I was surprised as well as flattered when the organising committee of the conference invited me to deliver this Keynote. Surprised, as there are others who have a more thorough and first-hand knowledge of Gavin's rich and varied intellectual contributions. The one important exception was of course the close collaboration he and I had in the collective enterprise that was ROAPE. Indeed at the conference Gavin produced copies he had unearthed of the correspondence that set the enterprise in motion in 1972–73. But he and I have seen little of each other in the last decade since we both became less directly involved in the journal's day-to-day working. So I don't pretend to know the whole breadth of his wide-ranging work, but a comprehensive evaluation of that body of scholarship was very much part of the very agenda of the conference, which brought together to pay their respects such a large array of scholars, many of whose work had overlapped with Gavin's in so many varied fields.
Nor have I been close enough to appreciate Gavin's teaching and mentoring role over the last 30-plus years in Oxford – though a young friend of mine from southern Africa just wrote to share the good news that his upgrading to full DPhil had been approved, adding the short phrase ‘after a good grilling from Gavin’. This was said with relief, but also seeming to imply both gratitude for the rigour, and pride that he had come out of a testing as rigorous as Gavin's with colours flying. The articles published here explicitly testify to such intellectual debts and were echoed by several similar acknowledgements of gratitude by participants at the conference.
Despite the fact that in my eyes Gavin is one of the younger fellows, I have found myself if not in direct scholarly collaboration then at least treading in his footsteps on occasions. The first was way back in the mid 70s, when he left the Sociology Department at Durham to come to Oxford. Ruth First had been there at the time, and soon after took leave of absence for a year to do a stint in Maputo, and I filled in. Gavin and I would both agree that Ruth was a fine colleague and good friend who had an important influence on us and so many others, not least in bridging the gap between serious intellectual work and passionate political engagement. And this spirit was an inspiration for the founding of ROAPE. Decades later I also found myself following on his work on land and agrarian reform in South Africa. Gavin had taken on the World Bank's vision being pushed in the mid 1990s, providing a crushing critique of what it was proposing (Williams 1996). More than a decade later I have been struck in seeking out the reasons for the failure on almost all counts of post-apartheid efforts at land reform by the legacy of that World Bank advice. Many of Gavin's predictions about the outcomes if World Bank advice was followed have proved to be correct. Recalling these insights about South Africa, there are echoes of a similar, much earlier experience when Gavin's critical rigour as well as his insights into agrarian issues were sought – over proposals being drafted in an FAO report on ‘Policy options' for agrarian reform in Zimbabwe in 1976. As one of a panel of three that pored over a wide range of prognoses thoroughly for two days in Rome, he unerringly and characteristically probed to great effect: what is the logic of this proposal? Where's the evidence to support that? Will that really work? Wouldn't it be better to …?
I have also been a follower into one of his specific concerns about southern African agrarian experience: the Western Cape wine industry. But whereas my more recent efforts were concentrated as much in participatory research in the uncorking end of this commodity chain, his several writings on this case characteristically took on an agenda that set the industry in a globalising market context, related it to the emergence of black capitalists, and explored labour relationships as a crucial part of agrarian structure.
Such investigations of specific situations and processes that go beyond theorems from ‘generalising social sciences’, that are rooted in an understanding of the context of the global political economy which at the same time does not ‘focus only on the imperial side’ in deducing explanations, and searching for social relations of production, but of gender and identity and politics as well as class – these elements represent both the concerns of his main body of work and also the approach he has used.
Such contributions, of which I have been just an impressed bystander, deserve mention for they illustrate how intrepid, and inevitably controversial, he has been prepared to be. In reminiscing with a comrade from the old days in ROAPE we recalled two such interventions which marked Gavin's readiness to depart from what might have seemed the logic of his own positions and certainly challenged some of the left-wing orthodoxies. Writing during the height of the indictment of all things to do with structural adjustment he offered a more ambiguous and contradictory view when he titled an article ‘Why structural adjustment is necessary and why it doesn't work’ (Williams 1994). He also offered a challenge to instinctive anti-market analysts of agrarian relations in Africa when he suggested that governments had become so corrupt that wresting agricultural produce marketing away from the state monopolies that had persisted since colonial days would be a beneficial step even if it was part of World Bank prescriptions, a way of ‘taking the part of the peasant’, as he once famously put it. Both these issues are still relevant to confronting present realities, and his particular arguments would repay the critical attention and debate that they did not receive at the time, but happily are raised in the articles. And the two issues exemplify his argument that incorrect and simplistic diagnoses of what needs to be analysed as a much broader ‘agrarian question’, one of lifelong concerns, is what generates so many wrong-headed and inappropriate policy prescriptions in Africa (Williams 1981).
Another, even earlier and provocative, intervention and one that might have fallen through the cracks and almost been forgotten, is worth recalling. In a Debates piece (Williams 1976a) he stated ‘There is no theory of petit-bourgeois politics’, and he went on to challenge the very terms of the debate which was then arising on the nature of the state in Africa. He argued for going back to first principles of Marxian political economy by rooting analysis in the relations of production. This was not the only occasion his critical voice was raised in favour of analysing in terms of more classical approaches – one case being of rooting discussion of land policy in the notion of a bourgeois democratic revolution. And as many of those who have worked with him in the last years know, and as Meagher's article reminds readers, Gavin's advice of going back to the classics of political economy has embraced a serious application of Max Weber's ideas.
In fact one way to show respect to ‘oldies’ is to engage with and look beyond their work, and I feel challenged to go on to raise issues to do with what should be the agenda and the approach of future research and writing, including Gavin's own explicit views on these basic issues.
African Studies: the role of intellectuals
In considering agenda and approaches, Gavin himself set out how he thought the study of Africa should proceed in a Keynote he gave to the 30 th Anniversary Conference of ROAPE. The published version (ROAPE 2004, vol. 31, no. 102), from which the quotes in the paragraphs above and below are taken, is a remarkably comprehensive and thought-provoking take on what are the key issues of ‘Political economies and the study of Africa: critical considerations’, and the role of those who seek to embark on such a voyage. Its compact series of succinct summaries of so many themes deserves regular rereading, especially in this new historical stage of global capitalism.
After a remarkable and handy single-page outline of the evolution of ‘political economy’, and its distinction from neo-classical economics and the ‘new political economy’, he goes on to talk about ROAPE, its founding aims and practices, and some of the key themes it has covered. It is that shared experience which I particularly feel able to explore. But Gavin also goes on to provide a thumbnail sketch and a critique of current themes in African Studies, with an exploration of democratisation as a case study, then to finish by posing the issue of ‘where our own responsibilities lie’, of how we should engage with policy advice and scholarship.
But Gavin's recent answer – that ‘we cannot have it both ways’ and must either follow the calling of science (and, quoting Weber, ‘act consistently in accordance with the demands of intellectual integrity’) or contribute to policy – appeared alongside another approach to this very question in the same pages of ROAPE 102. There Michael Burawoy (2004) spells out other answers to this basic question in exploring views expressed by Harold Wolpe (originally in ‘The liberation struggle and research’ in ROAPE 32, Wolpe 1985), and in his life's work. This uses another distinction between types of intellectuals, that offered by Zygmunt Bauman: ‘legislators’ and ‘interpreters’, corresponding to two different strategies of transformation of society (and thus different categories to Gramsci's ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals, which were distinguished by their attachment to distinct social classes). Wolpe originally defined the 'appropriate' stance of intellectuals vis-à-vis the South African liberation movement, but rejected two simplistic positions, one that envisaged the intellectual simply providing material or justifications for existing policy; the other that defended the unqualified autonomy of intellectual work: subordination or independence. But he still argued that the political should be the starting point for research, in the sense of shaping the agenda, not the conclusions. He carried these principles through to the era when the South African liberation movement came into power, in the work he took on in a priority area for the post-apartheid regime, education. Burawoy goes on to suggest that a different formula emerged in Wolpe's last years in the later 1990s, wherein he saw the need to question state priorities, especially in the absence of a clear development strategy and persistence of special interests, instead pointing the need for ‘continued critique of the social order and of the issues about continuous social transformation’. Burawoy saw this change to a ‘critique’ (reminiscent of Gavin's emphasis of what constitutes political economy) as one that should involve the intellectual in an interaction with civil society (the interpreter) rather than with the state (as legislator). But Burawoy's last word on this rebellion was to call for a home or network for dialogue between the two. His position thus goes beyond the formula that individuals have to choose one role or the other.
In fact, Gavin himself seems at some moments to see a case for blurring the distinction between scholars and policy-oriented intellectuals; for instance, when he argues that ‘left-wing critics of the international financial agencies tend to be bereft of alternatives to structural adjustment, other than the (old) statist policies which had encouraged the demand for imported manufacturing and agricultural products and lavishly rewarded those with access to foreign currency or imported goods at official exchange rates or controlled prices’ (Williams 2004, p. 574). This seems to assume that the working out of such alternatives is a task that someone needs to undertake – and this need for alternative paths to neoliberalism is still as urgently needed as in the 1990s. This is the core contextual dimension of debates about what Gavin calls ‘our own responsibilities’: how to offer critiques both of the theories, policies and actualities of a malfunctioning – and for Africa disastrous – global economy, and the forms of neo-imperial political interventions that mark our times today. What the appropriate roles are in any meaningful division of labour over these tasks is a matter I will return to. But a relevant consideration is to note that there are in Africa networks both in and outside academia, sometimes crossing the divide, that are posing these issues, and I will recount one such recent initiative in Tanzania below.
The ROAPE experience
My own take on these issues is that the choice of path is not one to be made by individual scholars in isolation, and that whether it is in pursuing discourse between those intellectuals who pursue different options or the grander one of seeking points of contact with public bodies ranging from the state, to liberation movements to civil society or activists, the forming of networks and sometimes organisations has to be on the agenda. So in order to seek possible learning experiences of collective intellectual endeavour, I want to go back to my original intention when I offered a much more modest contribution to this conference: just to explore the one experience which I did share with Gavin. This review of the Review, Gavin's role in it, and his views on it, was in fact planned with Peter Lawrence (to whom I am grateful for thoughts on an earlier draft). The Williams (2004) article does in fact provide a handy, potted summary of the journal's origin, and what people these days would dub its ‘mission’, and highlights some of the themes it dealt with especially in the first couple of decades of publication. Much could be added about the origins and the priority issues, but that would only provide further detail, changing little of Gavin's main thrust. The statement that the original aim was ‘to understand Africa in order to change it’ is as accurate as any one-phrase summary could be. But Gavin's own later conclusion in 2004 that the need is ‘to understand the world, not change it’ is an important though debatable proposition, appropriate for a gathering like the conference and this Special Issue to discuss, and to which I shall return. But that statement of the way his thinking has evolved would also fit the stance which the Review has come to adopt. So it would perhaps offer insights into the broader issue of the appropriate role of intellectuals, and Africanists in particular, in the present conjuncture, to explore how the work of this particular collective enterprise has morphed into something different.
The circumstances in which this journal was launched and how it came to be institutionalised offer the obvious starting point in any effort to learn from that experience: in understanding how and why the experience and prospects of radical publications have changed, for they may no longer be replicable. They raise the question of whether those involved have, like Gavin, undergone a shift in views or whether times have changed so much that a committed, radical intellectual project of that kind is no longer possible in the UK or the West more generally, and maybe not in Africa either. The core of that endeavour needs to be seen as an effort to link serious scholarship with political engagement, and thereby to shape what constitutes ‘radical’ and ‘committed’ intellectual work. That it did this by producing a publication is a secondary consideration in relation to what I put to the conference:
- 1.
What concerns constituted the agenda of ‘commitment’ and in what regard was the approach ‘radical’, and how did these change?
- 2.
How far are any such concerns and perspectives still appropriate today?
- 3.
Is any such enterprise that links scholarship and politics, to change and study, valid?
- 4.
What is the appropriate role of those individuals who study Africa, and what scope is there for collective activity of this kind?
The original intention to create a forum and to inform debates among African intellectuals and political activists, that Gavin recalled, was not entirely fruitless, and a wide range of contacts was made: African intellectuals contributed from the earliest days, and liaison with African intellectual networks has to some extent persisted. The goals of political commitment were originally defined principally in terms of support for national liberation struggles and for efforts against neo-colonialism. This translated into a tendency to support liberation movements, sometimes uncritically, and ‘progressive’ states. But these became untenable as the sole formulations of ‘solidarity’ as liberation was gained and spawned governments not markedly different to the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt regimes elsewhere. Linkages were also made with those bodies in the UK and the West, solidarity organisations, NGOs etc., that had similar concerns. These linkages have all tended toward erosion in the last decades – obviously in response to changed circumstances within Africa, but perhaps also because of institutional forms in UK. Here it may be instructive to compare the patterns of networking between African Studies and local mobilising organisations in Scandinavia and other European countries like the Netherlands. There, perhaps as they were less encumbered by a colonial past, the centre of political gravity in African and Development Studies, and perspectives within official aid bodies, they were for perhaps 20 years more towards the left than in the UK. There were activist ‘Africa Groups’, with a solidarity agenda, not geared only to liberation support and thus able to survive to the present, that were organisationally linked to the Africanist academia, and there were in turn both academic and popular publications. In UK there has never been any organised element in the African Studies network that has defined itself in formal terms as ‘radical’ or, as in the USA, ‘concerned’. Whatever the factors at work, it does seem to be the case that links between scholarly and activist work in UK, are now limited and confined mainly to initiatives by individuals.
Another tendency has also operated in UK and perhaps elsewhere to funnel the work of ROAPE and other radical scholarship into more of an academic rubric, as a result of what Gavin referred to in 2004 as the ‘current arrangements to enumerate the value of research’, which ‘create incentives to fit intellectual work to the dominant trends within “the discipline” … we are less able than before to define our own problems’. In one particular, the assessment of academics and their research puts a premium on the process of submission and acceptance, such that ROAPE's current remit characterises it as ‘a refereed journal committed to encouraging high quality research and fostering intellectual excellence’, embodied in editorial procedures that prioritise the interests of individual authors and methodological orthodoxy rather than readers' concerns or considerations of what matters. There is thus a contradictory tension between this aim and continued recognition in the remit to ‘inequality, exploitation and oppression’ and to ‘materialist interpretation’. This is in part a tension between being fair and professional toward writers and giving attention to the concerns of a certain readership. It is an aspect of defining ‘what is our role’.
Keeping in touch with African discourse
Those of us in the West who want to explore critically what we are or should be doing cannot do better than refer to how issues are seen within African discourses. Shortly before the Oxford conference, I had attended a ‘Fest’ that had these matters centre stage, and it might serve as an appropriate exemplar. It was the ‘Second Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival Week – 2010' in April 2010. The focus of that year's event was to seek a Tanzanian and pan-African answer to the global crisis of capitalism, and along the way it certainly raised basic issues about the prospects of radical scholarship and African Studies. In exploring the implications for Africa of the current crisis, it harked back to 40-year-old policy documents drafted by Julius Nyerere: The Arusha Declaration: a declaration outlining Tanzania's policy on socialism and self-reliance, reprinting that iconic statement for the first time for over 30 years, and Socialism and rural development. The possible contemporary relevance of these events was raised in ROAPE Issue 131. The broader attempts to engender discussion on radical analysis and on alternative futures reflected the aims involved in the initiative to set up in the hosting institution, the Mwalimu Nyerere Professorial Chair in Pan-African Studies in 2008:
to reinvigorate intellectual debates on the [Dar es Salaam] Campus and stimulate basic research on burning issues facing the country and the continent from a pan-African perspective.
The harking back to imperialism and the discussion of the era of the present Crunch – ‘what next after neo-liberalism?’, as the Festival blurb put it – were principally rooted in two lectures on ‘The long road to socialism’ by the grand old man of African radical scholarship, Samir Amin, prolific writer and founder of the UN Institute of Development Planning (IDEP) and then the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar. The first, ‘Crisis of capitalism and imperialism’, covered ground that was mostly familiar to those who had known his work. But in asking what was new about this latest major crisis, he suggested that the world was no longer characterised by an imperialism of the USA and its allies, occasioning an anti-imperialism of South vs North, but by a twenty-first century of US power alone, but one not able to govern – witness Iraq and Afghanistan – and with a ‘generalised oligopoly’ which occasioned more expansive arenas of struggle. The second lecture, ‘Exiting from capitalism in crisis: initiatives in the global South’, was more original and forward looking. After exploring positive dimensions of new Latin American regimes and movements, Amin considered the new Asian capitalism, its global significance and whether its evident impact on Africa was offering opportunities for ‘exiting’. (Although he considered controversially that what is seen in China and Vietnam is not capitalism because the land reforms which gave property to peasants, whether equally or less so, have not been reversed.) More generally in Asia he argued that a key distinction from Europe's path to capitalism could not be followed, as the option of dispossessing the peasantry and appropriating their land by exporting ex-peasants on a large scale was not an option. (These issues are also at the core of Meagher's contribution in this issue.) In Africa he pointed up the new processes of dispossession which were dramatically under way, although they certainly were going to be even less associated with industrialisation than in colonial days.
These latter themes were taken up by another Keynote, by the distinguished Indian scholar Utsa Patnaik, on ‘The agrarian question in the neo-liberal era: primitive accumulation and the peasantry following. Paralleling the colonial period's seizure of primary resources from third world countries, she sees a new phase of primitive accumulation of capital today with a thrust from advanced corporations to access tropical lands in the global South, through contract systems which formally subsume the peasantry under capitalism, or through outright land grabbing. The resulting attack on production, undermining food security and assets of petty producers, is generating bitter resistance. These trends certainly have their equivalents in present-day Africa, and were raised in these columns, notably in the new ‘agenda’ floated in ROAPE Issue 102 (2004), followed up by Issue 128 (2011) on Land: a new wave of accumulation by dispossession in Africa? In these circumstances Patnaik called for alternative strategies to generate livelihoods and genuine development for the majority, which must necessarily mean not the destruction but on the contrary, the preservation of labour-intensive petty production, hopefully leading to voluntary cooperation permitting economies of scale. This was a vision not unlike that of Nyerere in Socialism and rural development, even though the implementation of ujamaa villages took a quite different and non-voluntary form. These contemporary issues resonate with some of Gavin's work and concerns in this issue and elsewhere in the Review, and are core issues in any discussion of present realities and what kind of transformation is needed or possible.
The event was indeed a Festival. The heavyweight lectures, a panel reviewing the work of CODESRIA or a new volume on African liberation: Nyerere's legacy, a ‘palaver’ on the relevance of Socialism and rural development were interspersed with poems, with a Dar children's choir and one from the ex-slave port of Bagamoyo, and even a Festival signature tune, ‘Azimio’ (Declaration) performed by a Swahili rapper, Professor J. There was also a ‘salaam’ toward key institutions that were part of the pan-African radical network, especially CODESRIA, whose role was reprised, along with the publishing record of Pambazuka. This was a useful reminder that there has been an effective, if not always highly visible, pan-African network of radical scholarship for many years, and which is one potential focus for the badly needed intensification of work on alternatives to neoliberalism and imposed Western forms of partial democratisation. Gavin has offered the view (Williams 2004) that ‘left-wing critics of the international financial agencies tend to be bereft of alternatives to structural adjustment other than the statist policies’. Even if that generalised criticism was broadly true, it is encouraging that the question about alternatives to neoliberalism are being explicitly raised in discourse within Africa – and those of us on the outside are only beginning to engage with those networks.
Articles in this issue
A word about the several contributions in this issue that pay tribute to Gavin may be appropriate. The first engages with Gavin's own work on the wine industry in South Africa (Williams 2005 and subsequently). Like those pieces, Ewert (with whom Gavin has collaborated on land issues in South Africa) proceeds by analysing the redefinition of relations between the South African and worldwide wine industries, the resultant impact on production and accumulation within, and on labour relations. Since 1997 there has been a ‘triple transition’: an internationalisation toward more competitive involvement in export production; internal deregularisation of markets involving also withdrawal of subsidies and bureaucratic controls; in the context of a democratisation which extended rights over work practices, living conditions, residence to workers for the first time. The results include greater efficiency, quality of product and competitiveness of the industry as a whole, but these benefits have not been shared: some producers have gone out of production, some workers have received training and better rewards as employees rather than as ‘servants’ as the old paternal, ‘despotic’ relations with the patron have changed, but accompanied by ‘casualisation’ and ‘contractualisation’ of part of the labour force and (maybe) a loss of jobs in total. There has only been a slight degree of ‘redistribution’ of land in the wine industry via some farmworker equity schemes and buy-ins by black businessmen. This writer would ideally like to have seen an extension of the brief concluding discussion of how the national targets for 30% of white wine farms (recently reasserted with the ANC Centenary) might be reached; for instance, whether the survival of many of the marketing cooperatives involving middle-scale growers might offer prospects for more black growers. After all, high-quality wines are compatible with very small-scale producers in Burgundy, southern France and parts of Italy!
Another of the articles on South Africa continues the focus on post-apartheid changes in labour relations, but in Phakathi's case study those in the gold mining industry. He draws on Gavin's and others' historical work showing the past reliance on circulatory black migrant recruitment within and outside South Africa, single-men hostel accommodation, a racially stratified labour force and harsh work practices. He reminds us of what had been a crucial discourse that saw these very conditions as the very heart of an apartheid system and that made it functional to capitalism. He then draws on an argument of Gavin's that these particular labour relations had become unsustainable before the end of the twentieth century and that subsequent changes reflect this and the culmination of workers' resistance to these conditions, and have come about not merely because of the political and constitutional changes after 1994.
Pitcher's article then explores broader processes of change in the South African political economy as a whole in this period, documenting outcomes of one of the core dimensions associated with structural adjustment formulae – privatisation. But in post-apartheid South Africa such a transfer of ownership was more than the downsizing of the state in favour of allowing ‘free market’ forces to operate at the core with structural adjustment programmes (SAPs). It was a key element in pursuing Black Economic Empowerment, a central plank in post-apartheid policy. The subsidised sell-off of extensive state assets from 1996 did succeed in promoting the emergence of a significant class faction of black capitalists, and cementing the link between black capitalists and the state. But echoing Gavin's earlier work on SAPs generally in Africa, Pitcher's analysis brings out the contradictory impact of this transformation. She shows how by the new decade government felt it had to respond to demands for employment equity, to levels of overall unemployment, and to privileged procurement by black entrepreneurs with political muscle by halting further denationalisation of productive assets and by giving a parastatal sector a strategic role in development strategy.
Nwajiaku-Dahou's article takes us back to the other geographical focus of Gavin's work since the 1970s, Nigeria (see especially Williams 1976b and 1988 among many books and articles). Nwajiaku-Dahou builds on the work of Gavin as well as others on the key resource, oil, but she chooses her own focus on one of the most dramatic and disturbing issues of the last decades, the bitter struggles in the Niger Delta. She moves from the political economy of oil to its effect on the political history of the Ijaw people, thence to the political economy of conflict there, in the process making insightful comments and critiques of the massive literature on this latter subject generally in Africa.
In the final article Meagher uses a much broader brush to raise one of the most fundamental, comparative questions for Africa and the world. What explains the rapid and profound development achievements in East and South-East Asia, and the seeming inability of Africa so far to match such growth? And then the supplementary question of how China's equally rapid and challenging involvement in Africa in the last decade might change this story. Meagher admits she had an initial scepticism about the relevance of Weber to Africa when pushed into reading him, but now realises that he provides a perspective on how cultural factors can affect development, and grants that the Confucian ethic, a bureaucratic tradition and local social cohesion have contributed to China's development, and maybe also to the spirit of global capitalism as it is now evolving. However, she criticises the many ‘neo-Weberians’ who are explaining Asian experience in these cultural terms as throwing out the political economy baby with the bathwater. She feels that Africanist analysis should draw on those Asianist views that show the links between culture and political economy explanations, such as the state application of appropriate cultural forms, or seeing inherited social norms that relate to risk-sharing and mediating between redistribution and global imperatives to reproduce cheap labour.
By way of rounding off these personal and idiosyncratic reflections, and in the hope of stimulating some debate, I offer these exhortations.
For individuals, old and young, who earn their living in academia: consciously or not we are making choices about our work agenda and our approach. Let's seek to make it our choice, and not one forced upon us by institutional pressures and intellectual fashions. Let's examine our ‘vocation’ and be prepared to rebel. In making choices, such polarisations as serving science or policy, and becoming legislator or interpreter, should not be seen as exhausting the options. They are not necessarily either/ors. Some individuals may pursue both paths. Not all intellectuals earn their bread as academics, and not all academics deserve the title intellectuals. And for those that pursue one or other distinct role, networks for interchange, whether publications, electronic or face-to-face contact, need to be constructed, especially with African or other scholars/activists.
In making choices about responsibilities and roles, abstract philosophical or ideological positions that can provide definitive guidance for all times and places can only take us so far. Context is crucial: we are at a turning point of new and major crisis, although it is not yet a new revolutionary era. Africa's new position in a changing global division of labour, and its relations of production and reproduction and its politics are being reshaped. And networks of new discourse among Africans are emerging to which we need to attend.
And finally, Gavin, I hope you are seeing retirement as like a permanent sabbatical, a time for rounding off concerns and debates of a lifetime and for launching in new directions. We wait expectantly for more to come. Good luck!