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Andre “Gunder” Frank, one of the foremost economists of the 20 th Century, passed away on 23 rd April 2005 in his home in Luxembourg, leaving behind him 1000 publications translated into 30 languages, including 43 book titles in 140 different language editions and more than 160 printings, 169 chapters in 145 books and around 400 articles published in 600 issues of periodicals and newspapers, both academic as well as popular. But it is not for his prolific writings alone that he shall be remembered. The scholar, Gunder Frank, shall remained etched in our collective memory for doing what he loved doing best: turning paradigms upside down, displacing the centre to the periphery, making us turn our eyes towards the South and Re/Orienting our thinking away from a Eurocentric world. Gunder –nicknamed after a famous long-distance runner- the man, shall be remembered for his courageous personal and professional stance in anti-imperialist struggles.

Andreas Frank was born on 24 February 1929 in Berlin to German-Jewish parents who in 1933 were forced to flee to Switzerland with Hitler's rise to power. It is in this multilingual country that Frank started what he called his odyssey which later led him to become an “itinerant medieval scholar” making the rounds of centres of learning, accumulating academic honours and plaudits and then becoming unemployed or underemployed “always for the same reason – insubordination” to an unjust establishment whose authority he refused to recognize.

Frank's academic accomplishments defy compression into a few words, but it would be fair to say that “ Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America ” (1969) and “ ReOrient ” (1998) are the distillation of a lifetime devoted to hard and lucid thinking. In the former, Frank challenged the tendencies of classical Marxist theories for their failure to explain underdevelopment in the periphery. In the latter, a book characterized by many as “brave” , Frank shattered Delphi 's Eurocentric claim as the omphalos of the world to place it squarely in the Middle Kingdom of China in the 19 th Century.

In spite of his American and French doctorates, Frank always credited his true education to his hitchhiking adventures throughout the breadth and length of the United States in his youth, a period in which he worked at different trades and acquired an understanding of the world. In 1962 he started his Latin American period when he began teaching anthropological theory in Brasilia . He also went on to teach in Mexico and Montreal . In 1968, another pivotal year in world history, he became Professor of sociology and economics in Santiago , Chile . There he met Marta Fuentes, his first wife, with whom he struggled to build a new Chile under Allende. After the military coup of 1973, he and his family fled to Europe , where Frank taught at the Max-Planck Institute in Germany . Ironically, the very country whose passport he carried all his life would refuse him permanent employment, so he was forced to travel wherever universities would invite him: England , Holland , Canada , United States , Italy and finally Luxembourg , where he was close to his sons Miguel and Paul and their wives and children. There, Alison Candela, his third wife, valiantly nursed him till the very end of his long and painful battle with cancer.

Andre “Gunder” Frank has stopped running, but the world will go on, hopefully a better one, as Gunder would have wanted. He shall be remembered and cherished, not in a thousand publications, but in a thousand hearts and minds.