My friend and longstanding colleague, Reginald Green, who has died aged 86, was a development economist writing and advising on African economic issues, especially those of Tanzania, Mozambique and Namibia, and on what is now the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
In the 1960s and early 70s Reg was economic adviser to President Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, in the years when Nyerere was the darling of the donor community. In the 1980s, he was a key economic adviser to the South West Africa People’s Organisation (Swapo) liberation movement and the UN Institute of Namibia during Namibia’s run-up to independence in 1991.
Reg, a committed Christian, was highly conscious of the often-ignored ethical dimensions of debt, trade, aid, north-south relationships and political liberation more generally. His early book, Unity or Poverty: The Economics of Pan Africanism (1968), made the case for African countries to coordinate as a key condition for development.
Reg amply displayed the lifestyle of a bizarre eccentric. While commanding respect, support and only occasional exasperation from his friends, he often generated offhand dismissal from those who did not bother to read his articles. Strangers reacted instead to his whooping laugh, his head topped by long hair under a small Muslim cap and his colourful neckerchiefs tied with a cowrie-shell knot. In his later years living in Lewes, East Sussex, his gangly frame, hunched over and supported by Tanzanian walking sticks on both sides was instantly recognisable – and widely recognised: his public image by then was more tramp than eccentric.
Reg wrote prolifically – more than 500 published professional articles, papers, book chapters and books. Perhaps his most influential contribution was one commissioned by Unicef in the 1980s. In Children on the Front Line (1987) he estimated that more than two million children under five in Mozambique and Angola had died as a result of South Africa’s destructive economic and military policies targeted on these countries. The study was cited a number of times in the US Congress and helped bring a change in western support to the apartheid regime of South Africa.
Reg was born in Walla Walla, Washington, the son of a clergyman and professor, Reginald Green, and his wife, Marcia Herbold. He graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, then went to Harvard, where he gained his doctorate in 1961. After this, he joined the Economic Growth Centre in Yale University and then the University of Ghana, and Makerere University College in Uganda.
He worked in the Treasury of Tanzania from 1966 until 1974, and also served as adviser to Nyerere and as honorary professor of economics at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1975, he was made a professorial fellow of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, which served as his main base until his retirement at the end of 2000.
His 26 years at the IDS gave him freedom and opportunity for continuing involvements in countries of east and southern Africa, the Economic Commission of Africa, and various international organisations. His concern with poverty reduction, liberation and broad-based development were connecting threads through all his writings.
His marriage to Bliss Griffiths ended in divorce.
