[Debate] (Fwd) Remembering Dani Nabudere (Yash Tandon and David Simon)

[Patrick Bond]

    Nabudere: An uncompromising revolutionary


        Yash Tandon


        2012-07-12, Issue 593 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/593>


        http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/83570
        <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/83570>

A long-time comrade of revolutionary figure Dani Wadada Nabudere 
provides an in-depth view of the Ugandan leader's life and often 
uncelebrated achievements.

Of some people it is true to say that they are better known after they 
have left this world. What makes them relatively unknown in their life 
time is a mystery. Dani Wadada Nabudere was one of the most enigmatic 
revolutionary African figures of the 20th Century, a prophet of a man, a 
three-dimensional man. And yet he was not very well known outside the 
circle of people who crossed his path. The following are a couple of 
brief snippets of his life when it crossed mine.

1960S: MY FIRST ENCOUNTER AND MAKERERE

I met Dani first in London as students in 1961 when we were members of 
the Executive Committee of the United Kingdom Uganda Students 
Association -- UGASA -- together with the Ateker Ejalu, Chango Machyo 
and Edward Rugumayo, who were all later to play a significant role in 
the history of Uganda. We were then engaged in helping to raise the 
political consciousness of young Ugandans like ourselves studying or 
working in the UK and in Europe. One of our main activities was to lobby 
British parliamentarians for Uganda's independence.

Dani and I returned to Uganda in 1964. For the next six years, when I 
was at Makerere ("the Hill") and he was practicing law, our paths 
crossed intermittently mostly during debates on the Hill. Makerere was a 
stimulating, exciting, place in the 1960s. At the time, Rajat Neogy's 
literary journal called Transition (later found to have been funded by a 
CIA front) provided a trendy intellectual platform to contributors like 
Ali Mazrui, Paul Theroux and Wole Soyinka. Dani occasionally contributed 
to the discussions in the Transition. More than that, he was an active 
member of the youth wing of the Uganda People's Congress (UPC). He was 
later expelled from the Party.

In his Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy 
in Uganda (1997), Museveni explains why: "We had contacts with 
progressive politicians such as Dani Wadada Nabudere, Kintu-Musoke, 
Jaberi Bidandi-Ssali, Kirunda Kivejinja and Raiti Omongin. They were 
leftists who had been expelled from the UPC in 1964 for having belonged 
to the Kakonge wing of the party [1]. Some of us also belonged to the 
Uganda Vietnam Solidarity Committee, which Nabudere had formed as a 
support and to oppose the American war of aggression against the 
Vietnamese people". (p. 47). Museveni probably had no idea then (or 
maybe even now) that Nabudere and Omongin had just about that time 
formed the first Maoist Party in Uganda. During this period Nabudere had 
also played a critical role in the unification talks between Zanzibar 
and Tanganyika.

In September 1965, Nabudere was accused by a member of the Uganda 
Parliament of organising a "communist plot" to overthrow the government. 
In December 1969, following an attempt on Obote`s life at a UPC congress 
Nabudere (among others) was arrested and placed in detention under the 
Emergency Laws. He was released in late November 1970. When Idi Amin 
took over power in January 1971, a number of Ugandans on the left 
decided to work with the Amin government (Nabudere was appointed 
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the East African Railways), but 
they were soon disillusioned, and beginning with Rugumayo a number of 
them resigned from government in 1972. (For an account of this, see D. 
Wadada Nabudere, Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda, pp. 288-291).

This is Nabudere before I really got to know him intimately at the 
University of Dar es Salaam where he became a close friend and political 
mentor to many left activists from Africa. It was in Dar es Salaam that 
I, too, was inducted by Nabudere as a member of the Maoist Party of 
Uganda, some 10 years after it was formed.
1970S: NABUDERE AND THE DAR ES SALAAM DEBATE

There were at least three politically and pedagogically significant 
debates at the University of Dar es Salaam in the late 1960s and the 
decade of the 1970s. The first was about Tanzania, the direction it was 
going and how it might show the way for the rest of Africa towards the 
ultimate goal of socialism. It was mainly a debate among the Tanzanian 
radicals, sometimes joined in by others from outside Tanzania such as 
Walter Rodney and Nabudere. The second was a debate mainly among the 
African members of the teaching staff of the University, in particular 
in the Faculty of Social Sciences, on how the prevailing pedagogy of 
their disciplines might be challenged and changed to reflect the African 
context and conditions. This debate led to the formation of the African 
Association of Political Science (AAPS) in 1973, among whose early 
presidents' were Anthony Rweyemamu (the founder), Nathan Shamuyarira, 
and Nabudere. The AAPS was a Pan-African organisation, and admitted a 
variety of views from pan-African perspectives. It also tried to reach 
out to Africans in the Diaspora. Many of the leading members of the AAPS 
in the early years (1973-83) were scholars from other parts of Africa 
such as Shamuyarira and Ibbo Mandaza (from Zimbabwe); Okwudiba Nnoli, 
Claude Ake and Adele Jinadu (from Nigeria); Emmanuel Hansen (from 
Ghana); Mamdani and myself (from Uganda); Amedee Darga (from Mauritius); 
Moeletsi Mbeki (from South Africa) and Helmi Sharawi (from Egypt), among 
scores of others from other parts of Africa and the diasporas. Nabudere 
was one of the main articulators of the AAPS philosophy. He showed how 
the social sciences as ideological expressions of dominant classes faced 
a crisis of relevance in Africa, and how these needed to be challenged. 
These ideas were later to appear in his "African Social Scientists 
Reflections, Part 2: Law, Social Sciences and Crisis of Relevance" (2001).

The third was a debate among primarily the Ugandans on "the Hill" and 
those living in exile in East Africa, occasionally joined by others even 
outside East Africa. It was partly inspired by Nabudere's book 
Imperialism and Revolution in Uganda (1980) and its critique by Mamdani, 
Bhagat and Hirji. Later these discussions were reproduced as a book 
called The Dar es Salaam Debate on Class, State and Imperialism (1982), 
which I edited, with a foreword by Mohammad Babu, the well-known Marxist 
revolutionary from Zanzibar. The 'Debate' had intellectual, pedagogical 
and also political and strategic value for Uganda but also Africa and 
the third world. The key analyses and messages argued by Nabudere in the 
'Debate' remain valid to this day. The significance of this debate, 
latent when it was taking place, became clear in the early months of 
1979, as those same very issues took on a practical political salience 
after Amin's invasion of Tanzania in December 1978. Tanzania repulsed 
the invasion but then Nyerere faced a dilemma. Should he proceed to 
Kampala, with his army thus effectively becoming an "occupation force", 
or should he try to forge a united Ugandan political front to take over 
the reins of government? He opted for the latter. But to forge unity of 
contending forces from Uganda proved a nightmare.

Immediately following Amin's invasion, the left nationalists in 
Tanzania, under Nabudere's leadership, formed an Ad Hoc Committee for 
the Promotion of Unity Amongst Ugandans to try and unite with all forces 
opposed to the Amin regime. In its early days, Nyerere was skeptical of 
the "left", and had Nabudere's and my houses on "the Hill" under 
surveillance. But when Nyerere failed to break the deadlock between 
Obote and Museveni, he turned to the Ad Hoc committee to organise a 
conference of all democratic forces to form a government of national 
unity. The Moshi Conference - at which Nabudere, Edward Rugumayo and 
Omwony Ojwok played the key role of uniting all Ugandan forces -- laid 
the basis for the founding of the Uganda National Liberation Front 
(UNLF), under the chairmanship of Y.K. Lule. Rugumayo was elected as the 
Chairman of the transitional parliament called the National Consultative 
Council (of which I too was elected a member); Omwony Ojwok as the NCC's 
Secretary; Nabudere as the Chairman of its Political and Diplomatic 
Commission; and Paulo Muwanga (of the Uganda People's Congress) as the 
Chairman of the Military Commission. After the formation of the UNLF, 
the Tanzanian forces entered Kampala and the UNLF assumed power in 
Uganda in April 1979.

Looking back at that period (1979-1980), I am profoundly struck that 
thirty years ago we faced the same problems as the Arab revolutionaries 
are facing today (2011-2012) as they grapple with the problems of 
creating democratic structures after the fall of dictators, whilst 
trying to forge national unity and keeping out intrusive external 
intervention.

1980S: THE PERIOD OF THE UNLF AND THE DANISH VOLK HIGH SCHOOL

Assuming power is one thing; running a country politically and 
administratively is another. From May 1979 to May 1980, Uganda went 
through paroxysms of fear, hope, disappointments, ecstasy, adventure, 
chaos, bombing raids, murders and general mayhem. What prevented it from 
descending into total anarchy was the presence of Tanzanian troops. What 
kept political peace, fragile as it was at the best of times, was the 
political skill and outstanding clarity of strategic thinking of 
Nabudere. At the Moshi conference, he was the principal author and 
architect (along with Omwony Ojwok and Rugumayo) of the constitution of 
the UNLF, which is a document still worth studying even today for its 
political perspicacity. Nabudere was a conciliator between various 
factions and tendencies -- from the monarchists to the militarists -- of 
the UNLF. Let me give one instance of Nabudere's political dexterity. At 
the end of the Moshi Conference, when Museveni complained to Nyerere 
that his absence from it had marginalised him, it was Nabudere (along 
with Rugumayo) who persuaded Lule and Muwanga to bring him into the UNLF 
as Deputy Chairman of its Military Commission. Indeed, throughout that 
nervously tumultuous one year, it was Nabudere who provided the focal 
point for unity and vision as the chairman of UNLF's Political and 
Diplomatic Commission. It is during this period of Uganda's recent 
history that Nabudere came to be known as the leader of the "Gang of 
Four" (along with his three close comrades -- Rugumayo, Omwony and me).

What broke down this fragile ambience between the security and the 
political was the pressure felt by Nyerere to bring Obote (at the time 
still in Dar es Salaam) back to Uganda, and the machinations of the 
Ugandan domestic political and military forces. On 1 May 1980, the UNLF 
was overthrown in a military coup [2], and Nabudere, then in Yugoslavia 
attending the funeral of Marshall Tito, found himself together with 
other compatriots in second exile, this time in Nairobi. The UNLF was 
renamed as UNLF (Anti-dictatorship), and the struggle for the democratic 
dispensation continued. The UNLF (AD) went into a period of armed 
struggle around Mount Elgon but this was short lived.

An account of this period, and the debates on strategy and tactics of 
liberation struggle that the (Maoist) Party and its democratic wing -- 
the UNLF (AD) - was engaged in, would make interesting and highly 
educative reading for those involved in day-to-day struggle against the 
continued domination and interference by imperialism and its internal 
agents in Africa. The "Gang of Four" were only the few public faces of 
this movement, but hundreds of comrades and their families made huge 
sacrifices for the struggle during these very difficult months and 
years. A proper account of this period will one day no doubt celebrate 
and pay homage to the work and sacrifices of these comrades. It is a 
pity that Nabudere and Omwony Ojwok should have died before writing an 
account of this period. Rugumayo's forthcoming autobiography will no 
doubt deal with some of these matters. All I can say at this point is 
that the armed struggle in Mount Elgon lasted for only a short period, 
and for various strategic and tactical reasons it was decided to abandon 
it and concentrate on political work - what was later called the 
"grass-rooting" strategy. The UNLF (AD)'s Maoist wing was thus probably 
one of the few revolutionary organisations that deliberately ended its 
armed struggle and decided that a thorough-going cultural revolution 
should precede armed struggle (not follow as in the case of China).

This was also the period when Nabudere and the Party made far reaching 
contacts with several other revolutionary movements in Africa (such as, 
among others, those in Senegal, the Cameroons, Burkina Faso, the Congo 
and South Africa); as well as in the Middle East (Egypt, Palestine, 
Iraq); Asia (India, China, Japan, the Philippines); Europe (Germany, 
Norway, Belgium, Denmark); and the USA.

In 1982 Nabudere moved to Helsingør in Denmark, teaching at a Volk High 
School. This was one of his most productive years as a scholar. He wrote 
the over 300-page manuscript called The Rise and Fall of Money Capital, 
which I published in 1990 under an organisation called Africa in 
Transition, an organization I had founded with my brother Vikash. It is 
probably the most comprehensive analysis of money since the early 
writings, among others, of Marx, Engels, Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, and 
Keynes, all of whom came under Nabudere's cutting edge analysis. 
Nabudere carried out a meticulous historical analysis of the rise of 
money as money (as distinct from its evolution as capital), and made the 
prediction that money will eventually overcome capital and then meet its 
own demise as an instrument of credit. This is what in fact happened in 
the first decade of the 21st century, what came to be known in our own 
times as "financialisation of capital". Nabudere had already anticipated 
this during his period of research and writing in Helsingør. This book 
is one of the most outstanding, and relatively unknown, original 
contributions of Nabudere to Marxist economics. Later, a summary of the 
book was published by Fahamu, titled, The Crash of International 
Finance-Capital and Its Implications for the Third World (2009), to 
which I wrote a foreword.

I spent a week with him in Helsingør, taking part as lecturer to his 
class and also absorbing the very energetic and communitarian ethos of 
the school. Nabudere took in just as much as he gave. From Helsingør he 
learnt the volk school philosophy of adult education, which he was later 
to apply when he founded the Afrika Study Centre Trust, and the Marcus 
Garvey Pan-African University in Mbale, Uganda.

1990S: ZIMBABWE

In early 1990s Nabudere left Helsingør and came to Zimbabwe to join his 
family. His wife, Ida, and three of their younger children were already 
in Harare. Ida was then teaching in a secondary school. I too was 
already in Zimbabwe engaged in grassroots activities among largely trade 
union organisations and peasant communities in Zimbabwe and the region. 
Nabudere accompanied me to several of the rural projects in which I was 
engaged. He was particularly struck by the fact that given the right 
environment and encouragement, people at the grassroots level are best 
placed to take "development" in their hands. Development is too serious 
a matter to leave in the hands of the politicians and international 
"donors". This experience in Zimbabwe was the basis for further 
elaboration of the "rooting strategy" to which I have alluded earlier. 
For a deeper understanding of his thoughts in this period, see the book 
of essays he edited for the AAPS called Globalization and the 
Post-Colonial African State (2000). In his own essay he argued that 
African states "were being adjusted' out of existence as nation-states, 
and needed to build on the spirit of their people to fight against the 
negative impact of globalization.

2000S: UGANDA AND THE MARCUS GARVEY PAN-AFRICAN UNIVERSITY

In the mid-1990s Dani returned to Uganda with his family. Very soon he 
was involved in the politics of constitutional change under the regime 
of Yoweri Museveni. As a member of the Constituent Assembly, he actively 
participated in the making of a "new" Constitution of Uganda under the 
NRM government. But the effort to refashion the politics of Uganda 
towards a more democratic dispensation was largely frustrated by the 
complex politics of the country, and the machinations of external 
forces, especially of the IMF and the donor community.
Towards the turn of the century, therefore, he began to devote his 
energies to the broader agenda of encouraging a pan-African 
consciousness among the younger generation of Ugandans and Africans, and 
a "new universal order based on basic pluralist-humanist principles", in 
which Africa would play a distinct role. This was in contrast to some 
Western writers like Samuel Huntington who had predicted a "clash of 
civilizations". (See his The Crisis of Modernity and the Rise of 
Post-Traditionalism in Africa (1998); Afrikology, Philosophy and 
Wholeness (2011) and Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity: A Restorative 
Epistemology (2012)). He founded the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute 
in Mbale, Uganda, later to evolve as a university, of which he was the 
first Chancellor-Designate. In this capacity, he wrote: "...the model 
that I am advancing here is a direct reflection of our general 
experience under the global capitalist system and a reasoned response to 
its impact, which we can refer to as a 'post-capitalist synthesis.'" He 
advocated "the restorative governance and justice" aimed at restoring 
social relations in society and establishing "new balances that can 
enable people in the communities to regain control over their lives." 
Democracy in this sense involves "listening to voices of everyone who 
have normally been excluded from decision-making". He was particularly 
emphatic on the restoration of African languages in popular discourse, 
because the unfamiliarity with colonial languages denied the African 
people a meaningful inclusion in the democratic processes. Afrikology, 
he argued, requires scholars, students and practitioners "to liaise with 
the language communities in understanding what they know and mean". 
Going beyond Africa he proposed "The horizontal restorative 
epistemology" -- worldviews (cosmologies) that are responsive to nature 
and that take into account "our cosmic relations with nature".

Dani was in regular communication with me on these matters, but in some 
ways the person with whom he had even closer relations during this 
period was my brother, Vikash, with whom he would occasionally stay when 
he was in London. My last theoretical exchange with Nabudere was in 
March 2010 when he made significant improvements on an essay I had 
written on the "Dar es Salaam Debate" (forthcoming some time in the 
future). He also wrote to me about his engagement with the University of 
South Africa in joint research projects under the umbrella theme of 
"Reclaiming the Future", and invited me to join his efforts.

NABUDERE THE MAN

Before I close this very short narrative of this great son of Africa, a 
brief reflection on what kind of person Dani was might be in order from 
someone who was a close associate of his for half a century.

Nabudere was a world-class African revolutionary, a Ugandan patriot, a 
scholarly and erudite academic, and a shrewd politician. All these 
blended in him holistically making him a towering, formidable, figure in 
any gathering of intellectuals or politicians -- local or global. He was 
an extraordinary man, a visionary; in many ways even a prophet, with a 
three-dimensional view of the world, which few mortals possess. Most of 
us are two-dimensional with at the most short term and medium term 
perspectives. Few have the capacity to look beyond the present. He had a 
very long foresight, and many of his predictions, one for example, the 
collapse of the Soviet Union (made well before the fall of the Berlin 
Wall), and the collapse of the capitalist-financial system (made in a 
book published in 1980) came true when most of us could not even see the 
making of crises in these two global systems of the twentieth century.

Dan suffered fools badly. He was unforgiving to those who were, in his 
eyes, second rate academics, intellectuals or politicians. In his long 
vocation as a revolutionary from the age of 18 to the time he died at 
the age of 79, he set for himself unrelentingly high standards -- in 
political work and scholarly writings -- which his students, colleagues 
and compatriots had a hard time to emulate. He loved his family -- wife, 
children and grandchildren. For these too he set very high standards. 
His wife, Ida -- a wonderful, dignified person of South African origin 
with a determined face and soothing smile -- and seven children and 
eight grandchildren knew of Dani's total commitment to Uganda and to 
African revolution, and they made enormous sacrifices to enable their 
husband-father-grandfather to focus on his chosen destiny. Dan was a 
Marxist scholar and practitioner to his bones, which made some of his 
writings difficult to understand for those uninitiated in the Marxist 
dialectics. But he was not dogmatic in political tactics. He could work 
with monarchists as well as republicans; nationalists as well as 
internationalists. What he despised most were militarists and dictators. 
President Obote put him in jail for his revolutionary activities in the 
1960s and yet when the time came to work with Obote in 1979, he was 
quick to forgive him. President Museveni, with whom he had many 
differences, came to Dani's burial and praised him for being a "comrade" 
and a "Pan-African revolutionary".

Those who knew Dani intimately -- his family, friends and comrades -- 
knew that his hard and unremitting external demeanor hid a soft, very 
human, side. The mischievous twinkle in his eyes and his sharp, often 
acerbic jokes -- even as he challenged his worst adversary -- and his 
warmth and loyalty to friends and comrades betrayed his soft inside. He 
was above all a dreamer well beyond his time.

SELECTED WRITINGS OF NABUDERE

Nabudere wrote more than 15 books and over 200 papers and lectures 
(published and unpublished), among which the best known are as follows:
1977. Imperialism and the National Question. Tanzania Publishing House
1977. The Political Economy of Imperialism, London: Zed Press
1979. Essays on the Theory and Practice of Imperialism. London: Onyx Press
1980. Imperialism and revolution in Uganda, Onyx Press.
1982. Several essays in Tandon, Yash, The Dar es Salaam Debate on Class, 
State and Imperialism. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House.
1989. The Crash of International Finance Capital and its implications 
for the Third World. Harare, SAPES.
1990. Rise and fall of Money Capital. Africa in Transition
1998. The Crisis of Modernity and the Rise of Post-Traditionalism in 
Africa (unpublished)
2000. ed. Globalization & the Post-Colonial African State, Harare: AAPS 
Books
2001. "African Social Scientists Reflections, Part 2: Law, Social 
Sciences and Crisis of Relevance", Bonn: Heinrich Boll Foundation.
2002. "NEPAD: historical background and its prospects", in Anyang' 
Nyong'o, et.al. eds. NEPAD: A New Path? Bonn: Heinrich Böll Foundation.
2003. "Towards the Establishment of a Pan-African University: A 
Strategic Concept Paper" African Journal of Political Science. (2003), 
Volume 8 No. 1
2009. The Crash of International Finance-Capital and Its Implications 
for the Third World. Fahamu/Pambazuka
2010. The Global Capitalist Crisis and the Way Forward for Africa 
(unpublished)
2011. Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness: An Epistemology, Africa 
Institute of South Africa, Pretoria.
2011. Archie Mafeje: Scholar, Activist and Thinker, Africa Institute of 
South Africa.
2012. Afrikology and Transdisciplinarity: A Restorative Epistemology, 
ISA, Pretoria.
2012. Towards A Restorative Horizontal Economic, Political, and 
Environmental Transformation. (unpublished)

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* Yash Tandon is a writer on development theory and practice, and senior 
adviser to the South Centre. This article was first published in the 
Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 39 No. 132.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online 
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END NOTES

[1] The Uganda People's Congress (UPC) was a radical nationalist party. 
Its then Secretary General, John Kakonge, had broad communist leanings, 
and had a strong following among the youth wing of the party, among 
them, Nabudere. At the Gulu Conference of the party in 1964 the left 
wing was outmanoeuvred by Obote and the party mainstream 
leadership.<http://www.flysaa.com/cms/ZA/specials/frankfurt60years.html?utm_source=ZA_Homepage&utm_medium=adspacebanner&utm_campaign=adspaceimageza_60yearstofrankfurt>

[2] The first administration of the UNLF government under President Lule 
lasted only six months. In September 1979 he was ousted from power by a 
vote no confidence moved in the transitional parliament, the NCC. He 
was, in other words, democratically removed, and replaced by President 
Binaisa. It was the Binaisa administration that was then removed from 
power by the military led by the forces of Obote and Museveni, backed by 
Tanzania.

***


    Remembering Dani Wadada Nabudere


        David Simon


        2012-07-12, Issue 593 <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/593>


        http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/83572
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A tribute to the pan-Africanist Ugandan leader and towering 
intellectual, one of the last of the liberation struggle luminaries.

I got to know Dani only fairly late in his life. We first met as fellow 
trainers of civil society and postgraduate students in Sweden in January 
1996 at a workshop organised by the late Anders Närman, Sweden's truly 
radical development geographer, who had a long history of engagement in 
and with east and southern Africa, during which he had befriended many 
liberation strugglers and senior government members of relatively newly 
independent states. Indeed, it is a measure of his standing that both 
Dani and the late Omwony Ojwok (the latter representing the Ugandan 
government), both members of the famous Ugandan "Gang of Four" of 
1979-1980 attended Anders' funeral in Gothenburg in November 2004.

Both of us had recently embarked on critical "re-thinkings" of 
prevailing development theories, conventional and "radical", in the 
light of development failures and distortions, the post-structural 
challenge and the end of the Cold War. At that and several subsequent 
workshops and conferences, we engaged actively and productively, with a 
high level of agreement and occasional animated disagreement. I found 
his critique of post-colonialism for being too Eurocentric persuasive, 
despite the paradoxical nature of that charge, and was able to 
incorporate his resultant formulation of post-traditionalism into the 
analyses I was developing. He, in turn, enjoyed my perspective on 
postmodernism and its relationships with post-colonialism (1). Late 
night discussions were invariably facilitated by good beer and akvavit, 
or in his case, generally whisky. One conference in Copenhagen was 
particularly revealing in terms of the respect and affection with which 
those who remembered him from his period of exile in Denmark and work in 
Folk High Schools in the 1980s held him. He was quite touched.

We developed something of a double act in the training sessions. 
Initially the students were slightly nonplussed but once they "got" 
Dani's wicked sense of humour and playfully provocative style of 
teaching, often playing off me or vice versa, they loved it even if they 
didn't always understand the life experiences underlying his positions. 
The final time we worked together in this way was as part of a team 
convened again by Anders to provide continuing professional development 
(CPD) for social scientists (attracting both senior and junior staff as 
well as some postgraduates) at Makerere University in August 2002, 
updating and debating development theory, policy and praxis, informed by 
the Ugandan and East African contexts. Again, the wide respect for Dani, 
even from those who disagreed with him politically or young staff 
encountering him for the first time, was evident, and he soon disarmed 
the few who sought to cross swords.

In 1998 he produced a book manuscript that developed his ideas on 
African crises and post-traditionalism entitled "The crisis of modernity 
and the rise of post-traditionalism in Africa". We discussed the 
manuscript at length and he revised the text in 1999. However, it proved 
surprisingly difficult to find a publisher and then a commitment to 
publish by one was broken. He grew frustrated and abandoned the search 
for an outlet. I greatly regret that it never reached the public as it 
would have been a signal African contribution to these debates, and in a 
markedly different register from his earlier books.

I commissioned Dani to write the biographical essay on Nyerere for my 
edited volume, Fifty Key Thinkers on Development (Routledge, 2006). This 
he took on enthusiastically, quite delighted that I wanted to include 
Nyerere in this context. He wrote well, delivered on schedule but at 
nearly twice the firm word limit, and was then somewhat taken aback that 
I insisted that he cut it. However, we got there and many people comment 
on what a fine essay it is.

Another particular regret is that I never made it to his Marcus Garvey 
Pan-Afrikan Institute/University in Mbale, despite regular exhortations. 
I had set up an undergraduate field course for our Royal Holloway 
undergraduate students in rural West Pokot (now Pokot Central) on the 
Kenyan side of Mt Elgon around the same time and sunk costs plus cheaper 
air fares made it difficult to relocate. Once when I could have visited, 
he was in South Africa, a country where he spent considerable time after 
the end of apartheid, frequently based at UNISA in Pretoria, writing and 
conducting joint research.

Dani was a true polymath: an accomplished academic, lawyer, politician 
and government minister -- not only a towering figure in Uganda but 
widely in East and southern Africa and Europe. He was one of the last of 
the liberation struggle leaders, an enthusiastic teacher, a complex 
character, a great raconteur and a good friend. His departure from the 
stage of life will be keenly felt.


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* This article was first published in the Review of African Political 
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at Pambazuka News.

END NOTES

1. Our respective conference contributions were published along with 
others in a special issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human 
Geography 79B(4), 1997. Dani's paper is entitled "Beyond modernization 
and development, or why the poor reject development", pp.203-215, and is 
almost certainly his only publication in a Geography journal.


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