In 1457, the Council of Cardinals met in Holland where they sanctioned, as a righteous and progressive idea, the enslavement of black Africans for the purpose of their conversion to Christianity and to be exploited in the labour market as chattel property. This devilish scheme speedily gained the sanctimonious blessing of the Pope & became a standard policy of the Roman Catholic Church, and later of Protestant churches. [3].

Basil Davidson (a former officer in military intelligence during WW2) may look like one of the eminent Victorians who built the British Empire, in fact, he has done everything in his power to help demolish it. At 82, he can look back on an extraordinary life where he has made his mark as an Africanist - activist, historian and analyst in an area of study he more or less created, as a journalist, novelist as well as scholar-adventurer and major radical figures of our time.

Little-known in his own country [Britain], his achievements have made him famous abroad. In America, his rediscovery and re-writing of Africa's pre-colonial past coincided with the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of Black Power. His 1959 book, `Old Africa Rediscovered', sold 200,000 copies - a huge figures for an academic work - and became a bible for young African-Americans learning about their roots. They flocked to Davidson's American lecture tours, expecting a cross between Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, only to find that their hero was a white, middle-aged Englishman.

...Edward Said (a Palestinian Christian and) the most fashionable radical intellectual of the day, singles out Davidson among a handful of Western artists and thinkers who, `in effect, crossed over to the other side'. Thanks to their efforts, Said says, the West can no longer look down on the 90 per cent of globe it once conquered and colonised. Instead, we in the West have to learn to see ourselves from their point of view.

In Britain, Davidson is the often-overlooked fourth man in the group that includes his contemporaries and fellow historians, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thomson. These men's committed, left-wing approach to writing history opened up the stuffy, chauvinist world of British professional historians and reached a popular audience far beyond academia. But whereas the others wrote the British or European past, Davidson studied Africa and put his political energies into the struggle for Third World liberation. Hence his long neglect in the UK.

No sooner had Britain's colonies achieved their independence [from DIRECT colonial rule] - most of them by the early Sixties - than the Mother Country suffered a strange amnesia. It was if the British wanted to pretend the Empire had never existed; or to pretend that it still did. Few people were interested in the former colonies, and those who were tended to be die-hard imperialists - they regarded Davidson as a troublemaker and a leftist, if not an outright traitor.

...The Right accused him of `a romantic connoisseurship of struggle'. But Davidson was never like Franz Fanon, whose book, `The Wretched Earth', suggested colonial peoples were mystically purged or made whole through violence.

In 1951, he visited Africa where he branded the notorious South African Suppression of Communism Act `a law straight out of Mein Kampf'. In 1952, he was banned from South Africa for life and by 1956, he had been banned from seven other African countries, all of them British colonies. Davidson, then turned his attention to Portuguese Africa, the most secretive and backward-looking of all the colonial administrations, and virtually unknown to the outside world.

By 1973, Africa had begun its long slide into kleptocracies, dictatorships, `tribalism' (a term Davidson has always vigorously attacked, pointing out that the struggles among African groups are no different from struggles among ethnic, religious, kinship or other groups in Europe or anywhere else), terror, starvation and poverty. Thereafter, many western radicals became disillusioned about Africa and and abandoned their enthusiasm for it. Not Davidson.

Davidson recalls that when he began to write about Africa, it was a question of evoking interest in a subject which had no audience at all... He was taken up by American universities, but he still feels that he doesn't really exist in Britain outside specialist circles; Africanists, regimental circles. As far as the general public is concerned, he might never have put pen to paper. It used to annoy him. `Britain is still a racist country. It's very clear to all the English that somehow they have an inherent superiority over others, and it must have something to do with the fact that we're white and they're not. This is a problem we have not solved - we haven't succeeded in shifting it.' As a result, `when I'm not a target or under attack, people tend to think, `he's not a bad old sort, but we don't have to take him seriously.' Words like `sentimental' & `idealist' are used. It's because I write about pre-colonial Africa as if it were real-which, of course, it was.

Africans in those centuries had their own cultures, their own forms of civilisation (Ancient Egypt, Ghana, etc), which on the whole worked rather well. Most people still think of pre-colonial Africa as a place before history began, full of savages living in trees.

...His latest book, `The Black Man's Burden: Africa And The Curse Of The Nation States, eschews it entirely. Davidson criticises `nationalism' and suggests `popular participation' as part of the solution to Africa's crisis. He argues that the international debts accumulated in the Seventies and Eighties have to be cancelled. It is elementary and obvious. It may be painful, but it is not difficult. The colonial system dispossessed Africa, and it's the dispossession that matters. It's not that you knock people on the head and take their goods. It's that you dispossess them of their sense of person, their sense of value, their sense of history - everything (including religion). What the colonial systems put in place of old Africa were small dictatorial cliques, all modelled on the colonial services themselves. Now those cliques must be dispossessed, in favour of participation. The ordinary citizen needs to feel that he or she has a word to say which will somehow or other be listened to. We had that to some extent in this country before Mrs Thatcher got going. It's what they're (?) busy destroying in America right now due to lack of equity in wealth creation.'

He considers the study of history in Africa to be `an indispensable approach to our understanding of our present realities'. Long before globalising talk became fashionable, he saw the problems for the Third World as inextricable from those of the Developed World, as two extremes along the same continuum, created by the same forces. On a more provincial level, he also made the clear connection between the loss of Empire and Britain's own, worsening identity crisis, its post imperial hangover.

`The most striking example, and the easiest way to see it, is in our relationship with India', he believes. We left India - where we'd been for 200 years; there's scarcely a middle-class family in this country that wasn't deeply affected by the British Raj - and hardly a word. It's as if it had never been. We have a situation in which the English no longer have an Empire and they're not willing to talk about it.

The critical point in this collective amnesia came in the early Seventies, when the so called Golden Years of post-war capitalism came to an abrupt end. It was pointed out at the time (1973) how economic downturn coincided with a sudden outbreak of imperial nostalgia, with films such as `A Passage To India', television shows such as `The Jewel In The Crown' and books such as `Plain Tales From The Raj'. There was a hostile reaction to this insight.

Twenty years and a couple of recessions later, it's Africa's turn. Cecil Rhodes is the subject of a major TV series, and there is a steady trade in tales of imperial derring-do during the scramble for Africa. Right-wing writers such as Norman Stone now argue for the recolonisation of Africa - for its own good, naturally - but such absurdities say more about `us' than they do about `them'. The realities of the Third World offer different, less self-congratulatory lessons.

Back in the 60s, the Third World, and Davidson's beloved Africa in particular, became the focus for the hopes of many people who believed in social revolution....Davidson's fellow Africanist, Colin Leys, has accused him of being overly optimistic giving appalling statistics: 300 million out of 500 million Africans living in absolute poverty, and it's getting worse; per capita income down 2 per cent a year since the 80s; the highest international debt in the world; insanely, in some years, Africa repays more in interest to Western banks than it receives in Western aid.

And all of this, says Leys, is `not a tragedy sui generis, but the effect of a global logic from which no region of the world is immune'. As Africa goes, so go the rest of us, sooner or later.

The global logic Leys refers to is the logic of capitalism. The modern history of Africa and the history of capitalism are bound together, beginning with the slave trade, which some scholars say put the `capital' into `capitalism', and ending, according to Leys, with `a perhaps irreversible decline into barbarism'. Even in the fortunate societies of Europe and America, late capitalism is busy breaking down every bond between people, apart from Adam Smith's economic bond of barter or exchange.

As this process goes forward, it produces social resentments, racism, chauvinism and xenophobia hand in hand with a hunger for and admiration of political idealism. In Britain last summer (1996), the best illustrations of both tendencies concerned Africa. At the same time as politicians, press and public were lauding the achievements of Nelson Mandela during his state visit, the British press were demonising refugees and asylum seekers, many of them from Africa, in a blatant appeal to xenophobia and racism.