It is both a profound honor and a profoundly difficult task to summon up words that do justice to the memory of Claude Ake. I knew Claude Ake as a Colleague and a friend for many, many years. I knew him as a man of apparent contradictions. To me, he was both an ideological critic and a pragmatic ally. He was the most shy and self-effacing of men, yet one of the world's most widely-known and respected voices on Africa. Abstemious to a fault (he only ate one meal a day), his presence as a thinker and opinion-maker was gargantuan.

Claude was a tough nut to crack; and yet, once you got beneath the surface it was not so difficult to see what he was all about. With the courage of his convictions, Claude practiced what he preached. And what he preached was absolute independence of mind from political, cultural, or monetary domination. He bought into many ideas over an extraordinarily productive life; but he could never be bought. He was the incarnation of intellectual honesty.

It is perhaps surprising that Claude was also a patriot-surprising because he lived in one of the world's most difficult countries to govern. His countryman Chinua Achebe has captured with words the kind of patriot Claude was. He writes that:

[A patriot] is a person who loves his country. He is not a person who says he loves his country. He is not even a person who shouts or swears or recites or sings his love of his country. He is one who cares deeply about the happiness and well-being of his country and all its people. Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by a critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their short-comings without giving way to superiority, despair or cynicism.

And, of course, Claude will long be remembered as an influential and path breaking scholar. He was one of a handful of African social scientists whose work is widely known and respected outside Africa. Indeed, Claude was as enthusiastic a social scientist as you could find. As with so many of us whose lives have been touched by the late Professor James S. Coleman, Claude imbibed Coleman's sense of social science as a tool and a weapon in the good fight - the fight for a better-governed Africa. Even when he retired from formal teaching, he kept up his professional work at his typically frenetic pace. Claude was in fact ecstatic when Professor David Apter sounded him out about the possibility of coming to Yale as a Visiting Professor. Not only would this allow him to work closely with David, a man he held in considerable esteem - a position which, incidentally, I share -- but Claude was also particularly happy with the opportunity to recharge his "intellectual batteries" at a place like Yale.

Claude's career spanned the period of Africa's independence, and he built his reputation in international academic circles as a trenchant and independent observer of the events that shaped the continent's course for four decades.

His peculiar quality was that he combined academic rigor and scholarship with a deep concern for the human condition in Africa. And while his views changed and evolved over time, that concern for the human condition was always there at the core.