>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Welcome, welcome to the
African & Middle Eastern Division
of the Library of Congress.
And my name is Laverne Page and
I'm a librarian at the University.
I'm an area specialist
in the African
and Middle Eastern Division
in the African Section.
And I work mainly with the
Southern African Region.
And we have an unexpected
treat today
with Dr. David Birmingham's
visit to the Library of Congress.
And I should say that this
visit is mainly due to the fact
that the African Studies Association
is holding its annual meeting here
in Washington and Dr.
Birmingham is here to participate
in the Lusophone African
Studies Organization Roundtable.
This program is being webcast and I
should inform you that if you speak,
you're giving tacit approval
to your image, your voice.
And this program will
be available later
on Library of Congress websites.
Dr. Birmingham who is
standing so patiently,
looking at me reading my notes was
born in England and he spent most
of his childhood in Switzerland.
He spent his teen years in Ghana.
His father was a professor
at the University of Ghana
and Dr. Birmingham went
to college also in Ghana.
And as a teen, he wandered
around the African continent
and he then published
his first book in 1965.
And the title of that book was "The
Portuguese Conquest of Angola."
And he informed me that that book
was pirated or very moderately,
we should say, that it was
used maybe by the captains
who later overthrew the
Portuguese Government.
[ Noise ]
>> Dr. Birmingham has taught
history in West and in East Africa
at the London School of
Oriental and African Studies
and at the University of Kent and
he has been retired for 10 years
but he is still speaking and writing
and informally teaching,
I would think.
And there's a great
deal to say about him
and I will let him
tell you his stories.
I should just say,
though, that there's a lot
of interaction among
Africanist and among historians
and a colleague was telling me
today about Saint Claire Drake also
about Dr. Birmingham being
invited to give us a talk,
a lecture to the first group,
the Peace Corps Volunteers
going out to Africa.
He has written numerous books
which we have here at the Library
of Congress and articles
and he's just been very,
very busy in his retirement.
And so now I will leave it to
Dr. Birmingham to tell you more
about his work and interactions
and history of Africa.
Thank you.
>> Thank you Laverne.
Is this microphone working?
Yeah, good.
What I was asked to
do about four days ago
and that's all the
notice I had was to talk
about the re-sourcing
of history okay.
Re-sourcing of history, how does
one think again about the process
of becoming a historian and thinking
about what is the evidence
one is going to use
to answer the questions
that historians ask.
Now asking the questions is
the key art of an historian.
The answers come afterwards
and that's important.
But the questions are important.
Now when it comes to re-sourcing
history, the answer is very simple.
What you've got to do is
winkle out all the details
that do not appear on the internet.
Now I retired before the
internet was invented
and therefore I've never had
anything to do with the internet,
with computing, with
that kind of data.
But I am told by friends of
mine that is has real problems.
That it has a kind of series of
blind spots which we're not seeing.
But it potentially maybe
even has censorship
which we're certainly
not admitting to.
But a whole lot of ways in which the
internet isn't actually the best way
of writing history which is
living and which is close
to what's happening on the ground
or what's happening on the ground.
Now I'll tell you a story
here about a young Angolan.
I mentioned Angola because
the whole of my talk is
about Angola that's the
country I know best.
That's the country
that I've been invited
to Washington some months ago
to speak about next Friday.
A young Angolan, a
former Catholic priest,
who decided to write a doctoral
thesis on the relationship of church
and state, a very good subject,
an important subject if you're
in Africa the church plays a role
which sometimes is larger
than that of the state.
And it so happens that I posses on
the landing in my house 30 box files
of papers, clippings, cuttings,
graduate student papers,
draft of things, 30 boxes,
and so I said to him--
very reluctantly I said, "Would you
like to borrow my 30
boxes of papers."
"Oh no," he said," if it's not
on the internet, it
doesn't interest me."
So, you know, we have got problems
that there is evidence out there
which needs to be looked at.
So, Angola it is and 50 years
ago-- 50 years ago exactly,
Angola hit the headlines.
It hit the headlines in 1961.
Now it just so happens that
I'm so ancient that I was
around I was witnessing
what was going on.
And the first thing that happened
was there was a cotton famine.
I'm sure you all know
that cotton is a crop.
It doesn't actually
deliver the goods.
It's not one which makes profit.
Indeed in this country, I believe,
you used slaves to harvest it
because nobody else would do it.
Well in Africa, it was
harvested by colonial subjects
and the colonial government said,
"You will plant cotton
for the governor."
And this meant that people were
unable to feed their children.
It meant that they
weren't able to grow enough
of the crops they needed.
It meant they weren't able
to tend their livestock.
They weren't able to
go out and forage.
And so famine broke out.
And the then ruler of the Portuguese
Empire was a gentleman called
Antonio Salazar who
modelled his politics
to some extent on those
of Mussolini.
He wasn't a fascist but convert
fascist [inaudible] of commerce.
And he was told look you mustn't
press, things are serious.
And he wrote back and
this is the quotation
which I have not been able to trace.
I've seen it but my scholarly
intellects are so bad
that I haven't got the footnote.
And what he said is famine is a
figment of the Bantu imagination.
Now there is a phrase which
I think actually resonates
and you probably won't
find on the internet.
You can try and if you
find it, let me know.
The second thing that happened
in Angola was there was also a big
crisis over the picking of coffee.
Now coffee is profitable crop.
You can make a lot of
money out of grain coffee.
And indeed, Angola was I think the
fourth largest producer of coffee
in the world after Brazilian,
Columbia and whatnot.
But there's a lot of profit
and the land have been taken
over by immigrants from
Europe and the owners
of the land we're being
marginalized and indeed all owners
of plantations have
previously sold their coffee.
So many found that they are
being turned into day laborers
on somebody else's estate
and it was their land.
And so they protested quite
vigorously and there was a conflict.
And you will find, I'm
sure, a lot evidence
on the internet about this conflict.
It was a well-known American Scholar
who wrote about it of great detail.
What you probably won't find is that
a great many of the people working
on those plantations picking
that coffee were gastarbeiters.
They were migrant workers.
They had come from the south
of Angola and had been bust
in as [inaudible] labor, to pick
the coffee and [inaudible] process.
And so the local population in the
North said< We don't like this."
And when you read figures
about the massacres
that occurred during the coffee
revolution of March 1961,
you probably won't
find evidence that many
of the victims were actually the
migrant workers from South Angola
who had been brought to North Angola
and we're extremely poorly seen
by people whose jobs and
land had been stolen.
>> And so if later on you're
interested in Angola and you find
that there is real division
between the north and the south.
Go back to March of 1961 and
remember that here was quite a lot
of very bad blood between
northerners
and southerners at that time.
Now the third aspect of 1961 and
this will interest those of you
who happen to be American
citizens, I'm not, I'm a foreigner,
I'm just visiting here, because
Laverne twisted my arm and said,
"Will you come to Washington."
It concerns the Azuls, now
we call them the Azuls,
but Americans call them the Azuls.
And there is an American Military
Base on the Azuls in 1961 and at
that time American airplanes
were a bit rudimentary.
They couldn't get to
Israel without refueling.
And so they said we need the
Azuls which were in the middle
of the Atlantic as a refueling spot
between Washington and Televiv.
And the Portuguese said, "Ah, but
you have been saying that Africa is
for the Africans and the places
like Angola should get
their independence."
If you believe that, we would
close your base on the Azuls.
You will have to do without
the Portuguese Islands
in the middle of the Atlantic.
And so the American Government
which had just elected a
clean shinny new President
who I think was called
John F. Kennedy is
that right, is that the name?
And he said, "Oh dear.
That is a problem.
We will reverse our policy.
We will not say Africa
is for the Africans.
Africa is for the Africans in the
west and east but not in Angola."
And you've got trouble
with your cotton pickers
and with your coffee pickers
and with certain rebellious
educated young men in the city,
we will sell you cheap cut price
napalm to deal with the problem.
So the war in Angola
draws America in,
in a way that might have
been totally unexpected
because they we're
fighting on the side
of the white settler governments
rather than on the side
of the black nationalists.
Okay, so if you want history, we
have a little bit of chronology 61
or 50 years ago seems to me
is a good place to start.
But there are all sorts of
other things that we could say
about the experience of the
colonial presence in Africa and some
of them are little bit surprising.
And so I'm going to list some
them which might not occur to you.
And Laverne happened to mention that
I spent my childhood in Switzerland
of all completely lost
places a little village
in the Alpine vastness.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> We're having a problem?
>> Yes. Yes.
>> So you want that mic
further than this one?
>> Both.
>> Both? Okay.
>> Maybe if this goes up higher.
>> Well, I'm sorry you've
missed the most interesting bits
but I will carry on.
Is that better?
>> Yes.
>> Are you hearing more?
Sorry, you should have spoken
up sooner, shouldn't you?
[Laughter] Okay, so Switzerland,
one of the non-imperial
nations of Europe.
Okay?
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Right. Switzerland has quite
important missionary stations
in Angola.
And as I said at the beginning, the
church is some places more important
than the state as far as the
quality of life is concerned
of people living in Africa.
And so there is a Swiss
dimension to Angolan history
and there were some recent
researches been done on the Swiss
in Africa and in Angola
by distinguished people.
But one of the things that is
very interesting is that one
of the political leaders
of Angola was a man
who called himself
Dr. Jonas Savimbi.
You may have heard of him.
He actually had fairly
good relations
with various American agencies of
destabilization and of war by proxy
in Africa that sort of thing.
But the thing that interests me
which you can go and may look
for is what did the
title of doctor mean?
I don't think he had doctorate.
He started life as a
medical student and I know
because I've got the records that he
never completed his medical studies
and so he wasn't a
doctor in that sense.
And then he went on to become a
political scientist and he studied
as a political scientist and he
may have got his bachelors degree.
I don't know that for
certain but he may have done
at the University of Lausanne.
Now in Portugal, if you get your
bachelor's degree you're known
as doctor.
So when I was a student wandering
around Africa I was always Dr.
Birmingham although, you know,
I barely had scrapped BA.
So Savimbi may have had a bachelor's
degree and called himself doctor.
But there's another
dimension and again
because I don't do the
internet I haven't checked it up
but it would be very interesting
and that is that the University
of Lausanne occasionally
found it expedient
to give honorary doctorates and
the most famous of them is the one
that the University of Lausanne gave
in the 1930s to Benito Mussolini
in order to discourage him
from cannibalizing Switzerland
when he was building up his empire.
And so Mussolini has an
honorary doctorate from Lisbon
and my question is, did Savimbi
also have an honorary doctorate
from Lausanne?
I don't know the answer but you're
talking about re-sourcing history.
There is a little question
which there might be
sources to investigate.
Okay, shall we move on to
say should we try 1975,
is that a date which
resonates at all?
It's the date at which after
the captains had overthrown the
Portuguese Government and
had published my first book
in Portuguese Pirated translation.
They moved towards giving
independence to Angola.
And one of the exiled leaders
of Angola was a man
called Agostinho Neto.
Now, the interesting thing about
Neto was that he was arrested
as a student in, I
think, 1962 in Lisbon.
And a young lawyer in London called
Peter Benenson was so shocked
that this African student
had been arrested simply
for expressing his opinions.
He wasn't throwing bombs.
He wasn't doing anything radically.
He was just saying look, you know,
should we reconsider the colonial
agenda and he was locked up.
And Peter Benenson
said, "This is not good.
This will not do."
And so on half of his lawyer's
desk in the strand in London,
he set up an organization which
is called Amnesty International.
Now, some of you may have
heard of Amnesty International.
It is one which causes the mad
bomber in the United States
because they keep on bombarding
governors of Texas who believe
in hanging people and
that sort of thing.
But anyway, Amnesty International
was set up and its first prisoner
of conscience was Agostinho
Neto, the leader of one
of the liberation movement
in Angola.
And it just so happens that on
the day Agostinho Neto was due
to arrive back in Angola
after 15 years of exile,
I happen to have been there.
And I was standing on my balcony in
Luanda and there was a plane coming
in and whole lot of trace of bullets
going up towards it and I thought,
just a minute what's happening here?
Somebody doesn't like the idea
of Agostinho Neto becoming
the next leader of Angola
and they're trying to
shoot down his plane.
Well, that may have been
true, I can't prove it,
but what I can prove is that they
were firing at the wrong plane.
The plane they were shooting
at was actually a South
African passenger plane
who didn't have Agostinho
Neto on board.
They did hit but not fatally so it
licked it wounds and turned back,
moved back Johannesburg
and Agostinho Neto arrived
on another plane and went on to
become the President of Angola.
And so, you know, when
friends of mine say, "Ah,
but you know you're always in
the right place the right time."
It just so happens that
I did meet Agostinho Neto
because when he finally left
prison and came to London,
invited by Amnesty International,
nobody on that half of a desk
in London spoke a word
of Portuguese.
So during that meeting
do you speak Portuguese?
Can you come meet this
poet we don't understand?
Agostinho Neto was a poet and so I
had met him and discussed with him
on his first day out of prison
before he became President.
So these are the kind of
little insights into history
which accidentally
you may come across.
If you want to know more about
that period of '75 which is
when the transition took place from
imperial rule to nationalist rule,
you might do worse than
to look up a novelist.
>> Now novelists are to my mind a
very good source of information,
you know that they actually
can imagine outside the box.
They can think about
what's happening.
They can use the evidence they got
and they can write about in the way
that historians might be a
little cautious of doing.
And I don't know if
any of you ever heard
of a novelist called Garcia Marquez.
He happens I think to be Columbian.
But he wrote a very,
very interesting account
of the transition in Angola which
was available in gray publication,
it was [inaudible] and deterred,
whatever you call it at the time,
and it was one of the sources which
I found particularly insightful
into that traumatic
transition of '75.
But '75was also quite important.
Am I running overtime?
No, I'm not running overtime.
It was quite important in terms
of the United States as well
because the United States
was really rather concerned
to get the right answer to
the independent government
that would be established and
the Portuguese said, "Right,
we will leave on the
11th of November, 1975,
by which time there
will a new government."
And so the United States
Government was trying to do it
and they got it all wrong.
They got seriously muddled up.
And it just so happens that
after this had happened, I was--
I was in Washington,
I was here on a visit.
And a friend of mine said, "Oh,
there's a hearing taking place
on the hill about was responsible
for the failure of American Policy
in Angola in November of '75."
And I said, "Oh, that's very
interesting, can I come along?"
In state there was deadly silence.
Good gracious what have we let
ourselves into, a foreigner coming
to listen to our hearing?
However, they said,
"Well, since you've heard
about it, you better come."
And so there I was sitting
in the small room in--
on the hill and the Department
of State had its representatives.
The Department of Defense
had it representatives.
The Central Intelligence
Agency had its [inaudible].
The FBI had its agencies.
Kissinger's private
advisers where all there.
There a whole host of them.
And they were sitting around this
room trying to pass the buck.
Trying to say who was it that
got it wrong so that we got
into such a muddle that we're
now once again at war by proxy
at this time in Africa
not in Vietnam.
And it was really quite
an interesting episode
for a not very serious traveling
historian to find themselves sitting
in Washington listening
to this intense debate.
To the embarrassment I
saved the person from State
who had mentioned us to be
in it couldn't find a
way of uninviting me.
Right, however, you do have to
realize Kissinger got very upset
about the Texan dimension.
Now, one of the things that
was happening in Angola was
that oil was discovered and the
oil companies didn't quite know
when to admit its oil companies like
to find oil and then keep it secret
until they've got a
government they can manipulate.
And they decided eventually
offer independence, yes,
alright this is a government
which is sufficiently weak.
We can control it therefore
we will start pumping oil.
But there was a danger of people
destabilizing their onshore bases
possibly even blowing
up their offshore wells.
And so they wanted to hire some
very good mercenary soldiers
to protect their installations.
And the best mercenary soldiers
in the world were Cubans.
And so there at the big
oil companies Gulf Oil,
Morris or Chevron the rest who were
pumping oil from offshore wells
in Angola and using Cuban troops
to protect their installations.
But Texans didn't like to reveal
too much about what their doing
and eventually Henry
Kissinger discovered
that these oil companies were using
Cubans against whom he was trying
to fight a war to protect
their installations
and Kissinger I'm afraid
got very cross about this.
Now again it's something that
you can probably find information
about if you want re-source history.
Find out what was actually happening
in the early years of independence.
Now, one of the reasons that
Portugal was 10 years behind hand
in decolonizing its colonies,
Britain decided in the '50s,
late '50s it would decolonize,
they gave independence to Nkrumah
and Nyerere and various
other people.
And the French decided,
well, you know,
they couldn't actually
drag their feet any longer.
And so they eventually
said, well, you know,
if you want independence you can
have it but we will cut you off
and that's what they
said in New Guinea.
And then they said, "Now, you
can have independence so long
as you remain loyal
subjects of France
so we'll give you flag independence.
We won't give you financial
independence,
you'll still use our money and
we will control the economy,
but you could be independent."
So by 1960, essentially British and
French colonies were independent
and Portuguese ones weren't.
And the reason for this
is that both Britain
and France could say
very easily, "Look,
with independence we
still control the economy.
We are the neocolonial partner.
We are the suppliers of
industrial manufactures.
We're the people who are going
to keep those countries supplied
with all they need in a way of
motor cars and textiles and paint
and cement and all the other things.
They won't produce any of their own.
They'll buy it from us."
The Portuguese were
unable to do that.
Portugal was the second
poorest country in Europe.
The poorest country was Albania but
the second poorest was Portugal.
And it didn't actually
have the infrastructure
to become a neocolonial
partner [inaudible].
So for 10 years it
delayed independence.
During those 10 years, Portugal
moved forward very rapidly.
The industrialization of Portugal
in the 1960s was quite astonishing.
So by 1975, they really
did have a base
which would have provided
a neocolonial partnership
but by then the Portuguese was
so unpopular it wasn't viable.
And so what happens
with independence is
the neocolonial partner
of Angola becomes East Germany.
That again is a dimension which
is perhaps a little surprising
and if you're re-sourcing
history, you want to look
for the surprising dimensions.
You want to find that how it is
that Angola becomes a partner not
of West Germany as the
Portuguese had always feared
but of East Germany.
Shall we move on to the 1980s?
These are the years of austerity.
These are the years in which
Angola is extremely poor.
These are the years where
Angola unlike all the French,
flag independent, 17 republics
who have French money,
tries to create its own money.
And its money is actually
very difficult to control.
So what happens is that the
money basis for transactions
in Angola is not the
kwanza, the bank note,
because that is being
reduced by inflation.
It is the 6-pack, the
6-pack is 6 cans of beer.
And that is the unit of measurement.
And so if you want to go
and buy something what you do is
you carry your 6 packs of beer
and you pay for your loaf of bread.
You pay for you vegetables.
You pay for whatever it may be.
If you're trying to pay your
rent on your room you may have
to borrow a pickup truck in order to
take enough 6 packs to pay for it.
But this essentially is the way
in which the economy operated.
It operated on 6 packs
of lager beer.
Now I was there in, I suppose,
'87 and I was talking to some
of the Cuban financial advisers
and educational advisers in Angola
and this was quite an interesting
thing to do and they were saying,
"Look, you know, this will not do.
We've got to have financial economic
reform in this country and we've got
to establish a much more traditional
system not a command economy
but a market economy."
And so they talked to me about this
and I wrote it up as an article
which appeared in the Journal
of Southern African Studies
and if you want a copy there's
a copy on my desk over there.
And I was told subsequently
that this article written
by a traveling foreigner
who just happened
to be there caught the imagination
with somebody other who translated
in Portuguese and circulated
copies of it to all the members
of the Government and
Cabinet of Angola.
So, you know, you might say
that a traveling historian can
have a little bit of influence
on the way things change because
things did change and Angola moved,
like China, to a market economy.
And as they say, you know, I
happen to have written a paper
about how a 6-pack economy wasn't
going to be terribly sustainable.
Well, I have to say that the six
pack economy was only part of it.
The other part concerned diamonds.
Traditionally, the second produce
of Angola after coffee was diamonds.
And the diamonds were
all mined by a subsidiary
of De Beers the great
monopolist of diamonds
in the northeastern
quarter of the country.
>> They created a state within
a state nobody could come in,
nobody could come out
without permission
of the De Beers Diamond Company.
But it just so happened
that I knew enough people,
so in fact I did once spend a week
inside that state within a state
which was mining these diamonds
which was sustaining
the imperial economy.
Once independency had occurred,
the monopoly broke down.
Everybody was looking for diamonds
not just in the controlled northeast
but all over the country.
And so you've got these
horrendous stories of women
who essentially were
slaves working in cold water
up to their waists
hauling up buckets of mud
which were then washed and
sifted to produce small diamonds.
And diamonds became the
second currency of Angola.
So if you went around the embassies,
you went around the
nongovernmental agencies of Luanda
and they were dealing with important
things like real estate management,
they we're dealing in matchboxes
full of small gem diamonds.
So that was the 2nd currency.
And if you we're the
opposition trying
to overthrow the Marxist
government of Agostinho Neto,
if you were the followers
of Jonas Savimbi,
then you use these diamonds
to sell them abroad.
And so these women who were
digging up mud for Jonas Savimbi,
the diamonds then went not to
capital of the diamond world.
The capital of the diamond
word is in Antwerp that's
where you cut diamonds, that's
where you send them to Hatton Garden
where they market it in London.
They found an alternative circuit.
What happens is these
diamonds were being sold
to a rival diamond center Tel Aviv,
so that is where diamonds were going
from the wild diamond
mines in Angola.
And then from Tel Aviv, they
were converted into hard currency
and the hard currency
went to Ukraine
and Ukraine had an enormous
supply of redundant weapons,
aircraft and other such things.
And so Angola has this
close connection
with Ukraine diamonds being
sold for military hardware.
Now, one of the people
who get involved
in this diamond trade is the
daughter of the President.
A young lady called
Isabela dos Santos.
I'm told, but I haven't checked it
out that she actually has a degree
in politics from the
University of London.
Whether that's true
or not, I don't know.
But she certainly had a
business brain and so she took
up diamond trading in a big way.
And when De Beers realized that
there was a real danger that because
so many blood diamonds
were going into the chain,
the diamonds would demonized in
the same way that fur coats were.
Do you remember Brigitte
Bardot demonized fur coats
and said no self-respecting
person in Europe
or America will wear fur coat again
because it's cruel to animals?
De Beers really felt as though
the same might happen to diamonds
so many blood diamonds were coming
out of Syria and coming out Liberia,
coming out of the Congo,
but diamonds might suddenly
become an unacceptable form
of ornamentation for
middle class and rich women.
And so Angola signs
the Kimberly Agreement
which controls the origins
and sources of diamonds.
And I presume it's because
Isabela, daughter of the President,
was one of the main traders
in diamonds and therefore
from her point view, she didn't
want her market to be spoiled
by the thought that Angola
was selling blood diamonds
and so they joined the
Kimberly Agreement.
We move on to 2002.
In 2002, the third of the great
Angolan wars came to an end.
The first war was the
colonial war the Portuguese
against the nationalist.
The second war the war of
intervention, the gawkers [phonetic]
of America who were to come up
from South Africa, and the gawkers
of Moscow who'd came across from
Cuba at the war intervention
which went on throughout the '80s.
1992 a peace is orchestrated
between by the outside powers.
The inside political leaders
had very little to do it,
they don't like it, and the
country goes back to war.
So the third war is a civil war
essentially between the north
and the south with two nationalist
movements each fighting for control.
And then eventually in 2002
the famous Jonas Savimbi,
leader of the south, is killed.
Now, if you're going to go and
re-source history, I would like you
to find for me who was
that told government troops
where to find Savimbi.
I don't know the answer but
there were a number of people
who had fingers in the pie.
Savimbi was partly supported, of all
unlikely places, by Saudi Arabia.
It may be that the government,
of all unlikely friends,
was being supported by Israel.
So somebody was able to tell the
government look you will find
Savimbi in this very remote place
and they did find him
and they did kill him.
And it so happens that very shortly
afterwards I was in the place
where it happened and I said
to them would it be possible
to go and see Savimbi's grave?
No, they said, we don't
think that's a good idea.
We very much doubt if
Savimbi is still in his grave.
We think somebody would have
taken him out and removed him
for future use as a trophy, as
a hero, as something rather,
the grave is probably empty.
Peace then settles in Angola.
The various armies
start being demobilized.
The various civilians
were being displaced
and start being reintegrated.
The victims of the war
particularly women are trying
to rebuild their lives.
And the state government
begins to rebuild the economy.
Now one of the ways in which this
happens is peculiarly interesting.
Do you remember I mentioned
a young lady called Isabela?
Isabela, the daughter of the
President, the second richest woman
in the country, I believe
the richest woman
in the country was
actually her stepmother,
but Isabela was quite wealthy.
And what I have been
seeing in recent months is
that Isabela is saying, "Ah,
have you noticed Portugal
is going down the tubes?
Portugal can't pay its debts.
Portugal is in real trouble.
Portugal is going to
bring down the Euro.
It's gonna crash all
European economy."
So what's Isabela doing?
She's adopting a policy
of reverse neocolonialism.
She is saying, "Ah,
I've got some money here
from my transactions
from my diamonds."
And so she's going to Portugal and
she's buying up Portuguese banks
which are a bit stressed
at a cut price.
She's buying up Portuguese
telecommunications
which is a very profitable thing to
do because Africa has no landlines.
It only has telecommunications.
Portugal has telecommunications.
So there's Isabela in
Portugal quietly buying
up telecommunications.
And so reverse neocolonialism is
the name of the game when you get
to the end of the first
decade of the 21st century.
Okay, I think that is point
of which I have said enough
and more than enough.
And so I should stop.
But since Laverne is a librarian
if you want to know more, if you go
and look on her shelves,
you will find that there
about 42 ISBN numbers with
my name attached to them.
You'll find that there are about
30 essays some of which she's got
over there in which
have written about some
of the things I'm telling you about.
You will also find that the
person sitting over there
who is my long term colleague has
got a couple of reports on Angola
which I wrote for the
British Parliament
and I don't have copies
of them but she does.
Okay, Laverne is that enough?
[ Inaudible Remark]
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
>> Could you take questions?
>> Oh, in deed I could
take questions.
>> Well the first thing that comes
to my mind is you mentioned--
you described yourself several
times as a traveling historian.
>> Yes.
>> Is that your term?
>> Yes, I suppose that's my term.
You know it would be pretentious
to sort of say, "Ah, well,
you know this is the man who used
to teach in little downtown college
in California called UCLA or this is
somebody who actually was Chairman
of the African Studies Program
in University of London."
There are all sorts of things
I could say about myself
but they're too pretentious Laverne,
so I'm just a traveling historian.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
[ Laughter ]
>> You know quite often
it seems as if you were
in the right place
at the right time.
>> This is absolutely true.
I decided, you know, one couldn't
cover the whole of Africa and so
since I was particularly invited to
come, talk about Angola next Friday
in the African Studies
Association of that, you know,
it's Angola I would talk about.
But as you know full well I
did actually write a biography
of Kwame Nkrumah.
And I did actually meet
him on one occasion.
And more interesting that perhaps, I
interviewed his first Head of State.
Now do you know who the first
Head of State of Nkrumah was
when he gained independence?
Elizabeth II.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> The Queen, Elizabeth-- what's
her name Windsor was Head of State
in Ghana for the first
three years of independence.
And so when I was writing this
poetry I happened to have met
and I'm told that, you know,
you do not ask questions
of the Queen that is absolutely.
She sets the agenda
but I didn't know this.
And so I said, "Do you
remember Kwame Nkrumah?"
She said, "Oh, of course, I
remember Kwame Nkrumah he'd come
to stay with me."
And she inherited, I think, six
prime ministers or six countries
from her father and
Nkrumah was one of them.
So there you are.
The right place at the right
time by accident and being young
and impertinent I even
interviewed the Queen.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes?
>> How did you spent
your teenage year--
[inaudible] teenage years in
Ghana and going to in Ghana,
how did you migrate to Angola?
>> Some people really do ask
most impertinent questions.
The answer to that is that I was a
student in the University of Ghana
and the only white student
in the University of Ghana
so that means the other
2,000 were all black.
But the other 2,000 had all gone
to colonial secondary schools,
residential schools and they
had all, as a matter of course,
studied Latin because
that's what one did
in colonial secondary schools.
I had gone to a remote village
school somewhere in the Swiss Alps
and did not study Latin and
halfway through my degree I come
across this terrible fact that
one of the papers you needed
to graduate was a translation paper.
And they said well make it easy
for them we'll make it in Latin.
And I didn't have any Latin.
So how was I going graduate?
So I got the book out
all 600 pages of it
and on page 343 footnote 6
said, "Students studying history
in Africa will find a paucity of
Latin documents and if they so wish,
they may do their translation paper
from Portuguese instead of Latin."
So I went scampering
off to Portugal.
I spent 6 weeks doing an
intensive course in Coimbra
in Portugal to learn Portuguese.
I brought myself a
really good dictionary
which we were allowed to have.
When I came back and I
translated a piece of Portuguese
with the dictionary
and I got my degree.
So it's a good question.
Yes.
>> Professor Birmingham, you
mentioned in the beginning
about a student who
is using internet
and you had to use [inaudible].
>> Yes, yes.
>> As a professor and, you know,
what would you advise student to do
when they're looking
at [inaudible] today,
they will use the internet anyway.
>> Yes.
>> So what would you
advise them to do?
How would you guide them?
How would you resource-- have
them to resource their research?
>> Yes. Again, an absolutely
brilliant and essential question.
Of course they're going to
use the internet and you
and I hardly do use it myself
because, you know, I'm not really
in the way of information
technology.
But yes you must use it and
there is a lot of data out there
which wouldn't otherwise be
available and you have to use it.
But you have to go
further than that.
You have to actually
almost certainly go
to the ground you're
working on and you have
to put your ear to the ground.
You have to listen to
what people are saying.
You have to listen-- For instance
if you want to follow the history
of Angola, you go and listen to the
songs of protest that are being sung
down in the working class areas
as to what people are saying
about their experience of
government, their experience
of the whole process
of decolonization.
You have to find things which
the internet can't cope with.
And so I think, you
know, being present,
knowing people possibly
learning languages is important
and you know I had
this huge advantage
that actually can speak fairly
fluently four different languages
and this means that, you know,
people are not frightened of you.
If you are struggling
with their language,
they're going to be nervous.
They're going to say, "Well,
you may-- you misunderstand."
If you can speak reasonably
colloquially in the language
of the people you're studying.
And so when I did the history
of Switzerland which I did
after I retired, people
said you can't do
that Switzerland is totally private
country nobody will speak to you.
But I went up into the mountains
and I started talking to the farmers
about how they used their time,
how they used their labor,
how they used their families,
and how much choices they made
about pastoralism and agriculture
and forestry, and all questions
which are absolutely fundamental
to African history and I found
that these farmers because I
could speak their language,
because their schoolmasters
had also be my schoolmasters.
So I had an entry point.
So I think you've go
find your entry point.
Everybody will have a different
one but it is important to have it.
It is important to be able to listen
to people who are actually there,
who are the living
descendants of the process
that you're trying analyze.
But, yes, now I don't deny at all
that the internet is an incredible
resource and I'm just amazed that,
you know, when Clinton was elected
President it still hadn't got
a name.
They thought it might be called
the information super highway.
And in fact they called
the internet instead.
But it is a very new tool and I have
never really come to terms with it.
So my weakness.
[ Laughter ]
>> You mentioned using songs--
>> Yes.
>> -- listening laborers
who had been to protest,
what about rap music today?
>> Absolutely.
>> How would you use
something like rap music
in Angola to explain something?
>> Yeah, yeah.
Well, I have what is
known as a flannel ear
which means I can't hear music and
I don't even know what rap music is.
But I do have friends and your
friends are very important
when you're re-sourcing history.
And one of the people
that I would go
to immediately is a woman called
Marissa Moorman and she is professor
of history at the University
of Indiana in Bloomington,
Indiana Bloomington
not the other one.
And she does a great deal
about music and she has an ear
which can hear what are
the tones of the music
which will reveal what's going
on in the minds of people
who wouldn't dare to speak out
politically because, you know,
there is still a fairly
controlling police in Angola.
But just as the colonial police
didn't know how to read poetry
and so a lot of the protest
in the Portuguese empire
in poetry form is something
which does exist
because the police didn't realize
they ought to be censoring poems.
They weren't censoring politics.
So too with the music, you
can use it and should use it.
And so I think next time
in Luanda go and find
out what they're singing
down in the bakeshop.
>> It seems that literature
is very strong in Angola,
in other Portuguese
speaking areas of Africa.
>> Yes.
>> Why?
>> You're absolutely
right the last time I was
in this building was 10 years ago
and you had a huge a great
cardboard box under your desk
which is absolutely filled with
novels written in Portuguese
by Africans, you don't
remember that but I do.
And this literature really is quite
revealing and I think that one
of the things one has to say about
the Portuguese colonies or at least
about Angola is that a lot of
people did learn Portuguese
and Portuguese does become a
much wider language in Angola
than the colonial languages
within several other countries.
And so, you know, if you into a bar
in Ghana people will
be talking Ghar,
I can't know whatever
they're talking.
And in Angola they may well
be talking in Portuguese.
And there's a very nice story
about how the football team
from Zambia arrived in
Angola to play a match.
And the Angolans we're
terribly shocked.
They said, but all these players
are talking to each other in Bemba,
but you're not, that's
a bush vernacular,
why aren't talking a proper
civilized, wheels be Portuguese.
And so a lot of Portuguese, a
lot of Angolans use Portuguese
as their first language not
as their second language,
not the language you fill
in your tax return in
but as the language you
actually communicate
with your fellow football players.
And so there's a lot of
very, very good writing.
Please.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes.
>> But what you're speaking here
in African History is the use
oral history, to use a culture
and literature in being there
at the right time that's entirely
different set of resources
than what we find are [inaudible].
Can you help director that
way and how did you move
in to doing the kind of
history asking the historians do
which is quite different and what,
at least, in the '60s European
and American historians were doing?
>> The short answer is cheat.
I actually did my original
thesis essentially using very
traditional documents.
And yes you're right, you know,
Roland Oliver who's the great patron
of African History, founded
the Journal of African History
and the African Studies
Association in Westford.
>> He did realize that work that
had gone before which was limited,
tended to be out of French or
British and that, you know,
the Portuguese Empire
essentially history wants to boo
under the fascist regime,
fascist regime lasted for 48 years
and during that time you
could only talk in terms
of the glory Henry the
Navigator or whatever.
And you couldn't talk
about real history.
And so the Portuguese colonies
and Portugal itself we're
deprived of history.
And so Roland Oliver
said, right, you know,
you can have Angola
in the following year.
A very bright young
man called [inaudible]
and he said [inaudible]
you can have Guinea.
And then a young American got
turned up and called [inaudible].
So it's possibly the
young lady supervisor
and said you can have Mozambique.
And so it happened
[inaudible] the three
of us actually very rapidly wrote
books on these three countries
and then, you know, it's
expanded from there.
But as far using other sources
[inaudible] this comes later.
This is an awareness.
Okay, yes, when writing my thesis
I did travel around the Angola.
I was hitch hiking in the country I
was staying with Swiss Missionaries
who could tell me very different
account of the experience
of being a colony under
the Portuguese
and the ones who've got
from official records.
But essentially, my thesis was
written on the 17th century
and therefore I was
using written documents
with permission [inaudible].
Although many of those we're
based on oral information
which had been passed down
through traditional societies.
That oral information
survives so long as the society
and its students survive
and disappears [inaudible].
So records written in 17th century
on African politics
are vitally important.
And so having the languages--
you know, I don't have any Latin
but I can guess in Italian and
I guess in Spanish, you know,
various things like that.
But the whole idea that one
actually absorbs the atmosphere
of the culture, the music,
the language, the poetry,
the literature grows later and,
yes, alright it just so happens
that when I was writing my thesis
I did meet Agostinho Neto and went
on to become a President.
And, you know, that is--
And so I was able to speak
at the memorial service
when he died.
These are the kind
of happen in stances
that Laverne is talking about.
Yes.
[ Inaudible Remarks ]
>> No, the records I was using
were mostly written in Portuguese.
Yes. So, you know, some of
the church documentation
in the Catholic Church
would be in Latin.
This is true.
But essentially one of the
things the Portuguese did,
they didn't like asking
questions of an historical kind.
They did quite like publishing
documents, raw documents.
And so one of the things
I was able to buy
as a student was 13 huge great
volumes of document relating
to Angola in the 16th
and 17th century.
So I didn't even have to go and
get my hands dirty in the archives.
A lot of the material
was actually in print.
I imagined that Laverne
got sentiment
but it's no longer available.
But when I was a student you
could buy this up at about,
you know, 2 dollars a volume.
And so I had a lot
of written material.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yes, yes.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Yeah, yeah.
This is absolutely true.
But when I was an under graduate
in Ghana, it was the Gulf Cost
in the 1950s, the amount
of published history
of Africa was extremely small.
And so in so far as they were any
degrees anywhere America, Europe,
France wherever, and
dealing with Africa,
it was not about African History,
it was about the activities
of Europeans in Africa.
And so I was very fortunate and
that I was the first generation
that said, "Look, this is not what
we're interested, we're interested
in the history Africa itself."
Which means going to African
sources, it means finding
out what Africans themselves we're
saying and thinking and doing rather
than simply relying on David
Levingston and [inaudible]
and the rest of them to tell us
what they thought Africa was about.
And so there was a radical
transformation in the '50s
from European activities in
Africa to African History.
And it was in 1960 that the journal
of African history was
launched at Cambridge.
And so it's now being
running 50 years.
And does very much adopt
the agenda that you may need
to understand what
actually the African agents
of change are thinking and saying.
And some of that does involve
going and spending a lot
of time interviewing people because
they are not much written records.
And so oral history not
only of remembered tradition
of old societies, but also oral
tradition of the life memory
of yourself and your mother and your
grandfather are quite important,
okay.
[ Inaudible Remark ]
>> Well, I would like to thank Dr.
Birmingham for being here today.
I learned a lot.
I was also entertained I think.
And he's a reference for us.
I should also point out, since you
mentioned the Cambridge History
of Africa, we're in our reading room
and we have this reference
collection and he is a part
of our reference collection.
We do have the Cambridge
History of Africa,
the publication with Patrick--
>> Chabal.
>> Chabal.
We have this it's history of
postcolonial Lusophone Africa.
There are some other works that
we have here in our reading room,
in our reference collection.
So we have the living
reference here today.
So thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.