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Malcolm Deas joked that he owed his career as a historian to Fidel Castro — although he had little interest in that revolutionary leader, preferring instead the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi “because he annoyed Marx so much”.
Still, it was the early 1960s. The Cuban revolution was at its charismatic apogee. And the young Deas, recently appointed fellow of All Souls College, Oxford university, was buzzing with the adventures he had read about in Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Nostromo, set in the fictional South American republic Costaguana.
Deas’ tutor asked him what he wanted to do. Like most people in their early 20s, Deas had no idea — except travel, perhaps to Colombia. His vague premise was to study civil war. “One is very silly when one is young,” Deas recalled.
Yet there was nothing silly about his academic career that followed — nor the sage counsel that Deas, who has died in Oxford at the age of 82, gave as tutor and then adviser to multiple Latin Americanists and diplomats, some spies and several Colombian presidents — including Álvaro Uribe, who once slept on the couch in Deas’s study.
“At least one of my former students is in jail,” Deas once told me, in a display of the wit for which he was known. His was a humour that also existed alongside a deep wisdom. Deas’ advice to former president César Gaviria led directly to Colombia appointing civilians as defence ministers, an almost unprecedented move for the region. Deas’ ideas also helped to shape the security policies that tamed the country’s drug cartels, end the western hemisphere’s oldest civil conflict, and saved thousands of lives.
“Malcolm spent his life helping us Colombians understand ourselves,” said Sergio Jaramillo, a former Colombian defence official who designed the country’s peace process.
Deas was born in 1941 in Charminster, Dorset — the English county that inspired Thomas Hardy, whose doctor also delivered Deas into this world. His mother, a home maker, had been a glamorous debutante. His father, a major in the British army, had commanded a tank regiment.
Deas survived tedious lessons on Tudor history at a local school; went to Oxford; and, after visiting Colombia in 1963, joined the newly established Latin America centre at St Anthony’s College. The British government, alarmed by the Cuban revolution, had financed its creation. Deas remained there for four decades — hence his Castro joke.
In appearance, Deas was the acme of a distracted Oxford don. He invariably wore a dark jacket, white shirt and black tie. He didn’t have a doctorate and his definitive history of Colombia, one of the greatest books never written, was the deliberate result of a choice to avoid “the ranks of last word historians”. He spoke perfect Spanish with an appalling English accent that he could not, or preferred not to, change.
Yet despite this apparent fustiness, the historian’s two abiding characteristics were a delight in variety and the puncturing of stereotypes (“England is far more macho than Colombia”). His friends ranged from ultramontane conservatives to high-ranking revolutionary Caracas Chavistas. His academic work focused on 19th and 20th-century Colombian, Venezuelan and Ecuadorean history. But he eschewed writing on figures such as Simón Bolívar, believing that minor personalities captured a deeper sense of a country’s history. His many essays — from a bibliography of more than 130 titles, covering topics such as the role of grammar in Colombian politics, 19th-century orchid hunters and the interment of the bones of author Jorge Isaacs — are almost Borgesian in their depths.
In 2008, Deas, already garlanded with Colombia’s highest honour, the Cross of Boyacá, as well as an OBE, was awarded Colombian citizenship. Divorced and with one daughter, he divided his time between Bogotá and Oxford, where he received visitors in a front room knee-deep in books, with the watercolours he painted of Colombian landscapes hanging on the walls and his phone vibrating with WhatsApp messages from politicians and other luminaries.
Wherever he was, Deas’ mind ranged globally. He published on subjects as varied as Swiss democracy, soft home furnishings, and the battle for the Falkland Islands. During that conflict, Margaret Thatcher, when told there was an Oxford don who had studied the dispute, remarked: “How nice to be Mr Deas and to have time for such things.” Deas’ response, conveyed in the unpublished memoir he sent to me after a friendship of over 30 years, was characteristically humorous and self-deprecating. “One feels like a footnote, it is a vain, pleasant feeling,” he wrote.
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