The making of an Africanist

Basil Davidson’s engagement with African issues in the early 1950s was, to some extent, an unintended consequence of the Cold War. A self-educated journalist with a gift for foreign languages, Davidson became the Paris correspondent of the Economist in 1938, at the age of 24, and then the diplomatic correspondent of the London based Star, with ‘a crafty ear to the gossip of all the chancelleries in Europe’.⁷ When the war broke out, he was recruited by MI6 and sent to Hungary where he pretended to run a news service in Budapest, but was in fact acting as a liaison agent with anti-Axis elements. He later moved to Belgrade, was captured by Italian forces, and returned to Britain as part of an exchange of prisoners. From 1942, and for the remainder of the war, he worked for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), acting as chief of its Cairo section, and then as liaison officer with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia until 1944, as well as with the Italian anti-Fascist forces in Liguria and Genoa in 1945 – experiences he evokes in two of his books, Partisan Picture (1946) and Special Operations Europe (1980).

Known for attracting young idealist socialists and communist sympathisers, SOE and its missions in Axis-occupied Europe were a formative experience for Davidson, who for ever became enamoured with the egalitarian spirit of the Partisans’ war, and the sort of progressive democratic prospects that seemed to be opening up with the overthrow of fascism and the remains of the social ancien régime in several parts of Europe. With the dissolution of the organisation in 1946, Davidson, who ended the war as Lieutenant-Colonel with a Military Cross (and the American Bronze Star),⁸ apparently severed his ties with British intelligence as well. He resumed his journalistic career with an appointment as the Paris correspondent (1945–47) of The Times, and then as its foreign leader writer. Somewhat ironically in the light of future developments, he was banned from travelling to parts of Eastern Europe and the Balkans on account of his previous connections with the Secret Intelligence Service.⁹

In the heightened Cold War tensions of the late 1940s, Davidson began to attract suspicions for his political views and friendships. Some of his close friends and intellectual companions (among them, the academics John Desmond Bernal¹⁰ and Thomas Hodgkin¹¹) were indeed members of the Communist Party, and many were under surveillance by the security services. His critical opinion on the western intervention in the Greek civil war probably cost him his job at The Times. He was able to find a part-time job in the left of centre New Statesman and Nation, then edited by Kingsley Martin, a journalist with a pacifist background and an ‘erratic’ posture towards the Soviet Union (he was mentioned in the famous list of ‘fellow travellers’ which George Orwell handed to the Information Research Department in 1949).¹² Martin seems to have also been an important influence in another job that Davidson took up in those years, the position of secretary-general of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), a pressure group set up in 1914 to scrutinise the military’s influence in politics and, after the Second World War, to press for the cause of world disarmament (again, a suspicious activity when the United States had a clear lead over the Soviet Union in terms of nuclear capacity). Some of its mentors now wanted it to devote greater attention to colonial issues as well, an area in which Labour’s pragmatic foreign and imperial policy had not pleased many in the party.¹³

Davidson’s engagement with UDC went well beyond a simple ‘managerial’ capacity. He was a prolific writer of pamphlets on current affairs (a genre in which he was particularly talented), addressing topics such as the Greek civil war, German rearmament or the political situation in Spain. His views were, in many instances, on the left of the Labour Party’s ‘official’ positions, to the point of raising concerns among the security apparatus of Cold War Britain, who viewed the UDC as a ‘front organisation’.¹⁴ MI5 set up a surveillance operation on Davidson (and his family) which would go on for several years.¹⁵

Barred from travelling to Eastern Europe, Davidson redirected his interests to a part of the world still very much neglected by the media in Britain. Through an invitation by a group of South African trade unionists (the Garment Workers’ Union, mostly comprised of women, but directed by Solly Sachs, a member of the South African Labour Party and former communist militant), he travelled to the country where the apartheid regime had recently been established. From this trip he collected material for his first book on African affairs, Report on Southern Africa (1952), a critical overview of the segregationist policies of the apartheid state and the social and political conditions in the then-British-controlled territories of Basutoland (Lesotho), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).¹⁶ The contents of the book, and some of the reporting which preceded it in the pages of the New Statesman and Nation, deepened the suspicions that had provided the pretext for MI5’s surveillance operation. There was now ample concern among colonial governments in British Africa, as well as in South Africa, about the repercussions of Davidson’s writings. He was soon declared a ‘prohibited immigrant’ by Daniel Malan’s government, while other British Crown colonies, like Kenya, sounded out the Colonial Office about the possibility of following the South African example.¹⁷ These official misapprehensions, most likely hissed to the directorship of the New Statesman and Nation, in addition to his difficult relation with Kingsley Martin’s partner, Dorothy Woodman, led to Davidson’s removal from the permanent staff of the journal in 1953.¹⁸

In the following ten years, he was employed by the Daily Herald (1954–57) and then by the Daily Mirror (1959–61). His reporting of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 eventually helped to dissipate his reputation of communist sympathiser since his coverage of the crushing of the nationalist revolt led by Imre Nagy was extremely critical of Moscow’s intervention.¹⁹ But the core of his international reporting was now mainly located in West, Central and Eastern Africa, partly on account of the Mirror’s publishing interests in Nigeria, but most likely because Davidson was sensing a sea-change in the political situation of the continent.²⁰

For the purposes of this chapter, it makes sense to highlight one of his trips to Africa in this period, one which took him to the Belgian Congo and Angola in 1954. The funding partly came from an American organisation (the Foundation for World Government, based in Charlottesville, Virginia) and Harper’s, the US monthly magazine (which half a century before had commissioned Henry Nevinson’s famous reportage on the ‘new African slaveries’). This allowed Davidson to pen a series of articles, later developed into his book African Awakening (1955), largely devoted to the operation of the ‘contract system’ in Angola and the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe.²¹

Davidson’s comparisons of the two colonial contexts were highly unfavourable to the Portuguese. Whereas the Belgian colony struck him with its febrile pace of industrial development, and the rise of a new African proletariat in fast-growing towns, Angola was a colonial backwater run by the Portuguese with extremely archaic methods. His main conclusion could be summarised as follows: the labour system that prevailed in the Portuguese colonies was more human than in Nevinson’s time, but its functioning remained practically unchanged. In other words, Africans continued to be forcibly enlisted to work on plantations, in mines, railways and public works; their working conditions, despite some improvements in food, accommodation and medical care, remained almost as harsh as at the beginning of the century; and the Portuguese authorities, from the Ministry of Colonies in Lisbon to the modest chief of post in the interior of Angola, not only continued to provide coverage to and reap dividends from this degrading process, but they did not appear to have any remorse about it.

Davidson also contrasted the modest but, in some ways, meaningful civil and political liberties in parts of French West Africa and Northern Rhodesia, with the total denial of opportunities for political participation in the Portuguese colonies. Portuguese colonialism brought together the worst defects of other European empires, without having a single of its ‘qualities’. Its administration was corrupt and repressive, economic, social, and educational innovations practically non-existent, and Africans continued to be treated like beasts of burden, without any civic and political rights.

The publication of African Awakening, widely reviewed in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, immediately established his reputation as an African expert not aligned with pro-empire views. The book was translated into French (L’éveil de l’Afrique) and published by Présence Africaine in 1957. It was read avidly by many African intellectuals, including those who collaborated with the journal and frequented Africanist circles in Paris, among them Mário Pinto de Andrade, one of the founders of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA).²²

Davidson’s denunciation of the ‘contract system’ in Angola galvanised the critics of Portuguese colonialism, who soon got in touch and found in him an invaluable facilitator of contacts among Labour Party and other anti-imperialist circles in the United Kingdom. His London flat became, in his own words, a ‘port of call’ for many leading figures of the liberation movements that were emerging, as clandestine movements, in the Portuguese territories.²³ Since the 1950s, he had established close friendships with Pinto de Andrade and the future leader of the MPLA, Agostinho Neto, with Marcelino dos Santos and Eduardo Mondlane, both Mozambicans and the latter the leader of FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) until his assassination in 1969, and with the Guinean Amílcar Cabral, founder and leader of the PAIGC (and also a victim of a deadly conspiracy in 1973).

An important document anthology of the early years of the MPLA, published by one of its key figures, Lúcio Lara, provides evidence of the sort of comradely services that Davidson was able to offer the nationalists, from the translation of texts to the writing of articles that drew attention to the hardening of political repression in Angola. In 1959, the New Statesman and Nation published one of his most celebrated articles, ‘The Time of the Leaflet’, a three-column piece that described the growing signs of unrest among the colonial authorities and their heavy-handed attitude towards members of the African intelligentsia in Angola. The article also underlined the persistence of forced labour in the Portuguese territories, two years after Portugal signed the 1930 International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention which banned all forms of compulsory labour. Again, Davidson singled out the Portuguese as an especially unreconstructed imperial power: ‘Britain, France, Belgium may all move towards a reconciliation with the ideas of African quality. But not the Portugal of Salazar: not the boyo with the gun.’²⁴

The following year, Davidson received Cabral in his own apartment and assisted him in the translation of The Facts About Portugal’s African Colonies, to which he also contributed a preface.²⁵ In the ‘year of Africa’ at the UN, with the accession of thirteen new independent countries emerging from British, French and Belgian decolonisation, the pamphlet was a powerful rebuttal of Portugal’s claims of being a slower, but no less accomplished, ‘civilizing power’ in Africa. When Lisbon was still refusing to provide the UN General-Secretary with data on the social and educational progress in its overseas territories, Cabral’s pamphlet, published by UDC, underlined the appalling shortcomings of Portugal’s colonial rule in those fields.

By now Davidson was already a familiar figure among the Portuguese diplomatic and security apparatus. African Awakening had enjoyed excellent critical acclaim in various countries, only to be followed by two volumes on African history that also became best-sellers. Davidson’s articles were reprinted around the world, including in India, a country with whom Portugal had an ongoing territorial dispute over the fate of its colonial enclaves of Goa, Damão and Diu. He also took the initiative of sending his field notes from his Angolan trip to the ILO headquarters, drawing the attention of the Geneva secretariat to the ‘archaic’ Portuguese labour conditions in the colony.²⁶ Excerpts of his Harper’s reportage were circulating at the ILO headquarters in the bulletin of the Anti-Slavery Society, an additional reason for embarrassment being an unflattering reference in Davidson’s text to the Portuguese candidate for the Non-Metropolitan Territories Commission.²⁷ At some point, Salazar’s government considered sponsoring an anonymous pamphlet to discredit Davidson’s allegations,²⁸ but at the end of the day decided to follow a more ‘constructive’ path and commissioned a pamphlet with a pro-Portuguese apologia from an old Salazar admirer, F. C. C. Egerton (Angola without Prejudice, 1955), and subsequently a book (Angola in Perspective, 1957). Davidson did not let pass the opportunity to ‘cross swords’ with Egerton, who had managed to secure a prestigious publishing house to print his apology (Routledge and Kegan Paul), and wrote a demolishing review for West Africa, to which he was a regular contributor.²⁹

It was now evident that the repressive nature of the Estado Novo, as well as its retrograde colonial policies, were increasingly seen as ‘historical anomalies’ among progressive and liberal circles in the United Kingdom – a perception reflected in some of the comments elicited by Queen Elizabeth II’s rather grandiose state visit to Portugal in March 1957, including a provocative article by Kingsley Martin, ‘Fascism in the Name of Jesus’, and a letter to the New Statesman and Nation editor signed by Basil Davidson – both of which were to have some circulation as a pamphlet printed by the Indian authorities.³⁰

Campaigns and platforms

The unveiling of the harshest realities of the colonial situation in Portuguese Africa would be accelerated by the outbreak of the war in Angola in the early months of 1961, the ‘annus horribilis’ of the Lisbon dictatorship. The coverage of the events by the British press was significant, with the national papers devoting ample space to the explosion of vigilante violence against the African population of Luanda’s shanty towns (musseques), in February, and subsequently to the União das Populações de Angola (UPA) March uprising in the coffee districts of the north-east of the colony, and the quite ferocious counterattack by Portuguese settler militias and armed forces.³¹ The interest of British audiences for the under-reported situation in Portugal and its colonies had already been aroused by other events, such as the hijacking of the Santa Maria liner by a Luso-Spanish anti-fascist commando (January–February 1961). The prospect of a possible ‘insurrectional detour’ of the ship to Luanda had attracted a significant number of international journalists to the colony’s capital, including several British ones. Some were able to report the early stages of the anticolonial upheavals. The colonial authorities tried to control the news flux from the territory by inviting reporters from more trustworthy newspapers, such as The Times or The Daily Telegraph, to travel ‘embedded’ with Portuguese troops, but the results did not always meet their objectives.³²

Already banned from travelling to Angola, Davidson was nevertheless a regular contributor to New Statesman and Nation and other newspapers, taking advantage of his wealth of contacts inside the colony and among the African émigrés and anti-Salazarist oppositionists in the United Kingdom. Again under the auspices of UDC, he published a pamphlet (Angola, 1961. The Factual Record) which presented a detailed chronology of the insurgency in Angola and the Portuguese military and vigilante response.³³ Davidson also made an interesting connection between the campaign led by the Congo Reform Association between 1904 and 1913, in which the founder of the UDC, Edmund Morel, had played a key role, and the humanitarian outrage towards Portuguese actions in Angola. Writing in the summer of 1961, when Cold War solidarities meant the United States and other NATO members were already cooling down their initial criticism of Portuguese policies in the UN’s Security Council, Davidson was well aware of the need to present the sufferings of the Angolans as a cause of concern for the enlightened and ‘non-partisan’ opinion in the West.

Indeed, the plight of Portuguese oppositionists and Angolan nationalists was by then a relevant cause for British human rights activists. Peter Benenson, a Catholic lawyer, was in the process of launching Amnesty International, soon to evolve into one of the major humanitarian activist groups in the second half of the twentieth century. The event which apparently caused the ‘epiphany’ that encouraged him to start his humanitarian crusade was a discreet news item in a London newspaper related to an arbitrary arrest of two students in Coimbra (for raising a toast to freedom).³⁴ But the Lusophone figure who came under the spotlight in his ‘Forgotten Prisoners’ article in The Observer of 28 May 1961, the launchpad for the ‘Appeal for Amnesty’ campaign, was Agostinho Neto, the physician held under captivity by the Portuguese, and leader of the MPLA.³⁵

Davidson’s role as ‘broker’ between African nationalists and the Labour Party should also be underlined since events in Angola in 1961 were the pretext for several heated debates in Westminster between ministers in Macmillan’s government and opposition MPs.³⁶ A card-carrying member of the party since the late 1940s, he had at one point been sounded to run for winnable parliamentary seats but ended up deciding to focus on civic activism and his intellectual pursuits.³⁷ He nevertheless cultivated contacts among the more radical and ‘non-aligned’ sections of the party, many of whom he would meet not only at UDC meetings but also in the Movement for Colonial Freedom, a pressure group he helped to set up in 1954 and which can be counted, in the words of one author, ‘among the most important post-war British political pressure groups’.³⁸ At the UDC he kept up a close dialogue with the Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB), a small think-tank established in 1940 to advise Labour MPs and leaders on colonial issues. But his preference for ‘socialist’ solutions as the final outcome of the process of imperial dissolution was not exactly welcomed by the gradualist FCB and the ‘centrist’ elements of the Labour Party.³⁹ Together with Thomas Hodgkin, he organised several important meetings on Africa which brought together politicians, academics and African nationalists. In 1953, Davidson was also the author of a damning critique of the colonial sections of Labour’s policy document, Challenge to Britain, written, as remarked historian Stephen Howe, from ‘the newly influential perspective of an intimate relationship between economic exploitation, political and racial injustice in the colonies, and the prospects for socialism in Britain’.⁴⁰ Not without some reason, Hugh Gaitskell, Labour’s centrist leader between 1955 and 1963, is supposed to have used his influence to get Davidson sacked from the Labour Party-oriented Daily Herald a few years later.⁴¹ Seen as too much of a radical by these sectors of the Party, Davidson was nevertheless able to work with other elements who still had a degree of influence in Westminster, as well as among the ‘rank and file’ members and other sectors of British opinion. In 1960, along with several MPs (including Tony Benn and Fenner Brockway), and with the representative of the MPLA in London, and secretary of the Goan League, João Cabral, he helped to organise the visit of a delegation of several Lusophone African nationalists. One of its highlights was the staging of a press conference in the House of Commons, following an invitation by James Callaghan, then head of Labour’s National Executive Committee and its spokesman for colonial affairs. The event took place on 6 December 1960, shortly after a major defeat for Portugal in a vote at the UN’s Fourth Committee in New York. In their address to the House of Commons conference, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Américo Boavida, Viriato da Cruz (MPLA), Matthew Mayole and C. Nahala (Mozambique Makonde Union), Alfredo Bangura (PAIGC),⁴² and João Cabral (Goan League), asked for the recognition of their people’s right to self-determination, an amnesty for political prisoners, the restoration of basic civil rights and liberties, as well as the withdrawal of the political police and Portuguese armed forces from their territories.⁴³ They were nevertheless advised by the Labour MPs to refrain from using the expression ‘armed struggle’, as this was perceived as a term which could alienate most of the British public. Tony Benn tried to ascertain the Foreign Office’s willingness to meet unofficially with some of the nationalists who ‘in ten years’ time’ might be holding office in their countries, but his suggestion was not met with success.⁴⁴

Davidson’s contacts were not limited to the universe of African nationalists. Since the late 1950s he had also been cultivating friendships among the small, but growing community of Portuguese expatriates and political émigrés in the United Kingdom. Many of them were students, artists, young professionals or political dissidents trying to survive with odd jobs. A few could be counted as militants of the Portuguese Communist Party, which had recently adopted an unambiguous stance towards self-determination in the African colonies. Some of these elements were behind the launching of the Council of Freedom in Portugal and Colonies in 1960, under the chairmanship of Sir Leslie Plummer, a Labour MP with a long record of involvement in colonial issues and matters of racial discrimination, and someone attentive to the human rights situation in Francoist Spain. Other notable members included several Labour MPs, university professors, clergymen and human rights lawyers. In the MPLA communiqué announcing the setting up of the new body, Davidson was singled out as ‘the author of the book L’Eveil de l’Afrique – Editions Présence Africaine, Paris, which denounced the existence of forced labour in Angola’.⁴⁵ While a few years before Davidson had expressed some misgivings about the ‘shyness’ of the Portuguese opposition vis-à-vis the emancipation of the colonies, he was now more at ease with the younger generation of activists who were trying to organise some protest initiatives in the United Kingdom and other European countries. In 1962, he gave his patronage to the British Committee for Portuguese Amnesty, part of a larger West European Conference for Amnesty for Portuguese Prisoners and Exiles, with branches in France and Italy. Other eminent personalities included Doris Lessing, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Henry Moore and the Labour MPs Tom Driberg and Judith Hart. Davidson was particularly helpful to António Figueiredo, a Portuguese emigré who had benefitted from asylum protection in the United Kingdom since 1959 (acting as General Humberto Delgado’s representative in Britain), securing him temporary jobs in places like the Anti-Slavery Society, contributions to Anti-Apartheid News, Tribune and The Guardian, as well as an introduction to Victor Gollancz, who in 1961 published Figueiredo’s book, Portugal and Its Empire: the Truth, a volume that for many years was to be a reference book on twentieth-century Portugal, from the standpoint of the anti-Salazarist opposition.⁴⁶ Figueiredo was one of the Portuguese exiles who was able to gain the confidence of the Lusophone African nationalists that occasionally visited the United Kingdom and acted as one of the ‘bridge builders’ between these two groups, together with some other expatriates and exiles who had made acquaintances with the latter during their student days in post-war Lisbon.

Marching with the guerrillas

In the late 1960s, along with Southern Rhodesia, and to some extent South Africa, the Portuguese African territories remained one of the ‘unfinished businesses’ of European decolonisation. Armed struggle in Angola had been followed by equivalent insurgencies in Guinea-Bissau (1963) and Mozambique (1964). But while some observers had predicted that the colonialist regime in Lisbon would not concede easily to independence claims, the resilience of Portugal’s ‘ultra-colonialism’ took many by surprise (including the New Left Review, which introduced the concept in 1962).⁴⁷ The ‘Euro-Atlanticist’ priorities of the western alliance had gradually reasserted themselves after some brief flirtation in the early months of Kennedy’s administration with the cause of African liberation. Under Lyndon B. Johnson, Portugal was able to gain some respite and even if NATO’s backing for its colonial wars could not be taken for granted,⁴⁸ the country’s acceptance as part of the American sphere of influence, including its most important military alliance, was the source of many trump cards. Until 1974 Portugal enjoyed impressive growth rates, benefiting from its inclusion in the European Free Trade Area and other trade agreements, a significant flow of foreign investment and a measure of political solidarity from its western partners in the UN and other international bodies. Lusophone African leaders also met some difficulties in travelling to many western countries and were unable to be received by governmental representatives or other official bodies. This was particularly the case of the United Kingdom, even during Harold Wilson’s first stint in Downing Street (1964–70). Commercial reasons, NATO commitments and the ‘old alliance’ links, as well as the fear of a Portuguese collusion with the white minority in Salisbury, were behind Labour’s appeasement of Salazar in the 1960s.⁴⁹

In the British media, the wars in Portuguese Africa were gradually relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers, partly for the lack of major ‘breakthroughs’ from the guerrillas, partly due to the eruption of crises and conflicts on an altogether greater scale and with a greater salience in the international news, such as the Vietnam War, the Six-Day War (1967) and its aftermath in the Middle East, the secession of Biafra, not to mention Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

The situation correspondingly demanded a ‘public relations’ offensive from the Lusophone African nationalists at this stage, and Davidson was uniquely well placed to assist those with whom he had built a close rapport: the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, the MPLA in Angola and FRELIMO in Mozambique. They were the ‘modernist’ (and Marxist) movements that claimed to wage a people’s war based on the political mobilisation of the peasant masses, having as their final goal a complete overthrow of the structures of inequality erected by the colonial power, to be followed by the establishment of socialist regimes – though not necessarily modelled on the ‘real existing socialism’ of the Soviet bloc or Maoist China.⁵⁰ Given that such ‘subtleties’ were not easily understood by the less politicised sectors of western audiences, Davidson’s role as the ‘interpreter’ of their message was particularly valued. He needed to make the essentially ‘non-aligned’ outlook of the Lusophone independence movements better known to the wider world and thereby give a strong rebuttal to the Portuguese claim that Cabral, Neto and Mondlane were hostages to Soviet global designs or champions of ‘anti-white’ and ‘anti-western’ ideologies.

Between 1968 and 1971, he made two long incursions to the ‘liberated areas’ of Guinea-Bissau and Angola, travelling ‘embedded’ with the guerrillas, as well as a brief visit to Mozambique, to attend the second congress of FRELIMO (July 1968), in one of the ‘liberated areas’ of Niassa province.

The kind of voyage undertaken by Davidson to the Guinean maquis controlled by the PAIGC had become a regular feature of the guerrilla war in the Portuguese colony. Cabral was adamant that he had to seize every opportunity to make his cause known in western countries and give assurances as to the PAIGC’s determination to pursue a realistic nation-building project (along socialist lines but avoiding a dogmatic emulation of ‘foreign’ models), as well as an autonomous foreign policy.⁵¹ The timing of Davidson’s travel was probably related to the awareness that Portugal’s armed forces were trying to regain the initiative, with a more efficient use of air power and the appointment of a more ‘forward-looking’ commander, General António de Spínola, who did not hesitate to carry out armed incursions into the neighbouring states (Senegal and Guinea-Conakry) that provided sanctuaries to the PAIGC’s guerrillas. Some of Davidson’s observations were conveyed in a series of reports in European newspapers (New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique), but they achieved greater notoriety through his book The Liberation of Guinea, published in 1969. Along with filmmakers, photographers, politicians and fellow journalists, Davidson was one of several western enthusiasts who helped to popularise the ‘David versus Goliath’ struggle that was raging in the little-known Portuguese colony, praising the cunning and bravery of the PAIGC’s fighters, as well as the clear-sightedness and sense of moderation that distinguished Cabral.⁵² But his account was also somewhat appealing to more radical audiences, with its emphasis on grassroots mobilisation, egalitarian practices, and social and educational improvements in the ‘liberated areas’, as well as direct comparisons to Mao’s ‘Long March’ in the 1930s, the Viet Minh in Indochina, and ‘surgical’ quotes from Fanon, Marx and V. N. Giap.

In the late 1960s, Davidson had already established his reputation as one of the United Kingdom’s foremost ‘Africanists’. Indeed, he had a leading role in creating a new study field, helping to correct decades, if not centuries, of crude stereotypes about the continent, its peoples and its cultures.⁵³ Without an academic position, he made his living as a published author and although attracting some unsympathetic remarks for his lack of ‘critical detachment’ (the ‘fellow travelling’ accusations having in the meantime subsided), he enjoyed significant critical acclaim. His book on Guinea was his third with Penguin’s ‘African Library’ series, launched in 1962 by the South African exile, and anti-apartheid activist, Ronald Segal. It soon became a mass-market paperback, in a collection which included other well-known radical authors (academics, activists, as well as politicians) and was easily recognisable by its striking cover.⁵⁴

The timing of his small odyssey among the Angolan guerrillas was no less relevant; indeed it can be said that it was even a more pressing endeavour. The MPLA’s position was in many ways more complicated than the one of its fellow ‘progressive’ organisations in Guinea and Mozambique. It had a recent history of internal dissension and faced the competition of two other movements, UPA and UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola), with whom it maintained a belligerent relationship. Apart from scattered groups fighting in the Cabinda enclave and the Dembos region (north-east of Luanda), its military operations were quite reduced. Agostinho Neto lacked the skills to direct an effective guerrilla campaign and was mostly an ‘exile politician’, subject to growing internal criticism.⁵⁵ In the early 1970s, his leadership would face two important challenges which culminated in two splits – the Revolta de Leste (Eastern Revolt), led by the charismatic commander Daniel Chipenda, and the Revolta Activa (Active Revolt), led by Mário Pinto de Andrade, one the most respected intellectuals of the movement.⁵⁶ Davidson however remained loyal to Neto and his close circle of associates and his reports can to some extent be read as an attempt to bolster Neto’s faltering authority (this is particularly evident in the photographs published in some newspapers,⁵⁷ and later in the book which resulted from his wanderings with the MPLA, which portraited Neto ostensibly holding an AK-47 assault rifle).

In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s People was originally published in 1972 by Longman, only appearing in Penguin’s African Library collection in 1975, the year of Angola’s independence. It was a more scholarly volume than the previous one, with its first two chapters (out of four) devoted to the historical trajectory of Angola, from pre-colonial times to the eve of the 1961 uprising. In the third chapter, Davidson discussed at length the unravelling of the revolt and tried to throw some light on the factional divisions among the Angolan nationalists. The concluding chapter offered a more theoretical discussion about the possibilities of a meaningful decolonisation in Angola, that is, one which would avoid the pitfalls of other independence transitions which had become hostage to ‘neo-colonialist’ machinations. Again, Davidson was keen to stress the ‘revolutionary potential’ of the sort of ‘people’s war’ which the MPLA was waging thanks to the mobilisation of the peasants, the setting up of ‘democratic’ or egalitarian structures, and the political education of the rural communities by a ‘vanguard party’. Evidence that Davidson was eager to keep up with debates among the anti-imperialist left is easy to spot in the last sections, where extensive references to the works of neo-Marxist dependency theorists like André Gunder Frank and Samir Amin are made.⁵⁸

Indeed, in the early 1970s a revival of Marxist currents of thought was discernible among the sort of intellectual circles which Davidson frequented. He was close to several figures of the New Left in Britain, many of them former communists who had left the Party after their disillusion with the crushing of the Hungarian rising. Among them were Ralph Miliband and John Saville, editors of The Socialist Register, to which Davidson was a regular contributor in the 1960s and 1970s. In the United Kingdom, with the near completion of the ‘transfer of power’ phase of decolonisation, anti-imperial activists were now more aware of the modalities of subtle or not-so-subtle postcolonial influence facilitated by aid schemes, foreign investments and other economic arrangements. Davidson plunged into some of these debates which also involved the Portuguese territories, where the economic boom experienced in the early 1970s (‘the Angolan miracle’) gave way to apprehensions about a ‘flag independence’ masterminded by neo-colonial interests, with the imperial centre handing the levers of power to a ‘comprador’ African elite and some pragmatic white settlers.⁵⁹

Making Portugal look toxic

The temporising attitude towards Portuguese colonialism adopted by the Wilson administrations, and afterwards by Edward Heath’s Conservative government (1970–74), encouraged a small group of British activists, headed by Anthony Gifford, a human rights lawyer, Labour peer in the House of Lords and a speaker in Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) events, who launched a solidarity committee devoted to the liberation struggles in Portuguese Africa in 1967 – the Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea (CFMAG). The suggestion had been conveyed to him by Polly Gaster, a young activist who had worked for the Mozambican Institute in Dar es Salaam, FRELIMO’s educational think-tank and cadres training centre (and, coincidentally, a friend of Thomas Hodgkin, Davidson’s close associate since the 1950s).⁶⁰ According to FRELIMO’s president, Eduardo Mondlane, the time was ripe for FRELIMO to have a more direct channel to present its views to the British public, dispensing with the mediation of the Portuguese exiles established in London.

As the major populariser of the liberation struggles in Lusophone Africa in the United Kingdom, Davidson was approached by Gifford to become one of its initial sponsors. A few years later he became more engaged and, along with his wife Marion, worked as a full member in the committee, carrying out several tasks in its busiest years (1971–75), including the writing of pro-PAIGC brochures.⁶¹ His links to CFMAG would also allow him to interact more closely with some of the solidarity committees that had emerged in the late 1960s in several European countries, particularly in France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, usually bringing together the younger and more radical elements of the established Social Democratic parties as well as militants from the various currents that made up the European far left.⁶²

CFMAG’s initial efforts had been associated with opposition to the construction of the massive Cahora Bassa dam in Mozambique, and the indirect participation of British firms and banks in various aspects of the project – a topic about which Davidson wrote a short essay for Présence Africaine.⁶³ Apart from acting as the formal representative of the socialist-oriented liberation movements in the United Kingdom, CFMAG organised the visits made by their leaders to the British Isles and promoted the visits of journalists and other individuals to the ‘liberated areas’ in the Portuguese African territories. Additionally, the group dealt with the production and distribution of informative material and propaganda (including a newsletter entitled O Guerrilheiro and pamphlets with the translation of speeches by the leaders of the liberation movements) and made links with parties, churches and other elements of British civil society, as well as with the Portuguese exile community.⁶⁴

While being run with the characteristic professionalism of British NGOs, CFMAG also benefited from the enthusiasm and sense of improvisation and imagination of its activists. In addition to the production of the usual pamphlets, press releases, postcards and flyers, the Committee held meetings and seminars at universities that helped to create some excitement in a public willing to join protest events against ‘imperialism’ and ‘racism’, and was also keen to produce educational kits for secondary schools.⁶⁵

In terms of major public events, one highlight was the visit paid by Amílcar Cabral to the United Kingdom in October 1971. It was a carefully planned event, occurring at the height of Cabral’s prestige, in which various solidarity and civic bodies were involved. CFMAG organised a speaking tour that took him to Central Hall in London and the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, both attended by hundreds of people. Cabral gave several press interviews, and brochures with his translated speeches were circulated by CFMAG.⁶⁶ The intervention of the Labour MP Joan Lester in the London event was in many ways revealing. When mentioning Labour’s endorsement of anticolonial struggles in Portuguese Africa, she was booed by the audience – a clear sign of the disenchantment that many left-wingers felt towards what they perceived as Labour’s compromising stance on a series of issues, from nuclear disarmament to the Vietnam War.⁶⁷

CFMAG also played a pivotal role in a second episode that brought Portugal’s resistance to decolonisation to the forefront of public debates in Britain and elsewhere: the protests staged against the official visit of Marcelo Caetano, Salazar’s successor, to London, on the pretext of the celebration of the sixth centenary of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance (1373–1973).⁶⁸ When the celebrations were announced, the visit was immediately seized on by CFMAG and other groups as an opportunity to raise awareness of one of the most protracted conflicts in Africa, and of the lack of freedom and democracy in one of Britain’s partners in NATO and, until recently, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). A broad anti-fascist and anticolonial coalition was then assembled – the End the Alliance Campaign, which promoted workshops, symbolic protests and mass meetings prior to and during Caetano’s visit. Although Davidson was not, according to CFMAG’s chairman, ‘much at ease in the language of campaigning’,⁶⁹ he did take part in several events, such as the conference held at the University of Manchester to ‘explore and discuss the anachronism of Portuguese colonialism in the context of modern imperialism’, with speakers including academics and journalists, such as Fred Halliday, Bob Sutcliffe and Paul Foot, the South African exile Joe Slovo, as well as Marcelino dos Santos and Aquino de Bragança, two of the FRELIMO leaders with responsibilities for external relations.⁷⁰ At the beginning of the year, he had also kept an active presence in the media, writing on Amílcar Cabral’s assassination, a crime perpetrated by internal dissenters, but which Davidson believed to have involved the participation of the Portuguese secret police and Guinea’s colonial government.⁷¹ It was, it should be remembered, the second assassination which targeted a major figure of the Lusophone liberation movements, the first being Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of FRELIMO, killed on 3 February 1969 when opening a parcel-bomb sent to his office in Dar es Salaam (the circumstances have since remained wrapped in mystery, but strong suspicions of Portuguese involvement were also raised in the press).⁷²

Portugal was indeed becoming a ‘toxic’ ally and the revelation of a horrific massacre by Portuguese commandos against unarmed civilians in the province of Tete, central Mozambique, on the front page of the London Times (10 July 1973), only made things worse for Caetano and his hosts. As press coverage of Wiryamu and the circumstances of Caetano’s visit have fully been described elsewhere,⁷³ we shall not dwell on them here. Suffice it to say that although Wilson’s support for the anti-Caetano campaign was seen as ‘lukewarm’ by the CFMAG leadership, it seems undoubtable that the public outcry against the Portuguese Prime Minister’s visit, and the wide international repercussions of the Wiriyamu scandal (the subject of an inquiry commission set up by the UN in August 1973), encouraged the Labour Party to reconsider its stance vis-à-vis Portugal on the eve of the 1974 general election. Its foreign policy programme, presented in May 1973, had already repudiated ‘the Portuguese assertion that its overseas provinces were part of mainland Portugal’, and made a pledge to follow a more restrictive investment policy in Portugal, to pursue the cancellation of the commercial agreement celebrated between Lisbon and the EEC in 1972, to press for Portugal’s temporary suspension from NATO and take steps to prevent future British arms sales to Portugal, among other ‘drastic’ measures.⁷⁴

Following the February 1974 election, which saw Wilson return to Downing Street with a narrow margin of four seats, the composition of the new Cabinet showed a significant number of former anticolonial and human rights activists, some of them with junior ministerial posts at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, like Joan Lester, Judith Hart and David Ennals. Wilson’s second government took office in mid-March, just a few weeks before the military coup that put an end to the oldest colonial empire in Africa and the longest surviving dictatorship in Western Europe. Its influence on this outcome was negligible if it can be said to have existed at all. But in the subsequent months, several events showed that some of these choices did have a meaningful impact on the course of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the new Lusophone African states. Indeed, some of the personal links forged in the context of the public campaigns and solidarity committees helped the Wilson administration to start its relationship with FRELIMO’s government on the right footing (to the point of receiving an invitation to attend the independence ceremonies in Maputo on 25 June 1975, contrary to other NATO members), to initiate an aid programme which aimed to earn the confidence of the new regime in Maputo (an important step to isolate the minority regime in Rhodesia), as well as to explore channels to prevent the MPLA government in Luanda, headed by his long time friend Dr Agostinho Neto, from becoming even more dependent on the USSR and its closest allies.⁷⁵

Concluding remarks

As we have seen in parts of this chapter, attitudes among British socialists towards the specific case of the independence struggles in Portuguese Africa were inevitably conditioned by Labour’s commitments as a party of government and the constraints which resulted from the defence and foreign policy arrangements of the Cold War. The sympathies which some of its more openly anti-imperialist militants, MPs or voters expressed towards the aspirations of Lusophone African nationalists were not replicated at a more official level when Labour held office. Symbolic manifestations of solidarity were sometimes expressed (such as the House of Commons’ 1960 press conference with several Lusophone African nationalists) when the Party was in opposition. A fairly similar pattern occurred in West Germany when Willy Brandt’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) entered the ‘grand coalition’ with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 1966 and then became the senior partner of the ruling coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP) from 1969 to the end of the 1970s. The Social Democrats’ desire to ingratiate themselves with progressive forces in West Germany, Europe and the Third World, and earn support for their foreign policy initiatives in the UN and other fora, was in many ways checked by their fear of alienating Portugal, a partner in NATO and a country which had provided defence facilities to the Bundeswehr since 1960, as well as a few investment opportunities in an industrialising peripheral economy.⁷⁶ A marked contrast in Western Europe is provided by neutral Sweden, where a strong ‘thirdworldist’ stance among the Social Democrats imposed a withdrawal of Swedish firms from the Cahora Bassa dam project and assured a significant flow of aid to the Lusophone liberation movements.⁷⁷

At most, the prevalent realpolitik attitudes in London and Bonn were mitigated by the activism of grassroots militants and less ‘officially aligned’ figures among Party ranks. Davidson was a good example of these ‘fellow travellers’ of the independence parties and the anti-imperialist movida who not only found ways to harness support for their causes, but also worked to open channels of dialogue. His repertoire of connections was in many ways impressive, ranging from the more centrist personalities of the Labour Party to some of its ‘maverick’ elements (among which people like Tony Benn or Fenner Brockway), as well as including a broad range of individuals from the ‘progressive’ circles of Britain’s intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. On several occasions, he was able to reach out to influential MPs and Cabinet ministers in order to convey the views or support the interests of the liberation movements to whom he was closely associated. But Davidson’s personal trajectory also highlights the sort of closed doors which someone with his views had to face. From the late 1940s and 1950s, the label ‘fellow traveller’ was a term of opprobrium that had quite a negative impact on his professional career as a journalist, at times even threatening his job security. He also faced a number of travel restrictions in British territories across Africa in the 1950s and was apparently vetoed for a job opportunity at UNESCO, when his reputation as a foremost historian of Africa was already well established.⁷⁸ Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Davidson’s views on decolonisation ceased to be perceived as completely at odds with the British ‘official mind’ or with ‘middle-of-the road’ published opinion. Britain had dismantled most of its African empire, decolonisation by then received near unanimous support at the UN, and the condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid and Portugal’s ‘ultra-colonialism’ was now shared by large sections of society in most western countries. The expectations towards the future development of the newly independent states in Africa were still fairly optimistic at the time, even if disillusionment and scepticism were beginning to gain ground by the end of the 1960s in Britain and other western countries. But Davidson’s quasi-millenarist enthusiasm with the ‘revolutionary prospects’ in Lusophone Africa, and his close identification with the Marxist ‘vanguard parties’ in power in Bissau, Luanda and Maputo (not to mention his support for Siad Barre’s regime in Somalia),⁷⁹ helped to rekindle ancient suspicions and reservations in official circles.⁸⁰ The high hopes which he and the tiermondiste sectors of the British left placed in the political developments in Southern Africa shortly after the collapse of the Portuguese colonial regime in 1974 came up against the hawkish attitudes prevailing in Whitehall in the aftermath of the Soviet and Cuban intervention in Angola and the Ogaden war between Ethiopia and Somalia.⁸¹ As such, his counsel and expertise continued to be disregarded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office under the Labour governments of the second half of the 1970s.

Notes

1. 1.  Research for this chapter was carried out in the framework of IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST. The IHC is funded by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UIDB/04209/2020, UIDP/04209/2020, and LA/P/0132/2020.

2. 2.  For a nuanced account of the war in Guinea (the thornier war theatre for the Portuguese), see Mustafah Dhada, Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993). On the importance of the diplomatic dimension of the liberation struggle, see Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London: Longman, 1997).

3. 3.  For the Angolan context, see Stephen L. Weigert, Angola: A Modern Military History 1961–2002 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). For the other theatres, see MacQueen, Decolonization; John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War 1961–1974 (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997).

4. 4.  Norrie MacQueen, ‘Belated Decolonization and UN Politics against the Backdrop of the Cold War: Portugal, Britain and Guinea-Bissau’s Proclamation of Independence, 1973–1974’, Journal of Cold War Studies 8, no. 4 (2006); Pedro Aires Oliveira, Os Despojos da Aliança. A Grã-Bretanha e a Questão Colonial Portuguesa 1945–1975 (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2007).

5. 5.  There is a fast-expanding literature on this topic, which is difficult to summarise. In the context of this chapter, important references are Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 1918–1964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Robert Gildea, James Mark and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third World”. Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–1973’, Cultural and Social History 8, no. 4 (2011); Kostis Kornetis, ‘ “Cuban Europe”? Greek and Iberian thirdmondisme in the “Long 1960s”’, Journal of Contemporary History 50, no. 3 (2015); Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Nils Schliehe, ‘West German Solidarity Movements and the Struggle for the Decolonization of Lusophone Africa’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 118 (2019); Victor Barros, ‘The French Anticolonial Solidarity Movement and the Liberation of Guinea and Cape Verde’, International History Review 42, no. 6 (2020), as well as Zeina Maasri, Cathy Burgin and Francesca Burke, eds. Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the Global Sixties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022).

6. 6.  A useful survey of the Labour Party and foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century is provided by Stephen Howe, ‘Labour and International Affairs’, in Pat Thane, Nick Tiratsoo, Duncan Tanner, eds. Labour’s First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

7. 7.  Basil Davidson, Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War (London: Gollancz, 1980), 51. For an overview of his life and literary achievements, see the obituary by Victoria Brittain, ‘Basil Davidson’, The Guardian, 9 July 2010, as well as the special issue devoted to him by Race & Class in 1994, particularly the contributions by Barry Munslow, ‘Basil Davidson and Africa: A Biographical Essay’, Race & Class 36, no. 2 (1994), and Stephen Howe, ‘The Interpreter: Basil Davidson as Public Intellectual’, Race & Class 36, no. 2 (1994).

8. 8.  Munslow, ‘Basil Davidson and Africa’, 3.

9. 9.  According to Brittain, Davidson was mentioned as a British intelligence agent in the László Rajk process in Budapest in 1949.

10. 10.  J.D. Bernal’s son, historian Martin Bernal, alludes to this friendship while noting that his parents had some reservations towards Davidson, most likely on account of his ‘Titoist’ sympathies. Martin Bernal, ‘Basil Davidson: A Personal Appreciation’, Race & Class 36, no. 2 (1994), 101.

11. 11.  See Hodgkin’s evocation of their friendship in Thomas Hodgkin, ‘Where the Paths Began’, in African Studies since 1945: A Tribute to Basil Davidson, ed. Christopher Fyfe (London: Longman, 1976), and the biography by Michael Wolfers, Thomas Hodgkin: Wandering Scholar (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2007). Thomas Hodgkin’s MI5 files at the UK’s National Archives (KV series [Security Service]) cover a period from 1949 to 1958.

12. 12.  See Peter Davison, ed., Orwell and Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2001), 501–9.

13. 13.  See Howe, Anticolonialism, 190–95, for an overview of UDC’s commitment to anti-imperialism after the Second World War, and Munslow, ‘Basil Davidson and Africa’, 8–9.

14. 14.  The National Archives (TNA), KV-2-3691-1, 84. See also Union of Democratic Control (UDC), propaganda directed to trade Unions 1952–1954, TNA, FCO 141/4972.

15. 15.  There are eleven files on the KV series (Security Service) on Davidson, covering a period from 1952 to 1958.

16. 16.  Basil Davidson, Report on Southern Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952).

17. 17.  Basil Davidson, The Search for Africa (London: James Currey, 1994), 99.

18. 18.  Brittain, ‘Basil Davidson’.

19. 19.  Basil Davidson, What Really Happened in Hungary: A Personal Record (London: UDC, 1957).

20. 20.  Munslow, ‘Basil Davidson and Africa’; Brittain, ‘Basil Davidson’.

21. 21.  Some pieces of reportage were also published in New Statesman and Nation, Reporter (a US bi-weekly current affairs magazine) and in West Africa, a British monthly magazine.

22. 22.  See Michel Laban, Mário Pinto de Andrade. Uma Entrevista (Lisbon: Ed. João Sá da Costa, 1997) and Lúcio Lara, Documentos e Comentários para a História do MPLA. Até Fev. 1961 (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1999).

23. 23.  Davidson, The Search for Africa, 180.

24. 24.  Basil Davidson, ‘The Time of the Leaflet’, New Statesman and Nation, 21 November 1959.

25. 25.  Abel Djassi (alias of Amílcar Cabral), The Fact About Portugal’s Colonies (London: UDC, 1960).

26. 26.  Basil Davidson, Report for the ILO – UN Special Committee of Forced Labour – Forced Labour in Angola, 3 June 1954, ILO Archive, Series FLC, number 1-3-4 Jacket 1. ILO\ - \UN\ Special \Committee\ on \Forced Labour\ - \Correspondence\ with Basil Davidson, London.

27. 27.  Dispatch from J. Luís Archer (Bern embassy) to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Portugal), 25 November 1954, Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático (AHD), Lisbon, PAA – 124.

28. 28.  Dispatch from P. Teotónio Pereira to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Portugal), 16 September 1955 forwarding a letter from a London solicitor advising against such a course of action, AHD, PAA – 324.

29. 29.  Basil Davidson, ‘Angola in Perspective’ (book review), West Africa, 6 April 1957.

30. 30.  Both were reprinted as an 8-page pamphlet by the North-American bureau of the Information Service of India, Fascism in the Name of Jesus (Washington DC, 1957).

31. 31.  A detailed account of the British newspaper coverage is provided by Tânia Alves, 1961 – Sob o Viés da Imprensa. Os jornais portugueses, britânicos e franceses na conjuntura da eclosão da guerra no império português (Unpubl. PhD dissertation, University of Lisbon, 2018).

32. 32.  Aires Oliveira, Os Despojos, chapter 5.

33. 33.  Basil Davidson, Angola, 1961. The Factual Record (London: UDC, 1961).

34. 34.  Tom Buchanan, ‘ “The Truth Will Set You Free”: The Making of Amnesty International’, Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (2002).

35. 35.  Peter Benenson, Persecution 1961 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).

36. 36.  Aires Oliveira, Os Despojos, chapter 5.

37. 37.  Munslow, ‘Basil Davidson and Africa’, 4.

38. 38.  Howe, Anticolonialism, 231.

39. 39.  Howe, Anticolonialism, 193–94.

40. 40.  Howe, Anticolonialism, 220–21.

41. 41.  Richard Gott, ‘Basil Davidson: a fine writer and fighter’, 7 May 2011. https://www.redpepper.org.uk/basil-davidson-a-fine-writer-and-fighter/ [accessed 7 January 2021].

42. 42.  Alfredo Bangura was the pseudonym of Aristides Pereira, who became the first head of state of Cape Verde (1975–1991).

43. 43.  Press statement, 6 December 1960, Fundação Mário Soares (Lisboa), Casa Comum/Amílcar Cabral Archive, folder 07058.017.032, http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=07058.017.032 [accessed 1 March 2021].

44. 44.  Meeting of Portuguese Nationalist Leaders, H.F.T. Smith, 7 December 1960, TNA, FO 371/147256.

45. 45.  Lúcio Lara ed., Um Amplo Movimento …: Itinerário do MPLA através de documentos de Lúcio Lara: 1961–1962 (Luanda: Edição do Autor, 2006), 53–4.

46. 46.  A. de Figueiredo, ‘The Times of Utopia’, New African, November 2004, 60–61.

47. 47.  Perry Anderson, ‘Portugal and the End of Ultracolonialism (Part. 1)’, New Left Review 15, no. 1 (1962), 83–102, whose first line read: ‘It is now clear that the Portuguese empire is coming to an end.’

48. 48.  At least in an overt fashion. But some NATO equipment seems to have been regularly diverted to the African theatres, and British, French and West German matériel (including fighter jets, light aircraft and helicopters) gave the Portuguese armed forces an important edge throughout most of the conflict.

49. 49.  Aires Oliveira, Os Despojos, chapter 6.

50. 50.  Patrick Chabal et al., A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (London: Hurst & Co., 2002), chapters 1 and 2.

51. 51.  See Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War (London: Hurst & Co., 2002 [original edn 1983]).

52. 52.  António Tomás, O Fazedor de Utopias. Uma biografia de Amílcar Cabral (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2008), chapter 8.

53. 53.  Brief assessments of his contributions to the post-war African historiography can be found in Stephen Ellis, ‘Writing Histories of Contemporary Africa’, Journal of African History 43 (2003), and Jason Parker and Richard Rathbone, African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

54. 54.  Basil Davidson, The Liberation of Guinea: Aspects of an African Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969). For the Penguin African Library, see the post by Josh McPhee (‘111: Penguin African Library: Part 1) in https://justseeds.org/jbbtc-111-penguin-african-library-pt-1/ [accessed 12 March 2021] and Alistair McCleery, ‘Minding Their Own Business: Penguin in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 3 (2018).

55. 55.  See Dalila Cabrita Mateus and Álvaro Pereira, Purga em Angola. O 27 de Maio de 1977 (Lisbon: Texto, 2009), chapter 2; Lara Pawson, In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).

56. 56.  These internal dissensions are presented in great detail in Jean-Michel Mabeko-Tali, Guerrilhas e Lutas Sociais. O MPLA Perante si Próprio 1960–1977 (Lisbon: Mercado das Letras, 2018 [original edn 2001]).

57. 57.  Basil Davidson, ‘Advance in Angola: Guerrillas head for the Atlantic’, Sunday Times, 16 August 1970.

58. 58.  See the chapters ‘The neo-colonial variant’ and ‘The road ahead’ in Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm: Angola’s People (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975 [original ed. 1972]).

59. 59.  See Basil Davidson, ‘South Africa and Portugal’, Issue: A Journal of Opinion 4, no. 2 (1974), and Basil Davidson Can Africa Survive? Arguments Against Growth without Development (Heineman: London, 1974).

60. 60.  Anthony Gifford, ‘Basil Davidson and the African Liberation Struggle’, Race & Class 36, no. 2 (1994).

61. 61.  See Basil Davidson, Growing from Grassroots: The State of Guinea-Bissau (CFMAG: London, 1973).

62. 62.  See Victor Barros, ‘Connected Struggles: Networks of Anticolonial Solidarity and the Liberation Movements of the Portuguese Colonies in Africa’, in Transnational Solidarity, ed. Maasri et al. 131–52. Minutes on some of the ‘pan-European’ conferences of these solidarity committees in the early 1970s are held in the collection of the Committee for the Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea (CFMAG) at the Bishopgate Institute, London.

63. 63.  Basil Davidson, ‘Cahora Bassa’, Présence Africaine 82 (1972), 39–51.

64. 64.  Pedro Aires Oliveira, ‘Generous Albion? Portuguese Anti-Salazarists in the United Kingdom, c. 1960–1974’, Portuguese Studies 27, no. 2 (2011).

65. 65.  Samples of these materials, as well as some correspondence and other documentation, can be found in the CFMAG collection.

66. 66.  See the brochure ‘Speech at a Mass Meeting in Central Hall, London, on 26^th October 1971’, CFMAG collection.

67. 67.  Telegram from Portuguese embassy in London to MFA (Lisbon), 27 October 1971, AHD, Collection of Telegrams London-Lisbon.

68. 68.  See Norrie MacQueen and Pedro Aires Oliveira, ‘ “Grocer meets Butcher”: Marcello Caetano’s London Visit of 1973 and the Last Days of Portugal’s Estado Novo’, Cold War History 10, no. 1 (2010).

69. 69.  Gifford, ‘Basil Davidson’, 87.

70. 70.  Report from the Metropolitan Police/Special Branch, 22 May 1973, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (Lisbon), PIDE/DGS Archive. SC. CI (2). UI 7690.

71. 71.  Basil Davidson, ‘The men who killed black Africa’s top guerrilla’, Sunday Times, 8 April 1973.

72. 72.  See José Manuel Duarte de Jesus, Eduardo Mondlane. Um homem a abater (Coimbra: Almedina, 2010) and George Roberts, ‘The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the Politics of Exile in Dar es Salaam’, Cold War History 17, no. 1 (2017).

73. 73.  See MacQueen and Aires Oliveira, ‘ “Grocer Meets Butcher”’, and Mustafah Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiryamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–2013 (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

74. 74.  Aerogram 81 from Portuguese embassy in London to MFA, 25 May 1973, AHD, PEA/26 (1974).

75. 75.  Pedro Aires Oliveira, ‘The UK and the Independence of Portuguese Africa 1974–1976: Stakes, Perceptions and Policy Options’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britanique 18, no. 2 (2013).

76. 76.  See Schliehe, West German Solidarity, and Rui Lopes, West Germany and the Portuguese Dictatorship 1968–1974 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

77. 77.  See Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, 2 vols. (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999).

78. 78.  Brittain, ‘Basil Davidson’.

79. 79.  Howe, ‘The Interpreter’, 25. Davidson’s post-1974 unqualified support for Neto and the MPLA is critically mentioned in Pawson, In the Name of the People, namely in the context of the Nito Alves ‘failed coup’ of 27 May 1977 and the fierce retaliations commanded by the Angolan President.

80. 80.  An FCO profile about Davidson dated August 1979 described him as ‘sometimes hostile to HMG, but not exclusively extreme. He remains a Marxist and strongly “anti-colonialist”, and he is still associated, though not very actively, with certain front organisations.’ TNA, FCO 106/82.

81. 81.  Concerning the UK’s stance in relation to Angola and Mozambique after 1974 see Oliveira, ‘The UK and the Independence’, and Geraint Hughes, ‘Soldiers of Misfortune: the Angolan Civil War, The British Mercenary Intervention, and UK Policy towards Southern Africa, 1975–6’, The International History Review 36, no. 3 (2014).

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