African History without Africans

Basil Davidson

  • The Lusiads by Luí Vaz de Camões, translated by Landeg White
    Oxford, 258 pp, £6.99, October 1997, ISBN 0 19 283191 7
  • Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961-1974 by John Cann
    Greenwood, 216 pp, US $59.95, February 1998, ISBN 0 313 30189 1
  • The Decolonisation of Portuguese Africa by Norrie MacQueen
    Longman, 280 pp, £15.99, February 1998, ISBN 0 582 25993 2
  • African Guerrillas edited by Christopher Clapham
    James Currey, 208 pp, £40.00, September 1998, ISBN 0 85255 815 5

In Canto Four of Camões’s 16th-century epic, as Vasco da Gama and the men of his fleet prepare to embark on their conquest of the Golden East, ‘an old man of venerable appearance’ steps down to the quayside of Belem. Solemnly, if fruitlessly, he warns against their enterprise of imperialist piracy:

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