The death of a close friend of nearly 40 years’ standing, especially a man as vibrant and sensitive as Basker, cannot but impoverish one’s own life. Indeed, his untimely passing will make a huge dent in many lives.

Basker’s forbears were Brahmins and he used to joke about his high-caste background. But he also described Asians as the Jews of Africa, and perhaps his outsider status helped him to understand and empathise with the oppressed everywhere.
Basker grew up in the repressive atmosphere of segregationist, settler-colonial Rhodesia and, as a teenager, became committed to the cause of African freedom. As a young man, he joined the liberation struggle, becoming a member of ZAPU and a protégé of the late Joshua Nkomo. He spent a year in prison, where he was tortured, then in 1965 he went into exile in London where he spent ten hectic years working for the liberation of Zimbabwe.

At the LSE, where I first met him in the late sixties, he was present at the birth of the students’ movement, and indeed was one of its midwives, as John Rose has reminded us in his tribute. Basker’s experience of the radical sixties fused with his commitment to African nationalism to produce an original political and cultural mix. He became a Marxist and joind the International Socialists.

Basker had a keen intellect and few people knew more about Africa and the Third World in general than him. In 1972, he was invited to lead a new radical research organisation - Counter-Information Services - which was to focus on multinational corporations and their destructive impact on the Third World. A series of memorable “Anti-Reports” were produced in which the neo-colonial penetration of the Third World was systematically exposed.

In 1977, the success of CIS led to his being head-hunted again, this time to become director of the prestigious TNI, ’a world-wide fellowship of scholar-activists’, a post he held for ten years. But even after relinquishing his post, he was to retain a close intellectual, political and personal relationship with the TNI. In the course of his years in Amsterdam, Basker built up a reputation as one of Europe’s leading African intellectuals.

In 1980, he was elated at the achievement of Zimbabwean independence even though his own party, ZAPU, lost out in the jockeying for power to Robert Mugabe’s ZANU. But it was not long before disappointment set in at the speed with which the Mugabe regime capitulated to western multinationals and at the extent to which post-colonial Zimbabwe became dominated by an increasingly authoritarian regime.

At one level, Basker became a citizen of the world, with his roots in Africa, but also at home in his adopted Europe - London in particular - and the USA, where he taught for several years after his first heart attack in 1987. He was well versed in European culture, its literature and radical politics. At another level, however, he remained the outsider, estranged from his beloved Zimbabwe, never wholeheartedly wedded to Europe.
The last few years of Basker’s life were dogged by ill-health, a condition he bore with characteristic fortitude. To the end, he remained committed to the values and ideals that fired our imagination in the late sixties - a world without war, poverty, racism and oppression, a world based on human solidarity.

Basker was a warm and generous human being, possessed of immense charm, instantly liked by anyone who met him. He had a great sense of fun and also a sharp sense of humour, which he often directed against the absurdities of our society. These features made him unusually good company.

Basker and I became close friends during the seven years that he lived in my house in the seventies. He was a loving and loyal friend, and a devoted comrade and colleague. Like so many, I shall miss him.