by CAMERON DUODU
(The Bible and the Gun, Part V, by Basil Davidson)
Basil Davidson has died in England aged 95.
Why should that concern me as an African?
Well, soon after my country Ghana gained its independence in 1957, thoughts that we had never been exposed to, in our missionary and government schools, began to sneak into our consciousness.
For instance, one black American historian/artist called Earl Sweeting, arrived in Accra and tried to interest us in a series of colourful post-cards he had drawn that carried such ‘provocative’ titles as ‘Africans teaching the Greeks mathematics’; ‘Africans teaching the Greeks medicine’; and ‘Africans teaching the Greeks philosophy.’
As editor of the monthly magazine, Drum, I was approached not by Sweeting himself but by his wife, a thin, husky-voiced African-American lady, to run an article on Sweeting’s work. I was quite keen to do it, but unfortunately, Sweeting said he had left the books that would support his claims in the US. As a hard-boiled journalist, this sounded like a self-serving excuse, and I stalled the lady by saying that it wasn’t possible for me to do anything until I could verify his statements independently.
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