Nigeria Content Online

When I heard of the
death of Basil Davidson, the great historian of Africa on Friday July
9, I was overwhelmed by a deep sense of personal loss, of a kind I had
not felt for many public figures since the assassination of Thomas
Sankara, the charismatic leader of Burkina Faso, in October 1987.
Although I never met Davidson, I had always thought of him as someone
to know in person. So deeply did his magnificent work speak to me I
often imagined I would write about him in this manner: a free-flowing
appreciation of his work, in grateful acknowledgement of what I learnt
from him, and just as often I imagined the piece of writing as an
account of a meeting.

About ten years
ago, I inquired about him from a British publisher I had met at a
conference, who told me that the historian now lived in an infirmary
and that his hearing was impaired. I was in graduate school at the
time, and had few opportunities to travel to England, out of pocket, so
I bid my time. While living in Portugal a few years ago I made serious
attempts to arrange a meeting and even had encouraging signals from
some quarters, but the encounter did not happen. After this I resigned
myself to the reality of never seeing him, and knowing how grown in
years he was—95 at death—I accepted that his passing would be
devastating, but not surprising. (The writer Kole Omotoso, who put me
in touch with some people who knew Davidson, said that though the
historian had lost much of his hearing his mind remained very sharp.)

He was the
preeminent historian of Africa; there is no debate over that. He was an
intellectual driven by a genuine passion and rather common decency to
record the past and the evolving present of the continent in all its
complexity. And he did this undeterred by the two cautionary roadblocks
most writers on this subject usually face. He evinced a readiness to
focus on the entirety of the African continent, and a willingness to
write about present historical events without a fear of being adjudged
hasty by posterity. In a field where scholars routinely argue that the
continent is too large to be spoken of as a unit, he wrote book after
book that touched on every part of the continent, sometimes on every
country, always looking for common thematic trends in ancient and
contemporary history. When he wrote about the rise to power of a
soldier, he was less bothered by the undemocratic route taken or how
soon the man of power would unravel than by the soldier’s actions as a
patriot. His stance is this salutary on the first, on the second, the
records are mixed.

A socialist

Davidson was born
in Aldershot, England in 1915 and became a soldier in the Royal Army,
seeing Second World War action in the Balkan theater. This experience
would feed into his work when he finally decided to write about Africa,
but before and after the war, he published several novels, about which
very little is known in part because they were published before he
discovered his great subject, which is amply and memorably recorded in
his essayistic but scholarly writings. He was a socialist, that is, a
political human being operating with the conviction that the modern
state ought to be in a position to supervise the redistribution of the
common wealth in such a way that excess is checked and each human being
has enough.

This orientation as
a socialist shaped the way Davidson approached African history. He was
a materialist in the sense that he believed that things are, that they
matter in specific verifiable ways, and that material forces in which
humans act as agents shape the course of history. His view of African
history frames everything he wrote about the various periods or events
in the continent’s long experience, but it is stated most explicitly in
the opening part of Africa: A Voyage of Discovery, the eight-part
documentary film he produced in the mid-1980s in collaboration with
Nigeria’s National Television Authority, NTA. Positioning himself
outside the frame and speaking from somewhere between Egypt and the
Sudan, Davidson said that African history did not start with the
continent’s contact with Europe. It had an impressive past comparable,
and in some cases superior, to Europe’s, and it was the Europeans’
violent incursion through the slave trade that ruined most of the
physical and the psychological aspects of that history. The duty of a
decent man or woman of letters, as he added in Black Mother, his study
of the Atlantic Slave Trade and slavery first published in 1968, is to
explain the present in terms of the past, to produce history, not
propaganda, which aims at just the opposite.

Africa in Modern History

In my opinion his
most important work is Africa in Modern History, published in 1978,
which both summarizes and demonstrates the themes of his work, using
the circumscribed context of Africa’s encounter with modernity to look
at the continent’s problems and prospects. The continent is big, to be
sure, and contains numerous multitudes, but through Davidson’s elegant
prose, lightened with irony and constantly powered by a deep
understanding of human abilities, this enormous complexity is rendered
accessible in beautiful passages in which the currents of history
passes from Mansa Moussa to Samory Toure through Herbert Macaulay to
D.D.T. Jabavu and Sol Plaatje. He shows how the fall in the value of
gold in the mercantile world of late Renaissance Italy was complexly
responsible for the maritime revolutions in which commerce in human
beings became the business of the day.

In all this, his
greatest investment is in African agency, the belief that Africans are
capable of making and do make their own history. His work constantly
pays homage to those of Africans who were his contemporaries—Kenneth
Dike, Adu Boahen, Festus Ade Ajayi, and Saburi Biobaku. He was a
personal friend of Kwame Nkrumah; Amilcar Cabral took him into
confidence as the documenter of the revolution in Guinea Bissau.
According to political insiders, his advice was decisive in the
Nigerian government’s 1975 declaration of support for the MPLA in
Angola, when Cold War arm-twisting might have weighed things in favour
of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA.

Given his interest
in African agency, he tended to look kindly upon moral reprobates who
happened to be in power: having been privy to General Olusegun
Obasanjo’s support for MPLA, he would write positively of Somalia’s
Mohammed Siad Barre and later of Ibrahim Babangida, but Master-Sergeant
Samuel Doe unraveled too quickly to deserve his kindness.

Basil Davidson, historian of Africa, will be remembered for as long as people continue to generate ideas about the continent.

Akin Adesokan is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at
Indiana University, Bloomington, US. He writes this from Lagos.