Academic John S. Saul was regarded as one of the world’s foremost Marxist scholars of Africa, and was was one of the founders of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa.Ben Joseph/The Globe and Mail
Toward the end of his life, John Saul and his friend of more than 60 years, fellow African scholar Gerald Caplan, spoke on the telephone once or twice a week.
They would exchange thoughts on the local politics and politicians of the day – Prof. Saul, the committed Marxist; Dr. Caplan, whose democratic socialism was part of his DNA – but inevitably their conversation turned to the continent that had dominated so much of their intellectual lives.
“Should we have known?” Dr. Caplan asked rhetorically. “Should we have seen it coming? And what do we do about it?” He was talking about the struggles to end colonialism and white rule that had swept over the continent in the last four decades of the 20th century and ended in corrupt governments, inequality, and exploitation of wealth.
Prof. Saul had taken up the cause of every liberation, anti-colonial movement that emerged on the continent. He wanted to fight for it, he wrote more than 20 books on the struggle for freedom in southern Africa.
“In the end,” Dr. Caplan said, “he openly confessed that he was disappointed in every single liberation movement that had won power … and had then gone on to betray the cause.”
Prof. Saul, who died of cancer at home in Toronto on Sept. 23 at the age of 85, was widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Marxist scholars of Africa. He was a professor of political science at Toronto’s York University, and a teacher at Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam University and Mozambique’s Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.
In his 20s, he joined the brilliant group of global intellectuals attracted to Tanzania by the Arusha Declaration of socialist theoretician, activist and prime minister Julius Nyerere, the hero of the progressive political world. At University of Dar es Salaam, he co-authored with British political economist Lionel Cliffe a two-volume teaching guide for African students preparing to govern their countries. He engaged in intoxicating debate with fellow academics such as Italy’s Giovanni Arrighi and Guyana’s Walter Rodney on how Mr. Nyerere’s socialism could be adapted for the continent.
With British political economist Colin Leys, he co-authored a seminal book on Namibia’s liberation struggle.
He became a close friend of Mozambican revolutionary leader Samora Machel. At Mr. Machel’s invitation, he travelled with his FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, or Liberation Front of Mozambique) guerrilla troops through parts of the country liberated from Portugal. Some years later, he was on his way to the Mozambican university office of celebrated South African anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, to attend a party in his honour, when she was killed by a letter bomb.
And eventually he confessed in his books that he had been wrong about his predictions on how southern Africa would take shape as it emerged from European colonial oppression. He was wrong about a liberated Africa creating a new world order of equality, equal opportunity, social justice and high moral politics.
He had hoped the new governments of postcolonial and postapartheid southern Africa would launch an assault on capitalism and the inequalities it created. Instead, he found that the elites of newly independent Africa were slipping effortlessly into the roles of the white capitalist rulers they had replaced. It was, he wrote in one of his last books, a “terribly dispiriting outcome.” He quoted former South African president Thabo Mbeki as saying (“cavalierly”) in a 2006 interview about his economic policies: “Just call me a Thatcherite.”
Despite significant victories, such as the abolition of South African apartheid and the rule of a white racist minority in Rhodesia (renamed Zimbabwe) and the end of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique, the people of southern Africa still lacked freedom from “class and corporate oppression, from structures of male domination and from authoritarian political practices,” he said in his 2014 book A Flawed Freedom: Rethinking Southern African Liberation.
“Simply put, it remains the case that there has been virtually no ongoing challenge to the continuing grip of global capitalism upon any of the ostensibly ‘liberated’ countries of the region,” he wrote.
John Shannon Saul was born in Toronto in May 4, 1938, the elder son of Wilford and Dorothy Saul (née Shannon). He attended North Toronto public schools, the University of Toronto’s federated college of Victoria University, where he was awarded bachelor’s and master’s degrees; Princeton University (at the time a conservative, stuffy institution which denied him a doctorate because his thesis was disliked); and the London School of Economics. Though he never received an earned PhD, South Africa’s University of Johannesburg and his alma mater, Victoria University, both gave him honorary doctorates.
In 1962, at the age of 24, he married the love of his life, Pat Chalmers, and began to display the polyglot life for which he was to be celebrated by his friends and students.
Gerald Caplan, who accompanied him to London for graduate school, recalled John Saul taking him to see an Italian-language version of Hamlet at the Old Vic Theatre.
They both eventually returned to Toronto, Prof. Saul taking his post at York in 1972. Dr. Caplan remembers going into Prof. Saul’s library and having him point to several books in French, 19th-century novels, “and he mentioned quite in passing – he wasn’t showing off; he never did – that he reread those French classics every year once or twice. This from a guy who was writing 25 books on Africa and getting involved in the struggle.”
Prof. Saul was a devotee of opera and jazz (especially the music of Miles Davis), a film buff, a lover of mysteries and thrillers. He was a steadfast baseball fan and played basketball with the same group of friends for decades. He had an acid dry wit.
He was one of the founders of the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Canadian Association of African Studies and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Toward the end of his life he would quote Scottish academic Norrie MacQueen who described the declared Afro-Marxism of FRELIMO as “the [completed] destruction of an idea” by the “kleptocratic elites.” He would quote from a speech by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu describing the governing leadership of the country’s postapartheid African National Congress as “corrupt, arrogant and deeply estranged from those they govern.”
He nonetheless eschewed pessimism. The successful struggles against Africa’s white colonialists he saw as a step forward – a step that had to be taken, he said, in order to address the larger problem (which brought his Marxism to the fore) of class struggle, the struggle against the inequalities of capitalism.
He used the rallying cry of FRELIMO: A luta continua. The struggle continues.
Canadian journalist and friend Rick Salutin wrote in a column marking the occasion of Prof. Saul’s retirement from York University in 2003, “Saul’s writings are all about instilling hope and learning from failure. … He is a sort of underground alternate Canadian tradition to the internationalism of Lester Pearson, more like the tradition of [Canadian war doctors] Norman Bethune and Chris Giannou.
Said Prof. Leys: “It was very few foreign scholars who were accepted as full participants in the national discourse in an African country and John was, to the point where he could disagree sharply in print with very senior African politicians and that was acceptable because he’d paid his dues, fought the battles.
“His legacy is in hundreds of young Africans. Also young people in Canada who were inspired by him. He was a very impressive guy, both intellectually and in his personality.”
Prof. Saul’s wife, Pat, died last year. He leaves his brother, Bill; his children, Nick and Joanne; and grandchildren, Ben, Quinn, Clare and Charlie.