|
 Basil Davidson, who died, aged 95, on 9 July 2010, led an extraordinary life. Born in Bristol on 9 November 1914, he left school at the age of sixteen intending to become a journalist, and by 1938 had become a correspondent for The Economist. When war broke out he joined the Secret Intelligence Service and later the Special Operations Executive (SOE), serving first in Hungary as a spy, and then in Yugoslavia and Italy with anti-fascist guerrillas. He describes these experiences in his war memoir, Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (1980), a book remarkable for its insistence on documenting, not what the allies (or Lt-Colonel Davidson, MC) did to win the war, but what local partisans did to liberate themselves.
Davidson’s war experiences shaped his later journalism in Africa. He saw the African nationalist movements as a continuation of the liberation struggles he had joined in Europe. He was an early supporter of African independence and wrote extensively exposing the iniquities of apartheid in South Africa and of Portuguese colonialism. He showed the same sympathetic understanding for African guerrillas as for Yugoslav and Italian partisans. As one guerrilla leader, Amilcar Cabral, testified, Davidson ‘accepted every risk and fatigue that could bring him into personal touch with the way our people live now; together we shared the same canoes, the same trails in the bush, we drank from the same calabash, the same bombers bombed us, the very mosquitoes mingled our blood.’ He was still reporting from the battlefield as late as 1988, aged 74.
This personal touch and human sympathy led him to a serious and sustained investigation into the African past, both in print and in film. Between 1952 and 1994 he published some twenty-six books on Africa, a number of which James Currey are proud to keep in print. The Lost Cities of Africa (republished in paperback in 1996) won the 1960 Anisfeld-Wolf Award for the best book that dealt with racial problems in creative literature. Other books examined the history of slavery (The African Slave Trade), Africa’s cultural history (African Genius), Africa’s post-war transformation (The Search for Africa), the birth of pan-Africanism (Black Star), and finally, the failure of many post-independence states (Black Man’s Burden).
Further accounts of Basil Davidson’s life and career can be found in obituaries appearing in the Guardian and the Scotsman.
Image Copyright © 2010 The Guardian
|
|
