My first encounter with the late historian David Beach was a non-encounter. I spent most of 1990 and 1991 hoping not to meet him, and by careful planning, I cunningly succeeded in fulfilling this objective. (Albeit with the assistance of the Zimbabwean government, which helpfully closed the University of Zimbabwe during my time there.) It is not that I had heard anything in particular about Beach before arriving. In fact, I was woefully understudied in useful gossip about Zimbabwean scholars. My anxiety about Beach came first from the context of my own graduate studies and second from my anxiety about my own knowledge.

Without naming names, I can say that I had come into conflict early in my graduate work with one of the senior professors in my department. Without going into the gory details, it would be fair to say that the conflict was both regretable and inevitable, and as much about style as substance. However, one of the substantive issues on which I found myself perennially at loggerheads with this advisor concerned our fundamentally different sensibilities about the social and political obligations and character of the historical profession. Certainly my declared political sensibilities at that point were frequently loud, superficial, and swaggeringly self-righteous, but our disagreement went far deeper than a matter of different ideological loyalties.

This advisor was fond of declaring himself an objective empiricist who approached history without a politics, a scholar who believed that his central responsibility was to pursue intellectual inquiry without suborning that inquiry to any political agenda.