Davidson found himself listed as a ‘prohibited immigrant’ in some white-ruled African countries. Photograph: Augusta Conchiglia
Radical journalist and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa. 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
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
by 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
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
CLICK
