basil davidson obituary

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Basil Davidson obituaryRadical journalist and historian who charted the deaththroes of colonialism in Africa

Victoria Brittain guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 July 2010 17.52 BST

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Davidson found

himself listed as a prohibited immigrant in some white-ruled Africancountries. Photograph: Augusta ConchigliaBasil Davidson, who has died aged 95, was a radical journalist in the greatanti-imperial tradition, and became a distinguished historian of pre-colonialAfrica. An energetic and charismatic figure, he was dropped behind enemylines during the second world war and joined that legendary band of Britishsoldiers who fought with the partisans in Yugoslavia and in Italy. Years later,he was the first reporter to travel with the guerrillas fighting the Portuguesein Angola and Guinea-Bissau, and brought their struggle to the world'sattention.

For many years he was at the centre of the campaigns for Africa's liberationfrom colonialism and apartheid, endlessly addressing meetings and workingon committees. Extremely tall and with a shock of white hair, and possessingthe old-fashioned courtesy of the ex-army officer that he was or even of thecountry gentleman that he eventually became after his move to the WestCountry he was an unlikely figure at many of these often incoherent andsometimes sectarian events, usually run by student activists and exiles.
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Among his friends were the historians Thomas Hodgkin, EP Thompson andEric Hobsbawm. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said placed him in a selectband of western artists and intellectuals with a sympathy and comprehensionof foreign cultures that meant that they had "in effect, crossed to the otherside".

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 shopwindows in the north of England. Moving to London, he found his way intojournalism, working for the Economist and then as the diplomaticcorrespondent of the Star, a now defunct London evening paper.

In the late 1930s he travelled widely in Italy and in central Europe, and hisfamiliarity with its geography and his capacity to learn its languages made himan obvious candidate, when the war broke out, for the Special OperationsExecutive seeking to undermine the Nazi regime from within. His self-

reliance, and lack of interest in received wisdom, soon marked him out. Whensent out to Budapest, to stimulate the resistance forces in Hungary, he crossedswords with the British ambassador, who ordered him to stop storing plasticexplosives in the embassy cellar.

In Cairo, he worked on plans to drop agents into Yugoslavia, first to theroyalists and then, after much internal argument, to Tito's communistguerrillas. Davidson was eventually parachuted into Yugoslavia himself, tojoin the communists in the uncompromising territory of the Vojvodina, theplain of the Danube valley across from Hungary. There, his exceptionalphysical strength and bravery were tested to the utmost.

When he returned to Yugoslavia at the end of the war, his companion on thevisit, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, recorded how "as weentered the villages, people would run out crying 'Nicola, Nicola!' (Davidson'spartisan name) and, after kissing him on the cheek, carry us both into theirhouses, where it was hard without offence to avoid getting drunk onSlivovitza."Davidson fought in Yugoslavia from August 1943 to November 1944, thentransferred to the Ligurian hills of northern Italy. He and his partisan bandseized Genoa before the arrival of American or British forces.

The war years marked him for ever. He fell in love with the comradeship, thetrust and the spiritual force of endurance in the service of an ideal that hefound with the guerrilla fighters. The lessons he learned about the muddle ofwar were important for his later work in Africa. In Angola and Guinea-Bissauin the early 1970s, and in Eritrea almost 20 years later, he found those samelife forces and loved them. The subjective nature of his response to
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this historyin the making, to deep friendships made and lost, made verypainful the eventual unravelling of so much that he believed in.The political lessons were less personally rewarding, since his willingness tocollaborate with communists in battle would lead him in later life to belabelled by the Foreign Office as a dangerous "fellow traveller". Davidson had

never been attracted to Marxism, but his wartime experiences withCommunist partisans coloured his general attitude towards the cold warstruggle, first in Europe and later in Africa. If communists were prepared tofight against the Nazis, or later against South African apartheid andPortuguese colonialism, that caused him no problems.

At the end of the war, a lieutenant-colonel awarded the Military Cross andtwice mentioned in dispatches, he turned again to journalism, working firstfor the Times as one of its correspondents in Paris and then as chief foreignleader writer in London. Out of tune at the Times, and especially unhappy

with the western intervention that crushed the communist partisans inGreece, he left in 1949 to work for three years as the secretary of the Union ofDemocratic Control (UDC), the campaigning foreign affairs organisation setup by ED Morel during the first world war.

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

Injustice, western hypocrisy and a whiff of revolution were enough to get himfirmly engaged: later, from 1969 to 1985, he was a vice-president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. He produced an important series about hisAfrican journey for the New Statesman, and then wrote a book about thecrimes 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 wasnow closed for him.So too was the New Statesman. On his return, Martin told him he was "proudto publish the articles, [but] if you have to hive off to another paper, I shallobviously understand".

When he was offered a job as an editor at Unesco, the British governmentvetoed his appointment. Again, it was alleged that he was a fellow traveller,
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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 Africathan those from the west. Far from being soft on communists, Davidson wasaccused during the treason trial of Lszl Rajk in Hungary in 1949 of being anagent of the British secret service, as indeed he had been.

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

For a family man with three small sons, this was not an ideal profession. Itwas unfashionable, badly paid and meant long periods away from home.Davidson was no longer a journalist, yet nor was he a tenured academic. Hiswife, 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 prosestyle, at home with both fact and fiction. He wrote five novels and more than30 other books. These were mainly about African history and included classictextbooks still in use in both east and west Africa. Davidson was enthusedearly on by the end of British colonialism and the prospects of pan-Africanismin the 1960s, and he wrote copiously and with warmth about newlyindependent Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He went to work fora year at the University of Accra in 1964.

Later he threw himself into the reporting of the African liberation wars in thePortuguese colonies, particularly in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verdeand Guinea-Bissau. Following in the steps of the great campaigning journalistHenry Nevinson, who had reported from Angola in 1905, he made an epicjourney on foot half a century later that took him into the liberated areas ofeastern Angola with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. TheMPLA became the government at independence in 1975 and the epicentre ofthe cold war struggle in Africa.Over the years the elaborate, CIA-run propaganda campaigns in favour of theMPLA's main rival movement, Unita, led byJonas Savimbi and aided by the

secret invasions of the apartheid regime, frequently stumbled againstDavidson's authoritative counter-version. His scorn for the mainstreamjournalism that swallowed the western line on Angola was legendary. OnRhodesia, too, both the media and British government's equivocation andconnivance with South Africa's support for the white regime found no morescathing critic than Davidson.
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In the 1980s, with most of the African liberation wars now won except forSouth Africa's Davidson turned much of his attention to more theoreticalquestions about the future of the nation state in Africa. He remained apassionate advocate of pan-Africanism. In 1988 he made a long anddangerous journey into Eritrea, writing a persuasive defence of the

nationalists' right to independence from Ethiopia, and an equally eloquentattack on the revolutionary leader Colonel Mengistu and the regime that hadoverthrown Haile Selassie. Davidson was invited to Havana to discuss thelong-running Ethiopia-Eritrean war after the Cubans threw their weightbehind Africa's latest revolution. He was irritated by the personal enthusiasmof Fidel Castro for Mengistu, and by the large numbers of Cuban troops sent tohelp him in his border war against Somalia although they did not fight inEritrea. Davidson expressed no surprise at Cuba taking on a new Africanprotege, 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 wereimprisoned in Asmara, was a sad rerun of a similar political trajectory he hadwitnessed in post-independence Angola. He did not like talking over thesematters, but he did not disguise his disappointment. Critics from the rightwere swift to condemn the early judgments that he had made about theserevolutions that had turned sour, and even some of his friends would havewelcomed more debate.

In 1984 Davidson embarked on a new career in television, making Africa, aneight-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 ofAfrican 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 TheSearch for Africa (1994); and his final book, West Africa Before the ColonialEra: A History to 1850 (1998).

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

He relished the irony of being decorated with great warmth in 2002 by theprime minister of Portugal once an activist against the fascist regime thatDavidson had done so much to bring down. And when the Cape Verdegovernment chose to decorate him in 2003 in an Angolan embassy where the
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ambassador was a former prominent official of his old opponent Unita, heremarked drily on the surprising reconciliations demanded of those who livelong enough.

He is survived by Marion and his sons.

Basil Risbridger Davidson, historian and campaigner, born 9 November1914; died 9 July 2010

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