Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr and your family, excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Godwin Murunga, the Executive Secretary of CODESRIA. I would like to begin with the caveat that my statement will not be like the others, partly because in the scheme of things, Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr taught the people who ended up teaching those who taught me. So that makes it very complicated for me. When I came here, I assumed that I would be speaking only on behalf of CODESRIA only to discover that just a few years before I was born, Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr was in East Africa. I am Kenyan and I think he knows a few secrets about Kenya's inadequacies in relation to progressive politics and I might end up having to apologise for the mistakes of my seniors.

When I heard the news that we were thinking about this celebration of Professor Sawyerr's life and contributions, I started imagining a memoir that I will read in 2021. I thought about the title and discovered how inadequately I was positioned to give that memoir a title, but it is a memoir that will be written by Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr. In that memoir, CODESRIA will have a chapter and it will be a chapter with serious, rigorous engaging scholarship on the social sciences and humanities in Africa and indeed, in the world. But also, it will be a chapter with some drama. Because Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr was the President of CODESRIA from 1996 to 1998. I can easily count up to ten people in this room who can speak to what the CODESRIA General Assembly normally is · a meeting of at least 500 social scientists, scholars and humanity scholars from across the continent and the diaspora.

The 1995 General Assembly was particularly dramatic, partly because a number of young academics, and one of them is sining here laughing, our Keynote Speaker, decided that it was a nice moment to shake up the council and begin" to challenge the "gerontocracies." At the same time feminists in the organisation also questioned the masculine and patriarchal manner CODESRIA had cast itself. The two movements met at the 1995 General Assembly, at the end of which Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr was elected President of CODESRIA. And if he thought that the drama would end with the election, it was not to be as it was also a moment of transition in CODESRIA secretariat. The Executive Secretary Professor Thandika Mkandawire who had served in the council from the 1970s ifl'm not wrong, risen through the ranks to become Executive Secretary was leaving and we needed a new Executive Secretary.

It was the duty of Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr as President of CODESRIA to lead the organisation through, what in my view, was an early mid-life crisis. Anyone of you who has handled a combination of adolescence and mid-life crisis will know how difficult it is to manage the combination! Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr helped CODESRIA to manage the combination. So those of us in CODESRIA, those of us in the African social sciences and humanities community want to thank Ghana for the gift that Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr has been. I won't dilute that by mentioning that a part of the training that produced him comes from East Africa!. I think the richness of his experience is informed for me, partly by the vastness of Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr's understanding of the terrain. Not just of the social sciences in Africa but the social sciences and humanities generally, both within the continent and in the diaspora and we thank you very much for this.

Last year in December 2018, CODESRIA held its 15th General Assembly. I had been appointed Executive Secretary a year and a half before so this was the first time I had to organize this major event. In the Secretariat, we spent close to three weeks of sleepless nights, worrying about making sure that the General Assembly was successful. On the first day of that General Assembly Professor Akilagpa Sawyerr was the Chair of the panel with a keynote speaker. Prof you do not know this, but the few words you said just before you opened up the panel calmed all of us in the Secretariat. You said you are happy to be invited to the CODESRIA General Assembly as a member of an older generation of CODESRIA, to an Assembly that was being organised by a much younger generation of academics on the continent and everything was going very well. That statement alone calmed all of us and we had a very interesting General Assembly.

The integrity you bring to your work, the soft voice that can send far the fine message, the friendship you have with the big and small is something that speaking for myself I have appreciated a lot. This is why we in CODESRIA decided we want to advertise ourselves with our nice little gift. I thank the organisers for allowing me to make this presentation to you on behalf of CODESRIA. Thank you very much.