RIP BASIL

Basil Davidson Basil Davidson, who died on July 9 aged 95, was a radical journalist and man of action who championed liberation movements in colonial Africa and became a respected authority on the continent’s cultural history, despite being entirely self-taught. Published: 6:53PM BST 19 Jul 2010 Comments Photo: Channel Four For a generation, Davidson developed his argument – backed by research on the ground – that rich civilisations had thrived in the pre-colonial past. Yet his belief that such cultures would flourish again once the baleful effects of colonialism wore off has not yet been borne out by events – something he conceded in his later years. Davidson discovered Africa as a journalist, not an academic. But his trenchant articles for the New Statesman in 1951 on South Africa and the British colonies he had visited brought his dismissal from the weekly, and exclusion from English-speaking Africa. He responded by developing close ties to the liberation movements in Portugal’s colonies, slogging through the bush with guerrillas; his wartime experience with SOE in Yugoslavia – where he won an MC – came in handy. He was particularly close to Amilcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissau nationalist leader assassinated just before Portuguese rule collapsed. Davidson’s wife once remarked: “I didn’t have to go to Africa with Basil – Africa came to me.” For decades, he kept open house for aspiring leaders. In power they honoured him, and in 2002 Portugal’s democratic government decorated him for his opposition to its authoritarian predecessor. A tall, civilised man with the air of a country gentleman, Davidson was modest about the impact of his work. “There isn’t a single literate East African aged 35 to 50 who wasn’t educated on my textbooks,” he noted. “What good did that do? Very little.” Yet despite his lack of even a degree, he was accepted as an equal by the Left-wing historians EP Thompson, Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. In 1955, when Davidson produced his first book, The African Awakening, most of the continent was under colonial rule and there was no such discipline as African history. When first taught in the 1960s, it covered the immediate prelude to colonial rule, the colonial period and the emergence of the nationalist movements to which Britain, France and Belgium ceded power. Davidson looked further back at what pre-colonial societies had achieved. Above all he sought to expound history from an African point of view. He built a reputation as the historian best-trusted in Africa itself, through the cultural underpinning he gave to nationalism. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said rated Davidson one of the few western intellectuals who had “crossed to the other side”. Critics claimed he was harking back to a golden age that had not existed, disputing his inferences that, for example, the Asante kingdom had been as advanced as Tudor England. Davidson shrugged off this criticism, as he did accusations of being a fellow-traveller. In 1956 Hugh Gaitskell tried to have him sacked from the Daily Herald, saying: “Most people believe [Davidson] to be a Communist.” The charge was pressed by supporters of the Portuguese dictatorship and apartheid, against which Davidson campaigned after meeting Nelson Mandela on his first visit. For 16 years he was a vice-president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Later he was targeted by those who claimed Britain had betrayed the monarchist Chetniks in Yugoslavia by switching its support to Tito’s Communist partisans. Davidson had worked hard to secure support for Tito, on the ground that Tito was fighting the Germans and General Mihailovic’s Chetniks were not. Yet he did come to see Yugoslavia’s liberation as the model for revolutionary struggle. Basil Risbridger Davidson was born in Bristol on November 9 1914, the son of Thomas and Jessie Davidson. His father, who worked for a cotton firm, died when he was six; his mother remarried and the family moved to Somerset. Leaving school at 16, Basil found a job in the North – where in the Depression his socialism took root – putting up posters for Fyffe’s bananas. But he set his heart on journalism, in 1938 landing a job on the Economist. He saw Hitler’s forces march into Vienna, travelled through the Balkans and after war broke out reported on the mood in Paris. When Davidson volunteered, Section D – forerunner of SOE – intervened, and despatched him to Budapest with a sack of mines for blowing up shipping in the Danube. More arrived by diplomatic bag; the British ambassador had them thrown away.

When German troops arrived in April 1941, he rebased to Belgrade, but had to leave hurriedly. Captured by the Italians and interned in Albania, Davidson and Britain’s ambassador to Yugoslavia were released in exchange for the Duke of Aosta and sent by train to Portugal.

After a spell at SOE’s Baker Street headquarters, Davidson was sent to Cairo as deputy head of operations for Yugoslavia – travelling via Gambia, Nigeria and Khartoum. SOE was still dropping agents to the Chetniks to persuade them to fight, but intercepted German communications showed the partisans were wreaking havoc. Davidson informed Bill Deakin, Churchill’s former researcher; visiting Cairo, Churchill decided to back Tito regardless of his politics.

Deakin was parachuted in, then Churchill’s emissary Fitzroy Maclean and finally, in August 1943, Davidson. Landing in Bosnia, he joined Deakin, who introduced him to Tito.

Codenamed Nicola, he stayed for 18 months, mainly to arrange supply drops from Cairo, which at first were erratic.

First he was with units in the Vojvodina, harassing the enemy, ferrying recruits to Bosnia and setting up liberation committees.

Then he slipped into Hungary, finding no signs of resistance.

A second trip was more eventful. He joined partisans who were hotly pursued by the SS; after they left one village all 300 inhabitants were shot.

Back in Yugoslavia, he monitored German forces retreating ahead of the Soviet advance, and arranged for the RAF to fly out wounded partisans.

In January 1945 Davidson joined partisans in north-west Italy.

With Allied forces, under Alexander, preparing to breach Hitler’s Gothic Line, he was to help them stop the Germans destroying vital installations.

Alexander ordered them not to engage the occupiers, but late in April they staged an insurrection in Genoa and took the Germans’ surrender.

Davidson secured an American general to formalise the situation.

Demobilised in 1945 as a temporary lieutenant-colonel, he joined The Times as its Paris correspondent, then became chief foreign leader writer.

He resigned in 1949 over the paper’s support for German rearmament.

Davidson was also general secretary of the Union of Democratic Control;

its chairman was Kingsley Martin, editor of the Statesman, who made him a special correspondent and potential successor – until his return from Africa when Martin (influenced by his companion Dorothy Woodman) told Davidson he was “drawing too far to the Left”.

Unesco now offered him the editorship of its publications, only for Whitehall to veto the appointment.

Davidson wrote for the Daily Herald, then from 1957 the Daily Mirror, whose links with Nigeria enabled him to travel to Africa.

Davidson was increasingly seen as an academic and became a visiting professor and research fellow at several universities.

In 1980 he presented an award-winning documentary series on Africa.

His MC apart, he was twice mentioned in despatches, and awarded the US Bronze Star and Yugoslavia’s Zasluge za Narodj.

He held decorations from Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Portugal and was a freeman of Genoa.

Davidson published more than 30 books, including Old Africa Rediscovered (1959); The Lost Cities of Africa (1960); Africa: History of a Continent (1966); The Africans, An Entry to Cultural History (1969); In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s People (1972); Special Operations Europe (1980); Modern Africa (1982); The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1993); The Search for Africa (1994); and West Africa Before the Colonial Era (1998).

Basil Davidson married Marion Young, also of SOE, in 1943; they had three sons.