Lionel and authors present President Nyerere with a copy of their 1967 book on the Tanzanian General Elections of 1965.
As Issa Shivji noted in his obituary, Lionel was back in Tanzania in April 2012 together with a small group who had made each other's acquaintance at the University of Dar es Salaam in the 1960s. Prior to attending the Nyerere Intellectual Festival to which Issa refers, two of us had met up with Lionel, who had arrived a couple of days before after participating in a conference on South African land issues in Cape Town. Now we found him still concerned with land. There he was at a table of his hotel dining room with local researchers and activists involved in land struggles in the Arusha region and with a British Africanist historian whom Lionel wanted to get involved in researching the land struggles and their history in the area. Lionel himself had researched such struggles in the region some 50 years or so earlier. Typically of Lionel, he was making the necessary historical and personal connections at that lunch table for further work to be done and inspiring a young researcher to do it. A day or so later, in Moshi, we bumped into someone now in his sixties, who immediately recognised Lionel as his teacher at Dar es Salaam over 40 years earlier. There are many such people across the African continent, including two current presidents and many more senior politicians, policy makers and activists, who owe a significant part of their education to Lionel in the various institutions in Africa and the UK where he taught.
Born and brought up in Sheffield, UK, Lionel was educated at King Edward VII School and then took a degree in Economics at the University of Nottingham. Objecting to doing military service, he was given the alternative of working for a charity and chose to join Oxfam in their Oxford office. He was later elected as a Labour councillor for the city. Lionel then began his long association with Africa, going to newly independent Tanganyika to join Kivukoni College in Dar es Salaam, set up to enhance the education and training of party cadres. He then joined the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda from where he undertook a major study of the 1965 Tanzanian general election, which, uniquely for one-party states, involved contested elections between two candidates from the same party in each constituency. At the Institute of Development Studies of the then University College, later, of Nairobi, he completed the editing of this study and then took up an appointment as a Lecturer in Politics at the University College, later University, of Dar es Salaam. In 1970, he was appointed Director of the interdisciplinary Development Studies programme which all students in the University had to follow, and on which many lecturers in the University sympathetic to such a programme were happy to teach. As a socialist he wanted to make his contribution to the development of Julius Nyerere's ujamaa transformation of Tanzania and conducted a prolific amount of rural research in collaboration with like-minded academics into the nature of Tanzanian rural economy and society and the existing patterns of collective activity that could be built on in order to effect transformation and development. His two-volume edited collection with John Saul, Socialism in Tanzania, published in 1972, is still regarded as an excellent reference source on this period.
Lionel left Tanzania at the end of 1971 for short periods at the University of Wisconsin's Land Tenure Centre and later in 1972 at the Nordic Africa Institute at Uppsala. In 1972, he convinced a small group of radical Marxist Africanists to start this journal. We debated a name endlessly until we settled on its title which gave RAPE as its acronym. ‘It's a model (of imperialism and Africa)’, Lionel exclaimed with a characteristic mixture of seriousness and slightly mischievous humour. Lionel had advocated a journal that would be different from the established Africa journals, avowedly pro-socialist and Marxist in approach, but also not academic in style. So we had a working group to edit the journal, and for every issue we pasted up the typeset copy before it went to the printers. Stuffing envelopes with issues of the journal, stamping and posting them to subscribers, and taking block orders to bookshops was part of the editors' work. For Lionel, this was an example of the need for intellectuals to get their hands dirty in the process of production and to do this co-operatively, in this case with plenty of glue, sharp knives and elbow grease. Editorial meetings comprised long discussions about submitted manuscripts, with some heated political arguments around such issues as Cuban and Soviet support for the MPLA, and the role of the African National Congress in internal struggles in South Africa, such as the Soweto Uprising of 1976. Lionel took an active, if not leading, role in these discussions, always arguing for open debate through the publication of different perspectives. When the pressure emerged to change the journal's acronym because of its perceived offensiveness, it was typical of Lionel's pragmatism that he was the one who proposed inserting and capitalising the ‘o’ of ‘of’ to produce ROAPE.
In 1975, Lionel moved to the University of Zambia. This was after independence had been won in the Portuguese colonies, but when forces in favour of détente with South Africa were gaining strength in the so-called front line states. Many University students in Lusaka were militantly supporting the Soviet- and Cuban-backed MPLA, while Zambia was suspected of supporting the Western-backed UNITA in what had become a bloody civil war. Four foreign lecturers, including Lionel, were conveniently accused of fomenting student revolt, and were detained in a Lusaka jail for varying periods – Lionel for the longest spell of two months. He was released and deported and, following two short-term appointments at Sheffield and Durham Universities, was offered a lectureship in the University of Leeds Politics Department in 1978. He became Professor of Politics in 1990, retiring in 2001. During his time at Leeds, Lionel was the first Director of the University's Centre for Development Studies (LUCAS), spent a year at the University of Manchester as a Hallsworth Fellow, and spent time at the Agrarian Reform and Land Settlement Service of the FAO in Rome. As Emeritus Professor, he continued to pursue his research interests and was active at Leeds and especially also with the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of Western Cape in South Africa until his death.
Over five decades, Lionel achieved international stature for his large body of published research on African political economy and politics, for the quality and force of his critical work and for his deep commitment to the independence and development of the continent. Some three years before the world was forced to wrestle with the Ethiopian famine, he edited a special issue of ROAPE laying out the causes of the impending crisis. His work throughout his life centred on issues of rural development, especially of land tenure and land reform, and rural development policies and institutions. This inevitably led to his exploration of the wider questions of African politics and political economy to which land issues gave rise, especially the politics of African development. His output included important studies of good governance, the effectiveness of different institutions for development, state capacity and bureaucratic efficiency, the way in which the political process allocated resources and values and the nature of democratic politics and social movements in Africa. With others, he led and contributed pioneering and watershed studies: the early ones on Tanzania, agrarian policy options in Zimbabwe, land tenure and agrarian systems in Africa, food and agricultural production in Eritrea, and land resettlement policy issues in South Africa and Swaziland. Following on his pioneering study of the Tanzanian elections, he produced studies of elections and democratisation in countries as diverse as Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Eritrea and Namibia. Concern with land issues led him to explore political conflict and relief and recovery, starting with Zimbabwe and Namibia and then moving to the Horn, where he continued pathbreaking work on Eritrea's war of liberation and reconstruction. His work attracted substantial funding, including a major award from the UK Department for International Development to a consortium he set up for a research programme on complex political emergencies. He continued to participate in the work of ROAPE, helping to point to the issues which he thought the journal should be addressing. His range of interests was not confined to Africa. With colleagues at Leeds, he undertook pioneering work on the ‘politics of lying’, in the USA and UK and well ahead of the more recent exposures of the secrecy and deception prevalent among those in power in those countries.
There are many people teaching and researching around the world today who were inspired by Lionel's enthusiasm for getting to the roots of development problems and finding appropriate policies to deal with them. In 2002, in recognition of his lifetime contribution to African Studies, he received the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association of the UK. This award and the tributes that poured in from around the world on news of his death are testimony to the high regard in which he was held, none more so than by those that did not always agree with him. There are many who will remember equally Lionel's gift for friendship and loyalty, his hospitality, and his love of Yorkshire cricket. Recently he had linked his attachment to cricket with his capacity for research, analysing the ethnic politics of Yorkshire cricket. It was typical of Lionel that he should make connections between his academic work and practical life.
When in August this year Lionel was diagnosed with myeloma, typically, he told his friends that ‘having a ball and enjoying company has suddenly become a much greater priority. But the “face” I want to see must be unfailingly happy – and serious about the world, not me.’ He is sorely missed by his family, friends, former colleagues and students.