Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Obituary: Basil Davidson

Basil Davidson obituary

Radical journalist and historian who charted the death throes
of colonialism in Africa


Victoria Brittain
Saturday July 10 2010
The Guardian


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/09/basil-davidson-obituary


Basil Davidson, who has died aged 95, was a radical journalist in the
great anti-imperial tradition, and became a distinguished
historian of pre-colonial Africa. An energetic and charismatic figure,
he was dropped behind enemy lines during the second world war and
joined that legendary band of British soldiers who fought with the
partisans in Yugoslavia and in Italy. Years later, he was the first
reporter to travel with the guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in
Angola and Guinea-Bissau, and brought their struggle to the world's
attention.

For many years he was at the centre of the campaigns for Africa's
liberation from colonialism and apartheid, endlessly addressing
meetings and working on committees. Extremely tall and with a shock of
white hair, and possessing the old-fashioned courtesy of the ex-army
officer that he was - or even of the country gentleman that he
eventually became after his move to the West Country - he was an
unlikely figure at many of these often incoherent and sometimes
sectarian events, usually run by student activists and exiles.

Among his friends were the historians Thomas Hodgkin, EP Thompson and
Eric Hobsbawm. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/sep/26/guardianobituaries.highereducation";
title="Edward Said] placed him in a select band of western artists and
intellectuals with a sympathy and comprehension of foreign cultures
that meant that they had "in effect, crossed to the other side".

Born in Bristol, Davidson left school at 16, determined to become a
writer, though he first made his living by pasting advertisements for
bananas on shop windows in the north of England. Moving to London, he
found his way into journalism, working for the Economist and then as
the diplomatic correspondent of the Star, a now defunct London evening
paper.

In the late 1930s he travelled widely in Italy and in central Europe,
and his familiarity with its geography and his capacity to learn its
languages made him an obvious candidate, when the war broke out, for
the Special Operations Executive ? seeking to undermine the Nazi
regime from within. His self-reliance, and lack of interest in
received wisdom, soon marked him out. When sent out to Budapest, to
stimulate the resistance forces in Hungary, he crossed swords with the
British ambassador, who ordered him to stop storing plastic explosives
in the embassy cellar.

In Cairo, he worked on plans to drop agents into Yugoslavia, first to
the royalists and then, after much internal argument, to Tito's
communist guerrillas. Davidson was eventually parachuted into
Yugoslavia himself, to join the communists in the uncompromising
territory of the Vojvodina, the plain of the Danube valley across from
Hungary. There, his exceptional physical strength and bravery were
tested to the utmost.

When he returned to Yugoslavia at the end of the war, his companion on
the visit, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, recorded how
"as we entered the villages, people would run out crying 'Nicola,
Nicola!' (Davidson's partisan name) and, after kissing him on the
cheek, carry us both into their houses, where it was hard without
offence to avoid getting drunk on Slivovitza."

Davidson fought in Yugoslavia from August 1943 to November 1944, then
transferred to the Ligurian hills of northern Italy. He and his
partisan band seized Genoa before the arrival of American or British
forces.

The war years marked him for ever. He fell in love with the
comradeship, the trust and the spiritual force of endurance in the
service of an ideal that he found with the guerrilla fighters.
The lessons he learned about the muddle of war were important for his
later work in Africa. In Angola and Guinea-Bissau in the early
1970s, and in Eritrea almost 20 years later, he found those same
life forces and loved them. The subjective nature of his response to
this history in the making, to deep friendships made and lost, made
very painful the eventual unravelling of so much that he believed in.

The political lessons were less personally rewarding, since his
willingness to collaborate with communists in battle would lead him in
later life to be labelled by the Foreign Office as a dangerous "fellow
traveller". Davidson had never been attracted to Marxism, but his
wartime experiences with Communist partisans coloured his general
attitude towards the cold war struggle, first in Europe and later in
Africa. If communists were prepared to fight against the Nazis,
or later against South African apartheid and Portuguese
colonialism, that caused him no problems.

At the end of the war, a lieutenant-colonel awarded the Military Cross
and twice mentioned in dispatches, he turned again to journalism,
working first for the Times as one of its correspondents in Paris and
then as chief foreign leader writer in London. Out of tune at the
Times, and especially unhappy with the western intervention that
crushed the communist partisans in Greece, he left in 1949 to work for
three years as the secretary of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC),
the campaigning foreign affairs organisation set up by
ED Morel during the first world war.

At the same time he joined the staff of the New Statesman, where he
was soon viewed as Martin's heir apparent. It was not to be. At both
the UDC and the New Statesman, he earned the undying hatred of Dorothy
Woodman, Martin's companion, and was accused of being a fellow
traveller ? "or worse". Unable to return as a journalist to the
Balkans, because of the cold war, he was taken by chance to Africa,
and the continent soon caught his imagination, never to let go. Then,
through an invitation from a group of South African trade
unionists, he met Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and other leaders
of the African National Congress, about to launch its campaign
of defiance against the apartheid laws of the Nationalist
government.

Injustice, western hypocrisy and a whiff of revolution were
enough to get him firmly engaged: later, from 1969 to 1985, he
was a vice-president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain.
He produced an important series about his African journey for the
New Statesman, and then wrote a book about the crimes of apartheid.
Soon he was listed as a "prohibited immigrant", both in South Africa
and in other parts of white-ruled Africa. That area of work was
now closed for him.

So too was the New Statesman. On his return, Martin told him he was
"proud to publish the articles, [but] if you have to hive off to
another paper, I shall obviously understand".

When he was offered a job as an editor at Unesco, the British
government vetoed his appointment. Again, it was alleged that he was a
fellow traveller, and that his articles were quoted consistently in
Moscow. Doubtless they were, since they were very good, and Soviet
reporters had even less access to Africa than those from the west. Far
from being soft on communists, Davidson was accused during the treason
trial of László Rajk in Hungary in 1949 of being an agent of the
British secret service, as indeed he had been.

Davidson was rescued by the Daily Herald (1954-57) and then taken up
Hugh Cudlipp at the Daily Mirror (1959-62). Encouraged to take an
interest in the Mirror's publishing activities in Nigeria, Davidson
made regular annual journeys through west, central and east Africa on
the brink of independence from colonialism. Soon he was plunged deep
into unwritten African history.

For a family man with three small sons, this was not an ideal
profession. It was unfashionable, badly paid and meant long periods
away from home. Davidson was no longer a journalist, yet nor was he a
tenured academic. His wife, Marion Young, whom he had married during
the war - she had also worked in SOE in Italy - somehow held their
life together.

Books now began to pour out. The self-taught Davidson had an
elegant prose style, at home with both fact and fiction. He wrote
five novels and more than 30 other books. These were mainly about
African history and included classic textbooks still in use
in both east and west Africa. Davidson was enthused early on by
the end of British colonialism and the prospects of pan-
Africanism in the 1960s, and he wrote copiously and with warmth about
newly independent Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He went
to work for a year at the University of Accra in 1964.

Later he threw himself into the reporting of the African liberation
wars in the Portuguese colonies, particularly in Angola, Mozambique,
Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Following in the steps of the great
campaigning journalist Henry Nevinson, who had reported from Angola in
1905, he made an epic journey on foot half a century later that took
him into the liberated areas of eastern Angola with the Popular
Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The MPLA became the government
at independence in 1975 and the epicentre of the cold war struggle in
Africa.

Over the years the elaborate, CIA-run propaganda campaigns in favour
of the MPLA's main rival movement, Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi [http://
www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/feb/25/guardianobituaries.victoriabrittain";
title="Jonas Savimbi] and aided by the secret invasions of the
apartheid regime, frequently stumbled against Davidson's authoritative
counter-version. His scorn for the mainstream journalism that
swallowed the western line on Angola was legendary. On Rhodesia, too,
both the media and British government's equivocation and connivance
with South Africa's support for the white regime found no more
scathing critic than Davidson.

In the 1980s, with most of the African liberation wars now won ?
except for South Africa's ? Davidson turned much of his attention to
more theoretical questions about the future of the nation state in
Africa. He remained a passionate advocate of pan-Africanism. In 1988
he made a long and dangerous journey into Eritrea, writing a
persuasive defence of the nationalists' right to independence from
Ethiopia, and an equally eloquent attack on the revolutionary leader
Colonel Mengistu and the regime that had overthrown Haile Selassie.
Davidson was invited to Havana to discuss the long-running Ethiopia-
Eritrean war after the Cubans threw their weight behind Africa's
latest revolution. He was irritated by the personal enthusiasm of
Fidel Castro for Mengistu, and by the large numbers of Cuban troops
sent to help him in his border war against Somalia ? although they did
not fight in Eritrea. Davidson expressed no surprise at Cuba taking on
a new African protege, but he retained his own unfavourable view of
Mengistu.

The eventual turn towards repressive government taken by his friends
in the Eritrean leadership, when other leaders to whom he had been
close were imprisoned in Asmara, was a sad rerun of a similar
political trajectory he had witnessed in post-independence Angola. He
did not like talking over these matters, but he did not disguise his
disappointment. Critics from the right were swift to condemn the early
judgments that he had made about these revolutions that had turned
sour, and even some of his friends would have welcomed more debate.

In 1984 Davidson embarked on a new career in television, making
Africa, an eight-part history series for Channel 4. He was excellent
on screen, bringing to an unexpectedly wide audience a vision of
Africa far from the usual famine-and-corruption cliches  that annoyed
him so much. His alternate version of African reality reached
further and deeper than he had imagined possible, though he continued
to write, producing notably The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the
Curse of the Nation-State (1992); the collection of essays The Search
for Africa (1994); and his final book, West Africa Before the Colonial
Era: A History to 1850 (1998).

He received honorary degrees and appointments from many universities,
including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Turin, Ghana and
California, and was also decorated by Portugal and Cape Verde for his
services to their history. Apart from his military medals, the British
state was studiously uninterested in recognising his talents and his
service.

He relished the irony of being decorated with great warmth in 2002 by
the prime minister of Portugal ? once an activist against the fascist
regime that Davidson had done so much to bring down. And when the Cape
Verde government chose to decorate him in 2003 in an Angolan embassy
where the ambassador was a former prominent official of his old
opponent Unita, he remarked drily on the surprising reconciliations
demanded of those who live long enough.

He is survived by Marion and his sons.

- Basil Risbridger Davidson, historian and campaigner, born 9
November 1914; died 9 July 2010


guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010

--