I was rereading ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ when just before Christmas I heard of Andrew’s illness. That book is the second of the seven volumes of CS Lewis’ ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, written for his god-daughter Lucy, published in 1950. Andrew, like CS Lewis, was an Oxford man, so that is a nice connection. If you are watching in New Zealand or Singapore, Malaysia or India, or the Americas, you may not know the books: let me say that The Chronicles of Narnia are a classic of British children’s literature, of fantasy and adventure, with many allusions to the Christian faith.

In the first volume, we meet a young boy, Digory Kirk, who magically finds his way into another land. He meets Aslan, the lion, and witnesses the founding of Narnia: the creation of a beautiful land of forests and grasslands, mountains and rivers, and a host of wild beasts. We also read how evil damaged the world of Narnia. The story reminded me of Andrew, who cared so much for our natural and human environment, and cared how we human beings have damaged it and our interrelationships.

At the end of the first volume of The Chronicles, the young Digory comes back from Narnia to our world with a magic apple which grows into a tree. The wood of the tree is used to build a magic wardrobe. The second volume, ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ is best known of all. The boy Digory of volume 1 becomes old Professor Digory in volume 2. Aha, a Professor! Another connection! Four children are evacuated during WW2 to live in the home of Professor Digory. Through the magic wardrobe the four children enter Narnia and find it frozen by the White Witch in a sort of ‘global cooling’. In the damaged Narnia it was 'always winter and never Christmas’. The rest of that volume explains how Narnia was restored through the power of Aslan, the lion.

So, we read of a wise old professor who knew the land of Narnia and its original beauty, damaged by global cooling. Had CS Lewis written in the 2020s rather than the 1950s he might have reworked Narnia to be subject to global warming. [Quite remarkably, there is catastrophic sea-level rise in the final book, volume 7, but you will have to read about that for yourself]. We are here to honour another Professor whose life’s work in agricultural economics and development was to address the challenges of poverty, hunger, injustice and climate change—as if he were combatting the damage that beset Narnia.

Andrew’s PhD on smallholder agriculture was the foundation for his work. If Malawi and Africa were his first and principal interest, he did branch out. Someone wrote:

Andrew was an original thinker way ahead of his time, who was very keen to reach out to other disciplines beyond agricultural economics, such as the links between agricultural development and conservation science, well before others were making these connections.

Also:

He was a pioneer in defining the research space linking agriculture, nutrition and health… 

Among many other colleagues in the UK and overseas, I was fortunate to collaborate with him. I accompanied him to Vietnam to examine agricultural markets; he introduced me to Malawi and we worked together on farmer organizations. Together we puffed up and down the hilly streets of La Paz, Bolivia at an altitude of nearly 4000m above sea level, alternately talking and walking, needing to stop to catch our breath so that we could talk some more…

There is so much we didn’t realise about climate change, but Andrew was ahead of most of us, taking on board the accelerating effects and the likely impacts on his beloved smallholder farmers. He changed the curriculum and student profile in our Centre for Development, Environment and Policy at SOAS by introducing a module on climate change. ‘Climate Change and Development’ became a full Masters Programme. As a family you Dorwards changed your lifestyle in ways that even now, if all of us were to do so, we would reduce our ecological footprint. International travel was a part of Andrew’s work, but someone wrote:

He was offsetting his flight carbon and following a planetary health diet years before most people!

That is just one neat example of doing and thinking to which Jienchi and Leejiah referred. In his retirement he didn’t stop thinking. To combat climate change he envisaged a shift from farming as we know it towards industrialised production of protein foods. At the end of last November I sent him a paper from the journal Nature Food which was titled ‘A scoping review of cultivated meat: techno-economic analyses to inform future research directions for scaled-up manufacturing’. How exciting?! Well, we never got to talk about it. Instead, we made a cinema trip to watch Paddington in Peru. But his mind was still working, and maybe he will be proved right about cultivated meat.

Respect for the environment, a better deal for smallholder farmers, justice and equity were key aspects of his life. But he was an integrated soul: coherent and consistent, not just in his profession. He was joined up as husband, father, brother and in-law, grandfather and great-uncle, cousin, friend and academic colleague, a mentor to such as the children in our Sunday Club, steadfast to Scotland whatever happened in the Six Nations, and firm in his faith in Jesus Christ.

Not every idea was good, not every diagram was immediately intelligible. He would be upset if we were naïve, because he was honest: like all of us from time to time, not everything worked out.

The ultimate driver of his life was the Christian love exemplified by Jesus, described in St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: 'Love is patient and kind, not boastful or rude, not irritable or resentful, rejoices in the truth’.

His knowledge without love would have been nothing. As for his research, he would agree with St Paul that ‘We know only in part…’ As a Christian, and of a future age, he would say ‘then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’.

Digory, the boy who brought back the magic apple, then the Professor who owned the house with the magic wardrobe, reappears in the consummation of The Chronicles in volume 7. This last volume was published in 1956 as Andrew was entering the world. That was a good year! There is a reunion in a new Narnia of all Lewis’ characters. Happily, the old Professor Digory has been rejuvenated and ‘unstiffened’. He and the others are now able to run, faster than an arrow flies, further up and further in, through a land where all the good of the old Narnia has been transformed and built into the new Narnia, more real and more beautiful.

Lewis concludes for his characters that of this ending:

… it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page…

Legacy… is not something you leave behind. Legacy is the building blocks of the future, the laying of bricks of a new creation that will last, more real and more beautiful. Andrew’s legacy, all the good of his life and work, are part of, are built into the kingdom of heaven of which Jesus spoke, that is near at hand, that is now and is to come, more real and more beautiful than hitherto we have known.

So, to the book of Revelation, and the vision of a new heaven, a new earth, and the new Jerusalem, where God dwells with his peoples:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. The one who is seated on the throne says, “See, I am making all things new… it is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”.

Andrew has not gone. He’s not gone and forgotten—we are here and around the world, remembering. He’s not gone fishing, even though he might have enjoyed that. He has gone ahead, gone before us. As we said so often in memory of Eswatini, hamba kahle, Andrew, go well.  On behalf of all of us, I want to say, thank you, Andrew... And to you, Sam Ling and the whole family, sullani kahle, stay well.

Maybe Andrew would wish for us that we ‘Today, remember, and rest tomorrow; but on Monday get back to work’—to work in that love which always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. So be it.