Abstract
This special issue is dedicated to the work of Sam Moyo, founding Editor-in-Chief of Agrarian South. Since Sam’s untimely passing, in November 2015, in New Delhi, the Agrarian South Network (ASN) has been working jointly with the renamed Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS), of which he was the Founder and Executive Director, as well as the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), of which he was an active member and ex-president, to think through a plan for honouring his work and furthering his legacy.
Over the past year, we have mourned his passing and commemorated his life. And we have had time to reflect on what would be the most appropriate way of recognizing his contribution and keeping it alive for future generations. Thus, we have taken steps to affirm his ideals and virtues—most immediately by renaming the Institute—and also to initiate a process of collective reflection on his work and how best to disseminate it to a broader audience. The latter process was effectively launched in January 2016, at the Colloquium held in his memory in Harare, organized to coincide with our annual Summer School. Most of the articles published here were presented at the Colloquium, while others were invited subsequently. This process will culminate in a conference to be held at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, in February 2018, and a book dedicated to Sam, with many more contributors from the continent and around the world. A legacy project will also be launched in the medium term, with a view to republish a selection of Sam’s work and make it accessible to a wider public.
Other initiatives and tributes have also been underway quite independently, attesting to the deep respect that Sam commanded on the continent and beyond. Thus, the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Social Policy (AMRI) at the University of South Africa (UNISA) has renamed its Pan-African Roundtable Dialogue on Land and Agriculture to the Sam Moyo Roundtable on Land and Agrarian Questions—a gesture which certainly would have made both Archie and Sam delighted to be reunited in this way. Moreover, a doctoral scholarship has been founded in his name at JNU, the university which Sam cherished for its innovating and rigorous research, and not least its fraternal reception of Sam over many years. Finally, conferences and tributes to his life and work have also been organized over the past year in Europe, South Africa and China, and others are still to be organized. It is, indeed, heartwarming that Sam’s work and spirit touched so many people across the globe.
Contents of the Special Issue
This special issue traces Sam’s intellectual trajectory, including the inspiring influence he had on fellow researchers, and offers an assessment of his impact on the study of land and agrarian questions in Zimbabwe, Africa and beyond, as well as on the social sciences more generally. The contributors all enjoyed long discussions with Sam, either over time or in specific phases of his life, as students or colleagues. Together, they throw light on the details of his intellectual formation and trajectory, on key concepts and methods of mutual concern and the overall meaning of his work. The special issue begins and ends with two poems composed by Issa Shivji, which were recited at the burial ceremony in November 2015 and at the unveiling of the tombstone in September 2016.
The first article is written by Mabhena Phakamile Moyo, Sam’s junior brother, and provides a family perspective on the formation of Sam’s ideas. The article traces Sam’s earlier life and ideas within three distinct periods, namely, his growing up in Highfields under Rhodesian rule, then the several years he spent in West Africa studying for his first degree and later teaching at university, and the later period when he went to Canada for his post-graduate work. These were his formative years, before he returned to Zimbabwe to carry on a long career in research and teaching.
Samir Amin writes of the ideas that he shared with Sam regarding the nature of contemporary imperialism and its destruction of peasant societies in Africa and Asia. Amin focuses on the challenges arising from the ‘emergence’ of the South, this being an issue debated extensively with Sam in CODESRIA and elsewhere. Amin argues that conventional patterns of economic growth in the South, associated with relocation and subcontracting industries, continue to produce accelerated social disintegration and the destruction of rural societies—or ‘lumpen development’. The emergence of nations, he argues, as distinct from that of markets, implies the formulation of sovereign projects, engaging in the consolidation of integrated industrial production systems and the renewal of family-based peasant agriculture. The article offers a critical assessment of the African experiences and identifies alternative strategies beyond neoliberal re-colonization.
Issa G. Shivji also shared with Sam ideas and purposes and collaborated on Pan-African initiatives. In this article, Shivji raises four issues which he identifies as having been very dear to Sam. Shivji argues that all four are ‘classical’ questions, very commonly debated among Marxists, but which always need to be addressed anew, in concrete situations. The first is the category of ‘the peasant’, in its analytical and empirical dimensions; the second is the relationship between the peasant question and the national question; the third is the form and character of accumulation in the agrarian sector; and the fourth relates to social agency for transformation and forms of its organization. Shivji probes these issues tentatively, in the interest of continuing the debate.
Marjorie Mbilinyi engaged with Sam especially on the gender question in agrarian transformation. In this article, Mbilinyi takes the debate forward, arguing that agrarian studies in Africa today is taking place in the context of an aggressive plunder of resources. The article analyzes the ongoing gender and class struggles over agricultural commercialization in Tanzania. The analysis is informed by transformative feminism, which illuminates the intersections of gender, class and race, and other social relations, such as age, to understand the changing agrarian political economy and the challenges posed by patriarchy and neoliberal globalization.
Brian Raftopoulos traces Sam’s early intellectual development at the Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS), where they worked together after Zimbabwe’s independence. ZIDS was established in the early 1980s to provide an alternative intellectual space for considering socialist policy alternatives, and, as such, ZIDS was subject both to the opportunities and challenges of state politics. In his work at ZIDS, Sam drew on a long history of radical political economy studies on Zimbabwe, as well radical Africanist thought, to pursue his seminal work in agrarian studies. His experience at ZIDS was important for developing an approach, which later was deployed for the analysis of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP). Raftopoulos argues that Sam led the way in understanding not only the economic challenges of the FTLRP, but also the opportunities that it created for moving beyond the unequal legacies of the settler-colonial agrarian political economy. Raftopoulos also argues, however, that while Sam pioneered the study of the changing forms of agrarian production relations in the 2000s, he focused less on the changing forms of political rule in the country. Into this space, a rich literature from different disciplinary frameworks has emerged and expanded the debate on agrarian and political change in Zimbabwe.
William G. Martin argues that Sam’s insurgent intelligence and discipline made him a compelling and controversial intellectual leader. The article examines Sam’s life and work as part of the global production of knowledge, intellectuals and institutions dedicated to the study of Africa. Martin, as a long-time colleague and member of the ASN, traces the divisions and inequalities that mark the positions and struggles of scholars of Africa, and in which Sam was inevitably situated. Martin argues that Sam’s choices and commitments sharply highlighted these divisions and inequalities, offering a unique perspective and body of work linked organically to the key issues of agrarian transition in Africa and struggles over land. Martin argues that Sam gave the example of how we might move to open up the possibility of disrupting and decolonizing the institutions and intellectual frameworks surrounding the study of Africa.
Ian Scoones focuses on the methodological lessons from Sam’s scholarship. Having engaged in close dialogue with Sam over the land question in Zimbabwe, Scoones argues that Sam’s work is characterized by a combination of detailed empirical investigation, deep knowledge of the technical and practical aspects of agricultural production and farming livelihoods and big-picture political economy analysis and theory. In this sense, Scoones argues that Sam’s method is an insightful contemporary application of the method originally set out in Marx’s Grundrisse. Many contemporary explorations of agrarian political economy fail to sustain the important tension, and dialectical debate, between diverse empirical realities and a wider theorization of the ‘concrete’ features of emergent processes of change. The implications of Sam’s methodological approach for the analysis of Zimbabwe’s land reform are discussed, especially in relation to the land occupations and the politics of agrarian reform since 2000.
Tendai Murisa argues that Zimbabwe’s decolonization could never be complete without addressing the land question. Sam’s work, spanning over three decades, is a fundamental entry point in the discussion of land policy, rural mobilization and trends in land reform. Murisa, as Sam’s research student and collaborator, argues that Sam’s work was dedicated to influencing policy and creating connections between local processes, such as land occupations, national policy and global debates. Murisa provides a summary of Sam’s writing on land reform policy in Zimbabwe, highlighting the complex relationships that exist between policy formulation, rural mobilization and implementation of policy. Murisa argues that an examination and critique of Sam’s work should focus on outstanding issues pertaining to the FTLRP, especially the unresolved land tenure question, which currently faces the threat of elite capture.
Richard Mbunda, whose doctoral research has also been inspired by Sam’s work, turns his sights on Tanzania to examine the food shortages in the country. Mbunda argues that, while Tanzania has an undisputable potential for food production, the state and its development partners, such as the World Bank, portray peasant production as the cause of the food crisis and call for de-peasantization in favour of commercial large-scale farming. The article argues that achieving food self-sufficiency should begin with improving peasant agriculture instead of dispossessing peasants of their land. The principles of food sovereignty must be adopted and the orientation of the state must be developmental. The state must play an activist role in investing heavily in agriculture-related projects.
K.N. Harilal and K.K. Eswaran, who engaged with Sam on the challenges of land reform in a neoliberal environment, focus their attention on the agrarian question in Kerala, India, in the aftermath of post-colonial land reforms and in the context of the more recent experiment with democratic decentralization. The authors focus on one of the weakest links of democratic decentralization, that is, the failure to generate sustainable livelihood opportunities in either industry or agriculture. The crisis in agriculture, they argue, is part of a larger process of structural transformation of the Kerala economy, which has blocked agrarian transition, despite the land reforms, and requires thorough overhauling of the social organization of production for overcoming the present impasse. The authors argue that, even though local governments have a major role in resolving the agrarian question, its resolution presupposes greater involvement of higher tiers of government and deeper cooperation among different tiers.
Finally, our special issue includes reviews by Archana Prasad and Lyn Ossome of two books which Sam co-edited but which appeared in print after his passing: one co-edited with with Dzodzi Tsikata and Yakham Diop, Land in the Struggles for Citizenship in Africa (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2015), the other with Yoichi Mine, What Colonialism Ignored: ‘African Potentials’ for Resolving Conflicts in Southern Africa (Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG, 2016). We also carry a third book review by Camila Penna on a theme close to Sam’s heart, rural social movements, by Renata Motta, Social Mobilization, Global Capitalism and Struggles over Food: A Comparative Study of Social Movements (Oxon and New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).
We invite our readers to engage critically with this rich body of work, carry it forward and illuminate the challenges that we face in the twenty-first century. This would indeed be the best tribute to our brother Sam.