Connect with the world
By living in several places at once
Preface
Part 1 explores how I have combined living between two or more places—first, Britain and North America and then France (Paris) and South Africa (Durban)— to find the fullest self-expression and free association I can. This requires movement and combining activities in different places conducive to it.
Part 2 extends this reflection on my own migration to a more general reflection based on my recent book, Self in the World: Connecting life’s extremes (2022). How do we reduce the gap between a puny self and a world lacking in natural and social order? We must scale up the self and scale down the world, so that they can make a meaningful connection. Religion always did this through prayer, ritual, and belief; it still does. But fiction—plays, novels, and movies—now performs that role for many, and science has become central to the leading societies. M.K. Gandhi—who spent two decades in South Africa after settling a legal dispute in Durban—made a career from helping his followers to bridge the gap.
A postscript reflects on a youthful episode, when I learned not to assume that a first-class metropolitan education trumps local knowledge of the world.
1. Why Durban is an important place in my life
This part is based on a book launch talk for Self in the World held at Ike’s Books and Africana Collectables, Durban. It was previously owned by my long-time friend, research partner, and co-author, Vishnu Padayachee, who died in 2021.
Vishnu came to Cambridge University and visited the African Studies Centre where I was Director. We chatted in the pub about Gandhi, cricket, and Indian Ocean commerce. Head of the School of Development Studies at UKZN, he had been an economic adviser to the ANC government and held diverse public appointments. With Julian May, he owned Ike’s Books, a cultural landmark. He invited me to Durban, the largest Indian city outside India. They came there as indentured workers in Natal’s sugar industry after slave emancipation. I could connect with India there while remaining in Africa.
I later spent a month in Durban and Cape Town, checking out African Studies there. I loved Durban with its mixed white, brown, and black population. The Indian Ocean, port and beach appealed to me greatly. The atmosphere in Vishnu’s School was relaxed and amiable. The university was a beautiful campus on a hill. I came back often and a decade later bought a second home on the beach. Vishnu and I wrote a paper on Indian businessmen after apartheid; we cooperated in a book, The Political Economy of Africa, and later embarked on a history of South African capitalism seen in national and global perspective. We sometimes had breakfast in a colonial hotel or sat on Ike’s veranda sipping Sauvignon Blanc. We explored parallels and differences in our personal histories of upward mobility.
One day Vishnu saw a fantastic apartment on South beach. I bought it, having just retired when sterling lost 30% in two weeks after the Lehman crash of September 2008. It was in a 1930s Art Deco building with panoramic views, a huge living room and eight smaller rooms. Cable television gave me English football and world cricket. I became a connoisseur of local wines. The first night there I woke up to the sound of heavy traffic, but it was the ocean. I slept again soundly.
Durban meant Gandhi to me. He tried to unify the sub-continent against the British Empire’s divisive politics. I have all his writings in my living room—with Lenin’s, my other favorite revolutionary. C.L.R. James, the Caribbean’s leading writer of the last century and my mentor, lives in my memory. My Paris family spends our holidays there. Durban's semi-tropical winter is delightful. Lonely Planet lists it in the world’s top ten family beach resorts. With John Sharp, I founded and ran the Human Economy Programme at the University of Pretoria, 2011-18.
I like having more than one home. The main pairs have been Manchester and Cambridge, Accra then Cambridge, British and American university towns. Jamaica showed me a ‘cubist’ strategy for living. Durban and Paris play a similar role now. I can’t stand being stuck in one place. I belong to world society and must be free to move in it. If I don’t like being somewhere, I complain and if that doesn’t work, I move on.
I was attracted to India as a teenager by reading E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924); but I ended up studying the North Atlantic quadrilateral made by the slave trade—Britain and Europe, West Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. France and South Africa came into my life together. North America was the obvious alternative to Britain. My spirit is American. Americans have a music that is going somewhere; I am going somewhere. Comparing Britain and the US, it is obvious which is the old society and which the new one. I moved between them. Britain closed me down and America opened me up, but my home country was more comfortable; people looked after me there. American freedom became vulnerability before long. I wanted American possibility, but felt exposed in that vast country. I was glad to return home eventually. I had lived in two countries that were complementary, each combining positive and negative features.
When I moved to France, I added South Africa as another new place. This pair repeats the first differently. France is an old society, but it feels strange to me. I identify with exiled Black writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin who escaped from an unbearable society to Paris where they could write. They were never integrated there, nor am I. South Africa is only a century old, but it was made by the British empire. It has deep problems: a history of extreme racism (like the US) and its people seem to be stuck in ingrained patterns (like Jamaica). It is a new country, but it feels familiar to me.
In Paris, I can’t handle the practical nuances, but I have made a precious second family home there. Whether dealing with Africans, Indians or British in Durban, I know how the social infrastructure works. I can get English soul food here—ginger beer and spicy hot cross buns all year round! South Africa was at first reassuring and hopeful, now much less so. It hasn’t begun to explore its ultimate identity, however. It may crash, but the future will be better. England and France are depressing and depressive societies, wallowing in nostalgia for their imperial glory.
South Africa and France combine elements that were separate in Britain and the US. France is an old society but it’s new to me; South Africa is a new society, but it’s old to me. In Paris I have the stability of my family. In South Africa I have institutions made by the British. As an expatriate in both, I choose where and how to engage or detach myself. Together they provide a platform to enter the world more fully than before. I can synthesize old and new, stability and movement, local and global. I renew myself while selecting from my past.
Durban’s hinterland is the Zulus’ home area; they now dominate the city that excluded them before. South Africa is a magnet for Africans from everywhere and relations between the two are tense. A third is Indian in origin. Natal was the first South African colony the British made. They pushed the Dutch out of the Cape and transplanted Caribbean sugar production there. I prefer three races to the Anglo binary; most Europeans agree. Durban’s Indians moderate racial contrasts that are starker in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
South Africa is the US of Africa. Its inhabitants feel separate from the world. The two share a history of brutal capitalism and organized racism in the last century. America's Blacks moved into the northern cities, while the Africans worked in the mines. Segregation followed—the color line, Jim Crow, apartheid. Durban is South Africa’s melting pot. It is a port city too, the Marseille of Southern Africa. A large harbor is around the corner. I watch the container ships coming and going. Port cities are always more open and dynamic. Paris is a capital city, like London. I love Chicago because it is not Washington DC. I like provincial industrial cities that don’t live off extracting taxes and rents.
I can see the horizon and an infinite expanse of sea and sky through eleven windows tight on the sea front. ‘Horizon’ is not a metaphor for me. Oceans open the world to places that are often closed and inward-looking. I am at home and anchored there. I entertain my most ambitious and inclusive thoughts, stimulated by the ocean’s restless expanse.
Ports generate red light districts. Behind me is a rundown area that once had more crime, drugs, and prostitution than now. The number of sailors coming to Durban has fallen dramatically since the container revolution. The strip clubs on Point Road—renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road!—have been reduced from nine to one legal establishment. In front is a well-maintained international resort and at the back a neglected area for poor people. The first time I went to the supermarket in the China Mall, I couldn’t believe how cramped, noisy, and vital it was, just like Nima, the Accra slum where I did my doctoral fieldwork in the 1960s. All I saw there were poor Africans, but the largest migrant groups are Congolese and Nigerians! Durban’s beach front is a cross between Blackpool and Miami.
When I walk out to the back, I am revisiting my youth in Accra’s slums. The front evokes all the beaches I know from Santa Monica to Goa. A beautiful racecourse is nearby with the Durban July. I started betting on the horses at 12. I can pull together a patchwork from my life that combines its key parts. It takes the cubist vision I found in Jamaica to another level—the ability to put the viewer into the picture in several places at once. In Durban I can watch English football and international cricket on TV, certainly more often than in France! When I was a kid, I could walk to United’s ground and Lancashire’s test cricket ground in 15 minutes.
Manchester is the liberal, egalitarian, provincial city that formed me. Its industrial revolution changed the world. The cities I love, such as Chicago and Durban, have something of Manchester in them. Paris is the opposite of Manchester, so I must go somewhere else to tap into what Manchester means to me. Durban and the others are real cities with a sense of their own destiny. Vishnu belonged to an almost medieval bourgeoisie, a class of citizens who care for their city. This one knew its power, did good work and built museums. It was committed to fending off the intrusive political power of national, provincial and city governments. The African politicians are winning now, and the local bourgeoisie has decamped to the north coast. But now the Whites and Indians are taking refuge in an overcrowded Cape Town, leaving Kwazulu Natal’s and Durban’s Africans more room to grow.
A great city is in decline. Is it surprising that I feel at home here? Manchester’s Victorian bourgeoisie was very strong. With the organized workers, they launched the free trade movement and liberal economics, plus the cooperative, anti-slavery, and Chartist labor movements. London’s old colonial regime pulled the plug on our historical momentum in the mid-nineteenth century. The Pan-African Federation for African and Colored Peoples was founded in Manchester during the Second World War.
Manchester and Durban are inseparable in my imagination. Like the phoenix, they will both rise again. Chicago is an industrial city, but it also organizes the agricultural commerce of the Great West. The architecture is brave and beautiful. A self-sufficient political class encouraged that. I love the spirit of what they have made there.
I aim to find the fullest self-expression and free association I can. This requires movement and combining activities in different places conducive to it. Some places, several at once, support me in this goal more than others. We live in an increasingly interdependent—and screwed up—world. We must each connect with this situation in shared ways. The media feed us the pap of national politicians and identify stock prices with the economy’s health. My all-time favorite book is Rousseau’s Emile: On Education (1762); he knew that the Old Regime limited what children can become. The British Empire successor did the same, France and South Africa now. What can we do?
This was the inspiration for Pretoria University’s Human Economy Programme. We must win democracy from the expert classes. People often don’t understand the remote forces that affect their lives. For our children’s sake, we can’t settle for less than making the world a better place. This includes learning from the kids, not believing that they are buckets in which to pump our out-of-date hose. Our dealings with the world must be grounded in daily life. It is no good adopting an ideology that has nothing to do with your actual life. That is symbolic politics, the opposite of Gandhi’s non-violent and Lenin’s revolutionary messages about how to change the world.
In 2013, I put on a course of improvised lectures in Pretoria on ‘Africa in World History’.
“What does world history look like from an African perspective? These lectures are a survey, but each will examine one or more outstanding books addressing various aspects of this topic, arranged in historical sequence. Every book—many written by Africans and the African diaspora—has inspired me. This is lecturing for belief, not for knowledge”.
2. Scale down the world, scale up the self, bridge the gap
On one side a puny self; on the other a vast unknowable universe. How to bridge the gap? Religion performed this task by linking men of power and the masses, a fraudulent one perhaps but civilizations depended on it. The leading modern societies no longer rely on this claim for legitimacy. Science now rules, and social science has replaced the humanities. Great literature was once the latter’s main vehicle, but also history, the arts, ethnography, philosophy, case law and rhetoric. They sought truth of general significance by using scholarship and judgment to examine persons and places in history. Now they hope to attract students by peddling abstract jargons.
Michel de Montaigne in his sixteenth-century Essays pioneered my project for developing a conversation with readers (Sarah Bakewell How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, 2010). He was a contemporary of Shakespeare who knew Florio, his English translator. But Immanuel Kant’s Copernican revolution in metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason combined subjectivity and experience of the object world for the first time: “Hitherto we have made our knowledge conform to the world of objects”, he wrote, “but perhaps the objects should conform to our knowledge”.
A common method transcends academic inquiry. We must scale the world down and scale up the self if they are to make a meaningful connection. Anthropologists could explore cultural variations in solving this problem. The classical means was prayer. Religion sustains a binding link between the inner life of a human being and the impersonal world out there. Anyone can talk to God, privately or collectively. Marcel Mauss, who helped his uncle, Émile Durkheim to found French sociology, made prayer the topic of his unfinished PhD thesis. When asked why, he replied, “because speech is the unity of thought and action”. Many in our world still bridge the gap this way.
In the last two centuries, attempts to reconfigure self and world have mainly been through consumption of fiction: novels, plays, movies. Here the world is reduced in scale to a stage, paperback, or screen, allowing the audience to enter it without supervision on any subjective terms they wish. Who do you identify with when reading War and Peace or watching the movie—Pierre or Andre? Does Natasha deserve their love or yours? Sophocles and Shakespeare stand out as social thinkers because their medium bridges the gap between human personality and an impersonal world. But modern novelists and movie makers are not far behind.
The main political event of the last century was the anti-colonial revolution whereby people coerced into world society by European colonial empires fought to establish an independent relationship to it. I study the intellectuals of this movement, of whom the greatest was Gandhi. He made a career from bridging the gap: The Story of my Experiments with Truth (1927) is the best source for his politics and ethics. He brought East and West together—the Victorian romantics (Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Ruskin) and Buddhist economics. Ajit Dasgupta, in Gandhi’s Economic Thought (1994) claims that the Buddha was Gandhi’s main predecessor as an economist. Buddhism and Protestantism, as middle-class religions, are both linked to commerce. This appeal to western sensibilities alone would explain why the Hindu fanatics killed him and now persecute the Moslems whom Gandhi tried to save from the partition of India.
For Gandhi, a civilization should enable its members, whereas modern states disable citizens, making us patients, students, taxpayers, prisoners. His philosophical humanism had unique personalities participating in our common humanity. How to span the gap? We normally mediate the poles of life by emphasizing divisions of race, nation, gender, religion, politics, and class, but do they reconcile or exaggerate differences? Like Rousseau, Gandhi asked what size and type of society best enables its citizens. He thought that the village was most suitable for Indians then, since most of them lived there and found some dignity as members of an agrarian civilization. Nehru, Jinnah, and Ambedkar had other plans. Subsidiarity is the principle that would locate decision-making in the lowest level of democratic government capable of implementing them.
Two examples. He went to London to study law and couldn’t find anything he wanted to eat. He joined the Vegetarian Society, got on the committee and when he left London there were a dozeb new vegetarian restaurants there. In the mid-1920s a big strike broke out in Ahmedabad, a Gujerati industrial city near his home. Gandhi went there and sat down on a street corner in his dhoti without saying a word. Within days the strike revolved around him. This was not to assert his leadership. He was showing his followers that if they wanted to make a difference, each must find concrete, local, and personal reasons for fighting. Scale up the self and the world down.
A pathological variant of this method sustains autocracy. An individual claims the exclusive ability to do this for his followers. An academic version is the classic German philologist who dominates his field by learning many languages, sees off allcomers and then writes the dictionary while representing his subjective preferences as objective knowledge. Most of the structuralists qualify. Claude Lévi-Strauss was the last century’s greatest anthropologist, but the egocentrism of Tristes Tropiques! He and Noam Chomsky—his own doppelganger as linguist and troublemaker—lived into advanced old age, 101 and almost a century so far.
Some of these anti-humanists, however, came to a sticky end: Roland Barthes was run over by a milk truck; Louis Althusser—who only read Capital Volume 1—murdered his wife; and Nikos Poulantzas jumped out of the window of a friend’s Paris flat. Compare Bruno Latour’s method with Rousseau’s or Gandhi’s. He undermined others’ academic endeavors by downgrading human intelligence and monopolizing it. He even claimed that Pasteur’s liberating the molecules was a democratic move.
The great scientists light up the world with an equation like E=MC squared; Stephen Hawking dreamed of finding “a theory of everything”. The message in all these examples is “Do what I do, and you too could be a master in four decades”. When most graduate students are now surplus to requirements, this advice lacks broad appeal. I wanted to bring back world history to anthropology, but I rarely succeeded in teaching it. Fieldwork-based monographs and novels score because they don’t peddle abstractions when reducing the world to a book about one local story. Young students can find their own messages from the material at hand today. Many intellectuals represent the world as an implacable and singular entity anchored in their own life story that no-one else can replicate.
Virtuoso reductions of the world to the personal level are most effective when harnessed to the political project of democracy. Shakespeare sold bums on seats by asking if the new Tudor state could resolve the contradiction between public office and personal rule. How can the king be a man? The answer to both was “they cannot”. His last tragedies—Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear—were the climax of his search for answers. It ends in civil war and madness. We can learn more from these plays than from all political science.
The escalating power of production has introduced a rift between individuals and society. Scientific modernism—quantum (Planck) and relativity (Einstein)—sought to unify extremes of scale. But this never became common sense or penetrated the social sciences. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle goes: “We can’t measure position and movement at the same time and when we observe something, we change it”. The new sciences of complexity use non-linear equations to investigate chaos and phase transitions, as when fast-moving water molecules become fixed as ice. Chaos is itself determinate. James Crutchfield, a physicist and mathematician, asks “What lies between order and chaos?” His answer is “human innovation”. The middle ground is where life and creativity grow.
As Vladimir Nabokov puts it in his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951): “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place of imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones that is intrinsically artistic”. Chinua Achebe, in a collection of autobiographical essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child (2010), tells us that for the Igbo “the middle ground [is] where the human spirit resists an abridgement of its humanity”. Leave the extremes to the fanatics. This is not only about individuals and society, but also the time and space coordinates of where and how we live. The digital revolution in communications is collapsing them now.
The end of national capitalism now provides an opportunity for community currencies. But many take their form from an isolated location; a clubby committee acts as a mini-central bank. Large-scale bureaucracies are also needed for economic democracy. We must build bridges between local interests and world society. Alliances between grassroots initiatives and some, by no means all large-scale bureaucracies offer one way.
Vishnu Padayachee, with a South-African-born Lebanese entrepreneur Neville Kerdachi, developed the Validation Clearance Bureau, a system for speeding up slow payments for the self-employed. The VCB is a platform linking buyers and sellers with the banks. The service recipient puts an invoice into the system acknowledged by the provider. The bank then issues up to 80% at once. The provider’s cash flow is boosted for buying more stocks and building up cash balances. Big buyers get a cheaper method for handling their invoices.
They thought they needed the government’s permission. When Vishnu approached the Office of President Zuma, he was told “We want 40% of the form’s shares”. Vishnu made a half-hearted riposte only to be told, “Black people don’t buy shares”. In fact, their system is perfectible with banking laws everywhere. This system has won approval from the Bank of International Settlements (‘the central banks’ bank’) and the World Bank for implementation in any country.
There are 250,000 Black SMEs in South Africa. Setting up a network of small accounts is laborious and slow; a contract with Walmart can help finance this. Amazon and iTunes combine blockbusters with a million small items (‘the long tail’). The latter make up half of Amazon’s total revenues. Major firms and governments can join in if their interests overlap with bottom-up initiatives. Small operators should link up with big players, but they usually reject this idea.
Innovations in money and markets are well-suited to going beyond local solutions. Their recent explosion is very dangerous, but it brought world society to express human principles through social media, if only as a small proportion of the products of spam, bots, and trolls. A federation of self-help currencies is feasible, but a few scattered activists lack the resources to scale up coordination. Community currencies are defensive, offering a temporary refuge from capitalism while relying on trust between members. Hoping to avoid “ruthless impersonality”, some base their currency on time. This increases obstacles to linking their trading circuit with the national and global economy. Virtual relations at distance and face-to-face interaction complement each other. I never heard of an association of small local groups who could launch a communications satellite, yet we all want to use the internet, do we not?
People ask, can new trading circuits succeed in economic terms? This is the wrong question. They are a great source of political education. Tahrir Square, Occupy Wall Street and London’s two-million march against the Iraq war did not deliver what they aimed for, but they changed many people’s political outlook, including mine. Experience of crowds and self-organized networks change how we see the world. Alternative currencies open their members’ eyes to new possibilities. This is the social impact of experiments like them.
Using money teaches us to be more fully human (Self in the World, Chapter 19). It connects the extremes of existence. We are all in the world market and it runs on money, as do the local shops. With money, even a little, we can do almost anything; money allows us to imagine universal society. But spending it also anchors us in our most intimate locations and interests. We do it many times each day. This is how money schools us to combine personal and impersonal dimensions of life, finite and infinite, abstract and concrete, analysis and synthesis. I call it Humanism 2.0, combining personal and impersonal dimensions of living in society. Humanism 1.0 reduced a violent world to personal experience. Romeo and Juliet both ended up dead.
A cautionary tale
In Ghana, I once visited a remote village in the northern savanna, 500 miles from the coast. Land shortage had pushed people to settle too close to the Volta River. They were now dying from river blindness (onchocerciasis): the simulium fly can only breed during the dry season in fast-flowing water. It had stopped raining when I arrived; but the thatched roofs were limp with the damp and the air was hot and humid. I saw no-one. It felt like the end of the earth. I imagined that I was bringing the outside world into these villagers’ drab lives. It was 1967 and I was 23 years old. I found the chief under an awning, wearing only a jockstrap. A woman and child played a bead game. He invited me to play with them and I won. He agreed to talk. I was quite fluent by then. After a while he asked,
Chief: What do you thinks of Vietnam?
KH (surprised): How do you know about Vietnam?
Chief: My son is at secondary school and listens to the BBC World Service. Which side is going to win?
KH: The Americans of course, they have all the money, the weapons, the machines.
Chief (shaking his head): I don’t think so – too many trees. The people will hide behind the trees.
KH: How do you know about the trees?
Chief: I fought the Japanese in Burma with the British army. We drew them into the jungles and killed them there.
My bubble burst. Most of my news came from Time magazine. This guy had seen more of the world than I had. But he wouldn’t let me go yet:
Chief: You know how long it took you British to get us out of our hills when all we had were bows, arrows and jockstraps? 25 years! In the end, they brought up heavy artillery to get us out. I don’t think the Americans will stay in Vietnam for 25 years, do you?
My host, as was customary, gave me a live guinea fowl to strap onto my scooter handlebars and I left, much chastened. Ghana taught me that, for all my democratic pretensions, I was an overeducated snob. Global and local are not separate. We all move in the world and have our points of local anchorage. Some of my academic colleagues are the most parochial people I know. The working-class autodidacts I have met would put them to shame (Self in the World: 94-5).
A Cambridge education is not knowledge of the world. James and John Stuart Mill devised a form of education that produced confident ignoramuses whose oral fluency would allow them as administrators to impress the natives in the Khyber Pass. In 1870, 17 out of 20 British civil servants in the world, including the United Kingdom, worked in India. By the time I got to Cambridge, India had been independent since 1947, but the education was still the same.
I have been trying to change it ever since. In my fields of anthropology and development studies, I am working on some ideas for how I would like the organization of knowledge about the economy to evolve.