A Hippocratic Oath for Historians

Against the backdrop of some of the troubling trends that have emerged in statist construction of public human rights history, the question must be asked: What are the ethical and professional obligations of public historians generally and public historians of human rights in particular? What ethical impulses must public historians heed as they engage questions of culpability and accountability in human rights practices?

For example, historians of Nazi Germany have had to be particularly conscientious about issues of trust and professional responsibility, not only thoroughly documenting the unspeakable crimes of an outlaw regime, but also in accurately situating their subject in the context of a particularly violent period. Similarly, post-colonial historical must be conscientious about documenting colonial atrocities while juxtaposing them with the ostensible “social benefits” of colonialism.

Some professions such as the medical and legal professions have, over the years, developed comprehensive codes of ethics to which members are obligated to abide. The process of disciplinary qualification, certification and accreditation is hinged on strict adherence to these codes. Historians have not been traditionally bound by such formal ethical and professional obligations. Although several Historical associations including the American Historical Association and the National Council on Public History have produced broad ethics guidelines on professional conduct, these are not as strict and obligatory as those in some other professions.[1]

Given the instrumentality of public history and particularly, the pivotal role of human rights historians in national commemoration and memorialization projects, we must ask whether it is now time to consider holding public Historians to a stricter and more obligatory ethic code -- perhaps a “Historian’s Hippocratic Oath.”

The Greek origins of the Oath of Hippocrates historically taken by physicians required them to swear by several healing gods, to uphold specific ethical standards. For the public historian, it would require a declared commitment to upholding the basic tenants of our trade - respecting the integrity of primary and secondary sources even while subjecting them to critical scrutiny, contributing in a fair-minded way to scholarly and public debates over what sources tell us about the past, and ensuring that argument are justified by evidence.

This point is well articulated in the AHA's “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct.”

Practicing history in the public realm presents important challenges, for when historians communicate with a wider public, they must represent not just a particular interpretation or body of facts, but the best practices of the discipline of history itself. This means they must inevitably walk a tightrope in balancing their desire to present a particular point of view with their responsibility to uphold the standards and values that underpin their professional authority as historians.[2]

The call for a “Historian’s Hippocratic Oath” might not be as facetious as it appears. Scholars working within public spaces have the potential to go great public good or harm. A historian who devotes a lifetime of research work to denying the atrocities of the Holocaust or justifying the colonial dispossessions of indigenous can potentially do as much harm as a malevolent physician.

In 2014, it was revealed in a United States Senate Report that contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program which included the torture of detainees. In some cases, academic psychologists conducted interrogations using new techniques that they had developed.^[3]

This revelation triggered renewed debates within medical and academic communities about the ethical obligations of medical professionals involved in state security projects. Admittedly, historians are less likely to be embroiled in such controversies. But at a time when historians are increasingly being called upon to lend their expertise to national memorialization projects, we need to re-open the conversation about public trust and the historian’s ethical obligations. Public trust in historians as experts confers a set of responsibilities to the public: to bring that expertise to bear in debates about the past in the present.

There are at least two sides to the debate about professional ethics. On one hand, public historians have been urged to guard against being used simply to rationalize and legitimize statist agendas, particularly those that serve to exclude and further marginalize subaltern constituencies. On the other hand, public historians have to be equally mindful of their roles as advocates. 

They must guard against appropriating the stories of the oppressed and victimized in ways that drown out these voices, undermine scholarly objectivity or erode public trust. As the AHA’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” cautions: “The desire to score points as an advocate should never tempt a historian to misrepresent the historical record or the critical methods that the profession uses to interpret that record.” [4]

These debates are particularly relevant to the memorialization of human rights atrocities and the role of historians and museums in documenting these atrocities. The narratives that museum and memorial sites construct through their collections and displays can represent powerful historiographies.

For an increasing number of museums dedicated to social and memorial histories, these histories are recuperated from silenced or disappeared pasts. The act of making these histories public is an important moment in the lives of the individuals who have experienced trauma, as it is for the collective memory and catharsis of society.[5]

The ethical and professional obligation of the public historian of human rights is therefore not simply academic. They also have practical real-world implications on the lived experiences of individuals and communities.

(Excepts from: Bonny Ibhawoh, “Why Public History?” Paper presented at the International Congress of Historical Sciences, 23-29 August, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, China, August 2015).

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[1] The American Historical Association’s “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct” (updated 2011) at http://historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-and-standards-of-the-profession/statement-on-standards-of-professional-conduct

[2] AHA, “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct.”

[3] Jefferson M Fish “Psychologists played a key role in the CIA torture program.” Psychologists and Torture.www.psychologytoday.com/blog/looking-in-the-cultural-mirror/201412/psychologists-and-torture. (Accessed June 16, 2015.)

[4] AHA, “Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct.”

[5] Carter, “Human Rights Museums and Pedagogies of Practice,” 328.

 

A Hippocratic Oath for Historians

12/24/2020 08:10:00 PM education, history

"A Silent Monument to Slavery": The Ivory Tower confronts its Past

Like their US counterparts, Canadian universities are coming to terms with unsettling parts of their histories. In recent weeks two of the country’s oldest universities - Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College - both in Nova Scotia, have announced scholarly inquiries into their institutional links with slavery. 

Slavery existed in the East Coast province until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire, including Canada, then British North America.

Dalhousie University’s panel will research the controversial views and actions of its founder, George Ramsay, the 9th Earl of Dalhousie, on race, racism and slavery. Lord Dalhousie reportedly described black refugees who fled the United States during and following the War of 1812 as “slaves by habitat and education.” He also made efforts to have them removed from Nova Scotia. 

The president of the University of King’s College states that the task of his university’s panel is to examine the institution’s past in an open and honest way in order to make the school as welcoming as it can to people of diverse communities, including those from the local African-Nova Scotian community.

These inquiries follow similar developments in U.S. universities such as Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the University of Virginia that have acknowledged and addressed their institutional links with slavery. In his book, Ebony and Ivy, historian Craig Wilder shows how slavery benefited universities financially and through the labor of those enslaved. 

Slavery also influenced the intellectual development of universities, shaping pedagogy and curriculum over a century. The American campus, Wilder argues, “stood as a silent monument to slavery.”

Until recently, these hard questions have not been asked of Canadian universities. As an African-Canadian historian who teaches slavery in a Canadian university, I have found this silence unsettling from both personal and professional standpoints. However, as someone with ties to both Dalhousie University and King’s University, I’m pleased that these institutions have taken the first step in what I hope will be a trend among other Canadian universities historically linked with slavery.

In the era of truth and reconciliation, Canadian universities must strive to create spaces for conversations about their historical connections with institutional racism and the institution of slavery. The quest for diverse, inclusive, and welcoming campuses should begin with open discussions about the historical role of universities in profiting from, and sustaining systems of oppression of indigenous people, African-Canadians and other minorities.

Although, universities have been silent on these issues, histories of exclusion resonate deeply within minority communities. As a graduate student at Dalhousie University in the late 1990s, I took many of my classes in the Henry Hicks Building, an imposing masterpiece of Victorian stone architecture with an iconic clock tower. 

As I walked through its grand halls, I often wondered what Lord Dalhousie who invested his treasure to establish the University would have thought of my place at the institution. I also often wondered how much of the treasure that went into building the university came from unacknowledged slave labor.

I have fond memories of my tenure as Residence Don of Cochran Bay at the University of King’s College. It was not a very diverse community, but I found it warm and friendly. I enjoyed living among and superintending over a cohort of boisterous teenagers. As was the university’s Oxbridge tradition, we had formal meals at the common dining room in academic gowns where grace was said in Latin. 

But even then, as a newcomer to Canada, I wondered why African-Nova Scotians, whose ancestry in the community date back to 1605, were not more represented in that beautiful campus. I also wondered why indigenous and African-Nova Scotian faces were not at all represented in the many portraits of former university chancellors, presidents, and distinguished professors that lined the hallowed halls of the university.

The initiatives by both Dalhousie University and the University of King’s College might help begin the conversation that provides answers to these questions. A first step would be acknowledging that some institutions of learning in Canada and the institution of slavery share an interconnected history. 

These will be difficult conversations sometimes, leading to equally difficult decisions. Some feathers may be ruffled in the process. In the U.S., the debate has led to calls to take down statues of slave-owning and slave-trading university founders, erect memorials to enslaved persons, rename building, and redesign university insignia. But it is a conversation that we must have in our universities and beyond, if the goal of building inclusive campuses that are welcoming to all is to be achieved.

"A Silent Monument to Slavery": The Ivory Tower confronts its Past

4/24/2018 01:27:00 PM education, slavery

Public Talk: Global Peace and Local Action

It is encouraging that many more people seem interested in learning about peace and what we can do as individuals to promote peace and transform conflict in our communities, our nations and our world. 

Public Talk: Global Peace and Local Action

10/08/2015 11:50:00 PM education, war and peace

Of Hunters and the Bravery of Lions

One of my favorite quotations is by the writer Chinua Achebe, author of the classic novel Things Fall Apart. It states: "Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter." It is a message that goes out with every e-mail I send.

The idea is not originally Achebe's. As he acknowledged himself, this is a common age-old African proverb. Many African communities have a version of it. But the life and work of Achebe represented the essence of this universal aphorism. The story of the defeated is rarely told. Or as Winston Churchill put it, "History is written by the victors".

But this need not be so. In a just world, even the defeated deserve to have their stories told. There aren't just two sides to any story. There are multiple sides. In the analogy of the hunter and the lion, we have at least three possible stories. The hunter's, the lion's and the historian's or storyteller's. Scholars fail in their responsibility to their audiences when they tell stories only from the perspective of the triumphant hunter.

A year after his death, Chinua Achebe remains an inspiration to many who strive to tell the stories of the subjugated and the vanquished in a way that reflects the true complexity and diversity of human experiences.

Achebe tells of how this impulse to tell the stories of the voiceless shaped his own work as a writer:

"There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions."

Chinua Achebe: The Art of Fiction (Parish Review)

Chinua Achebe and the 'Bravery of Lions' (New York Times)

Of Hunters and the Bravery of Lions

2/14/2014 09:39:00 AM education, reflections

Why do we need Peace Studies?

Scholars of Peace Studies are familiar with this question. Why do we need peace studies? With the end of the Cold War, hasn't humanity safely avoided the existential threat of Mutually Assured Destruction? Didn't the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaim triumphantly at the end of Cold War that humanity had finally reached the End of History? Why should we be investing in the study of peace when there are diseases to be cured, bridges to be built, computers to be invented, and the cosmos to be explored? 

True, these are all important human endeavors but so is the study of global peace and conflict. According to the World Health Organization, the leading worldwide public health problem today is not cancer, malaria or HIV/AIDS. It is violence. In the last century alone, more people died from violence within and between nations than any known disease (Read WHO Report). The Cold War may have ended, but we continue to live in an age of terror, asymmetrical warfare and genocides. The study of peace remains as relevant today as it ever was.

I was invited to talk about my current Peace Studies project as part of the 3 Minutes Thesis Competition (3MT). The 3MT Competition is aimed at encouraging graduate students and post-doctoral scholars develop and learn how to effectively communicate complex research in just three short minutes. As Graduate Dean, I thought that I should show by example. 

Why do we need Peace Studies?

2/02/2014 01:37:00 PM education, war and peace, world

A Harvest of Books

It's been a particularly productive year for me and my colleagues at McMaster. Seven books published with some of the most reputable academic presses on a vast range of subjects - advertising and commercial culture in Nazi Germany; suicide in New Zealand; representations of the First World War in Britain, three books exploring human rights, christian identities and energy/conservation in Canada, and of course African encounters with Imperial Justice. So, we have seven more reasons to celebrate this December. We'll be toasting to a year of hard, productive and rewarding work.

A Harvest of Books

11/20/2013 01:58:00 AM education, history, human rights

Gandhi Peace Festival

The annual Gandhi Peace Festival is here again. Its is a celebration of peace, tolerance and inclusiveness. All men and women of goodwill are welcome.

Gandhi Peace Festival

9/19/2013 09:00:00 PM arts and culture, education, war and peace

Knowledge Mobilization: Enriching our Comunities

Academics are constantly being asked to produce knowledge that enrich their communities and serve the greater common good. Lately, in Canada, the preferred term for this is "Knowledge Mobilization." There have been varied and sometime conflicting interpretations of what exactly this means. In this workshop, we hope to raise critical questions about the meaning and practice of "knowledge mobilization" as defined by scholars, practitioners and funding agencies. Join us. Registration required.

Knowledge Mobilization: Enriching our Comunities

4/26/2013 01:30:00 PM education

Human Rights and Global Justice

http://philosophyandculture.org/seminar1303MCigneski.html

I join two of my colleagues to discuss issues of human rights and global Justice in the "Crossing Boarders Series" of the Society for Philosophy and Culture.

Human Rights and Global Justice

2/20/2013 01:09:00 PM education, human rights

The Honor Code

I attended a Catholic High School. It was a small boy’s college founded by Irish Priests in the heart of Africa. Like most Catholic Schools of the time, my teachers did not ‘spare the rod.’ Discipline was almost martial. Looking back, there is much that those well-intentioned and dedicated teachers could have done better. But one thing they did exceptionally well was inculcating the values of honor and integrity. I recently had cause to mingle with my “old boys”, as we call our Alumni, and we reminisced about the ‘’Honor Code.” I thought I should share it. It still rings true….

The Honor Code

11/03/2012 08:11:00 PM education, reflections

Gandhi Peace Festival

The Gandhi Peace Festival which is an initiative of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University in collaboration with local NGOs is in its 20th year this year. Over the years, the festival has provided an opportunity for students to engage with the local community to raise awareness about issues of peace and human rights around the world. This year's event promises to be quite an exciting one. Everyone is welcome to the festival and the universal cause for peace and justice.

Gandhi Peace Festival

9/26/2012 02:29:00 PM education, human rights, war and peace

The Poverty of Illiteracy

I had an epiphany today.

A routine visit to the optometrist to check out my failing eyes gave me a new perspective on the withering deprivation and poverty that is illiteracy.

As part of the process of testing my eyes for reading glasses, the optometrist put in some eye drops to dilate the pupils of my eye. It would take about 30 minutes for the eye drops to work, so she asked that I return to the waiting room to wait for further test. One effect of the eye drop, she told me, was that I would have very blurry vision and be unable to read or see clearly.

I didn’t think much of this until she put in the eye drops and I returned to the waiting room. The world suddenly became a blur. Posters and images on the wall became fuzzy and distorted apparitions that made no sense. So were the images on the TV.

Everyone else in the waiting room seemed to be reading something, so I pulled a magazine from the rack. All I could see were meaningless wiggly black lines. I could make out some of the pictures on the page but the words meant nothing to me.

There was a beep on my blackberry. I had an instant message; perhaps the message from the office that I had been expecting. I snatched the phone from my holster in anticipation. Alas, it was all a blur. I couldn’t even make out the alphabets on the keypads.

Then it hit me. How was I going to spend the next 30 minutes of my life without the ability to read? How do you spend a lifetime without literacy? What quality of life does one have in today’s world without the ability to read?

An hour later, my vision was back in focus and I was literate again. I left the optometrist's office with a new found appreciation of the gift of vision and the value of literacy. I have always believed that literacy and education are fundamental human rights to which everyone should be entitled. But now, I believe that more strongly than ever before.

The Poverty of Illiteracy

9/14/2012 08:20:00 PM education, human rights, reflections

The Great "Who will History Remember" Debate: Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? The Lesson of Andrew Carnegie

There has been much furor over the controversial statements credited to Canadian journalist and bestselling author, Malcolm Gladwell that Apple’s Steve Jobs will likely be forgotten for his contributions to the technology industry while Microsoft’s Bill Gates will be remembered for his philanthropy rather than entrepreneurship.

According to Gladwell, "Gates is the most ruthless capitalist, and then he wakes up one morning and he says, 'enough.' And he steps down, he takes his money, he takes it off the table… I firmly believe that 50 years from now, [Gates] will be remembered for his charitable work, no one will even remember what Microsoft is." Gladwell was referring of course to Gates' charitable work through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which has given over $2.6 billion in grants to causes around the world since 1994.

Even as a historian, I am reluctant to get into the business of predicting who history will remember or forget. There are certain things we should simply just leave to posterity.

But this much I can say. If history is any guide, there may be a ring of truth to Gladwell’s statement. Having worked in many parts of the developing world as both human rights educator and researcher, I can attest to the fact that the American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegies is much better remembered today than most of his entrepreneurial contemporaries.

Andrew Carnegie is remembered today not for his pioneering innovations in the steel industry but for his public service. Between 1883 and 1929 the Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist built 2,509 Carnegie libraries around the world. 1,689 in the United States, 660 in Britain and Ireland, 125 in Canada, and others in Australia, New Zealand, Serbia, the Caribbean, and Fiji.

The story of the benevolent American who spent his fortune promoting public education and building libraries around the world has been passed on from generation to generation. The several Carnegie foundations he established continue to do great public service – The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs  where I was formerly a Research Fellow (Full disclosure)

So, although I am not inclined to be drawn into the debates on who history will remember or forget, the lesson of Andrew Carnegie is that public service has a much longer lasting legacy.

The Great "Who will History Remember" Debate: Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? The Lesson of Andrew Carnegie

6/13/2012 12:15:00 AM education, history, reflections

“What Comes to Mind when you think about Africa?” Doing African History in the Canadian Academe

The editors of the Bulletin of the Canadian Historical Association invited me to do a reflection on teaching Africa in Canada. This appeared in the April 2012 edition.

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“What Comes to Mind when you think about Africa?” Doing African History in the Canadian Academe

Every term, I begin teaching my undergraduate class in African History with the same question: “What images come to mind when you think about Africa?” And every year, I get pretty much the same answers: war and poverty; famines and starving children; safaris and wild animals; tribal people and exotic costumes. Sometimes, I get the odd “Nelson Mandela” or “The Lion King” (the Disney animated movie with an African theme). For the most part however, the images my students bring to class come, not from personal experiences, but straight out of the popular media.

These images sometimes prod their interest in African history. Students come to my class wanting to know more about apartheid in South Africa because they have seen the movie Invictus, or more know about the Rwandan Genocide after seeing Hotel Rwanda. But these images also pose enormous challenge for anyone teaching Africa in the Canada and many parts of the West. How do you get these students, products of the internet age and a pervasive sound bite media culture, to think about Africa beyond the ubiquitous stereotypical images and representations of the continent? It is a daunting task.

I started teaching African History over a decade ago, first in Africa and later in the United Kingdom and the United States. In these places, African history holds certain relevance. In Africa, African history is local history; in the United Kingdom it is an integral part of British imperial history; in the United States it is tied to the African-American experience. In Canada, the story is slightly different. African history does not enjoy the same interconnectedness with local history as it does in Africa, Europe or the United States. It should. One can point to several links between African and Canadian history dating back to the eighteenth century black loyalists of Nova Scotia. Still, many of my students come to my classes with very little background in African history. They may have learnt about ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs and the pyramids in High School, but chances are that they did so as part as a history of Western Civilization rather than African History.

“What Comes to Mind when you think about Africa?” Doing African History in the Canadian Academe

4/18/2012 09:36:00 PM africa, education, history

Cultural Relativism and Human Rights: Are human rights only in the eyes of the beholder?

I am teaching an undergraduate course on "Human Rights" this term and last week the topic was "Universalism vs. Cultural Relativism." As always, it was interesting to get the students' perspective on a debate that has long dominated human rights scholarship.

I began with a survey of the class of about 60 students. “How many of you here think human rights are universal?” Only 6 hands went up. “How many think that human rights are culturally relative?” 40 hands went up? “How many cannot make up their minds about this?” About 10 hands went up. Verdict: Most of my students think that human rights, despite the claim to universality, are in fact not universal. It’s a conclusion that proponents of human rights will find rather disheartening

But then, I tweaked the question a bit. “How many of you think human rights OUGHT to be universal?” 42 hands went up. “How may think human rights ought not to be universal?” Only 6 hands went up? Verdict: Although these students thought that the contemporary international human rights regime/movement is far from being universal, they nevertheless saw in it the promise and ideal of universalism. This offers some consolation. But whether this Universalist utopia can ever really be attained was the subject of another debate.

After the class, one of the students sent me the cartoon above. For him, it captured humorously but quite eloquently, the unending debate over the universality and cultural relativism of human rights.

Cultural Relativism and Human Rights: Are human rights only in the eyes of the beholder?

1/19/2012 01:46:00 PM education, human rights

Taking Liberties: Historicizing 20th Century Human Rights in the English Speaking World

A Research Workshop presented by McMaster University, Department of History and the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History, 1-2 March 2012.

Research Brief

In 2004 Mark Mazower noted that while the history of human rights in the 20th Century could be written as a triumph of civilization over barbarism, it must also be seen as a campaign imbued with politics, cynicism, and state interest. As he points out, we need to understand the political struggles and conflicts of interest that led to the emergence of human rights on the international arena as they had a profound role in the actual definitions of human rights that have largely triumphed. But not only were such struggles fought out in the international arena, or at the highest level of state policy making, they were also to be found at the level of civil society and amongst a variety of activist individuals and advocacy organizations within societies.

Taking Liberties: Historicizing 20th Century Human Rights in the English Speaking World

11/13/2011 09:29:00 PM education, human rights

Reading of the Month: "The Death of the Liberal Class"

My reading for the month has been “The Death of the Liberal Class,’ by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges. In it he makes the argument that the “liberal class” which has historically been at the forefront of championing social reforms for the poor and middle class is increasing becoming irrelevant.

Hedges point accusing fingers at five specific groups and institutions in America for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a “permanent underclass.” These are the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia.

Hedges argues that for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the “liberal establishment” purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.

Although the book is essentially about American politics and societies, I find the that some of the questions it raises bear universal relevance. Hedges indictment of the academia and its complicity in the corporatization of the global socio-political space is one that I think resonates with many observers. League universities, he argues have become essentially, vocational schools. There has been a “kind of withering of the humanities” in which the liberal education that would normally ask broad questions and challenge structure and assumptions has become corporate. Academic departments now carry the burden of raising their own funds. “This is pretty hard to do if you’re in the classics department,” Hedges notes.

Hedges also faults the “purging within economics departments and business schools of people who challenged what I call the utopian vision of globalization — the idea that somehow the marketplace should determine human behavior and guide human activity.”

Not everyone will agree with the Hedges' blanket indictments in this book, but I think it makes for very thought provoking reading. The books comes highly recommend.

Reading of the Month: "The Death of the Liberal Class"

11/04/2011 11:58:00 AM education, politics

What are Human Rights?

The german non-profit organisation /e-politik.de/ has released an animated video about human rights. It is a simple and easy to follow primer on the meaning of human rights. It is a great educational resource for teaching and explaining human rights. The clip is licensed as Creative Commons and can be used, shared and embedded.

What are Human Rights?

8/30/2011 11:19:00 AM education, human rights

Human Rights in Canada: Promises, Failures and Prospects

Keynote Presentation at the Amnesty International Conference, Hamilton, Canada, June 2010 (click to link)

Human Rights in Canada: Promises, Failures and Prospects

8/10/2010 01:17:00 PM education, human rights, politics

Basil Davidson: Obituary

I first read one of Basil Davidson's many books as a high school student in the 1980s. Even then, it made an immediate impact. His narrative and analyses of African history and politics were lucid as they were compelling. Whether critiquing the tyranny of European colonialism in Africa or the hypocrisy and ineptitude of post-colonial African leaders, Basil Davidson wrote about Africa like someone who really cared. His passion for the continent was inescapable. As an undergraduate student, no essay of mine was complete without a sprinkling of quotations and anecdotes from Basil Davidson. For my students, he remains compulsory reading and his landmark TV documentary "Africa" is a must-see.

Although I never had the privilege of meeting him, Basil Davidson, perhaps more than any other scholar, living on dead, has had the most profound and enduring impact on my scholarship and my perspectives on the continent.

Here is a fitting tribute to the man, the scholar and the sage from the Guardian:

Basil Davidson obituary

Radical journalist and historian who charted the death throes of colonialism in Africa

Victoria Brittain

guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 July 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/09/basil-davidson-obituary

Basil Davidson, who has died aged 95, was a radical journalist in the great anti-imperial tradition, and became a distinguished historian of pre-colonial Africa. An energetic and charismatic figure, he was dropped behind enemy lines during the second world war and joined that legendary band of British soldiers who fought with the partisans in Yugoslavia and in Italy. Years later, he was the first reporter to travel with the guerrillas fighting the Portuguese in Angola and Guinea-Bissau, and brought their struggle to the world's attention.

For many years he was at the centre of the campaigns for Africa's liberation from colonialism and apartheid, endlessly addressing meetings and working on committees. Extremely tall and with a shock of white hair, and possessing the old-fashioned courtesy of the ex-army officer that he was – or even of the country gentleman that he eventually became after his move to the West Country – he was an unlikely figure at many of these often incoherent and sometimes sectarian events, usually run by student activists and exiles.

Among his friends were the historians Thomas Hodgkin, EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The Palestinian scholar Edward Said placed him in a select band of western artists and intellectuals with a sympathy and comprehension of foreign cultures that meant that they had "in effect, crossed to the other side".

Born in Bristol, Davidson left school at 16, determined to become a writer, though he first made his living by pasting advertisements for bananas on shop windows in the north of England. Moving to London, he found his way into journalism, working for the Economist and then as the diplomatic correspondent of the Star, a now defunct London evening paper.

In the late 1930s he travelled widely in Italy and in central Europe, and his familiarity with its geography and his capacity to learn its languages made him an obvious candidate, when the war broke out, for the Special Operations Executive – seeking to undermine the Nazi regime from within. His self-reliance, and lack of interest in received wisdom, soon marked him out. When sent out to Budapest, to stimulate the resistance forces in Hungary, he crossed swords with the British ambassador, who ordered him to stop storing plastic explosives in the embassy cellar.

In Cairo, he worked on plans to drop agents into Yugoslavia, first to the royalists and then, after much internal argument, to Tito's communist guerrillas. Davidson was eventually parachuted into Yugoslavia himself, to join the communists in the uncompromising territory of the Vojvodina, the plain of the Danube valley across from Hungary. There, his exceptional physical strength and bravery were tested to the utmost.

When he returned to Yugoslavia at the end of the war, his companion on the visit, Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, recorded how "as we entered the villages, people would run out crying 'Nicola, Nicola!' (Davidson's partisan name) and, after kissing him on the cheek, carry us both into their houses, where it was hard without offence to avoid getting drunk on Slivovitza."

Davidson fought in Yugoslavia from August 1943 to November 1944, then transferred to the Ligurian hills of northern Italy. He and his partisan band seized Genoa before the arrival of American or British forces.

The war years marked him for ever. He fell in love with the comradeship, the trust and the spiritual force of endurance in the service of an ideal that he found with the guerrilla fighters. The lessons he learned about the muddle of war were important for his later work in Africa. In Angola and Guinea-Bissau in the early 1970s, and in Eritrea almost 20 years later, he found those same life forces and loved them. The subjective nature of his response to this history in the making, to deep friendships made and lost, made very painful the eventual unravelling of so much that he believed in.

The political lessons were less personally rewarding, since his willingness to collaborate with communists in battle would lead him in later life to be labelled by the Foreign Office as a dangerous "fellow traveller". Davidson had never been attracted to Marxism, but his wartime experiences with Communist partisans coloured his general attitude towards the cold war struggle, first in Europe and later in Africa. If communists were prepared to fight against the Nazis, or later against South African apartheid and Portuguese colonialism, that caused him no problems.

At the end of the war, a lieutenant-colonel awarded the Military Cross and twice mentioned in dispatches, he turned again to journalism, working first for the Times as one of its correspondents in Paris and then as chief foreign leader writer in London. Out of tune at the Times, and especially unhappy with the western intervention that crushed the communist partisans in Greece, he left in 1949 to work for three years as the secretary of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC), the campaigning foreign affairs organisation set up by ED Morel during the first world war.

At the same time he joined the staff of the New Statesman, where he was soon viewed as Martin's heir apparent. It was not to be. At both the UDC and the New Statesman, he earned the undying hatred of Dorothy Woodman, Martin's companion, and was accused of being a fellow traveller – "or worse". Unable to return as a journalist to the Balkans, because of the cold war, he was taken by chance to Africa, and the continent soon caught his imagination, never to let go. Then, through an invitation from a group of South African trade unionists, he met Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and other leaders of the African National Congress, about to launch its campaign of defiance against the apartheid laws of the Nationalist government.

Injustice, western hypocrisy and a whiff of revolution were enough to get him firmly engaged: later, from 1969 to 1985, he was a vice-president of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. He produced an important series about his African journey for the New Statesman, and then wrote a book about the crimes of apartheid. Soon he was listed as a "prohibited immigrant", both in South Africa and in other parts of white-ruled Africa. That area of work was now closed for him.

So too was the New Statesman. On his return, Martin told him he was "proud to publish the articles, [but] if you have to hive off to another paper, I shall obviously understand".

When he was offered a job as an editor at Unesco, the British government vetoed his appointment. Again, it was alleged that he was a fellow traveller, and that his articles were quoted consistently in Moscow. Doubtless they were, since they were very good, and Soviet reporters had even less access to Africa than those from the west. Far from being soft on communists, Davidson was accused during the treason trial of László Rajk in Hungary in 1949 of being an agent of the British secret service, as indeed he had been.

Davidson was rescued by the Daily Herald (1954-57) and then taken up by Hugh Cudlipp at the Daily Mirror (1959-62). Encouraged to take an interest in the Mirror's publishing activities in Nigeria, Davidson made regular annual journeys through west, central and east Africa on the brink of independence from colonialism. Soon he was plunged deep into unwritten African history.

For a family man with three small sons, this was not an ideal profession. It was unfashionable, badly paid and meant long periods away from home. Davidson was no longer a journalist, yet nor was he a tenured academic. His wife, Marion Young, whom he had married during the war – she had also worked in SOE in Italy – somehow held their life together.

Books now began to pour out. The self-taught Davidson had an elegant prose style, at home with both fact and fiction. He wrote five novels and more than 30 other books. These were mainly about African history and included classic textbooks still in use in both east and west Africa. Davidson was enthused early on by the end of British colonialism and the prospects of pan-Africanism in the 1960s, and he wrote copiously and with warmth about newly independent Ghana and its leader, Kwame Nkrumah. He went to work for a year at the University of Accra in 1964.

Later he threw himself into the reporting of the African liberation wars in the Portuguese colonies, particularly in Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Following in the steps of the great campaigning journalist Henry Nevinson, who had reported from Angola in 1905, he made an epic journey on foot half a century later that took him into the liberated areas of eastern Angola with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The MPLA became the government at independence in 1975 and the epicentre of the cold war struggle in Africa.

Over the years the elaborate, CIA-run propaganda campaigns in favour of the MPLA's main rival movement, Unita, led by Jonas Savimbi and aided by the secret invasions of the apartheid regime, frequently stumbled against Davidson's authoritative counter-version. His scorn for the mainstream journalism that swallowed the western line on Angola was legendary. On Rhodesia, too, both the media and British government's equivocation and connivance with South Africa's support for the white regime found no more scathing critic than Davidson.

In the 1980s, with most of the African liberation wars now won – except for South Africa's – Davidson turned much of his attention to more theoretical questions about the future of the nation state in Africa. He remained a passionate advocate of pan-Africanism. In 1988 he made a long and dangerous journey into Eritrea, writing a persuasive defence of the nationalists' right to independence from Ethiopia, and an equally eloquent attack on the revolutionary leader Colonel Mengistu and the regime that had overthrown Haile Selassie. Davidson was invited to Havana to discuss the long-running Ethiopia-Eritrean war after the Cubans threw their weight behind Africa's latest revolution. He was irritated by the personal enthusiasm of Fidel Castro for Mengistu, and by the large numbers of Cuban troops sent to help him in his border war against Somalia – although they did not fight in Eritrea. Davidson expressed no surprise at Cuba taking on a new African protege, but he retained his own unfavourable view of Mengistu.

The eventual turn towards repressive government taken by his friends in the Eritrean leadership, when other leaders to whom he had been close were imprisoned in Asmara, was a sad rerun of a similar political trajectory he had witnessed in post-independence Angola. He did not like talking over these matters, but he did not disguise his disappointment. Critics from the right were swift to condemn the early judgments that he had made about these revolutions that had turned sour, and even some of his friends would have welcomed more debate.

In 1984 Davidson embarked on a new career in television, making Africa, an eight-part history series for Channel 4. He was excellent on screen, bringing to an unexpectedly wide audience a vision of Africa far from the usual famine-and-corruption cliches that annoyed him so much. His alternate version of African reality reached further and deeper than he had imagined possible, though he continued to write, producing notably The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992); the collection of essays The Search for Africa (1994); and his final book, West Africa Before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850 (1998).

He received honorary degrees and appointments from many universities, including Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Turin, Ghana and California, and was also decorated by Portugal and Cape Verde for his services to their history. Apart from his military medals, the British state was studiously uninterested in recognising his talents and his service.

He relished the irony of being decorated with great warmth in 2002 by the prime minister of Portugal – once an activist against the fascist regime that Davidson had done so much to bring down. And when the Cape Verde government chose to decorate him in 2003 in an Angolan embassy where the ambassador was a former prominent official of his old opponent Unita, he remarked drily on the surprising reconciliations demanded of those who live long enough.

He is survived by Marion and his sons.

• Basil Risbridger Davidson, historian and campaigner, born 9 November 1914; died 9 July 2010

Basil Davidson: Obituary

7/11/2010 10:37:00 PM africa, education, Tributes