The presentation by the Orator Dr M. C. Horton to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol of Basil Davidson for the degree of Doctor of Letters 1999
WE HAVE THIS AFTERNOON a very unusual event. I am presenting to you a candidate who, only two years ago, received an Honorary Degree in this very same building, not I dare to say, from our University, but from another, from the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, whose Vice-Chancellor came specially to our city to honour a local resident and Bristolian, and you most graciously consented to allow the ceremony to take place within these walls.
Basil Risbridger Davidson was born nearly 85 years ago, in a house at the top of Blackboy Hill which is reached by way of the Whiteladies Road. We can only speculate if living one’s formative years among the ‘white ladies’ and ‘black boys’ influenced the ultimate direction that his career would take, as one of Africa’s foremost modern historians, but this lies in the future of an extraordinary life.
Leaving school at 16, Basil Davidson obtained work as a clerk in a banana warehouse at Avonmouth, but aspired to be a journalist, and after numerous begging letters, obtained work in London with that most ancient of our newspapers, The Colliery Guardian. Indeed he soon rose to be the editor of its sister newspaper, The Quarry and Road Making Journal. It proved to be the foot in the door, and by 1938, he had joined The Economist as a correspondent. But war was to break out, and Basil Davidson was soon at the recruiting office, offering his services to fight fascism. His talents were rapidly recognised, and he found his way into Special Operations Executive, or SOE. He was sent into the Balkans, with cover as a journalist, and survived there for nine months in clandestine operations. But with the German onslaught into the Balkans during April 1941, he was captured, perhaps fortunately, by the Italians. After a brief internment, and an extraordinary exchange deal, which involved 100 British diplomats and agents for one rather minor Italian royal duke, who was taken during the campaign in Ethiopia, he reached Britain, was given ten days leave, and immediately sent back to SOE headquarters in Cairo.
By late 1942 it was clear that British policy towards the Balkans was hopelessly wrong, and now Major Davidson was one of a small group to persuade Churchill, during a visit to Cairo, to switch support to Tito’s partisans. This was to prove a turning point in the war, but also for Davidson, who was able to return to Yugoslavia, to fight with the Serbian partisans in a savage, brutal and hair-raising war. By late ’44 the Balkan war was over and Davidson, rejecting an offer of home leave to return to his devoted wife, Marion, volunteered to be parachuted into Nazi-controlled northern Italy, where again he worked with the partisans and communists behind enemy lines. The official histories record the greatest moment of Davidson’s war career, wrongly, when the surrender of the proud city of Genoa was taken, not by the advancing American Fifth Army, but by a British liaison officer, Colonel Davidson MC. Characteristically, Basil Davidson denies this; the surrender was taken by the Italians themselves, fighting for their own freedom from fascism.
Basil Davidson had a ‘good war’, but unlike many war heroes who returned home to obscurity, and whose fame has been briefly re-remembered in the obituary columns of The Times, decades later, he built upon his experiences to make a unique contribution to the modern world. He resumed his career as a journalist and became The Times’ correspondent in Paris, but soon saw that the injustices that he had fought to eliminate in Europe were still present in colonial Africa. He first travelled to South Africa, where the new Nationalist government had begun to establish the framework of apartheid. Appalled by what he saw, he wrote his first book, A Report on Southern Africa in 1952. This was one of the first liberal outcries against apartheid, and was to prove to be a foundation block of the anti-apartheid movement. By now, thrown out of South Africa, he travelled through colonial Africa, branded by the settler governments as a dangerous subversive and communist sympathiser, and was often escorted to the border, PDQ, on one famous occasion, having to turn down an invitation to stay with the Chief of Police who was an old family friend.
It was to the Portuguese colonial system that Davidson reserved his most active opposition. Fascist, reliant upon forced labour systems, the modern manifestation of slavery, with minimal education or health services for the indigenous population, these colonial relics belonged to the 19th-century world, which those great liberal pioneers, such as E. D. Morel and Henry Nevinson, had exposed. By the early 1950s a few brave Africans were challenging this colonial order, by armed uprisings and guerrilla warfare. Davidson is one of a handful of Europeans who was able to obtain the trust of these Africans and their leaders, fighting for their freedom and liberation, and by his writings was able to plead their case in the world of the colonial rulers. His pen was indeed mightier than the sword.
To gather material for his numerous books and reports to the British press, he travelled to the guerrilla-held areas of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Eritrea, at enormous personal risk. In one visit he walked over 300 miles into Angola. He was still reporting in 1988 from Eritrea, when he was the only journalist present at the final successful offensive against the Ethiopian army. The guerrilla camps of Africa were little different from those of the partisans and the communists of the European war. Amilcar Cabral, one of the liberation movement’s leaders, who was later gunned down by Portuguese agents, wrote how 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’. His books stand as a vital eyewitness record of the emergence of modern Africa.
Between these trips Basil Davidson became a serious historian of Africa. To him, the writing of history is not a self-pleasing activity, but a moral exercise. He had read the texts of the imperial historians, and saw how they had misunderstood Africa; they had promoted a racist view of Africa, a necessary justification for the enslavement and exploitation of black people. They had ignored the rich pre-colonial past, in which African empires and cities had flourished and craftsmen and artists worked to produce some of the finest pieces to survive from Antiquity. Much was misinterpreted, or attributed to foreigners. If these achievements were possible before colonialism, Davidson argued, then surely Africans could also deliver their own future destiny. His groundbreaking book Old Africa Rediscovered, published in 1959, meticulously documented the evidence for pre-colonial Africa. Even today, with the gathering pace of historical and especially archaeological research, his books and writings have a freshness and purpose, and many remain in print as the texts for students of African historical studies.
With victory in the liberation wars assured, the winds of change having swept across Africa, many, including Davidson, hoped for a new beginning: a prosperous, free and democratic continent. But as we all know, it was not to be. Despots and dictators wiped out democracy, while corruption and mismanagement destroyed economies. His most recent books have sought answers to the modern predicament, and he shows little sentiment towards those African leaders who failed to deliver on the earlier idealism. The paradox of nationalism, which at first provided the rallying call to remove the colonial masters, became the yoke of tribal conflict and territorial dispute. The inherited nation state was and is, in Davidson’s immortal phrase, and the title of a recent book, The Black Man’s Burden.
MR VICE-CHANCELLOR, we have here today with us one of the great radical figures of the 20th century. He has pursued, throughout his life, a just cause, without fear for his own personal safety. He has provided an inspiration for millions, through his books and television work, and by his academic writings gave us African history, when many denied that there could be any African history.
MR VICE CHANCELLOR, I present to you Basil Risbridger Davidson MC, as eminently worthy to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.
The African Genius
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