowledge production through independent research and training became increasingly a struggle against privatization and the market (Mamdani, 2007). Expectations that the victory of the national liberation movements would deliver more radical challenges to the epistemic, institutional and paradigmatic domination of the North failed to be sustained into the 1990s.

Under these conditions, Africa’s independent journals and institutes began to close and scholars were increasingly unable to sustain themselves and their families. The evaluation of those who had fostered the creation of regional and continental research networks and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s made for dismal reading. Mkandawire (2005, p. 28) reported an epoch of ‘disenchantment and disillusionment’, Tadesse (1999, pp. 145–154) charted African institutes passing from ‘Euphoria to Gloom’ (Tadesse, 1999) and Zeleza referenced a massive intellectual brain drain, as 20,000 highly educated Africans moved to the North every year in the post-1990 period (see West, 2002, pp. 81–100), devastating the intergenerational transfer of skills and knowledge on the continent. The withdrawal of funding for African universities and their replacement by external non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and private universities further diminished the possibilities of self-reliant knowledge production as noted by many scholars. ⁸ Those who had worked most assiduously to chart the path to autonomous, local knowledge production reported regularly on unfulfilled promises (Hountondji, 1990, p. 10; 2009, pp. 8–9). Even CODESRIA (2012, p. 20) concluded in its most recent strategic plan that ‘African universities do not feature prominently in the global rankings of universities, and knowledge produced by Africa, even allowing for the under-counting it suffers from, is marginal in terms of the volume’. And the divide between the continent and the North seemed to many as fixed as ever. As Mkandawire (2011, p. 25) recently put it, ‘[a]ny student of Africa is confronted by two research communities that rarely interact’.

As conditions worsened in the 1990s, a small, predominantly male, number of senior African scholars moved North, often under political pressure. As Mamdani put it, ‘when the going got rough, we got going across borders’ (as cited by Mkandawire, 2005, p. 33). Positions opened up in the United States in particular, following the Afrocentric, US student protests of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which often denounced the colonial staffing and scholarship of African Studies centres. While these positions were not numerous, they were notable additions to tenured faculty and US centres, including Michael Chege (University of Florida), Mamadou Diouf (University of Michigan), Toyin Falola (University of Texas at Austin), Amina Mama (Mills College), Mahmood Mamdani (Columbia University), Micere Mugo (Cornell to Syracuse), Achille Mbembe (Columbia) and Tiyambe Zeleza (Trent, University of Illinois), among others. This crossing of the continental divide created new possibilities, as in Mamdani’s support of African scholars in New York and the subsequent rebuilding effort as Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. For its part, CODESRIA (2014) launched a new programme to expand the links of African scholars in the diaspora with African universities.

Zimbabwe, Decolonization and the Moyo Countermovement

It was precisely in this epoch of gloom and rare resources that Moyo sought to sustain intellectual and institutional innovations that would challenge the centralization of knowledge production in Europe and America. Sam knew the system well. Like a previous Southern African cohort before him—one need only mention A.C. Jordan, the UCT’s first African PhD in 1957, who was forced into exile in the United States in 1961, and his friend Archie Mafeje, exiled from UCT and the country in the late 1960s (Hendricks, 2008)—settler colonialism had forced Sam into exile in search of higher education. But there he did not remain. In 1983, after teaching and working in West Africa, Sam returned to Zimbabwe. Despite being offered employment in the North, in Zimbabwe he would stay.

Advances after independence in 1980 had been sharp, wide-ranging and, in many areas, effective. Lively efforts to transform the colonial inheritance spanned from the production of new African-centred, primary education texts to locally driven research at the University of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS), among other centres. Economic growth was matched by expanding investment across the educational and health sectors. These gains were reversed after the government entered into agreements with the World Bank and, in 1991, signed a standby loan arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A standard package of adjustment policies was subsequently applied (such as budget cuts to the education and health sectors, the deregulation of commodity and labour markets, trade liberalization and tax cuts). Increasing indebtedness and an economic downturn followed, paralleling development elsewhere across the continent.

Zimbabwe in the 1990s was thus hardly an auspicious location for radical initiatives, with students and scholars heading North and South. But Sam pushed forward, moving from research at ZIDS (1983–1995), through his years at the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies (1995–2001), to his founding of the AIAS, in 2002. The Institute would remain the centre of his work thereafter, an effort that took place outside the university and its disciplinary and institutional constraints—but offset, to be sure, by lack of university infrastructure and support. By the end of the first decade of this new century, these efforts took definitive shape and direction, marking a notable movement in the effort to continue to decolonize advanced research on and about the continent.

As a concept, ‘decolonization’ surfaces regularly. In the hands of Fanon and Cabral, among others, it marked revolutionary expectations. State or ‘flag’ independence and the forging of a territorial, national identity often underwrote however a process that shaded into promotions of ‘Africanization’ and ‘authenticity’. These uses and abuses of ‘decolonization’ by state elites have underpinned a deeper and richer investigation of the concept in the most recent period, tracing how formal independence permitted the continuation of colonial hierarchies and domination in the production of knowledge. While ‘coloniality’ as a concept most often references racial, labour and gender hierarchies in its Latin American context, as charted above, the production of knowledge regarding Africa in the post-independence period has been sharply marked by global, North/South (or core–periphery) hierarches that reach far beyond national inequalities—and if anything, have become more marked in recent decades due to structural adjustment.

Tracing out the continuing colonial nature of knowledge production has been most frequently conducted by African philosophers, often with close attention to epistemological concerns (Hountondji, 2009; Mbembe, 2015; Wiredu, 1998). For those labouring in the Social Sciences, more mundane material concerns have imposed themselves—and it is here, in often unobserved fashion, that Sam and fellow travellers charted new ground in the neoliberal era. These myriad efforts can be illustrated in three areas: (i) defining and conceptualizing African research problems; (ii) creating self-directed centres of training, research and publication; and, most problematically, (iii) recasting relationships among intellectuals, the state and post-colonial social movements.

Beyond Academic Tourism: Whose Problems, Concepts, Methods?

In her novel A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (2000) unveils, step by step, how modernity and independence have failed to alter colonial relationships: the rich fly in to international hotels and resorts in the Caribbean and are served and entertained by labouring locals. Academic tourism in the post-colonial era exhibited a similar division of wealth and labour: academic wealth was withdrawn to core zones, with Northern scholars, in common parlance, travelling to the South to collect data using local informants. As with multinational corporations, activities of the brain were to be retained in the mother country, while brawn was supplied by ex-colonial subjects. Even after decades of independence, as Hountondji (1990, p. 7) puts it, ‘scientific and technological activity, as practiced in Africa today, is just as “extroverted”, as externally oriented, as is economic activity’. Scholars from the North were to centralize model and theory building, which was then applied to the South.

Moyo’s work subtly but directly moved against this framework. This took place most critically in the very selection of the research problem, which was dictated by local priorities as opposed to the research agenda of the North. In a period when leading scholars of development had long assumed urbanization and capital would wipe out rural areas, Sam placed the agrarian question at the centre of contemporary, anti-capitalist struggles. This generated much debate, from the very name of the Institute to the case he and colleagues made for the relevance of the agrarian peoples and struggles today. Seen from the North, the agrarian problem was an historical artefact, a concern of pre-or at best early-industrial societies. Zimbabwe’s land struggles, from this standpoint, were thus historical oddities, at best, and historical retreats, at worst. And they were, accordingly, most easily explained through conceptions of corrupt, neo-patrimonial elites, and failed states—depictions facilitated, to be sure, by the actions of the Mugabe government.

Seen from Harare, land struggles however were hardly blockages to the course of development but central aspects of countering colonial dispossession and contemporary poverty and inequality. If of little interest to scholars and journals in Europe and America, land was of overwhelming interest to local students, local scholars, local policymakers and local audiences—not least of all the landless, land poor and farmworkers embroiled in a major social struggle. Seen from the North, by contrast, land grabs across Africa were analysed from the conception of crisis in the North, which was to be resolved by a crudely reductionist conception of primitive accumulation in the South. There was little room in that conception for Southern problems and agency as in Zimbabwe, which received very little attention.

Centralizing land in the twenty-first century also led to keen methodological and conceptual innovations, following directly from the difficulties of applying concepts and theory predicated on the historical paths of core states. This was most evident in the debate over the contemporary relevance of the agrarian question. ⁹ While one might claim peasant life in the North disappeared with development, such developments in the North proceeded through colonial plunder and the commodification of rural life elsewhere. Agrarian issues might disappear in the richer zones of the world; in the South, they were created in the age of European expansion and endured in the post-colonial age.

The conceptual and epistemological assumptions of such an account are rarely traced out. As Connell (2007, 2011) has argued at length, models of development of core states and cultures were constructed on the bedrock of colonialism—and thus necessarily fail when applied to the South. Epistemologically, ‘the society of the periphery comes to be understood as an imperfect extension of metropolitan modernity’ (2011, p. 108). To argue otherwise requires insight and inventiveness, and much objection from the North. Awkward as they might seem, concepts that Sam and his colleagues deployed, such as ‘semi-proletarianization’ and ‘repeasantization’, pointed towards distinctly regional processes, tied to, but distinct from, core class and accumulation processes. These terms also suggested that emancipatory projects may be agrarian projects, a vision very different, indeed, from those projected from core academic zones of the capitalist world. Movement along these lines was very much a part of a growing effort to break with conceptions generated in, and appropriate to, the North, and construct alternative subject matters, concepts and emancipatory possibilities.

Decolonizing Education, Research and Publications

Colonial powers and educators were quite clear: advanced research and training would take place in the universities of the North. The continent’s best students would be sent there, and research projects and teams would originate from there; post-World War II regional research institutes would be headed by scholars dispatched from the mother country (or apartheid South Africa).

State independence and US hegemony reshaped, but did not fundamentally alter this understanding, which was based on vast disparities in resources and institutional power. Indeed, publication in Northern journals became in short order the privileged location for assessing value, tenure and promotion. As continental associations and institutions advanced in the post-colonial period, a long struggle ensued to reorient the training of young scholars, centres of research and publication outlets. This proceeded, in large part, hidden behind the North–South divide, with rich universities in the North complacently secure in their hubris, while new intellectual collectives, programmes and institutes emerged in Ibadan, Dar es Salaam and Dakar, among others. If the absence of African authors in Northern journals was noted by many, it was mentioned by few; at a conference in the mid-1990s, a past, progressive Africanist editor of the Journal of African History spoke to the issue, saying that he had attempted to break this pattern by heavily recruiting, without success, African authors. Senior African authors in the room mentioned the reasons: unbeknown to the North, they had organized an informal boycott of the journal at the time.

Sam grew up as a student in this international complex, moving from Zimbabwe to North America to receive his postgraduate degrees. Moreover, Sam came of age as a scholar in the wake of the full-scale attack waged by structural adjusters against higher education and research on the continent. Yet, from his earliest days after his return home, Sam sought out avenues with fellow scholars to promote local students and local research. In this, Sam’s effort followed long-standing continental initiatives, most notably those by CODESRIA, where Sam was successively an Executive Member (1995–1997), Vice President (1998–2002) and President (2009–2011). Against the advice of his seniors at times, he sought out and promoted young scholars, a practice that was extensively advanced with the founding of the AIAS, in 2002.

The summer schools organized by AIAS, like all the above initiatives, reached out not to the North but to scholars struggling with similar concerns in the region and the continent. This imperative followed through to publications, an area long stratified by the global academic division of labour. To find an academic audience has long meant for many finding a European or North American journal audience—and addressing the problems they pose, the concepts they value and the theoretical tradition they represent. This puts scholars concerned with locally defined research agendas, and developing alternative conceptions and theory, with few avenues to publish their research, forcing them, all too often, to locate their work within the Northern Africanist or Area Studies framework that speak to the intellectual and practical needs of the North.

This research complex created colonial lines of communication: while scholars in Europe and North America had conversations with each other, African scholars were pressed into vertical engagements, looking North (Hountondji 1990, pp. 11–12). In recent years, this colonial division of labour has worsened. As one recent quantitative study notes, Africa’s share of journal output has steadily declined over the last several decades and African-based scholars’ publication in leading Northern Africanist journals has been falling as well, despite an increasing number of submissions by African scholars to these journals (Briggs & Weathers, 2016, p. 466).

To break out of this trap would require journals grounded in local experiences and needs, and that foster conversations among African scholars. Agrarian South, with admittedly thin resources, like most continental journals, ¹⁰ moved in this direction with support from fellow African scholars and institutions. Just how stark a contrast this presents is indicated by the editorial boards of journals in Agrarian Studies. In 2015, the editorial board of the so-called leading journals in the field were completely without a single board member in Africa and composed almost wholly of scholars resident in the North (85 per cent for the Journal of Peasant Studies, 100 per cent for Agrarian Change). Agrarian South’s board, by contrast, had not a single member resident in the North. Even more strikingly, its board, beyond Sam, had 50 per cent of its members from Asia, 25 per cent from Latin America and 25 per cent from Africa. If decolonization means self-definition and self-ownership, the lesson could not be clearer.

In this domain, Moyo and his colleagues also moved significantly beyond attempts to create a community bound by regional or continental boundaries, as had been common in the twentieth-century response by African scholars. In a period when everyone celebrates transnationalism, Sam practised it from within his local setting, reaching out to Asia and Latin America. This also spoke to the decline of the unbridled power of the North, and the emergence of a much more multi-polar world that opened up relationships across the South. The summer schools were similarly tri-continental affairs, with participation from the federal universities of Brasília and ABC in Brazil and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India. Regional partners included Rhodes University and the UCT (South Africa), and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).

Movements and Decolonization

One of the great challenges posed in both the North and South in the wake of the 1960s revolts has been the post-colonial relationship among social movements, intellectuals and the state. For most of the twentieth century, social movements, generally, and independence movements, specifically, were focused on capturing state power. In both the United States and much of Africa, however, electoral victories in the 1960s by the leaders of civil rights and independence movements did little to improve the lives of their peoples. Fanon’s (2004, p. 116 passim) assessment of nationalist leaders would prove prophetic: the new governments and new parties would become increasingly instruments of coercion and anti-democratic. Expectations that the armed national liberation movements would lead to a more democratic decolonization would prove illusory. A long-standing dilemma was reinforced: how might decolonization and equality be pursued without being appropriated and corrupted by state power and party politics?

Zimbabwe was no exception to this dilemma, with intellectuals increasingly divided between those supportive of the new state and those, over time, more aligned with opposition parties. The explosion of land occupations after 2000 polarized these two groups and their followers. On one side stood a growing phalanx of ‘international leftists and liberals’, ¹¹ united in their criticism of the regime’s authoritarianism and cronyism and supportive of human rights and civil society (Bond & Saunders, 2005; Campbell, 2003; Ranger, 2005). Land reform, from this perspective, was often reduced to the act of a desperate and brutal regime, destined to destroy the nation’s agricultural sector and eventually its entire economy. At another pole stood local intellectuals sympathetic to the regime who stressed external imperialist pressures and opposition parties’ affiliations with white farmers and structural adjustment (Moyo & Yeros, 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Raftopoulos, 2006).

Sam was committed to land reform and committed to struggling against domination from the North. Yet, he rejected the polarization dictated by electoral politics, and avoided involvement in party politics and intrigues that could compromise intellectual autonomy. His primary concern and research interest—in contrast to much of the external left, urban opposition party supporters and intellectuals directly tied to and benefitting from the government—were with the possibility of land occupation delivering a more just rural order. (Offered a farm himself, Sam declined.) This stance came at great cost. Extensive research reports by Sam and his colleagues of much greater equity produced by land occupations than expected were regularly denounced or, more commonly, ignored by those living in richer climes. ¹² At the 2011 CODESRIA General Assembly in Rabat, Sam was virulently denounced as a regime apologist by Moeletsi Mbeki and others; a notable few such as Mamdani countered the charge then and later. ¹³

It would be a mistake to cast this as merely a personal political decision. For the dilemma it addresses remains: how do post-independence intellectuals reject service to organs of the party and state, and engage social change from below? This is even more pressing today, as mass movements—in both urban township and rural land struggles across the South—refuse to be channelled as in the past into party political work. Complicating the challenge even further is the ‘uncivil’ and often violent defence of the commons and its collective ownership, from land through public resources to public goods, including education. These challenges move us very far beyond the simple verities of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, making Sam’s and his colleagues’ choices rich examples to consider, indeed.

Steadfast in the Interregnum

In this, as in so many areas, Sam left us no model, no ideal type, no framework to implement a new stage of decolonization. Sam was no angel as friends could all attest. Life around Sam involved vigorous arguments, disappointments and debate. Summer schools were a focus for this, as charges of gender, generational and regional disparities and inequalities among those present were raised, contested and confronted. Debates erupted—and often continued in the journal—over the localization or importation of concepts and methods from the North; the endurance of colonial patriarchal discourses and analysis in participants’ work and institutions; and the need for greater democracy across generational, regional and intercontinental participants. None of these were resolved—they remain before us, a legacy of Sam’s life and work. And here, moving forward, we would be well served to remember and practise Sam’s generosity and good spirits—his ability to eat and drink and dance and celebrate with his friends after each conference, summer school and gathering. His love of a party—if not the political kind—was legendary.

And so the effort goes forward, often in difficult times and locations for many, as Sam knew so well. Here, too, Sam provides guidance, steadfast and unshakeable as he was in the face of insults and constraints, advancing with remarkable grace and good humour. Sam’s many friends can at such moments call up his memory. In this spirit, I call up another Sam story: while checking in late at night at the hotel for a major, heavily funded, international conference on land grabs, Sam, after long travel from Zimbabwe and without dollars in hand, was told he was assigned to share a room with an unknown student. While I watched, rather stunned, Sam simply acquiesced; this was common treatment. More on point, another black scholar pulled out his US Visa card and separately booked Sam a room. When I awoke, I turned to the young African American woman manning the hotel registration desk and asked: ‘Are all the whites in rooms by themselves and African scholars and students sharing rooms? Is that how it works?’ She replied: ‘Yes, of course.’ Sam was unfazed. The work and conversations, surely with Sam’s guidance and blessings, continue.