Introduction: Festschrift for Bill Freund

The originating idea for this festschrift was Lance Van Sittert's. In the year or so before Bill Freund's sixtieth birthday was on the horizon, a couple of other people I know mentioned the possibility of getting a festschrift together; I remember Roger Southall musing about his Journal of Contemporary African Studies taking up the task, and Harald Witt, a long-time student and now colleague of Bill, and myself had talked about the Journal of Southern African Studies. Before any one of us could even think twice about the idea Lance got this project off the ground and going, and asked me for some assistance in finding some of Bill's many friends and colleagues. I ended up being something like a co-editor, but Lance took by far the primary role. Lance and Clive Glaser, the editor of African Studies, must be thanked profusely for the effort behind this volume.

Lance asked me to introduce this collection, because I have had the pleasure of working with Bill for the past five and a half years. Indeed, the job Bill advertised in 1999 that Henry Bernstein emailed on to me saved me from my ever diminishing prospects in Australia, where African studies were becoming a rare species: so I owe him a lot of gratitude. In the process of trying to decline the honour of writing this (after all, less than six years of working with a man with as much scope as Bill can hardly be considered adequate to the task of ‘knowing’ him, can it?) I asked Lance why he initiated this project. He said something to the effect of: “Bill helped me out when he didn't have to.” This sums up well Bill's attitude towards young scholars promising excellence, but it's not necessarily accurate to say that in Bill's mind “he didn't have to” help Lance out at some point many years ago. He knows that excellent scholarship thrives when people who can help do help: quiet support, suggestions about how and where to publish, constructive advice, discussions about what conferences are taking place; a generalised enthusiasm about the scholarly world; these are what keeps good scholarship ticking over – what reproduces an intelligentsia – and it is safe to say Bill would not waste such help on those he did not think would benefit from it. For Bill, helping out promising scholars is necessary for the encouragement and maintenance of excellent scholarly values and critical inquiry in the disciplines concerning him. He would hardly think too much about it, though, because he takes genuine and spontaneous pleasure in interactions with intelligent and inquiring young minds, and spurring them on to greater things. To help them reach their potential is natural to him; it is part of his search for kindred intellectual spirits that has spawned deep friendships and long-running discursive engagements all over the world. The contributors to this volume make up only a small proportion of them.

For want of the adequate words with which this volume could be introduced – and besides, I'm not quite ready to write a proper introduction to a festschrift that is appearing when Bill is not quite retired: the farewells are not yet due, as he continues to work on a quarter time basis at the Economic History and Development Studies Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal's School of Politics – an altered form of the advice I suggested to the contributors to the festschrift will suffice. They serve to indicate to readers what may have inspired this volume's contributors to take time out of extremely busy schedules to honour Professor William Mark Freund.

Having only known Bill since late 1999 I am less qualified than most of the contributors in this issue to introduce him. Thus I am not as able as many others to say what Bill's approach to economic history and development studies is, and what themes might best be emphasized to tease out a festschrift such as this. As it has turned out, the scholars, given their various relationships with him and his work, have clearly taken off from their own experiences and studies in the light of Bill's rich and diffuse work, and gone in many of their own exciting directions in this volume.

When I first met Bill on my arrival in the department, buried in the dark halls of the then University of Natal's Shepstone Building, he told me in our ‘welcoming meeting’ in his office, the walls of which were literally lined with books attesting to his catholic interests, that he was essentially a political economist. Since then he has described himself to some visitors as an urban geographer. (D)urban Vortex, articles in journals such as Urban Forum, his work on Abidjan, and his just finished African Cities, in the production process at the Cambridge University Press as this introduction is being written, attest to that. He is now embarking on an edited book with Harald Witt on why ‘development’ is not occurring in South Africa as simply and straightforwardly as policy makers and mainstream economists would think. Thus it is clear that in addition to the nature of the programme he has developed at his university, which combines uniquely the methodologies of the very broad, but materialist, economic history defining his approach, with the very interdisciplinary but often fuzzy field of ‘development studies’, he could be named whatever one might call a scholar who studies ‘history’ and ‘development’. I once wrote to a journal that I taught ‘historical political economy’: given that it is the influence of Bill, his programme, and his methodology that informed this slightly whimsical formulation, perhaps one might call him something like that too. It might be worth mentioning in this context, too, that he has also said that the ‘economist’ side of the political economy couplet is ‘self-taught’: perhaps this accounts for his willingness to criticise orthodoxies in that discipline as easily as he does.

About five years after that first meeting, I moved into his office (then, and now, in the Memorial Tower Building, a much more charming setting than the first ones to which I arrived) as I took over his post at the helm of the Economic History and Development Studies Programme (a much diminished role from in his days, as we had become absorbed into the School of Politics during the merger of the University of Natal and the University of Durban-Westville). I found between some of the cracks in the old bookshelves his Inaugural Lecture to the University of Natal (Freund 1986.) The lecture confirms his status as a political economist, and foreshadows much of the ‘political economy’ debates in South Africa today. Presented on 17 September 1986, just over a year and half after his arrival to Durban as Professor of Economic History, and entitled “South African Business Ideology, the Crisis and the Problem of Redistribution”, the lecture indicates Bill's ideology just as much as that of the South African ruling class, and the approach to economic history and development conditioned by it. In many ways, too, the lecture illustrates how little has changed in the socioeconomic structures of South Africa in the past two decades, ‘democratic’ revolution in their midst or not. (I discuss this lecture briefly in my contribution to this volume, but emphasize a slightly different point here.)

‘South African Business Ideology’ situates the South African economy comparatively and globally. After describing the boom of the early 1930s to the mid-1970s, he compares South Africa with societies such as Mexico and Turkey – countries “dependent on international trade in raw materials, although their gross domestic product consists in good part of an indigenous manufacturing sector that has limited export prospects, [and] a manufacturing sector which rapidly expanded up to a point on the basis of import substitution” (Freund 1986:5) – rather than letting it sit in its own pool of exceptionalism. Then he noted that “only significant political change is apt to allow the terms of economic policy itself to alter in South Africa” (Freund 1986:6) but he refused to speculate on what this change “should or could be”, preferring to place South Africa within “broader trends and comparisons in world history” – sometimes revolutionary, at others at least demanding a significant move towards economic reform – and to focus on the “economic nature of the dilemma” facing the state (defining ‘economic’ much more broadly than most of the other economic historians in South Africa, of whom many were in diametrically opposed ideological camps).

This is the sort of cool, comparatively oriented and politically open analysis that I think characterises Bill's work. The address does not claim to ‘read off’ a unified ‘business ideology’ from the class structure and revolutionary conjuncture of South Africa at the time: he writes that although those ideologies lead to “judgments that reflect their own experiences and the trajectory of their own firms, with regard to profitability, to social hierarchy and to work organisation” they oscillate according to “different pressures” and “specific economic differences” (Freund 1986:7), and were then considering some rather drastic changes. (Note that Bill, never the esoteric theorist did not define or debate the term ‘ideology’. He does not wear his ideology on his sleeve, preferring instead to allow his materialism to pervade solid empirical studies. Also note, though, that he was well read in the Althussers and E.P. Thompsons of the day. The title of his most well-known book The Making of Contemporary Africa self-consciously borrows from Thompson and shares the latter's disdain for the sort of high theory ending up in the circularity of post-modernism that Bill knew even then was a dead-end, and what he would call the ‘high-minded’ and idealist individualism of much liberal theory. He still talks of Poulantzas fondly, though – as well as of the Hannah Arendt lectures he attended in his undergraduate years at the University of Chicago.) In that conjuncture it was Bill's contention that the liberal ‘Thatcherism’ of ever-cheapening wages and privatisation – reflecting “the powerful influence of the dominant currents in capitalism internationally” that are reflected in local “corporate views” (Freund 1986:7) – was not the way to go. He went through the various proposals put forth by segments of relatively enlightened capital and suggested instead that a “qualitative leap” in this class's vision that “must have a political and cultural content” (and that, he repeated, was “beyond [his] brief”) would need to be made such that it would “begin to think about the economy in terms of meeting the actual needs of South Africans and how that can intersect with economic development” (Freund 1986:10).

In spite of his protestations there is definitely a politics in this document – even talk of a revolutionary break – and in the rest of Bill's considerable academic arsenal. Bill's politics here appears to be a sort of social democracy that assumes the possibility, if not the probability of an enlightened bourgeoisie, but just as importantly an open-minded state cadreship that will act to stave off the possibility of a working class becoming “dangerous” (Freund 1986:11) and to preserve order by managing the intersection of “actual needs” with “economic development” and thus create legitimacy (he almost avoids the question of the universal franchise by saying politics is beyond his brief; but earlier his statement that real policy change will only come about with “significant political change” stakes his position). Before the days of Cowen and Shenton's intentional vs. spontaneous development and accumulation projects and processes (Cowen and Shenton 1996), he was aware of the conflict inherent in uneven and colonially rooted transitions to capitalism. He seems to waver here between the ‘revolutionary tradition’ marked by October 1917 with the Fabian and FDR social welfare policies, but asserts (between the lines) that wise statecraft can bridge the gap. Perhaps this is the technocrat in the heads of all those with ‘economics’ in their disciplinary armour; perhaps it is his knowledge of ‘late development’ in the Japan that he taught in his second year ‘capitalism’ course or the Europe that he still teaches so well in his third year courses; it could be that this is the kind of social democracy he imagines from the Austria of his roots. The ‘vision’ to which he often refers, but does not specify in detail, comes out of a history of the political representatives of ruling classes in crisis, topped up by vigorous and vigilant working classes.

The cusp of his thinking on ‘democracy’ may be summed up in many conversations in which he has poured scorn on the post-Cold War democracy donors who think that liberal forms of managed participation (in tandem with the economic policies of structural adjustment that he knew as early as the mid-80s would serve little more than to lower wages) can cross the canyons of what I would call primitive accumulation processes in the periphery: he has jokingly referred to his desire to see a donor-funded institution for the promotion of good dictators who would implement plans to create the full employment and fulfilment of basic needs for the honest working people he obviously supports and admires – who would, as he said in another conversation, restrict ‘the market’ as much as possible. Yet he is not as cavalier in his calls for a developmental dictator as all that: at another moment, when the South African Communist Party was reporting to the media in the aftermath of one of its congresses, he remarked that it was this party that could make the space for democracy in South Africa. That too would be congruent with his prescriptions in 1986: bringing the wages of the black working class up as quickly as possible to white levels and stopping an over-reliance on ‘cheap labour-based exports’ as the ‘only potential vehicle for growth’. Expanding the local market would be the way out of this conundrum (and here, too, his words on the mistakenly too timid approach to the black middle class in the 1980s are worth remembering: perhaps the contemporary state has taken his word on this one). This would create real jobs, too: the dignity and discipline of work is important to Bill, as the souvenir he brought back from a recent visit to the US, and hung in our resource room, attests. It is a photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's words engraved on granite “no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralisation caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.” Bill thinks work – publicly funded if necessary – is better than social grants.

Moreover, Bill's suspicion of developmentally restricted democracy is made clear when, noting Michael Burawoy's The Politics of Production (1985) in his lecture, he states that the democratisation of the economic life of workers is essential. Although he added that this ‘engenders its own problems’, it would besides empowering workers, “remind us … that the world is a more complex place than the naïve and self-serving duality in which it is divided between a socialist path that will automatically reproduce the ruined economy of Angola and a capitalist one that will equally automatically bring about the affluence of California” (Freund 1986:12). I wonder where China would be on that scale, if the speech had been made today. And I wonder if he would accuse those who see no difference between social democracy and unfettered capitalism as ‘naïve and self-serving’, too.

Yet while Bill places emphasis on an enlightened cadre of state managers and perhaps a sufficiently ‘embedded bourgeoisie’ to do the developmental trick he seems not to be too sure of these groups' current role in Africa and South Africa. He expresses surprise on how many socialists maintained their faith in the African National Congress for so long, even (or especially?) during the halcyon days of struggle, while it was clear to him with his broad African experience that the nationalism of decolonisation was miles away from a socialist (or social democratic) project in South Africa or anywhere. Yet he also articulates mixed feelings about how this ruling group is carrying out the task of what other people call the ‘national (bourgeois?) democratic revolution.’

Maintaining this balanced view, he is surprised at those who are taken aback at the Zimbabwean debacle: it is neither that extraordinary for him, nor, most importantly, all that devastating given the continental experience. His historical depth allows him to dismiss the ephemeral hiccups of the consolidation of the African bourgeoisie – but also forces him to see the structural contradictions that too many hiccups create. It's the sort of savoir faire – or is it sang froid?–that made him refuse to get up too early during a humid Dar es Salaam morning to meet a crusading revolutionary for whom most academic tourists would have stayed up all night to meet. Perhaps Bill expects no miracles because he knows the social forces that created them historically may never appear again–especially in Africa.

But how do these ramblings relate to a festschrift for this renaissance (not African, but universal) man retiring from a life of administrating a department as best he can while facing intractable bureaucrats and neo-liberal university leaders afraid to spend money on the liberal arts, and much of his teaching, but to continue his post-graduate teaching, research and scholarship? They preface a volume celebrating the work and teaching of a man at the centre of a radical version of a discipline that was at its heyday in revolutionary South Africa; which, perhaps ironically, demanded the weight of structure in those most voluntarist of times, and demands it even more now. (Does this explain its seeming fall from grace?) It takes a cool, rational and nearly ironic, yet also very hopeful approach to fields of endeavour across the continent he knows so well. It subjects what might be the contradictions of Bill's idealist and realist juxtapositions – his scorn for too much in the way of normative and moralistic thinking amidst his desire for a rational (and maybe meritorious) order – to study. It takes in reams of knowledge spreading outwards and inwards from Bill's own encyclopaedic grasp of the literature(s) ranging from economic history across all continents to politics all over the place, grounded in the grist of hard-edged historical materialism. It starts and ends on the petards of the construction of a social democratic society on the outer, and constantly transforming, edges of global capitalism. It never forgets that those who promise ‘a better life for all’, or ‘the spread of freedom’ (if you want to get Bill angry, raise the possibility that George W. Bush's motivations in Iraq or Iran might be benevolent) given current structures of global and local political and economic power and their own desire to make an easy fortune from the fat of the land, are ‘reconciled’ to something less than that. Finally, it does not forget that the idea of a working class becoming ‘dangerous’ might not be a bad one – then, the name of the journal (Transformation) Bill did so much to make an essential one for radical thinking and real change in South Africa might not just mean bigger salaries and stock options for a new and often ill-deserving élite. If the sort of scholarship Bill has done so much to develop, and is represented in this journal, does continue in South Africa and the continent it is doing so much to alter, the frontiers of transformation may continue to expand.