California State University, Bakersfield

Faculty Member, Department of History

Professor of History

Thesis Title: Nationalist Politics, War and Statehood; Guinea-Bissau 1953-1973

About

I was born on November 18, 1951 in Nova-Lusitânia , in the former province of Manica-e-Sofala, Mozambique, then a colony of Portugal under the fascist dictatorship of António Oliveira Salazar.  Nova-Lusitânia was a tiny rural village astride river Buzi, so named after the antelope “kids” that roamed in abundance along its margins. I went to elementary school in the village and drew crucifixes and religious figures for extra credit and pocket money. At the end of the four years of primary schooling, I entered the Lyceum in Beira, the provincial capital, four-hour –river-boat-ride towards the mouth of the Buzi estuary on the Indian Ocean. Three years later, I boarded a P and O Line ship and headed to Central Asia to study via Zanzibar, Dar-e-Salam, Mombasa, Seychelles, Aden and Karachi.

I studied a variety of subjects at various religious and secular institutions and Tekkes ranging from comparative theology, Islamic jurisprudence, formal logic, Hadith, Sufi doctrine and practice, comparative mysticism, Arabic calligraphy, sacramental chanting and music, and history of Islamic design. I also learnt very elementary carpet weaving and did bookbinding and manuscript transcriptions on vellum.  At one point towards the tail end of my stay I got into a pre-medical college, but money ran out and I headed home.

I travelled quite a bit in South Central Asia and in 1971 I returned to Zambia, where my parents had taken refuge from the colonial war in Mozambique. I stayed with my parents for a bit, did some relief work and then went to England where I arrived on August 16, 1972 at 2:30 PM on a single ticket with fifteen hundred pounds sterling in my pocket, with little English, a lot of French and Portuguese and Arabic and other languages - determined not to fail. I studied Anglo Saxon Literature, World History and British Government and Politics at Cambridge Tutors College, and worked at jobs ranging from cooking and housekeeping to being a rockery gardener to a Czech exile from Nazi-dominated Sudetenland. She fed me lunch twice a week accompanied by a glass of wine and a new piece of classical music. She was Prague’s foremost literary and music critic, I was told, and this was her way of paying back. Twice a week then, I learnt about European wines and twice a week I was introduced to classical music from Bach to Sir Michael Tippet’s A Child of Our Time.

In 1974 I was interviewed by the Australian diplomatic historian Coral Bell to be subsequently admitted to the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex. There I continued my interest in fine and performing arts by taking classes in wood engraving, choral music, sculpting and playing the mediaeval recorder.  My professional interests were also drawn to world history (in addition to international relations) at Sussex where a number of eminent scholars influenced my thinking and formation on theory and history, the limits of evidence in historiography, and historical studies pursued from supra-national perspectives. Notable among these historians were, the Europeanist, Geoffrey Best, students of Martin Wight, the Oxford historian-turned-political- theorist, and the subaltern historical studies pioneer Ranajit Guha, author of History And The Limits Of World-History.

Three years later I headed after my graduation to Paris to study sculpture in an atelier in Levallois-Perret, a commune in the northwestern suburbs of Paris, and prepare for the Beaux-art de Paris, L’école Nationale Supérieure . I was intent to pursue a career in sculpting. Things did not pan out. Instead I was admitted to Oxford in 1977. There I did my doctorate in African history in the faculty of social studies at St. Catherine’s College which was then headed by its Master, the historian Allan Bullock.

Oxford shaped me in a broader range of fields covering the Balkans, British, European, Middle Eastern, Military, and African history. My first three years were truly intense and very challenging and at times difficult. At one point I had to stop gorging myself on lectures, seminars, and tutorials. “Get it written, not right” said my college supervisor.
He was right and I was ready, but did not know then. In retrospect, the timing could not have been more perfect. Hugh Seaton-Watson’s seminars had already equipped me to tackle with sensitivity factional nationalism under Balkan conditions, in my case in West Africa. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s guest lectures and his careful reconstruction of Cathar life deploying inquisition materials and Christopher Hill’s inspiring final series of lectures demonstrated what could be done with ephemera on studies elsewhere, using the “bottom up approach”.

That time unilateral disarmament was in full swing. E. P. Thompson’s discourses on the subject matter during his Oxford Union visits had a big impact on me; as did the texts from his impassioned historical quill. I leant to appreciate from him the need for user-friendly access to knowledge when writing history – which you can see from this note, I have yet to master. Albert Hourani’s work on Islam and the occasional visiting lectures from the sartorial and elegant Edward Said instilled in me a sense of manners, and healthy skepticism of Western epistemology in history and heurism.

By the time I finished my dissertation and studies at Oxford, I was ready to pursue an equally fruitful and varied professional life that took me to visit people and live in places I would not have missed. My travelogue on www.facebook.com/dhada tells me, I have been to 621 cities (no 622, I nearly forgot Bakersfield!) in 37 countries.

In among all this travel and professional engagement, publishing, and teaching, I have continued to write and sculpt, sketch and very very occasionally paint – and exhibit. My works urge visitors to touch and feel the bronze pieces. I want my viewers to see with their hands by touching, preferably with their eyes closed. You can view photo images by visiting www.MySpace.com/dhada where you will also find a quick write-up on my sculpting career.

I am finishing a monograph on a massacre that proved to be of great importance to Mozambique’s colonial history. For spring 2010, I began teaching two courses, World History and History of Southern Africa. The first course starts with our search for protein and berries, what happened to us when we got food surplus and a language/pictographic signage to communicate orally and in writing, and how we began to engineer ourselves socially and govern and protect our needs and wants. The second course on Southern Africa entailed conducting original research using oral evidence and written ephemera. I also teach, The History of African Decolonization, Why We Kill: Genocides and Genocidal Massacres In World History, Middle East In World History From Muhammad to the Fall of Constantinople, The Ottomans In World History, And Contemporary Middle East History.

My travels around the world and my studies in world history suggest we need to better understand our place in this fast changing and vast world; so we can adjust ourselves to changes that are upon us. There is no other subject better able to tell us who we are in the context of where we originated and how we fit from the most stable to the most volatile part of the world than the study of World History, African History and the History of the Middle East.

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