JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Mail & Guardian), December 22, 2007:
Norman Reynolds, a beloved partner, father, friend and mentor, died last Saturday, December 15, while hiking with his daughters in the Drakensberg. He was 66.
Reynolds was a development economist who dedicated his life to envisioning and implementing economic rights-based programmes that restore the local economies of communities through processes that reclaim African traditions of mutual care and support and bring economic growth. He worked with people in damaged communities, advocating that development begins with reclaiming their identity and renewing their culture.
He asserted that a renewed sense of community was the appropriate vehicle through which social grants and investments might be directed towards public benefits, such as providing for child, health and investment rights. He demonstrated that citizens could become responsible parents, proud community members and partners with government through rebuilding their local production bases. The local pilots of these programmes bear testimony to this vision.
Reynolds’s innovative, sustainable community investment programme -- being implemented at several sites across South Africa and adopted by the department of provincial and local government as its official approach to local economic development -- created road maps whereby all Southern Africans, trapped because of systematic disempowerment and exploitation, might take steps towards establishing working local economies in which cash circulation is raised by up to 400%. In the private sector Reynolds pioneered democratic employee ownership.
He was born in Harare on July 14 1941 and attended Peterhouse Secondary School before enrolling at the University of Cape Town for a degree in economics. He completed his PhD in 1968 with a Study of an African Irrigation Resettlement Scheme in Eastern Zimbabwe. He was a visiting fellow at Harvard, Cambridge and Cape Town universities and was an Ashoka Fellow. He worked at the World Bank with colleagues, such as Joseph Stiglitz and David Ellerman, and at the World Bank in India between 1970 and 1975. He joined the Ford Foundation between 1975 and 1979 as its rural development specialist in India and south Asia. In the early 1970s Reynolds helped Steve Biko and the Black Peoples’ Convention to establish economic programmes.
He was chief economist in the first post-liberation Zimbabwean cabinet between 1981 and 1986. After directing the Southern Africa Foundation for Economic Research in Harare between 1987 and 1990, Reynolds returned to South Africa and continued his work with Earth Africa, the Market Society and the People’s Agenda. Between 1992 and 1995 he chaired the National Drought Forum and worked on the Spatial Development Plan for the City of Cape Town and then on the Integrated Development Plan for Johannesburg.
In 2002 the United Nations requested that Reynolds develop a relief and recovery plan for Zimbabwe. He contributed a weekly column, illustrated by his friend Len Sak, to The Zimbabwean. In 2004 he founded The People’s Agenda.
He left footprints in the lives of many people. He committed his enormous intellect, passion and time to the cause of economic justice and human dignity. We will miss him sorely as we work to take forward his ideas and thinking.
Reynolds is survived by his partner, Lucy Thornton, his brother, Lance Reynolds, and his four daughters, Talitha, Portia, Sabaa and Abigail. His memorial service is at 12pm on December 22 at The Cottages, 30 Gill Road, Observatory, Johannesburg. --
By Marjorie Jobson
Marjorie Jobson is a board member of The People’s Agenda, which Reynolds chaired
Copyright Mail&Guardian, Johannesburg
