Abstract
This article provides a family perspective on the formation of Sam’s ideas.* As a family, we see Sam’s life and ideas as having developed within three distinct periods, namely, his growing up in Highfields under the Rhodesian colonial regime, then the several years he spent in West Africa, studying for his first degree and later teaching at university, and the last period when he went to Canada to do his post-graduate work. These were his formative years, before he returned to Zimbabwe to carry on a long career in research and teaching.
I was asked to give a family perspective of the formation of Sam’s ideas, and what we see, as a family, of how he got to his thinking and to his passion for his work. I talk not in terms of his actual work, but just the influences on his thinking and his trajectory. I look at Sam’s life within three distinct periods that marked his intellectual trajectory, namely, the first period, when we grew up in Highfields; then the second period when he went to West Africa to do his first degree; and the last period when he went to Canada to do his post-graduate work.
Early Life in Highfields and Chipembere Primary School
Sam was born in 1954, four years elder to me, and grew up in Highfields, in the period approximately from 1964 to 1971. During this time, there was political strife in the country, and Highfields was the centre of political activity for our independence. Around 1964/1965, Sam got involved in politics. There was a lot of political violence, the township was heavily militarized, and I remember we used to go to school, he used to take me to nursery school, and there were lots of violence around us, teargas, bullets, factional fighting. Our father was very active in politics, participating through the trade unions, and Sam as a result joined politics at that early age.
I remember, by 1965, he was arrested for participating in the ZAPU Youth League. They came to pick him up around four in the morning and he was taken to Mbizi Police Station, which was notorious for arresting and detaining political activists. He was detained there until he was released in the evening, most likely because our mother used to work for the State Broadcasting Corporation. They had been arrested for stoning a house that was said to belong to a collaborator—they used to call them ‘sell-outs’ at that time. While in custody, he was severely beaten by the Rhodesian police force and tortured, so much that he came back home with a swollen eye and torture marks all over his body.
So at that time Sam was very active in the youth wing, and I remember we used to go to school under police guard. There used to be boycotts and so on and the youths were supposed to be in the forefront of the battlefield, they used to boast that they could shoot down a helicopter with a sling. I also remember in primary school, the police used to come to the school assembly on Monday mornings and actually have a list of people they wanted to arrest who had committed crimes over the weekend. So that, I think, was the formation of his awareness and activism.
By 1965, all political activities were banned. Sam went to Chipembere Primary School in Highfields, and he was always the smallest guy in his class. At that time we had a lot of mature people at school, we had people who were already shaving when they were in primary school. I remember when I was in the first grade, we had some guys who would refuse to go to the same toilet as us because they were older. So you can see Sam already had to negotiate his way in life from an early age because he was such a small boy, people used to bully him, he had to live with bullying and negotiating his way in life.
This is also where Sam picked up smoking. A lot of people know him by his nickname, Mudzanga, which in Shona means ‘cigarette’, because he was always smoking. That also came from being in primary school with all these older people; he started smoking because of some of his older classmates.
High School at Bernard Mzeki College
When Sam finished Primary School in 1967, he went to Bernard Mzeki College, which is a high school about 120 km from Bulawayo, a boarding school, where he was again the smallest guy in class. The name Mudzanga really stuck when he was in Bernard Mzeki, because people had never seen such a small guy smoking. Bernard Mzeki was not a very eventful period in terms of Sam’s political development in school, because at that time political activities were under the State of Emergency, there were local law and order meetings, and all freedoms were curtailed, there was no freedom of speech, literature was censored. So there was not much political activity at that time.
Then in 1971, after he finished his O’Levels, Sam managed to go away for his first degree. At that time in Zimbabwe, we probably had six or seven schools for Africans throughout the whole country where one could proceed to do A’Levels, so the places were very limited. The educational system had been designed such that, at the end of the day, only 10 per cent of the kids who had started primary school would be able to go through the A’Level exams and finish high school, because there was a lot of screening. The other alternative was to go to teacher training college or find a job, but Sam managed to get a scholarship to go to Sierra Leone, to Njala University, where he did his first degree.
Life in Sierra Leone: Undergraduate Studies at Njala University
Sierra Leone must have been a very crucial stage in Sam’s development, because that was the first time he had gone out to an independent country, the first time he had gone to an African country with no restrictions in terms of freedom of speech, publication of literature, freedom of learning. I think this is when the world opened up to him. In Sierra Leone, Sam resumed his political activism. He was a student activist and leader of the Zimbabwean diaspora in that area in West Africa, as a representative of ZAPU. Their main mission was to support the liberation struggle through mobilization of resources, money or material resources that they used to send back to the camps in Mozambique and Zambia.
The other milestone in his development was that, during holidays, he would go visit our uncle, Dr. Mhlanga, who at that time was posted in Dakar, Senegal, working for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Sam used to go there for holidays, and even after he graduated he went to stay in Senegal. At that time, Senegal was under Leopold Senghor, and it was a centre of Pan-Africanism. A lot of African scholars used to go to Senegal for conferences, and Sam used to interact with leading African academics of that time. I remember Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese intellectual, Egyptian Marxist Economist, Samir Amin and Professor Mkandawire. All these people used to be acquaintances of my grandfather and uncle, so I think he got a lot of intellectual enrichment from interacting with them. I subsequently went to Dakar after Sam, in 1976, where I stayed for about nine months, and it was a very enriching environment, indeed. A lot of UN conferences used to be held there, a lot of conferences at Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP), the development organization with which my uncle used to work. Most of the papers that were presented at these conferences were available at my uncle’s home, he had a big library and we used to go through a lot of these papers that were being presented, given that we had grown up here in a censored society where information was not available. At times, in the 1960s and 1970s, you would get arrested for just saying ‘freedom’, people would look around and say who mentioned that word ‘freedom’, so the situation at home was so censored and heavily controlled. You could not even talk about Marxism, Karl Marx or Max Weber, it was not possible. This literature was readily available in the newly independent African states in West Africa. So when Sam went to Senegal, there was so much literature available, so much information that I am sure that that was one of the places that formed his thinking.
After he finished in Njala, in Sierra Leone, he went to Canada, University of Western Ontario, where he did his Master’s in Geography. Canada was not a very nice place for Sam, I do not think he enjoyed it that much, his stipend was very low and I remember he used to work part-time, playing soccer for a Portuguese team during summer. I think they were paying him about US$20 per match, and by that time I was also now studying in the USA and I had a bit of a better stipend, so I used to send him money from my side. I used to send him something like US$30 every month. We met once or twice, I sent him money twice or so to come and visit me, because I could not travel to Canada, I did not have a valid passport, so I paid his fares.
In 1980, Sam came home for our independence. I remember people always used to talk about how when he came back he had just one suitcase with all his clothes, and at that time a lot of people had gone out to exile and when they would come back from the UK or the USA, they would be carrying colour TVs, Hi-Fi stereos and so on. But Sam just came back with his suitcase, and I think my mother and father were very disappointed with him, because everybody else was bringing stuff in. I remember our dad saying to him, ‘but Sam, what’s wrong with you? Everybody else is bringing in stereos and colour TVs.’
So he came back for a while, and I think at that time I was still in the USA. Then he went back to Canada, packed his bags and went to Nigeria to take up a teaching post at University of Calabar.
Life in Nigeria: Research and Lecturing at Calabar
For a lot of people who were in Zimbabwe, it was understandable for you to be in Canada or the UK, or somewhere in the West. It was not understandable why somebody would leave the luxuries of the West to go to Nigeria, a poor country. But it was in him; by that time, I think, he had formed his sense of mission, he knew what he wanted to do. I also think that when he was doing his Master’s, the planning principles, the theories that he was learning in Canada, did not resonate with him, the rural planning aspect and the development path that was being promoted by the college or by his lecturers simply did not resonate.
When he went to Nigeria, he wanted to do his research and dissertation based on what he could evaluate on tangible evidence. Sam, as you know, was very particular in getting figures, getting proof of what he was talking about, and he spent a lot of time trying to quantify his theories. So, I think, that is why he went back to Nigeria, he wanted to quantify and probably to dispute in a tangible way the theories that they were giving him in Canada. It also took him a bit of time to get his PhD, because I think he was not in agreement with his supervisors, and he always had to prove his point. In Nigeria, there was quite a lot of sharing of ideas. People close to him at that time, like David Johnson, knew the details of this period. David Johnson, a historian, was coming from the University of Leeds, where Marxism was current. I do not know which direction they took, but whatever they did, I think it ignited a passion in Sam to push left leaning ideas.
Work and Collaborations in Zimbabwe: Founding Research Institutes
The next stage is when Sam came back to Zimbabwe and met Professor Thandika Mkandawire. They teamed up and founded Zimbabwe Institute of Development Studies (ZIDS). He had met Mkandiwire in 1976, in Senegal, so their ideas really gelled. From ZIDS he went to Southern Africa Political Economy Series Trust (SAPES), and then to the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS), a policy research institute focusing on agrarian issues in Africa.
Sam went on to contribute towards the development of higher learning through highly resourceful and effective research in economic policy analysis, land and agrarian reforms, and environmental sustainability, focusing on the Global South. Apart from founding the AIAS, he also co-founded Zimbabwe Environmental Research Organisation (ZERO), a regional environmental organization. He published numerous research works including books, book chapters and journal articles. Sam was also involved in building and leading various organizations, and was a member of various boards including International Development Economics Associates (IDEAS), ZERO, Hakiardhi n Tanzania, Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) and Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). He also undertook various research and policy advisory works for international agencies such as United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), World Bank and African Union. He took up lectureship positions at various universities, including the University of Port Harcourt and University of Zimbabwe, and supervised numerous postgraduate students from all over the world, most of whom have become intellectuals to be reckoned with.
So, Sam was always involved in a number of initiatives and research institutes. But he also continued to work on his own and propagate his own intelligent ideas. Sam’s commitment to fight for social justice could be traced to his activism against colonial oppression in the working class suburb of Highfields. The Pan-Africanist ideas that informed his scholarship were inculcated during his years in West Africa, in particular, Senegal, during the time of Leopold Sengor in the 1970s, and his long association with CODESRIA, the Pan-African research organization which he led as President between 2008 and 2011. The teaching stint in Nigeria also shaped his intellectual trajectory. Studying across three continents marked his development, and, later on, various research missions shaped the internationalist perspectives of his scholarship.