The role of institutions in development has becoming increasingly important, most notably in the recent works "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" (2006) and "Why Nations Fail" (2012). Before these books, Basil Davidson wrote "The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State" (1992), which places a large emphasis on the role of institutions, their legacy, structure and formation. In is also a work that he writes offers the "conclusions of a lifetime" of experiences and study. Davidson writes "in this book I present in summary and perspective whatever wisdom I have gathered in these forty-odd years of African study" (p. 8).

The following offers some quotes that summarize his key arguments, but this is essential reading in full:

"Africa's crisis of society derives from many upsets and conflicts, but the root of the problem is different from these: different and more difficult to analyze. The more one ponders this matter the more clearly is it seen to arise from the social and political institutions within which decolonized Africans have lived and tried to survive. Primary, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We have to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly independent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to Africa's own history, but the onset of a new period of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so state of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples possessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models" (p. 10).

"The contrast with Japan after 1867 could really not be more accurate. Japan was able to accept "Westernization" on its own terms, at its own speed, and with its own reservations, ensuring as far as possible that new technology and organization were assimilated by Japanese thinkers and teachers without dishonor to ancestral shrines and gods. Japanese self-confidence would be salvaged. Such an outcome was impossible in dispossessed Africa. In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress" (p. 42). In essence, the post-colonial efforts, by in large Davidson argues, faced and embraced an environment wherein the 'traditional' was ignored, considered backward and stagnant.

"At the outset of independence there had been a narrow gap in trust and confidence between the bulk of the population and the beneficiaries or leaders of anticolonial nationalism. The social aspects of the anticolonial struggle still retained primacy of influence over all those aspects concerned with nation-statist self-identification… Now, after ten or twenty years the gap has widened to an abyss: on one side, a great mass of resentful and impoverished rural people and, one the other, a small minority with quantities of wealth. Into that abyss there had plunged, more or less helplessly, the legitimacy and credit of the state which had allowed this gap to yawn." (p. 214-215). 

Decolonization struggles against the Portuguese are often thought about as Angola and Mozambique, far less does one hear about Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Basil Davidson brings first-hand experience of that struggle, for which he was praised by none other than Amilcar Cabral himself in the Preface. The book, "No Fist is Big Enough to Hide the Sky: The Liberation of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, 1963-74" (1969, with additions in 1981) by Basil Davidson, offers insight into the struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and anti-colonial struggles generally. The book is not a history, nor it is an analysis of deconolization (as Fanon has done). It is more of a travel diary and set of reflections, supported with documents and quotes from the leaders of the struggle.

What can be learned from the movement of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)? From Davidson:

• "Genuine revolts against an established order begin with necessity. The penalties of guerilla warfare can be accepted, can be justified, only when they are suffered as part of a necessary self-defence. This is a hard lesson that has nothing to do with revolutionary verbalism. A few leaders many understand, from the start, this necessity to use violence both in self-defence and as the only means of opening the door to a better future. But they remain powerless until and unless large numbers of people also feel and acknowledge it. Only then can the bitterness and hope take fire." (p. 9)

• "one cannot make the revolt first, and think about the revolution afterward. All anti-imperialist revolts take a revolutionary direction. That is their nature. But only those come to fruition which realize, in the course of the struggle, a complete integration of military and political effort within a framework of thought and aim that is revolutionary. Another principle, flowing from the first, is that methods, structures, and objectives must be profoundly and increasingly democratic. Here there can be no question of a group of leaders or fighters, no matter how devoted and sincere, 'making the revolution' on behalf of others. Unless and until the mass of people actively and continually participate in changing their own lives, there will be no change, or none of any value. Not until the farmers in the villages and hamlets embrace the revolution as their own work, as their own thing, does success become possible." (p. 21)

• "the central concept of national liberation was to be defined not so much as the right of a people to rule itself, but as the right of a people to regain its own history: 'to liberate, that is, the means and process of development of its own productive forces'. So, 'in our thinking, any movement of national liberation which fails to take account of this basis and objective of national liberation may well be fighting against imperialism, but will not be fighting for national liberation'." (p. 53)

• "'We want no volunteers', Cabral said to me on this point, 'and we shall turn them back if they present themselves. Foreign military advisers or commanders, or any other foreign personnel, are the last thing we shall accept. They would rob my people of their one change of achieving a historical meaning for themselves: of reasserting their own history, of recapturing their own identity'" (p. 62)
  

It is well worth reading in full.