‘I’m kinda weary,’ is how Thandika Mkandawire suggested I remember his surname when we met for the first time in Dakar in the early 1990s at a CODESRIA workshop on Reflections on Development. He was the Executive Secretary at the time, but shunned the grand chauffeurdriven pomp which usually accompanied his seniority. Instead, he drove around Dakar in a small, beaten-up French car. I was immediately struck by his endearing modesty and, even though he was an extraordinarily busy man, he always gave you the sense that he had time for you. Hence, he was not only respected, but also loved by all of us who were mentored by him. I always felt enormously privileged to be in his accompany – his effervescent energy, his alive intellect, his wit and, of course, his joie de vivre were all infectious. We are inspired by him and we must honour his memory by continuing his scholarly search for solutions to our multifarious continental problems. It is impossible to do justice to Thandika’s oeuvre in such a short tribute. What follows is an attempt to capture a few vignettes of our interaction over the last 30 years which I hope demonstrate not only his breadth of scholarly and political interests but also his personal warmth. Thandika, as he was widely known, dreamed of setting up a Centre for Reflection for senior African scholars in Malawi, his fatherland. His standpoint, however, was invariably pan-African. While recognising the fact that the colonial borders had not changed in any substantial way since independence, his search was for an African perspective of and by the continent in its entirety. With his encyclopaedic knowledge of the continent, he managed to embrace everybody from the furthest nooks and crannies of rural Africa to the bustling urban environments where he was most at home. Thandika was, above all, a man of ideas. More than anything else, he loved to engage in debate and discussion and always had an angle that he could back up with his prodigious evidential knowledge of virtually everything, from political economy, to art and music, to history, culture and language. In particular, he challenged dominant global discourses about Africa, many of which are informed by deeply racist attitudes parading as scholarly works. He eschewed these stereotypes and, instead, offered penetrating analyses grounded in African experiences, invariably connected with an abiding commitment to Africa’s development in all its diversity. The very fact that everybody addressed Thandika by his first name speaks volumes about the manner in which he challenged the stultifying hierarchies in much of African academia. For him, it was not a matter of where you stood on the ladder at your university, as a junior lecturer, or senior professor, or even a vice chancellor. What mattered was the force of your ideas and how you could marshal evidence and theory into an argument. He was thus much more than a mentor; he was an intellectual companion. Thandika’s father was Malawian and his mother Zimbabwean. Born in Zimbabwe in October 1940, he spent much of his early childhood and part of his adolescence there and in Zambia, following his migrant father. Later, after assuming Malawian citizenship, he was imprisoned a number of times before going into exile in Sweden where he became a citizen, in line with his broadly social democratic approach to political economy. The rich tapestry of Thandika’s life requires a detailed intellectual biography, not only for his role in shaping ideas about Africa’s development, but also in institution building globally.

中文翻译：

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致敬：Thandika Mkandawire

1990 年代初，我们在达喀尔的 CODESRIA 发展反思研讨会上第一次见面时，Thandika Mkandawire 是这样建议我记住他的姓氏的，“我有点累”。他当时是执行秘书，但避开了通常伴随着他的资历的盛大司机驱动的盛况。相反，他开着一辆破旧的法国小汽车绕过达喀尔。我立刻被他可爱的谦虚所震撼，尽管他是一个非常忙碌的人，但他总是让你觉得他有时间陪你。因此，他不仅受到尊重，而且受到我们所有受他指导的人的喜爱。能和他在一起，我总是感到无比荣幸——他那充满活力的能量、他活泼的智慧、他的机智，当然还有他的生活乐趣，这些都极具感染力。我们受到他的启发，我们必须通过继续他的学术探索来为我们各种各样的大陆问题寻找解决方案来纪念他。在如此简短的致敬中，不可能对 Thandika 的作品做出公正的评价。接下来是试图捕捉我们过去 30 年来互动的一些小插曲，我希望这些小插曲不仅能展示他广泛的学术和政治兴趣，还能展示他的个人热情。众所周知，桑迪卡梦想在他的祖国马拉维为非洲资深学者建立一个反思中心。然而，他的立场总是泛非的。在承认自独立以来殖民地边界没有发生任何实质性变化的事实的同时，他的探索是从整个非洲大陆和非洲大陆的角度进行探索。凭借他对非洲大陆的百科全书式知识，他成功地接纳了每个人，从非洲农村最远的角落到他最熟悉的繁华城市环境。最重要的是，Thandika 是一个有想法的人。最重要的是，他喜欢参与辩论和讨论，并且总是有一个角度可以用他对几乎所有事物的惊人证据知识来支持，从政治经济学到艺术和音乐，再到历史、文化和语言。尤其是，他挑战了有关非洲的全球主流话语，其中许多都受到了作为学术著作而炫耀的深刻种族主义态度的影响。他避开了这些陈规定型观念，而是提供基于非洲经验的深入分析，这些分析总是与对非洲所有多样性发展的持久承诺有关。每个人都用他的名字称呼坦迪卡，这一事实充分说明了他挑战非洲大部分学术界枯燥的等级制度的方式。对他来说，这不是你在大学阶梯上的位置，是初级讲师，还是高级教授，甚至是副校长。重要的是你的想法的力量以及你如何将证据和理论整合到一个论点中。因此，他不仅仅是一位导师；他是一个知识分子。Thandika 的父亲是马拉维人，母亲是津巴布韦人。他于 1940 年 10 月出生于津巴布韦，跟随他的移民父亲，他在那里和赞比亚度过了童年的大部分时间和青春期的一部分。后来，在取得马拉维公民身份后，他多次入狱，然后流亡瑞典成为公民，符合他广泛的社会民主主义政治经济学方法。Thandika 丰富的人生经历需要详细的知识分子传记，这不仅是因为他在塑造非洲发展理念方面的作用，而且在全球机构建设中也发挥了作用。