Basil's contribution as a writer and historian on Africa is without parallel in Europe. His active study and active involvement in the politics of liberation was also outstanding. It was natural that he provided, as scholar and activist, an inspiration for this Review but also practical support from the word go. He was one of the first to sponsor the project and remained one of our International Editors from 1973 until his death this year. The debt of those associated with this journal and everyone concerned with understanding Africa to his life's work is enormous. But as the time for obituaries and solemnities passes, the celebration of that life's work can begin – not by erecting a monument, but a true tribute: a considered evaluation of the living legacy he leaves.
Basil had established himself as a journalist before and after World War II. In broadening his writing beginning in the 1950s to concentrate on Africa, he was to make major contributions in three areas: first in African history, then the studies of liberation movements, and finally, I would argue, the nature of African politics.
A series of general books and a stunning TV series on African history opened up to scholars and a broader public what has become a whole sub-discipline but was at the time only embryonic. One of the first generation of UK Africanist historians, Roland Oliver, described Basil's role as ‘the most effective popularizer of African history and archaeology outside Africa, and certainly the one best trusted in Africa’. The inspirational effect of this body of work is attested to by scholars around the world. And all this scholarly impact from a man who remained outside the professional realms of academia, although he was recognised by several honorary doctorates and by being the first-ever recipient of the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association UK.
‘I first read Basil's Black Mother while still at school in Sierra Leone, and from that moment wanted to devote myself to African history.’
Professor Tunde Zack Williams, UK
‘Discovering Basil Davidson's writings was what turned me on to solidarity activities with African liberation movements, and eventually to African studies.’
Professor Makoto Sato, Kyoto, Japan
‘It was his Old Africa Rediscovered of 1959 that encouraged me to apply for a studentship for historical-archaeological research in East Africa. His inspirational message of the necessity of recognising an independent pre-colonial Africa, and equally – despite the scepticism of mainstream academic historians in Britain – of the feasibility of researching that through Iron Age archaeology – was especially influential at the time.’
Dr John Sutton, archaeologist, Oxford, UK
Beyond memorialising this pioneering body of work, it deserves (re)reading, if only because Basil writes like a dream. But what more does it leave behind? Clearly more in the approach than in filling in specific parts of the record. Clearly, too, an ‘Africanist’ history in terms of the stress on the richness and complexity of the indigenous past rather than on the colonial experience. But also not just a ‘celebration’ of all things traditional, and especially not of the kingdoms, as a recent TV series was called, and their hierarchies. How does his less grandiose claim that pre-colonial Africa ‘when Africa knew no such misery and crisis’ (as today) stand up to scrutiny? One hopes that the specialist historians might usefully generate a debate by testing such insights.
The insights he offered about the nationalist movement and achievement of Independence also deserve revisiting. He campaigned against colonialism and racism – he was Vice-President of the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement for many years – and was cautiously optimistic following the achievement of statehood. Does the fact that events have turned out differently necessarily mean the analysis is without insight and should be just forgotten as sympathetic over-enthusiasm? It has been suggested, even in the Guardian obituary, that in particular he was discreet about the national liberation movements and the ‘logic’ of armed struggle. But how far was this a result of a conscious suppression of information or as he questioned a generation later: ‘what did we miss?’; see below on ‘nation-statism’. What is the case was that he proved ready to be frank in what he said face-to-face with the inner circles of power.
His insight into national liberation struggles came about from the mid 1960s when Basil made a series of daring safaris into areas liberated by the emerging nationalist movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, and much later in Eritrea. He reckoned he walked 600 miles in the four visits to ex-Portuguese Africa (Jeremy Harding in London Review of Books, 5 August 2010). He brought to those missions a deep understanding of guerrilla movements from his liaison with anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia and northern Italy in World War II, the subject of a memoir and a novel. The contacts that led to these travels arose when Basil happened to meet a young and unknown Amilcar Cabral on an extended visit to London, before he formed the Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC). As the armed struggle got under way Cabral kept Basil informed of its form and progress, and through him the English-speaking world. Field visits among the liberation forces and the people in the liberated areas made the flow of information real. Basil's second stay coincided with the Portuguese military coup in 1974 that overthrew the Fascist regime. He described in his first book how in the lead-up he was able with PAIGC cadres to have clandestine meetings with progressive Portuguese army personnel (Davidson 1981). Many years later the Portuguese President presented Basil with one of that country's highest honours in the fields of history and culture. He was made Grand Officer of the Order of Henry the Navigator, the citation referring to him as a ‘historian of Portugal and colonialism’, a recognition of how he had seen the African liberation struggles as generators of democratisation in Europe (see report in ROAPE, 29 (91), pp. 117–119).
Another example of how influential was Basil's reporting at first hand on the guerrilla struggles was given to me by Marcelino dos Santos, former President of Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and of Mozambique at a conference in Dar es Salaam this year, when he recalled how Basil, returning from FRELIMO's Second Congress in the liberated areas of northern Mozambique in 1968, via Tanzania, was debriefed by President Julius Nyerere:
Basil and Eritrea
In the late 1970s Basil began to engage with the Eritrean liberation struggle, and on reflection he took the position that Eritrea should not be denied the chance for ‘self-determination’ enjoyed by all ex-colonies in Africa. Of course liberation from Ethiopian over-rule was a much more controversial issue than the support of anti-colonial struggles in southern Africa. His writings on the liberation movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique and his support for liberation of the settler colonies in Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa had sounded an automatic resonance on the Left and among young people, and in Pan-African circles, which no longer came into play over Eritrea. Ethiopia was caught up in a proxy conflict of the cold war, with the United States its enemy. As one old-guard fellow-traveller MP said when Basil made the case for Eritrea to the Africa Committee of the Labour Party: ‘I hear what you report but at the end of the day I simply ask myself what side Fidel is on!’ In African circles supporting the Eritrean case for self-determination against their enforced incorporation into a unitary Ethiopian state was seen as endorsing secession and fragmentation of an African state. Only a few among radicals on the Left or in Pan-Africanist circles, such as Ruth First, shared Basil's courage in espousing this cause.
He was involved in the first public raising of the Eritrean question in the West, a conference in London in 1979 initiated by Bereket Habte Selassie, and they co-edited the proceedings (Davidson et al. 1980). Thereafter Basil was contacted on occasions by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front seeking endorsement of specific positions or requesting he speak at some event but he told them, like others, he did not feel able to go beyond his initial stating that they had just cause without more information on their struggle. He cited the pattern that had grown up in relation to Guinea-Bissau with Amilcar Cabral sending briefings, and eventually invitations to visit, to Basil and others giving solidarity. It took a couple of years before Basil's suggestion was acted upon, but networks were gradually established, leading to a ‘seminar’ in the liberated areas in 1983, once the throwing back of the last of Ethiopia's several offensives made that possible. And one result was the setting up of the Research and Information Centre for Eritrea (RICE) with offices in Rome and Brussels, the beginnings of an archive and a monthly newsletter, which was a partnership between the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and its ‘friends’. Ultimately this work and the archive were built on in setting up the Research and Documentation Centre in Asmara after liberation. As word spread and more ‘friends’ had made their own visits, a more considered volume on different dimensions of the struggle was put together in 1988 at the suggestion of the EPLF, with Basil co-editing (Cliffe and Davidson 1988).
Basil used his considerable reputation in the cause of solidarity. He spoke to the Labour Party Africa Committee, which did take an official position of support for the Eritrean liberation. He also made representations to Cuba, where his efforts to support the cause of liberation in Angola, especially, were well known, to question its support of the Derg regime in Ethiopia and thus its indirect bolstering of attempts to suppress the Eritrean liberation cause. (Cuba had a military presence in Ethiopia but it should be said, unlike the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR], it did not allow its personnel to be involved on the Eritrea front.)
Basil was not able to attend the 1983 seminar but did eventually make the arduous trip into what the Eritreans called the ‘Field’ in 1988 and was able to witness the decisive battle of the liberation war at Afabet, where the EPLF forces broke out of their 10 years of encirclement. He even broadcast from the battlefield just after the victory direct to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service in London on a line the EPLF had managed to set up, announcing ‘the most significant conventional battle in the Third World since the Vietnamese liberation forces defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu’.
With the achievement of statehood in 1993, Basil was one of the invited guests at the Independence celebrations in Asmara. At a small informal party for the international ‘friends’ he gave a brief, inspiring speech in replying on their behalf to remarks by President Isaias Afeworki. The latter had said rhetorically that what Independent Eritrea would continue to require from friends was ‘criticism’. Whether he meant it or not, Basil made some cautions about the future at a seminar a few days later when he was invited to give his views to an audience that included many senior party leaders about the lessons from the post-liberation experiences of other African countries. His main advice was the need to avoid the institutional crises that resulted from the gap between leaders and people through encouraging those traditions of participation and answerability built up in the years of struggle. I was able to unearth the notes I had taken at the time to pass back to Basil when emissaries from the regime came to pay a ‘courtesy call’, presumably to keep him ‘on side’ after the war with Ethiopia (1998–2000) and after the most authoritarian moves occurred in 2001. He reminded them of his earlier warnings at that time, and in criticisms of the authoritarianism and imperviousness to criticism, notably in one of his last writings, the Introduction to collected material by another ‘friend’, Dan Connell (Davidson and Cliffe 2004).
One ridiculous but sad moment occurred during the celebrations when Lady Trumpington, a junior Foreign Office minister who was the official representative of the Thatcher government, came across a hotel lobby to greet two people who looked to be compatriots, and when Basil introduced himself, her immediate response was to blurt out, ‘aren't you the fellow traveller?’ Even her Foreign Office minder looked embarrassed by this instinctive bluntness, although someone like him had presumably prepared the briefing for her containing that categorisation – evidence that he was still seen in these terms by UK officialdom. Basil's coldly polite response was to ask whether she understood the significance of what we were all there to celebrate, the victory of a movement that was independent in all senses, against a Soviet-backed counter-insurgency – a struggle he had supported for years in the teeth of severe criticism by the Communist-influenced Left.
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Basil's recognition of the harsh realities of post-colonial Africa, and of the limited impact of ‘popular struggles’, in southern Africa and then in Eritrea and Ethiopia, led him to interrogate the earlier work of himself and others. And in posing the question ‘what explains this degradation from the hopes of newly regained independence?’ and in his specific answer, a ‘crisis of institutions’, he made a third major contribution, into the nature of the contemporary state and politics (Davidson 1992). This work delves back into post-colonial history but to come up with a contemporary thesis. He argues that the universal pattern of equating ‘national’ independence as a project within existing colonial states, ‘nation-statism’, ensured that it became a ‘modernising’ project, following liberal democratic norms, eliminating any prospects of either building on any indigenous roots, and inviting a new form of chronic tribalism or unqualified repression. This work deserves to be kept alive within current discourses on politics, alongside and in contention with the likes of Mamdani or the neo-patrimonialists.
In this and in many other dimensions Basil's work should remain a source of insights and controversy.