Adam Curle’s first degree was in anthropology and, like so many British anthropologists, this study introduced him to Africa and gave him an interest in that continent he never lost. One of his early academic appointments was a professor of education at the University of Ghana, while much of his intermediary work occurred in Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
After service in the Second World War he worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London, helping to resettle former British POWs. He then taught at Oxford University and the University of Exeter and in the 1950s travelled and engaged in development work in the Middle East and Asia, including the Indian sub-continent. This enabled him to get to know some of the leaders of both India and Pakistan and to act as an intermediary following the 1971 Indo-Pak War. Much of this work is described in his early book, Making Peace, in which he first touched on the question of whether “peacemaking” should also involve development and of the necessity for surfacing inequalities and injustices as a preliminary to trying to find some equitable solution.
Curle was the first Professor of the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford in northern England, which became the premier centre for peace and conflict studies in that country. However, he was an unconventional academic. It was as a Quaker practitioner that he was best known and it was this work which informed much of his writing. Before going to Bradford he had spent several perilous years acting as an intermediary between the breakaway Biafran regime and the Nigerian Federal Government in Lagos, where he earned the trust and friendship of the Nigerian military leader, General Yakubu Gowon. As he mentions in this interview, between 1967 and 1969, Curle and his Quaker colleague, Walter Martin, made several flights into Biafra to convey ideas and occasionally offers to Colonel Ojukwu and the Biafran leaders. In the process they joined the many third parties attempting to mediate in that long forgotten war -- but in their case always in danger of being shot down by a marauding Federal night fighter. Curle incorporated many of the practical lessons he learned about peacemaking from this initiative in his small but powerful account entitled In the Middle, which became essential reading for a whole generation of potential go-betweens.
After retiring from Bradford in 1978 and handing over to his successor, James O’Connell, Adam continued his peacemaking work and his writing, spending time and effort in Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, South Africa – where he was arrested and jailed - and Northern Ireland. In the former-Yugoslavia he was a central figure in the establishment of the Centre for Peace, Non-Violence and Human Rights in Osijek, Croatia. He was awarded the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2000 and died in London at the age of 90 in September 2006.
JB/CRM
