Gracias Companero: An appreciation of Orlando Fals Borda

Abstract

I first met Orlando Fals Borda in April of 1977. He was standing in the lobby of an older colonial style hotel in the city of Cartagena, Columbia. He was sur-rounded by a group of very earnest younger and older Latin Americans who were holding very heated discussions about the nature of knowledge, the role of intellectuals in revolutionary change and the age-old question in times of need: 'What is to be done?". The occasion was a meeting of 56 scholar-activists from all over the world, whom Orlando Fals Borda had brought together to this Caribbean city of coastal Colombia to embark on a daring new idea: to break the positivist hold on science by means of recognizing channels of valid knowledge production by and with the common people, with the purpose of social recon-struction and participation. Some of those scholars had been working to these ends since the late 1960s outside of academic confines. Orlando traced his lineage in Participatory Action Research and related approaches from that meeting. At the time, I was a newly appointed research officer working with the International Council for Adult Education, fresh from five years working in Tanzania where a number of us began the work which we coined 'participatory research'. A number of us were working on the building of an international par-ticipatory research network and we needed Orlando's ideas and support to move our work forward.