Flowing with Basil Davidson

By Owei Lakemfa
BASIL RISBRIDGE Davidson is not the saint- like hero that Ernesto Che Guevera conjures. He was not a Tarzan swinging through the African jungles, neither was he a missionary of some foreign religion who evangelised the continent at the cost of its land, culture, blood and wealth.

He was no World Bank or International Monetary Fund  neo-colonialist who prescribes an expired drug for all Africa’s ailments. Rather, Davidson was a committed intellectual who studied and wrote honestly about Africa and its people; its ancient and contemporary history; conscientious  African leaders like Samora Machel and criminals like Mobutu Seseseko. He was not a disinterested social scientist who studied Africa from a distance; when our people were bleeding in the wars of liberation in Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, he was physically in the battle zones.

The over 30 books he wrote; primarily on Africa  were not just theoretical, but practical guides to the African; he helped in shaping the political focus of many African youths in the 1970s and 1980s. He opened the minds of many  Africans to their rich history from pre-colonial times, through the anti- colonial struggles to the deadly combats for liberation between the patriotic forces of the continent and  the colonial over-lords in Lisbon, Brussels,  Paris, London and Johannesburg.

Yet, given his antecedents, Davidson was a most unlikely voice of African  conscientisation  and liberation. He was a retired Lieutenant-Colonel of the British army who fought in the Second World War during which he served with the resistance in Hungary, Yugoslavia and Italy. He was a top British spy working in the M I5 with sabotage as his speciality and was a prisoner of war who benefitted from a prisoner exchange with Italy.

Davidson who reported for  a number of international media organisations,  decided in 1951 to document Africa.  His initial interest was Eastern Europe but  turned to Africa, and that was where he built a legacy that will endure over the ages.

His first encounter with Africa was when he went to Cairo as a soldier and spy to arrange logistics for the Slav resistance. His flight had a stop-over in Bathurst, then Lagos and on to what to him then was “somewhere in the north of Nigeria, an unknown point on an atlas map, as far as I could find out”.  The plane, he said,  “slid down into a landscape  of sand as flat and featureless as the eye could ever see, and utterly empty of anyone or anything”.

On ground he said he went for  a walk: “There came to me through that distance the outline of a presence, of a wall both tall and long, a city wall …It was built of mud and timber, and it went right round a city  lost in this African nowhere…I found out later, Kano was 700 years old, if not a lot more…and there wasn’t  any history in Africa, as far as I’d ever been taught”.

This was how his curiosity in Africa was aroused. His studies and writings  about  the continent were to occupy the last two thirds of his 95 years sojourn on earth which began  on November 9, 1914 and ended on July 9, 2010.

In seeking to establish that Africa had a rich pre-colonial history,  Davidson wrote a number of books  that included ancient Egypt, Kush, Nok culture and the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai. These featured in his books such  as Old Africa Rediscovered, Black Mother, The African Past and The Africans. He wrote about the break-up of African empires, forced mergers into new nation- states  and asked rhetorically: “Must Africa renew the proliferation of nations and national quarrels?…African peoples followed their  own in the past, there is nothing to say they will not follow it, constructively, creatively, again”.

But Africa did not follow its old path, rather it trod that dictated by the colonial masters. Davidson agonised about this. In analysing the tragedy of the continent, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, he lamented that “the decline in moral and political value of those who claimed to speak for Africa was both rapid and widespread”.

While acknowledging the immense moral authority of leaders like Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, he noted in leaders like Samuel Doe of Liberia, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida in Nigeria, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Jean Bedel Bokasa in Central Africa Republic and Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea what he characterised as “the acutely pathological phenomenon  that appear  in colonial and post-colonial dramas played out by men who have possessed the  strength and character to seize power, but not the wisdom  to control it. Such men seize power  and greed sets in, whether for more power or its fruits”.

One of his enduring legacies was his documentation of the liberation struggles in the Portuguese territories, the lessons for Africa and their verification of the People’s War theory. For instance, he related an audacious commando strike on the ‘safe’ airport in Bissau by the African Party  for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The Portuguese colonial army had fortified the airport  with minefields and wires, amongst other things.

The liberation army destroyed planes on the ground, hangers and airport installations without it sustaining any casualty. One of the lessons of this audacious attack, argued Davidson,  is that “immunity lay on the guerrilla side, not on that of the colonial forces”.
He posited that “all wars  have been evil” but that “ a well-directed war of self-defence – as distinct, always  from every terrorist adventure – could extract good from the most adverse circumstances”. He argued that an ideology  of liberation cannot  be developed without “the potentials of a people’s consciousness in any given specific time and place”.

Davidson in his classic works like The Black  Man’s Burden,  The people’s Cause: A History of Guerrillas in Africa, The Lost Cities Of Africa, West Africa Before The Colonial Era: A History  To 1850, Africa (which became a television series) and Africa In History firmly planted his legacy in the African soil and in the world of intellectualism.