The Institute of Race Relations joins the South African liberal community in paying tribute to one of its outstanding members, economist and notable liberal thinker Charles Simkins, who died on 6 December – just one day after the memorial service for his beloved wife, Rae.
Simkins, an exemplary former Vice-President of the IRR Council, Chairman of the IRR Board of Directors, and long-time member of the board, was Head of Commerce and Vice-President of St Augustine College in Johannesburg, where he held the Oppenheimer Economics Chair.
He was head of research at the Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) for eight years until his death.
He was previously an Associate Professor at UCT, from 1980 to 1988, an economics consultant at The Urban Foundation until 1990, and Professor – as the inaugural holder of the Helen Suzman Chair in Political Economy – at Wits University until 2008, when he joined St Augustine as Professor.
After completing a BSc Hons (Physics) at the University of the Witwatersrand, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship, and obtained a MA (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University. He then completed a PhD (Economics) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg.
In its tribute, the HSF noted that Simkins had been involved in civil society organisations and initiatives for the greater part of his life, dating back to his undergraduate days at Wits, when he was elected to the SRC as Treasurer.
‘In the early 1970s, when he was living in Natal, he was extensively involved in helping to create a non-racial trade union movement. This would eventually lead to his being banned for five years under the Suppression of Communism Act. During this time, he was given permission to relocate to the Maritzburg campus where he created the Development Studies Research Group, which would become an important enabler of social and economic research. After his banning order was lifted, he moved to Cape Town, where he joined the Economics Department at UCT.’
In 1986, his Alfred and Winifred Hoernlé Memorial Lecture, Liberalism and the problem of power, delivered under the auspices of the IRR, was followed by a seminally influential work, Reconstructing South African Liberalism, at a time when South Africa was reaching out for sensible ideas. Its influence was substantial.
The HSF said of him: ‘Quite apart from the quality of his work, we will remember Charles as someone who had the rare gift of combining an impressive academic background with a no-nonsense approach to analysing complicated practical issues confronting South African society – all done with a complete absence of pretence and affectation.’
IRR chief executive Dr John Endres said: ‘We are immensely saddened by the death of Charles Simkins, which registers as the loss of a great South African liberal and intellectual.’
Simkins is remembered as an original, intellectually rigorous thinker, a gentle, humble man of good humour, and an honourable South African of great import who was at once a contributing spirit to the creation of a free society, and an advocate for the greatest vigilance in sustaining it.
[Image: https://hsf.org.za/news/press-releases/in-memoriam-charles-simkins]