From 1939, Davidson was a reporter for the London "Economist" in Paris, France. From December 1939, he was a Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) / MI-6 D Section (sabotage) officer sent to Budapest (see Special Operations Europe, chapter 3) to establish a news service as cover. In April 1941, with the Nazi invasion, he fled to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. In May, he was captured by Italian forces and was later released as part of a prisoner exchange. From late 1942 to mid-1943, he was chief of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) Yugoslav Section in Cairo, Egypt, where he was James Klugmann's supervisor. From January 1945 he was liaison officer with partisans in Liguria, Italy. After the war, he was Paris correspondent for The Times, Daily Herald, New Statesman and The Daily Mirror.

From 1951, he became a well known authority on African history, an unfashionable subject in the 1950s. His writings emphasised the pre-colonial achievements of Africans, the disastrous effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the further damage inflicted on Africa by European colonialism and the baleful effects of the Nation State in Africa.

Davidson's book "The Lost Cities of Africa" won him the 1960 Anisfield-Wolf Award, for the best book that dealt with racial problems in creative literature. His work on African history won the 1970 Gold Medal from Haile Selassie.

In 1976, he won the Medalha Amilcar Cabral. He received honorary degrees from the Open University of Great Britain in 1980, and the University of Edinburgh in 1981. For his film series "Africa," he won the Gold Award, from the International Film and Television Festival of New York in 1984. He also won various other awards.

Davidson died on 9 July 2010, aged 95 [1].