Zimbabwe’s Despondent Political Economy
a Durban workshop to honour Sam Moyo, 13-14 June
In Durban, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Built Environment and Development Studies (SoBEDS) and Centre for Civil Society (CCS), invite the public to join more than a dozen friends, colleagues and students of Sam Moyo to remember and build upon his contributions to political economy and political ecology. Sam was an Honorary Professor at CCS until his tragic death in an auto accident during a labour studies conference in Delhi last November.
The hosts are his former Zimbabwean colleague Oliver Mtapuri and Sarah Bracking – both full-time faculty at UKZN SoBEDS – and Patrick Bond (now Honorary Prof at CCS and also professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand). Dr Shauna Mottiar is Acting Director of CCS. The workshop will review current debates regarding development, environment and poverty.
Venue: Centre for Civil Society Boardroom, 6th Floor, Memorial Tower Building
13 June, 9am-5pm – Sam Moyo dedication, with panels on environment, land and poverty
- Zimbabwe’s quick-disappearing mineral resources
- the deflating economy and disappearing dollars, formal and informal
- was it ‘radical land reform’ – or just jambanja?
- a decade of zig-zagging Zimbabwe politics
- final thoughts from Lloyd Sachikonye
Presentations by: Briggs Bomba, Patrick Bond, Sarah Bracking, Danford Chibvongodze, Malcom Chiororo, Bill Freund, Shakespear Hamauswa, Blessing Karumbidza, Joy Mabenge, Martin Magidi, Farai Maguwu, Charles Mangongera, Freedom Mazwi, Erin McCandless, Oliver Mtapuri, Adrian Nel, China Ngubane, Lloyd Sachikonye and Toendepi Shonhe.
14 June, 9am-1pm – financialisation, public employment and the BRICS in Africa
- Sarah Bracking will present her new book, The Financialisation of Power: How Financiers Rule Africa (Routledge 2016) with a panel review.
- Oliver Mtapuri will present his forthcoming book (from Oxford University Press 2016) reviewing the record of public employment programmes aimed at poverty alleviation in Argentina, India and South Africa.
- Patrick Bond, Farai Maguwu and China Ngubane will review the way BRICS interests are being expressed in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Maguwu was chapter author of a new Wits University Press book dealing with Chinese investment in the Marange diamond mines, as well as a co-author of a Zimbabwe chapter in the new book co-edited by Bond, BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Jacana, 2015).
Lunch will be provided; but please RSVP to bondp@ukzn.ac.za
The organisers thank, for financial support, the South African National Research Foundation’s Argentina/South Africa Research Cooperation Programme (UID 91992), and the Departments of Science and Technology and Higher Education for the SA Research Chair Initiative on Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment.
Sam Moyo, 1954-2015
Sam Moyo, a UKZN Centre for Civil Society (CCS) Honorary Professor, died in New Delhi, India on 20 November 2015. Moyo, 61, was at the peak of his career, having recently presided over the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (2008-11). He had built up the Harare-based African Institute for Agrarian Studies as a leading site for research and teaching.
Moyo was co-supervisor of two UKZN doctoral students studying Zimbabwe’s land reform, and was a regular participant in intellectual events in Durban. With CCS co-hosting, he was awarded for his contributions at the World Association for Political Economy in June, and was named a vice-chairperson of that association. Amongst his major innovations was deploying a sophisticated Marxist analysis to what he termed rural Africa’s ‘trimodal’ agrarian structure.
Moyo passed away following a car accident, when he was driven back to his hotel after a conference at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was in his element at that conference, entitled Labour in the South, with his closest collaborators nearby, and had just delivered papers on “Labour Questions in the African Periphery” and “Capitalism and Labour Reserves.”
Moyo earned his PhD in Rural Development and Environmental Management from the University of Northumbria, having received earlier degrees in geography from the Universities of Western Ontario and Sierra Leone. During the early 1980s he taught in Nigeria at the Universities of Port Harcourt and Calabar. He returned to Zimbabwe in 1983 and established a career focus on land and natural resources management, civil society organisations, capacity building and institutional development. His publications included 10 authored or co-authored books, 11 co-edited books and nearly 100 other chapters or academic articles, and he founded the academic journal Agrarian South. His most recent books were Land in the Struggles for Citizenship in Africa (co-edited with Dzodzi Tsikata and Yakham Diop, Codesria, 2015) and Land and Agrarian Reform in Zimbabwe (co-edited with Walter Chambati, Codesria, 2013), and with Paris Yeros he co-authored a book chapter about African geopolitics for a collection co-edited by Patrick Bond, BRICS (Jacana Press 2015), entitled “Scramble, resistance and a new non-alignment strategy.”
During the 1980s-90s he held leadership positions at the Southern Africa Regional Institute for Policy Studies and the University of Zimbabwe’s Institute of Development Studies and Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. He was also a land consultant to the Government of Zimbabwe, and celebrated the post-2000 land reform while offering mixed reviews of implementation given its circumstances. He also consulted to the governments of Sierra Leone and South Africa. And he founded the Harare NGO ZERO: A Regional Environment Organisation, which he also chaired.
As University of Dar es Salaam Professor Emeritus Issa Shivji put it, “We have lost one of our great comrades: utterly committed, a most unassuming scholar and an absolutely decent human being.” Indeed Moyo captured the spirit of his times in Zimbabwe and ours in Durban: intellectual hunger, an insistence on theorising not just describing social relations, progressive aspirations for transformed power relations in a profoundly unequal rural landscape, a critical spirit that meant he was often on the wrong side of political elites, and an infinite generosity. His professional networks were also the sites for conviviality and nurturing of the next generation of progressive scholars. He worked with civil society and helped build social organisation wherever he could.
Admired by rural scholars across the world, Moyo was academically inspirational, as Zimbabwe’s most cited organic-turned-professional intellectual, and as a genuine Pan-African scholar. His memory will demand from his admirers a renewed commitment to combining intellectual rigour and the passion for social justice that he personified, all with the sense of humour and love of life that kept him surviving and thriving in Zimbabwe’s stressed conditions.