Michael Burawoy had an enormous impact on the people he met and the world he inhabited.  I am one of the many, many people who felt a special bond with Michael. He was a mentor, collaborator, friend, supervisor, and fellow traveller to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.  His ability to make people feel a special connection with him was one of his endearing superpowers.  Even four months after his death, the pain continues to cut deeply.  It’s hard to imagine that I’ll never have another conversation with him, never be able to get his advice, hear his views, share stories, tell jokes, and enjoy a good meal together. He left us with so much life still in him, and at a time when we need his strong voice for social justice. 

Many tributes have focused on his enormous intellectual contribution including to Marxism, labour studies, and methods, his influencing (and changing!) the discipline of sociology through public sociology, his legendary supervision of over 80 PhD students, his extraordinary teaching abilities, his charismatic lectures, and his mentoring of friends, colleagues, and students around the world.  I too experienced Michael in these ways, but I want to focus my short piece on my personal relationship with him as he was first and foremost deeply humanist, a loyal and dear friend and confidant, had a quirky sense of humour, and enduring commitment to making the world a better place.  

While I got to know Michael well as his supervisee at Berkeley from 1995 to 2005, it was in South Africa that my relationship with Michael became deeply personal.  Michael visited South Africa regularly since the early 1990s, but for me it was after I moved permanently to South Africa in 2005 that I got to know him on another level.  Over the last twenty years he visited nearly every year (except for the Covid years) and stayed with me and my partner, Vishwas Satgar. 

For me, ‘Michael in South Africa’ was very different to ‘Michael in Berkeley’.  Up until this time, I had known him as my demanding and never-quite-satisfied but always caring and dedicated supervisor.  Meetings with Michael (including our monthly dissertation group evenings at his flat) were always loaded with expectation.  We were in the torturous process of dissertation writing and his (dis)approving feedback could affect us for weeks.  Don’t get me wrong, he was an amazing and caring supervisor. The supervisee experience is as much about us, the students, as it is about him, the supervisor.  He also worried about his students, which he expressed in various ways.  I remember one time before I started a year of fieldwork in Kerala, he was concerned something would happen to me. In typical Michael fashion, he showed it through cranky frustration. At the same time, he made clear that he was there for me.  He was deeply bonded to his students, but the relationship was a one-way street—he knew everything about us, but we knew very little about him.  He rarely shared personal information about himself, and when we found out anything the information spread quickly among the students as we pieced together his personal life through trickles of information. When I graduated and moved to South Africa, I got to experience a much more personal side to him, and also came to appreciate why he was so connected to the country.  

It was during Michael’s formative years in his early 20s that southern Africa shaped Michael. He became a sociologist, a Marxist, and an ethnographer through his years in South Africa and Zambia between 1968 and 1972. His love affair with Africa started in the summer of 1966 when he hitchhiked across the continent and spent nearly two months in Johannesburg. He was studying maths at Cambridge, but it was this time in Johannesburg that he became interested in education as a means of social transformation.  After finishing his maths degree in 1968, he returned to Johannesburg for six months working as a journalist, and then moved to the newly independent Zambia, and after a few months he registered to do his MA in Sociology and worked on the copper mines in the personnel department.  It was this time in the postcolony that shaped him into becoming a sociologist, introduced him to Marxism with a strong African inflection and made him deeply committed to sociology globally, and it’s where he began ethnography of the workplace and the social relations of production.  It is also when he made lifelong friendships.  

While he didn’t return to South Africa for 23 years due to the anti-apartheid boycotts, he remained tied to the continent and to South Africa throughout and returned in 1991, after the end of apartheid.  In these years, he gave many lecture series on the tree of Marxism, Polanyi, public sociology, Bourdieu, W.E.B. Du Bois, Palestine and South Africa. Through these lecture series he engaged in critical conversations about post-apartheid South Africa. He was in dialogue with a new generation of scholars and scholar-activists committed to the defence and reconstruction of Marxism; these conversations often went late into the night at our home. He mentored dozens of graduate students, gave innumerable keynote lectures across the country, accompanied colleagues for fieldwork, visited workplaces and gave seminars to workers and unions.  He was busy, but also always made time to meet friends and colleagues.  

Over the last 20 years Vish and I had the good fortune of spending many intimate times with Michael as our home was his base in South Africa. In this more personal space, we got to see the deeply sensitive and caring side of Michael. Michael loved people! We wanted to take him to the Kruger national park one year, and he responded that he went on safari in 1969 and doesn’t need to do it again.  But he would visit Soweto almost every year with Sarah Mosoetsa and Mandla Radebe, or would go to factories and mines whenever the opportunity arose. 

He was also the perfect guest.  As long as he had a desk and Wi-Fi, he would keep himself busy during the early hours of the morning (he never seemed to sleep more than four or five hours!), happily ate anything prepared, was easy-going, and would help host dinner parties making sure guests had drinks or whatever they needed.  He liked to help in the kitchen, whether in preparing meals or cleaning up—though he didn’t know much about food preparation!  He loved watching football and would do everything he could to ensure he watched Manchester United matches.  He listened intently to stories and shared his own stories about travels, people he met, intellectual engagements, and family in London. Though, I must say he always got more information from others than he was ever willing to give up about himself. Michael was the indefatigable ethnographer and masterfully able to evade revealing anything personal. He laughed heartily and had a wry sense of humour.  He loved walking in the neighbourhood. He had a fetish for black jackets—I can’t remember how many he bought on his visits. He appreciated important moments in peoples lives, and even made a special effort to come to our small marriage ceremony.  He never gave up his love of maths and cosmology, and was always interested in hearing the latest developments in the field.  He was generous and would come bearing the most special and thoughtful gifts. I know the thought he put into gifts because on every visit I took him shopping to buy a gift for someone (usually for the next place he was going). Though he was always cagey about who the gift was for.  I always tried to pry information from him—is the gift for a man or a woman? Are they in London, the US, or somewhere else? An Academic?—but rarely got straightforward answers.  It was like a choreographed dance that always ended the same. 

It is all these moments in the in-between spaces of life that marked our friendship with Michael. He was authentic and loving, cared deeply about the people in his life, and genuinely interested in others and the world. He dedicated much of his life to making the world a better place through teaching, supervising, scholarship, friendship, and building a global sociology community. He was one of the most important Marxist scholars and sociologists of our times and has left an enormous legacy.  I am grateful for all that he taught me, for the friendship he offered, and for always being an ethical loadstar in dark times.  I am especially grateful that I got to spend so much time with him over the years. 

Love and solidarity, Hambe Kahle Michael!