Remembering a loyal Malawian colleague and contemplating the challenges of mortality for collaborative research in Africa

By Elsbeth Robson

This blog is prompted by the tragic death of my valued colleague and collaborator at the Centre for Social Research of the University of Malawi – James Milner. On 2nd September 2014 James was involved in a road accident while conducting fieldwork in the north of Malawi. He was hospitalised and later died in Mwaiwathu Private Hospital, Blantyre on 7th September 2014. The James I knew and miss was committed to his work, his family and his church.

James’s sudden death is a huge shock and loss to his family, friends and colleagues around the world. He worked as an economist for the Government of Malawi for five years and 19 years as a research fellow at the Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi. He studied as a postgraduate at Williams College in the USA and York University in the UK.

I worked with James on an ESRC-DFID funded project investigating young people’s use of mobile phones in Africa (available here). He joined the project team in 2012 and quickly became a valued colleague for his dedication, loyalty, dependability and thoroughness. We last undertook fieldwork together in January earlier this year when we spent several weeks running a large questionnaire survey with a team of research assistants. It was demanding work involving long days in remote communities, rough roads, heat, occasional malaria and even reluctant respondents at times. Our evenings were spent closely quality checking piles of completed questionnaires and closely monitoring research assistants’ performance. James’ contribution was vital to ensuring everything went smoothly.

During fieldwork we usually travelled as a team together with a driver and several research assistants in a Toyota Landcruiser and as I always do I regularly reminded everyone to wear a seat belt and encouraged those reluctant to use the seatbelts because they were dusty, difficult to adjust and uncomfortable that it is better to ‘Arrive Alive’. I am a passionate believer in the virtue of seatbelts having been personally in two vehicle accidents (overturned minibus on US fieldtrip; collision in Germany) where seatbelts saved lives and because I might have been orphaned as a child had my mother not been wearing a seatbelt in an accident at high speed on a UK dual carriageway. It is painful for me to know that last month James was not wearing a seatbelt and was flung from the vehicle sustaining injuries, while the front passenger (a visiting researcher from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) and the University of Malawi driver who were wearing seatbelts escaped relatively unscathed.

I took this photo in July 2013 during the qualitative fieldwork phase of the mobile phone project. James (wearing glasses, 3^rd from left) is standing together with our hardworking team of research assistants during a break from transcription of interviews at the College of Medicine Guesthouse in Blantyre, Malawi.

While mourning the loss of a colleague James’ untimely death prompts wider reflections on the unevenness of the playing field between academics in/of the Global North and those in/of the Global South. It is a stark reality that life expectancy in the Global North (UK average life expectancy is over 80 years) far exceeds life expectancy in the Global South (like expectancy for Malawi is about 55 years). This bare demographic fact has major implications for trying to build and sustain long term North-South academic research collaborations.

It is more than poignant that on the weekend of his death James was expected to be travelling to the UK to present at a DFID-ESRC event in London with a collaborator from Durham University.  Sadly, during the past three decades of my career James is not the first academic collaborator I have worked with in Africa who has died before old age. An academic geographer at University of Malawi, as well as two team members (one a young researcher) in Ghana at University of Cape Coast all died during or shortly after we worked together on collaborative international research projects. None of these died in road accidents I believe but HIV/AIDS is one of the top causes of adult deaths for both Malawi and Ghana along with stroke and heart disease which also kill plenty of people in UK too. I can recall only one colleague in UK I might have collaborated with if he hadn’t died of cancer in his 50s. Other UK colleagues continue to be academically active into their 70s and 80s.

Where the death toll from road accidents in Africa are concerned expatriates are also not immune. I knew two British geographers and long term Africa residents who died tragically in car accidents in Kenya and South Africa. Their contributions to research and teaching which might otherwise have been expected to continue for several decades longer were curtailed.

Mortality on Africa’s roads is shockingly high - Malawi has the 3^rd highest rate of deaths from road traffic accidents in the world (here) exacerbated by poorly maintained vehicles and dangerous driving habits.

Are my experiences of the tragic loss of colleagues typical for researchers who work in the Global South and try to build up long term collaborative relationships? I suspect these experiences are not unique and there are similar challenge for those who work in Africa and other poor countries. 

A social scientist, a geographer or an Africanist? Researcher profile by Elsbeth Robson

Hi, I’m Elsbeth and I describe myself variously as a social scientist, children’s geographer, Africanist or development geographer depending on who I’m talking to. And that’s just at work – I juggle various identities in the rest of my life too. I joined the Department of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Hull in summer 2013 as a Lecturer in Human Geography. Hard to believe it’s already been almost a year! As a geographer, I have special interests in Africa having had the opportunity to work there on and off thoughout my career since a gap year in Kenya in 1987 straight after my A-levels. My expertise in children/youth geographies and feminist/gender geographies emerged later but can probably be traced back to doing babysitting as a teenager and early exposure to feminist ideas. In my research I embrace qualitative, participatory and quantitative research methods. So how did I get here?

Well, I began with my first degree (BSc Hons) in Geography at Durham University (1990) where I thrived in an all-women’s college (Trevelyan, now sadly mixed but still with intriguing hexagonal architecture). 

Durham Cathedral – awesome to be a student living in a village with a Norman cathedral in the middle used as the University’s gathering place for matriculations and graduations

The Durham years included a year studying as an ERASMUS student at Tübingen University, Germany, and an independent research project in Kenya on peri-urban land-use transformations back where I’d volunteered in an orphanage on a former sisal/cattle estate now a resettlement zone. My doctorate (Oxford University 2002) focused on the work of rural Hausa women in Northern Nigeria using feminist theories of empowerment applied to socio-spatial mobilities and inequalities. It was quite a cultural shift being a graduate student and working in West Africa. To be honest without a Masters degree as a stepping stone it was a bit of a struggle and I always advise students now to do a Masters before a PhD as it gives you time and training to be a better researcher. After five years wrestling with my doctorate in Oxford and Nigeria it was time to get a job. After 25 applications and 5 interviews I landed 2 job offers, turned the first one down and ended up as a Lecturer in Development Studies (within Geography) at Keele University. I was there for a decade after that (1995-2005). The best bits were leading regular undergraduate fieldtrips to Kenya and developing research on young people’s caregiving work within the AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa. I also undertook an MA in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Keele University 2006) – it was fun learning to teach alongside lots of other young new lecturers from across the university.

The splendid Keele Hall – where I once enjoyed sherry at a round table on gender issues hosed by the then Vice Chancellor Prof Janet Finch

Then prior to moving to Hull I spent more than nine years living in Malawi engaged in a mix of research and consultancy that gave me chances to work on a variety of projects including a year as social research officer in Malawi’s leading theatre for development NGO called Nanzikambe Arts. Now that was even more fun – working with drumming going on outside my window, attending performances, being involved in the trials and tribulations of an expatriate-established NGO going through change to being wholly Malawian-led. My major research engagements in Malawi involved managing the in-country component of three large multi-country, inter-institutional and inter-disciplinary ESRC-DFID research grants focussed variously on children/youth, transport, mobility, mobile phones, food security and AIDS. There’s more detail about my research projects on my web page http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/gees/staff/robson.aspx . While in Malawi I also had the chance to leading the occasional fieldcourse for UK geography undergraduates to Africa.

Royal Holloway University of London students and guides at end of a fieldcourse in Malawi, 2013

I’m trying to maintain my strong ties with Malawi and strengthening connections between Hull and Malawi. So already I have three PhD students starting research in October 2014 on colonial childhoods and caregiving youth in Malawi. A departmental Malawi fieldcourse is being revived to a field studies centre in the Likhubula Valley at the base of Mount Mulanje with a batch of third years heading off there in September this year. Other courses I teach include Children’s Geographies for final year students and Geographies of Development for first years. For the World Cities course I’ve also enjoyed preparing a couple of lectures on Nairobi in Kenya where I spent my gap year in 1985/6 and have visited many times in the intervening decades.

For the last year or so in my last lecturing post at Keele I was the only woman academic staff member in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences. So it’s nice to join a department in Hull with a better gender balance and current focus on responding to the lack of women in senior positions through the University’s engagement with Athena Swan and Aurora initiatives to promote greater gender equity in higher education. Things have changed a lot from when I was an undergraduate when there were only four female professors of geography in the whole of the UK. Now there are single departments with more than half a dozen female professors……….ours is not one of them L So there are still glass ceilings in academia for women but if we don’t tackle them they won’t crack. There are probably less stressful and easier jobs in the world than being an academic but there’s still plenty of flexibility, academic stimulation if you like reading and ideas and finding out. Oh and still a few battles to fight as well.