I met Ken in the academic year 1965/6 when I was a Master's student at the London School of Economics. With a dozen others I was registered for a degree in African Government and Politics, the only problem being that the assigned lecturer had upped and gone off to Kano. Ken came to the rescue, seconded from Birmingham as a supplementary lecturer. He cut an impressive figure. Seriously overweight, he barrelled along the corridors of the Houghton Street building chuckling and loudly guffawing. In seminars, he combined the minutest knowledge of Nigerian politics with a dazzling display of Marx's classics – from Das Kapital to the Grundrisse and back again.
When he offered me the opportunity to do a PhD under his direction at Birmingham I jumped at the chance. Following the recommendation of the Hayter report (Hayter 1961) assigning Area Studies support to different universities, Birmingham was encouraged to develop West African Studies. Its director, John Fage (the leading historian of West Africa), appointed the brightest emerging scholars in the key disciplines, including Ken in West African politics. With Roy May, Paul Kennedy and Mike Hartley-Brewer, we formed a tightly knit quintet, heavily engaged in discussing decolonisation and Africa. Ken's New states of West Africa (Post 1964a) was widely read, while his study of the Nigerian Federal Election of 1959 (Post 1964b) was the epitome of scholarly detail and judicious argument. Ken completely penetrated the personalities and foibles of Nigerian politicians and electors, apparently without any racial or colonial membrane separating him from the people about whom he was writing.
I assume that Ken's capacity to cross national, class and racial barriers effortlessly was derived from his own modest background. Born in Chatham, Kent (no metropolis), he propelled himself into Cambridge (where he was President of the Union) through sheer ability. He allied himself – without apparent reason other than never-ending curiosity – to the anti-colonial struggles then raging in Africa and Asia (we are talking of the 1950s). He had no airs – and when I say that, I mean that he did not particularly notice whether he was wiping the beer off his capacious beard in a senior common room, a posh hotel or a roadside stall in Ibadan or Lagos. With his twinkling eyes peering through pebble spectacles adding to his informal and somewhat comic appearance, many Nigerians of all walks of life appeared to enjoy his company.
Academically, he was restless and never satisfied. Books were written, published and discarded as he moved on to the next project. Not that these were fleeting enthusiasms. Ken undertook each new self-appointed task with a determination that was astonishing. Having decided that the crucible event in Jamaican social history was the labour rebellion of 1938, he found his way to the University of the West Indies (via a linked arrangement with the Manchester politics department) and wrote three stunning books, Arise Ye Starvelings (Post 1978) and the 2-volume Strike the Iron (Post 1981) covering the prelude and aftermath to the 1938 event. The titles were derived from the Communist song, the Internationale. Using his trademark combination of bottom-up description and an intense interrogation of Marxist theory, this time strongly interlaced with Althusserian argument, Ken produced a 1069-page magnum opus (reviewed in my article, Cohen 1982).
While in Jamaica Ken joined a march in support of Walter Rodney (the historian and political activist later assassinated in Guyana), but this relatively innocuous act was taken badly by the university authorities in the West Indies and Manchester, who ordered him home. Foreign academics supported by a UK government-sponsored link were not meant to interfere in local politics. Because they had been complicit in this decision, Ken was not comfortable with a number of his Manchester colleagues. He was eminently ‘chair-worthy’, as the expression of the time went but, according to his own account, was dogged at every turn by a senior reactionary political scientist who served as external assessor on every one of the limited number of professorships that were available in the 1970s. Again, Ken averred, the senior figures in the Political Studies Association had determined that there would only be one ‘commie professor’ in the UK, in Leeds; they would block all other positions if a leftie applied. I must admit I was a bit sceptical of his account and wondered whether Ken had simply been too combative at interviews. But some force was given to his version of events by the experiences of Ralph Miliband, who was denied a chair or personal professorship at the LSE several times over and finally accepted the chair in politics at Leeds in 1972.
Ken meanwhile had said goodbye to the UK, pretty much for good, in favour of a position at the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague. The ISS paralleled the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex in that it was sponsored by the Dutch foreign ministry and had an arm's-length distance from any academic institution. As in IDS, this was later to change. Ken dug in for the long term, as professor and emeritus. In truth, he was unsentimental about places and, other than his continuing love for his mother, had few emotional ties with the country of his birth. Place was about libraries, an office in which to work and a zone for walking around the block – less for pleasure than for ensuring that he was fit enough for his keyboard. He had been firmly warned about his weight by a forthright doctor who told him that he would die unless he slimmed down. Seemingly for the first time in his life, he listened to good advice and shed several stone. Sleeping accommodation was always minimal. This monastic life produced a stream, perhaps better a torrent, of books, chapters and articles emanating from The Hague.
He wrote a five-volume study on Vietnam (Post 1994), a book on European history (Post 1999), another (with George Jenkins) on a Nigerian populist politician (Post and Jenkins 2008), another on ‘Regaining Marxism’ (when that seemed a hopeless quest – Post 1996). His late colleague in The Hague, Peter Waterman, counted 17 books in the Library of Congress catalogue. Ken never bothered with a curriculum vitae, so there is no authoritative list of his writings. It has to be said that Ken got a little wilder in his choice of subject-matter. He wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist, and sent me a manuscript of a Marxist history of Satan. He clearly wanted a sympathetic reader, but I was not up to the job and sent back a bland comment. It is an abiding regret that I did not carefully preserve this manuscript – it has gone astray. Ken was remarkably indifferent to how his work was received. He did not know or care about ‘impact’, simply casting his bread upon the water and leaving it to his publishers, students or colleagues to diffuse. Given the quality of his work, he was very unlucky in not being discovered as one of the major political thinkers of his day.
Finally, I want to add something about his personal qualities. Ken was always open to a pitch for a good cause. He donated to the early ‘whip-rounds’ when the Review of African Political Economy was founded. My wife Selina, who worked for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London in the 1960s, remembers tapping him for the cost of an ‘addressograph’, which worked with the Roneo stencil duplicating machine and printed addresses for Anti-Apartheid News. He was also generous with students ‘who were trying’, though not keen on the slackers. Sadly, I was only occasionally in touch with Ken during his long years in The Hague – a phone call, comradely New Year greetings (never Xmas!) and then a few emails. I hope this tribute is a small way of saying ‘thank you’ to Ken and allowing others to appreciate his dedication and contributions to radical thinking.