From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Jul 14 2010 - 13:38:21 EDT
"He also had a stubborn streak, perfectly expressed in his support for
Eritrean independence from Ethiopia – a struggle that his friends in the
ANC, the MPLA and most other liberation movements regarded as ideologically
unsound, especially after Ethiopia became a Marxist-Leninist state in the
1970s. As with Angola and Guinea-Bissau, so with Eritrea: it wasn’t enough
for Davidson to argue the Eritrean cause from a distance; he had to plunge
into the action. In his seventies he was one of the first journalists to
report to the BBC World Service on the rout of the Ethiopians at Afabet in
1988, which ended Soviet influence in the Horn and, much to his
satisfaction, put victory within the Eritreans’ reach"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/07/14/jeremy-harding/on-basil-davidson/
On Basil Davidson
*Jeremy Harding* 14 July 2010
Basil Davidson, who died last week at the age of 95, was a regular
contributor to the *LRB *during the 1990s. In a generous sheaf of pieces,
many of them reviews, he drew on his experiences as a member of Special
Operations Executive during the war and his subsequent fascination with
Africa. He was fond of exposition and argument, but his writing could be
pithy too. On the postcolonial state in Africa: ‘a constitutional garbage
can of shattered loyalties’. On Milosevic and the break-up of Yugoslavia:
‘the Chetniks . . . have appeared once more,’ despite Yugoslavs having
‘refused incarceration within anyone’s “evil empire”’ for 60 years. On intrepid
writers pursuing their quarry in distant places: ‘Those who wander in the
great forests of the African tropics do not always manage, like Conrad’s
storyteller, to make it home again.’
Davidson, who always made it home in the end, was a man of action, a
journalist and, by his forties, a successful historian. His dramatic
introduction to Yugoslavia, where he was dropped by parachute in 1943 and
remained for just over a year, building links with Tito’s resistance, gave
him a taste for Balkan history. In sub-Saharan Africa, his determination to
produce a full history of the continent went hand in hand with a burning
curiosity about the anti-colonial movements of the 1960s in Guinea-Bissau,
Angola and, later, Eritrea. Travelling with guerrilla movements, he took his
chances, physically and intellectually, as he had in Yugoslavia.
Read over now, his pieces for the *LRB* only hint at the controversial
character of his two areas of interest. In the Balkan theatre, SOE threw its
weight behind Tito’s partisans, rather than Mihailovic and the Chetniks, and
when support for the Chetniks was finally cut, Davidson was already out of
the Cairo office and on the ground in the Vojvodina. Opposition to the
policy, much of it kneejerk, was bitter: what had SOE in Cairo been, if not
a branch of the Comintern? A handful of SOE staff also had their doubts, but
others including Davidson and William Deakin had argued simply that Tito was
running his end of the resistance better than the royalists. In *Special
Operations Europe* (1981), Davidson records that the Chetniks were only
happy when they had ‘enemy cash in their pockets’, while Tito’s partisans
were ‘the largest and most combative fighting resistance in all occupied
Europe’. In a passionate letter to the *LRB* in 1996, Jessica Douglas-Hume
disagreed with Davidson that only ‘creepy-crawlies’ would seriously ascribe
Britain’s support for Tito to a communist tendency in SOE. He replied that
her position was far-fetched to the point of unreality, whereas the
anti-Nazi struggle in Yugoslavia was ‘a very real and savage affair’.
By April 1945 Davidson was in Italy with his radio operator on liaison work
again, with one eye on the uprising in Genoa and the other on allied troops,
as they closed on the city. He emerged from the war with a Military Cross, a
US Bronze Star and a strong sense that British forces coming home wanted ‘a
country free of . . . dole queues, dead ends, glaring discrepancies of
wealth and poverty, and all the despair at the bottom of the heap’. He
returned to journalism, first to Paris and then as a leader writer on
foreign affairs at the *Times*, where he found it hard to get along. At the
*New Statesman*, he should have fared better, but office politics at the *
Statesman* were also ‘real and savage’ in their way.
By the 1950s Davidson was in Africa and soon intrigued by the strange
foreshortening of the continent’s past, which only appeared to begin with
the arrival of outsiders. Slavery, European imperialism and settler
colonialism were the benchmarks of African history; there was little, as far
as he could tell, to confirm the richer story of which archaeology offered
tantalising glimpses. To sketch out this neglected past Davidson had to
learn the art of writing history, as he’d learned to be a journalist in the
1930s, at the *Economist*, and a special operative during the war. A series
of books on precolonial Africa followed, taking in great swathes of time and
space, from the ancient Meroitic cultures in the east to the early modern
empires of Songhay and Mali in the west. Metal casting, the transaction of
salt and slaves, the power of the lineage and the force of religion: these
were the lines along which he traced the rise of civilisations on the
continent and staked his claim for achievements wiped from the record by
European imperialism.
He saw no point, as he said in the *LRB*, in ‘writing the history of Africa
without the Africans’. He wasn’t thinking only of his own excavations. He
meant, too, that it didn’t pay to ignore the people who stood at the margins
of power in contemporary Africa, a little behind the tree line: they had a
way of appearing unexpectedly on the open plains and making for the centre.
The figure he had in mind was the obscure rebel Laurent Kabila, precipitated
through the chaos of Zaire to become another undistinguished head of state
in 1997.
Kabila was of no great interest, but Davidson had been keenly alert to
earlier liberation movements, especially in Portuguese Africa. His study of
the anti-colonial struggle in Guinea-Bissau, where he met and travelled with
the PAIGC, appeared in 1969; a longer edition followed in 1980. The war had
been stressful, to say the least, but independence for Portugal’s colonies
was assured by the left-wing officers’ coup in Lisbon in April 1974. At the
time, Davidson was in the thick of things in Guinea-Bissau and, 25 years
later in the *LRB*, recalled stopping over in Lisbon on his way home:
I had watched Portugal’s armies in Guinea depart in peace during that long
summer of 1974, and in due course the moment came for me to go home. That
could be safely done by way of the French airline connecting Conakry with
Paris, but it meant going back through the bush from Bissau. ‘No,’ my
friends in the PAIGC advised, ‘go by Cape Verde and Lisbon, much quicker and
less bother.’ This was undeniable, but would the Portuguese police and other
such hostile authorities let me in, or indeed out again? ‘No problem:
everything’s changed.’ So I sat in that TAP plane and wondered if this time
I wasn’t pushing my luck too far. But I soon learned better. Confirming an
onward flight to Heathrow, I found a Lisbon ticket clerk suddenly wreathed
in smiles. ‘I know about you,’ he said, ‘we’ve read your articles. Now you
want to go to London? I’ll show you, I’ll carry your bag.’ Which he did,
striding across the passenger area and shouting to his colleagues with a
joyful excitement. And that was how I came to know that the anti-colonial
revolution in Africa had come to Portugal as well.
He referred to his approach as ‘obviously anti-imperialist’ and
distinguished it from the ‘academic tourism’ of one of the books we’d put
his way for review. In Angola, typically, he’d decided to follow the trail
of Henry Nevinson, a hero of his, whose books he gave me when we first met.
Nevinson made his investigation of slavery in Angola for *Harper’s* in 1905;
Davidson arrived in the colony more than half a century later and his
loyalties were with the Marxist MPLA. *In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s
People* appeared in 1972, after Davidson had travelled with MPLA fighters in
the east of the country as the colonial war intensified. It was one of a
dozen books on Africa, with as many to come.
Angola’s independence was the start of a long, nightmarish civil war –
‘chaos and misery’, as Davidson wrote in the *LRB* – with hostilities on the
ground inflamed by Cold War players on the outside (South Africa and the US
very much in the lead) and an abundance of oil, diamonds, hardwoods and
ivory to fund the bloodshed. Whatever his alliances with Marxists or
straightforward Communists, from his days in Cairo to his treks in the bush
with anti-colonial guerrillas, he was alert to their weaknesses, those of
the ruling MPLA in particular. He also had a stubborn streak, perfectly
expressed in his support for Eritrean independence from Ethiopia – a
struggle that his friends in the ANC, the MPLA and most other liberation
movements regarded as ideologically unsound, especially after Ethiopia
became a Marxist-Leninist state in the 1970s. As with Angola and
Guinea-Bissau, so with Eritrea: it wasn’t enough for Davidson to argue the
Eritrean cause from a distance; he had to plunge into the action. In his
seventies he was one of the first journalists to report to the BBC World
Service on the rout of the Ethiopians at Afabet in 1988, which ended Soviet
influence in the Horn and, much to his satisfaction, put victory within the
Eritreans’ reach.
Long after World War Two, Davidson was accused of being a British spook on
the one hand, and a fellow traveller (sin of sins) on the other; sometimes
of being both. ‘Creepy-crawly’ is an apt description for the small posse of
adversaries who were always obliged to strike below the belt. It was, to
give them their due, mostly a problem of stature. Unusually tall, Davidson
was hard to fell even with a low blow. And just as hard for his enemies to
pin down: why, for instance, would an agent or a Communist take up a
position at the Union of Democratic Control, as he did at the end of the
1940s, after leaving the *Times*? The UDC was by then in decline, having
been formed in 1914, when its founders laid the blame for war on secret
diplomacy and called for the democratisation of foreign policy. By
Davidson’s day, it was a loose association of anti-fascists, which suited
his thinking: he had an eye on the Iberian dictatorships and the brutal
imposition of the *pax Americana* in Greece.
But he was also following in the footsteps of another of his heroes, E.D.
Morel, who held the post of UDC secretary until his death in 1924. Morel,
like Davidson, had not been to university, though both mastered the basics
of researching and writing as well as any competent scholar. In 1900 Morel
became the powerhouse of the Congo Reform Movement and remained a staunch
Liberal until the outbreak of World War One. Davidson was a writer first and
a campaigner in an altogether quieter register, while Morel was destined to
become an activist and public speaker, writing on demand for causes,
especially in colonial Africa. Davidson was not tempted by the hustings, as
Morel was. Yet he was closer to Morel, intellectually at least, than he was
to any of his contemporaries on the left. By way of homage, he borrowed the
title of Morel’s book, *The Black Man’s Burden*, published in 1920, for his
own critical overview of the ‘curse of the nation state’ in Africa in 1992.
The continent that Morel revealed to his readers was a mirror of colonial
injustice; Davidson unearthed its history and let it speak for itself. And
like the great liaison officer he was, he got the rest of us to listen
closely.
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