"Reciprocity is a human principle": Barbara Harrell-Bond as mentor and friend

Barbara Harrell-Bond and Fatima Hashmi

Fatima Hashmi writes:

The memorial for the late Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond is taking place on 24 November 2018, at the Simpkins Lee Theatre, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. It will be the perfect opportunity to celebrate her life and her pioneering work in refugee studies with her family, friends, colleagues and the millions of people whose lives were transformed, including mine. Writing this blog has been an emotional journey for me, but I want to share what I learned from her and how influential she was in my life.

I got to know Barbara in 2014, through the Development and Emergency Practice (DEP) Masters course at Oxford Brookes University. It was Richard Carver's human rights module when I was introduced to the name of Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond. Yes, as strange as it may sound, I had never heard of her, let alone know what a legend she was in refugee studies. Richard mentioned that the students could take the opportunity to intern with her, which will be very beneficial for us, particularly for our dissertations. I casually said her name to my friend who had recommended the DEP course. Given that my friend worked in UNHCR in Islamabad, his response was 'this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to work so closely with the pioneer of refugee studies’. It was exactly that!

The first day I met her was at her famous flat in Oxford for the induction as an intern for the Rights in Exile Programme. Her way of teaching involved watching videos and real-life testimonies of refugees, which I must admit have stuck with me to this day. Her unwavering dedication for the voices of refugees to be heard and for the protection of their human rights was so infectious that I spent the entire day at her flat, long after the induction was over.

As an intern, I quickly learned the importance of writing coherent refugee testimonies, which Barbara advocated endlessly. It was hard to be detached from the (most often unbearable) stresses the refugees’ experienced. Given her anthropological background, she had developed a unique way of conducting refugee testimonies. It was instead a life history interview. The moments considered not as significant by the refugees were the ones Barbara would delve into deeper. No doubt, the majority of the cases were successful because of this method of approach towards conducting testimonies.

Over the next few weeks, I witnessed Barbara’s generosity and her continuous compassion for refugees for whom Barbara provided her flat as a sanctuary or a transit point. The ones who found refuge at her flat never felt as though she was doing them a favour because she firmly believed that ‘reciprocity is a human principle!!’. They in return would help cook delicious meals and also became interns for Barbara. I also had the opportunity to meet many intellectuals, academics and refugees from around the globe over dinner parties at her flat.

Anyone who knew Barbara would agree to her love of spicy food. To thank her for how much she had transformed my life, I started cooking Pakistani dishes for her. One of her most favourite dishes was Chicken Biryani. But Barbara felt uneasy that I always brought her Pakistani food. In one of our email chats she wrote ‘I miss you but don't dare tell you since you ALWAYS cook and won't let me pay’. And in the same email she introduced me to Marcel Mauss ‘The Gift’ and her essay on ‘The Experience of Refugees as Recipients of Aid’. This is how she taught me, through real-life experiences, which I would then put to use towards my essays and my dissertation. I found her so fascinating that I wanted other students to learn from her as much as I was learning. Any opportunity I got or whenever a colleague, friend, a Hazara community member asked me anything related to the topic of refugees, I would introduce them to Barbara, and she helped them with the same vigour.

As I was spending a lot of time with Barbara, she realised that I did not have a car and to make it easier she even insured me on her daughter’s car. From that moment on, there were endless dinners, drives and long chats. She had so many fantastic anecdotal stories (from the most light-hearted, fun, quirky ones.... unique to her.... to the most serious). We went everywhere, from hospital visits for her eyesight to court visits for refugee hearings.

At Fatima's graduation

During my time as an intern, I had several amazing opportunities to learn as much as I possibly could in the short time that I knew Barbara. I remember how she would insist on making the most of her knowledge and her connections in helping refugees. Like with everyone else she knew, she was gifted in pushing people to achieve the best versions of who they can be. Barbara was also my mentor, who helped me not only in my dissertation but also throughout the Master's programme. Needless to say, she also came to my graduation ceremony. I remember I was upset that my parents were not able to attend and she simply asked me to mark the date and time on her calendar.

One of the first things she said to me was ‘you have to get a distinction if you want to do a PhD’. The thought of a PhD had not occurred to me until that day. Barbara became an important figure in my life, as she did with all the people who knew her. She had an infectious personality, I included her in all of my major life decisions, and she was always seriously involved in making those decisions together. Given her teaching career at CENDEP, Barbara suggested that I should pursue my PhD at CENDEP because of the excellent support structure I already had in place, regarding the supervisory team.

Another thing I learned from Barbara was that field notes were a significant source of documentation, which today thanks to Barbara, we have the Refugee Studies Programme Documentation Centre, specifically archiving such documents. When I was conducting my research on the Hazara community in Oxford, Barbara organised for my visit to the RSP Documentation Centre. As we all know, Barbara struggled with remembering names and appointments, but she never forgot the important events. For example, she remembered that there exists one such field note from Quetta on the Hazaras forced migration from Afghanistan to Pakistan. Rightly so, I found that document dated from the 80s. In fact, there is no mention about Barbara’s work with the Afghans. During the 1980s, with the escalation of the Soviet War, Barbara had travelled to Quetta to attend a historic meeting with the Mujahedeen, who had battled against the Soviets. She also mentored one of the most notable figures in Hazara literature, Sayed Askar Mousavi and because I was conducting my research on the Hazaras, she arranged for me to meet him.

All the interns gained tremendous knowledge from her and today most of them are working in the humanitarian field, particularly in refugee studies, including many in the UNHCR. I too had the opportunity to attend the UNHCR Annual Consultations with NGOs, the very first year Barbara had to miss due to her health and insisted I stayed with her son David and her daughter-in-law Brigitte in France. They welcomed me in their home as a part of their family. What I loved about her the most was how much trust and faith she had in all of her interns. We were her troops, getting ready to continue her legacy.

Barbara’s steadfast professionalism, astuteness, brilliance and pragmatism was always a joy to watch. When my parents met with Barbara, the first thing my father mentioned was how energetic she was for her age and were shocked to see her working round the clock, to which she responded, ‘I don’t believe in retirement!’. Rightly so, in one of her most recent emails, she wrote ‘I don't have lots of time yet, losing my voice and my eyesight!! So, use me while I am still here’.

Remembering Barbara at CENDEP

Barbara Harrell-Bond 1935-2018 (credit: Refugee Studies Centre)

Richard Carver writes:

Barbara Harrell-Bond, who had a good claim to be the founder of refugee studies, died last week at the age of 85. According to her friend and colleague Themba Lewis, she was “surrounded by her family and her files,” which sounds about right. There have already been tributes and obituaries aplenty and there will be many more. I want to write about something that has not been mentioned in any of the tributes I have seen: namely that Barbara’s highly distinguished teaching career concluded with the eight years she spent from 2011 at CENDEP.

I first met Barbara in 1985. She had recently completed the fieldwork for the book that became Imposing Aid, a study of refugee livelihoods in southern Sudan that has had an extraordinary influence on the field. I had just started as Amnesty International’s researcher on Uganda and had, or so I thought, made an appointment with the director of Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Programme (RSP) to interview her about Ugandan refugees in Sudan. I went to her home, a large ground-floor flat in a grand Victorian villa in North Oxford. The experience was disconcerting, to say the least. Barbara apparently had no recollection of our appointment; she handed me a file of documents, sat me on a sofa and disappeared, not to return for an hour or so. The house was full of people, mostly Africans, wandering to and fro and apparently very busy on purposes unexplained. Over the course of an afternoon, Barbara granted me a few minutes now and again, and I left in some frustration, having discovered none of what I was looking for.

My next encounter with Barbara was several years later when, completely out of the blue, she invited me to come and teach at the RSP. I had no academic qualifications at the time, my only connection with Oxford University being some unhappy undergraduate years. I also had very little experience of the topic that I was to teach: refugee livelihood and economy. The Oxford powers-that-be thought I was an exceptionally poor choice, but Barbara didn’t give a fig for university authorities, so I was in. It later dawned on me that I was there not for some previously unsuspected expertise in livelihoods, but because of my human rights work. This corresponded with a new turn in Barbara’s own work that would culminate in her second great book, Rights in Exile, written with Guglielmo Verdirame.

In 1996, Barbara retired from Oxford University, or rather she was retired, very much against her will. This prompted perhaps the most influential phase of her career, establishing refugee studies centres in Kampala and Cairo, both with a more activist bent than had been permitted in Oxford. Then she returned, to a slightly less grand North Oxford flat, but one still marked by that constant flow of people and hum of activity. What might have been a retirement for most people – a real one this time, as she was now well into her seventies – became simply a new phase of activity. She established a new organization devoted to refugees’ legal rights and continued with extraordinary energy as both expert witness and informal adviser.

The academic research was now in the past, but not the teaching. In 2011, I was trying to put together a new module on refugees as part of our DEP Masters programme. The difficulty with a broad, introductory module like this is that it is extremely multidisciplinary. Someone like me (legal scholar, historian) can cover the law and history, but not the anthropology, sociology, psychology… and so on. I needed help, which arrived in the form of three excellent and charismatic scholars and teachers: Barbara herself, Giorgia Dona, and Helia Lopez. Typically, both Giorgia and Helia were people I got to know through Barbara, which remains pretty much how things are in the world of refugee studies. Barbara herself initially taught two sessions: one on “representing refugees” and the other on refugee camps, to which she was passionately opposed. After a while, she no longer had the energy for two sessions, so just gave the class on representation – essentially an introduction to refugee status determination, laced with anecdotes from her own experience.

In the classroom, various of Barbara’s characteristics came to the fore. I have never known anyone for whom the expression “doesn’t suffer fools gladly” was more appropriate. She tended towards impatience with less gifted students, but most of all she was intolerant of those who made no effort. In one famous incident, passed down from cohort to cohort as a piece of DEP folk history, she threw out a student who admitted to not having done the reading for her class. I was appalled, yet the interesting thing is that while the students were chastened none of them, not even the one affected, took against Barbara because of this. Indeed, they generally adored this increasingly tiny figure, struggling in later years to hear or be heard, but still with the sharpest intellect and (when she deemed necessary) the sharpest tongue.

A number of students took up the offer to go and volunteer with Barbara and the Rights in Exile programme or, best of all, to receive her advice on their dissertation research. On the odd occasion this did not work out so well, but those who braved Barbara’s criticism won her respect and benefitted from an enormous generosity with her knowledge and wisdom.

Our class always has several students who are or have been refugees. I think that the strong connection with these students came because Barbara’s distinctive contribution to scholarship was to restore the centrality of refugee agency. Today this might seem trite and obvious, but only because Barbara’s work has been so influential that it is now a commonplace. Much refugee studies literature is in the realm of public policy, but I think that, at root, Barbara was not in favour of any policy towards refugees. Simply give refugees their legal due and allow them to run their own lives.

In recent years, Barbara several times referred to Brookes as “the university in Oxford that actually cares about refugees.” Of course, this was a dig at her old employer as much as it was a genuine compliment to her new one, but we were still happy to accept it. We should return the compliment: Barbara Harrell-Bond was the scholar who actually cared about refugees.