I suspect Michael Burawoy is rarely thought of as an Africanist. Rather the words that come to mind might be: a theoretician of work and the labor process, the advocate of public sociology, a leading figure in Marxist theory, global ethnography, studies of socialism and post socialism, race and class, a voice to reclaim the very idea of the public university and so on. The breadth and the capaciousness of his interests are both legendary and breathtaking. But personally, politically and intellectually the continent of Africa was foundational to his entire research project and a constant presence across the span of his life.  Of course, he began that engagement with his time in Zambia and southern Africa generally, but it is striking how frequently in his writing he returned to the Zambian mines and to have them speak in new ways to his enduring questions of theory, method and politics. Michael’s connections to the continent and to southern Africa in particular were robust: long, deep, and unbroken. It was from his early African experience that Michael was to craft an entire research program—a program largely put on hold when he arrived at the University of Chicago as a graduate student and dove into factory work on the southside of the city—that he returned to later in his writing on Fanon, Du Bois, and his reading of the dynamics of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel and South Africa.  It was at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia) that Michael ran into anthropologists Jaap van Velsen and Max Gluckman (the founder of the so-called Manchester School of Anthropology), and their “extended case method” that was so central to his way of reconstructing Marxist theory and exploring the reflexivity required in linking theory to empirical analysis. It was in Zambia too that he became interested in radical student politics—the subject of his MA thesis—and communism. It was an exiled leader of the South African Communist Party—Jack Simons—and author of a book on race and class who introduced Michael to the firmament of South African Communism, and subsequently to his close and long-standing comradeship  with Ann-Marie and Harold Wolpe. I do not think it too much of a stretch to say that it was southern Africa that drew Michael into the world of labor and labor politics. Africa, in other words, left an indelible mark.  

Africa proved to be an important point of connection for us, though there were others too. Michael was a little older than me, but we had come through the English grammar school system, attended university, graduated, and moved to Africa to work. Each of us had come to the US, a year apart, for doctoral study, and both of us arrived at Berkeley in the 1970s (in my case, a couple of years after him). In some respects, we were generationally part of the British New Left and the cast of characters arrayed around the New Left Review. In part because he left England after graduation and in a sense never returned, Michael was removed from the internecine Left politics of the period, but by disposition he was I think deeply ambivalent about that cohort who smacked too much of a style of politics and public schoolboy culture that did not sit well with him.  Beyond our mutual interests in Marxist analysis and the political economy of development, our research programs pointed in different directions: his urban-industrial, and mine rural-agrarian. But it was Michael’s work on cheap labor in South Africa and his factory floor study (Manufacturing Consent) that so fundamentally shaped my work on the social reproduction and the labor processes among peasant households (how technical innovation and production under contract manufactured discontent rather than consent).  I was a beneficiary in a second sense, too.  Michael would quite regularly contact me with a standard refrain: “I know you are busy, but I have a brilliant student and he/she will absolutely take none of your time, but might you see fit to be on their committee/exam committee”?  In this way, there was regular traffic between Barrows and McCone Hall: Ron Weitzer, Suava Salumeh, Patrick Heller, Mike Levien, Michelle Williams, Zach Levenson, Michel Paret, Gay Seidman. The supply was seemingly endless.

But if I am honest, Michael’s real influence on me lay elsewhere.  As I came to know him better by the 1980s (during which time incidentally there was a vibrant Marxist community of campus including Dick Walker, Ann Markusen, Michael Reich, Manuel Castells—and the (then) flourishing East Bay Socialist School to say nothing of campus mobilizations through the South African Divestment movement and the Faculty for Human Rights in El Salvador and Central America (FACHRES)), Michael represented to me a sort of aspiration. I could never match his boundless talents in and beyond the classroom, but I could hold him up as a sort of model I could try and emulate. In a way that I could not fully articulate when I arrived at Berkeley,  he represented all of the reasons why I came to academia in the first place. Michael’s practice pointed to what a public university can and should be, and how a dedicated and committed teacher might help realize that getting a degree could be a transformative, even an emancipatory experience.  He stood for a particular vision of the public university and the public intellectual, even God-forbid what an effective departmental Chair or a good colleague might actually entail. All of this entailed a huge amount of collective labor and in its own way was a sort of Olympian project.  Michael showed the way even if I didn’t stand a flying fuck’s chance of achieving these lofty goals. I was just dragged along in the slipstream of his refulgence.  Michael Burawoy was in a league of his own, and despite his awful taste in English soccer clubs, the fact is he was my academic North Star. If teaching wasn’t going well, or if there was some academic challenge to be navigated, he was my first port of call.

Naturally, everyone touched by Michael’s brilliance—and there are quite literally thousands—have their own Michael, their own special relationship (at least as we constructed it), and their own precious moments now stored in that disorganized museum otherwise known as our memory. For me it is his mad biking habits, his questionable taste in headgear, a totally irrational commitment to an English football club (Manchester United), the mind-bending ‘Dada-Weimar-neo-Soviet’ apartment décor, long and raucous dinners at my San Francisco house (Michael loved to eat and loved to eat anything that my wife prepared), the presents he always brought for my children, and the fruitless efforts to have him disclose much (anything?) about his private life  (though I gather that some of his doctoral students managed to draw him out a little through their Gramscian theory of dating!). I once took Michael and Erik Wright to a performance of Japanese butoh dance/theatre in which the dancers, heads shaven, their bodies covered in bright-white zinc oxide, explore dark and challenging themes like death, decay, and the human condition. You can imagine how that went over.

Michael Burawoy was one of a kind, one of those individuals who, like a supernova, burst into our lives. It is a measure of his force of character that he also leaves us with a profound sense of regret. A sadness that we did not—could not—spend more time with him, that we did not know him better, and that there was so much more to learn from him.   But this is simply selfishness, of course, because we all carry Michael with us, constantly.