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Basil Davidson Receives the Amilcar Cabral MedalAuthor(s): Lionel CliffeSource: Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 30, No. 96, War & the Forgotten Continent(Jun., 2003), p. 350Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4006778 .

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350 Review of African Political Economy

References

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Apart from the above references the briefing is built on newspaper articles from The Daily Nation, The East African Standard, The Times, and the BBC News of the World.

Anders Ndrman, e-mail: hgeoanar@mark.econo.gu.se

Basil Davidson Receives the Amilcar Cabral Medal Lionel Cliffe

In March 2003, the Government of Cape Verde presented Basil Davidson with a special award: the order of Amilcar Cabral (First Class) 'in recogni- tion of his links with the country and his involvement with its liberation strug- gle'.

The award is named after Amilcar Cabral, who was born in the islands of Cape Verde, but who is famous for his leader- ship of PAIGC, the liberation movement of what was then a single Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

But Cabral was remarkable not just for founding a movement and leading a struggle; he was also one of the most innovative of theorists of the African revolution, working out a strategy for struggle based on a class analysis of a colonial society that had not been subject to settler colonialism like those in south- ern Africa (his 1969 text in English, Revolution in Guinea, is still worth study- ing for its topical relevance not just as history; his 1973 study Return to the Source is a profound insight into the 'colonial interruption' of African history and the cultural dimensions of the needed renaissance. Nkrumah paid him the ultimate compliment of plagiarising word-for-word his thoughts on 'Class Struggle in Africa'. He was assassinated in 1973 and so did not live to see the liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in 1975.

Nkrumah came to London in 1960 and was a frequent visitor to the Davidson home. The two men stayed closely in touch as the struggle got under way in Ghana in the 1960s. Basil also recounts how Cabral and PAIGC would keep him and other supporters informed of their progress, so that they could make the case (for the struggle) to the outside world and chart progress. Basil made the first tour of the liberated areas of Gunea- Bissau in the mid-1960s (reported on in his 1969 The Liberation of Guine by Pen- guin) and was there when the Portu- guese army coup set off the revolution in the metropolis in 1975 (described in No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky).

Given that long connection with Cabral and the PAIGC, Basil was particularly honoured to receive an award in the name of an African nationalist leader whom he admired so much. He also was especially pleased to receive an honour from Cape Verde, a country he had studied and written about after it gained its separate Independence in the 1970s.

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