Samir Amin: Great thinker who inspired many

Prof Samir Amin. He was compassionate and generous. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Amin strongly believed that the future belongs to Abuja, Accra, Dodoma, Kampala, Nairobi and the African continent in general.
  • He was convinced that the arrival of China in Africa and modernisation of the continent was a preparation for Africa to take over the world.

Prof Samir Amin was an intellectual and scholarly giant.

He contributed to the dependency and underdevelopment theory, which was articulated by scholars such as Walter Rodney, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Peter Evans in Latin America. This turned the modernisation theory upside down.

Mr Amin was mentioned in the same breath with Andre Gunder Frank, Theotonio Dos Santos, Arghiri Emmanuel and Immanuel Wallerstein for theorising about dependency and underdevelopment in ways that promoted the thinking of the ‘South’ and so called developing world.

His most famous book was Accumulation on a World Scale (1976). He did not like the United States.

I learnt this from him in Rabat, Morocco, when we met there for a CODESRIA congress a few years ago.

He strongly believed that the future belongs to Abuja, Accra, Dodoma, Kampala, Nairobi and the African continent in general.

US HEGEMONY

He was convinced that the arrival of China in Africa and modernisation of the continent was a preparation for Africa to take over the world.

Prof Amin’s suspicion of America was often expressed in his love for multipolar power base of the future, in which other countries would gang up against the US.

Like Prof Ali Mazrui, he was a convinced adherent of multipolarity. He said: “Yes, I do want to see the construction of a multipolar world, and that obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonic project for military control of the planet.”

I first met Prof Amin at the University of Leeds, UK, in 1994 at a conference. I was at the time a lecturer at Moi University.

Like Prof Mazrui, Prof Amin was insightful and friendly as a senior professor, and willing to accept our juvenile energy and enthusiasm kindly without condemning us.

AMICABLE

I had been brought up in a world where professors bullied junior lecturers at conferences, so I was surprised at how candid Prof Amin was when he commented on my presentation.

He had none of the airs we saw back home from senior professors who intimidated junior lecturers with heavy vocabularies, footnoted with where they went to school.

What amazed me about him were his great ideas about Africa, and the manner in which he articulated them on his feet, without reading from notes.

I had cited Prof Amin numerously in my undergraduate essays and my master's thesis but did not know how ordinary he was until I met him.

I had expected to meet a firebrand Marxist. Instead, I met a genuine scholar who was interested in liberating Africa from external dependence.

He greatly admired Mwalimu Julius Nyerere and hoped that every African president would be like him.

RESEARCH GRANT

I later learnt that Nyerere was the only African president to ever host all African professors at State House in Dar-es-Salaam and wanted to know their ideas about the future of Africa.

Nelson Mandela also did this in South Africa, holding regular discussions with senior professors.

Like other great professors, Amin, who died in Paris on August 12, was compassionate and generous and assisted me to win a research grant and recommended many organisations for funding my PhD studies.

He was among few great scholars to support and endorse my theory of Affinity and Proximity in Peace and Conflict in the world as original and insightful.

I had argued that affluent places such as Muthaiga and Karen existed alongside less affluent places such as Mathare and Kibera in reciprocal ways, and so were peace and conflict.

THESIS

Born in Cairo, Prof Amin attended a French high school, leaving in 1947 with a Baccalauréat.

From 1947 to 1957, he studied in Paris, gaining a diploma in political science (1952) before graduating in statistics (1956) and economics (1957).

In his autobiography Itinéraire intellectuel (1990), he wrote that in order to spend a substantial amount of time in ‘militant action’ he could devote only a minimum of time to preparing for his university exams.

In 1957, he presented his thesis, supervised by François Perroux among others, titled ‘The structural effects of the international integration of precapitalist economies: A theoretical study of the mechanism which creates so-called underdeveloped economies’.

ADVISER

After completing his thesis, Amin went back to Cairo, where he worked from 1957 to 1960 as a research officer for the government's Institution for Economic Management and subsequently left Cairo to become an adviser to the Ministry of Planning in Bamako (Mali) from 1960 to 1963.

I am sure discussion of Prof Amin and his ideas will dominate conferences and journals in Africa and the world in the next few decades.

We hope that professional associations such as African Interdisciplinary Studies Association, Africa Studies Association, OSSREA, CODESRIA and universities will dedicate distinguished chairs in honour of Prof Amin.

Prof Amutabi is a professor of history and Vice-Chancellor of Lukenya University. E-mail: [email protected]