With the passing of Thandika Mkandawire on March 27, 2020, the world has lost a giant of development, a towering economist, a brilliant thinker, and a committed fighter for social justice.

Born in 1940, Thandika first experienced the slap of injustice in early childhood. One night, trucks came with soldiers and removed Thandika’s family from their farm in Malawi. They resettled in a town in the Copperbelt of Zambia. There, he attended school (for blacks only) and was protected by his family from the brutal inequalities of the time, until the day he and a friend walked into an opulent white residential area to sell vegetables, and white children insulted and laughed at them.

As a young man, Thandika began writing for newspapers, but in 1965, he was made “persona non grata” in his country, the newly independent Malawi, then governed by pro-apartheid dictator, Kamuzu Banda. He managed to study in the United States (at Ohio State University), South Africa (Rhodes University), and Sweden (Stockholm University), where he eventually settled as a political refugee — living proof that refugee policies work.