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“... not Dame Stella’s outfit but the Secret Intelligence Service itself – and ‘the historian Basil Davidson’. Poor devil, he’ll have work on his hands. The consequences of becoming known as ‘pro-Tito’ and therefore ‘anti-Mihajlovic’, in the jargon of earlier years, were soon felt. In 1946, unwisely impatient (but the war had cost me ...”

“... The notion that war can be carried on without crime is as novel, I suppose, as the companion notion that the crime should afterwards be punished by legal process: the first idea has encouraged the second, or, more probably, the desire for the second has promoted the illusion of the first. Both are in any case gaining support. ‘lt is not too late,’ Britain’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Lord Shawcross, was writing the other day, in the tone of those who state the self-evident, since when other voices have echoed him, ‘to insist on the surrender of Saddam to be tried for his crimes ...”

“... Africa? But Africa is dying ... Or certainly the nation-state in Africa is dying wherever it is not already dead – see Chad, Sudan, Somalia – while dragging multitudes of starving or sorely wounded people into disaster such as the continent has never seen before, and on a scale that is hard even to imagine. Immediate arena of these evils, the post-colonial nation-state has become in most cases a fragile shell of exploded aspirations, a constitutional garbage-can of shattered loyalties, or a cemetery of projects without a future ...”

“... British and American writing about Africans seems generally to suppose that its audience is interested in reading about Africans, but this supposition goes against the evidence. Distinguished writers continue to publish books that are presented as being about Africans, but are in fact about ‘us’ in Africa. While natural to an age of imperialism, this approach becomes awkward in an age (if, of course, we have got there) which may wish to read about ‘them’ in terms other than those of Eurocentric romance ...”

“... Long-term ‘endings of an era’ tend nowadays to be announced with remarkable confidence. This may even be the case with an issue as controversial as the ending of territorial imperialism, truly a large affair. Yet there is much to suggest that it is ending, and the appearance of two large histories of Christianity in Africa, the first of their kind on any such scale, can be seen as another signal of this: a summing-up has evidently come to seem possible as well as desirable ...”

“... Africa tramples in its misery and blood, and commentators are left to chant dismay. I share this dismay, but is explanation possible? As in Rwanda now, these are disasters which repeat themselves, and for Rwanda, as for its Siamese twin Burundi, which has lately suffered much the same, the useful words seem all used up. Even so, there have to be sensible answers ...”

“... If the sovereign nation-state is truly nearing the end of its useful life, as political philosophers here in Western Europe now seem ready to persuade us, so that regional unities of one kind of another may replace it to the general good, the tendency looks far more problematical further east. Resounding nationalism, or rather nation-statism, the two being by no means necessarily the same thing, is what presently appears to reign from Lithuania to the Black Sea or further east again, and from Slovenia to Albania by way of a newly abrasive ‘Serbianism ...”

“... Those who wander in the great forests of the African tropics do not always manage, like Conrad’s storyteller, to make it home again, and the likelihood of their ending in terminal disaster has become greater than it used to be. Whether threatened populations in these forests and their neighbouring savannahs can still be sheltered from destruction, or even self-destruction, is pretty much an open question ...”

“... In olden times, which is when God was deciding what blessings he would give to the countries he was creating, after a long while he finally got to Angola and he asked Gabriel his angel to remind him where Angola was, because he’d forgotten. “Angola?” said Gabriel. “Angola’s down there some place, nobody’s been there yet.” And so ...”

“... In Canto Four of Camões’s 16th-century epic, as Vasco da Gama and the men of his fleet prepare to embark on their conquest of the Golden East, ‘an old man of venerable appearance’ steps down to the quayside of Belem. Solemnly, if fruitlessly, he warns against their enterprise of imperialist piracy: – O pride of power! O futile lust For that vanity known as fame! That hollow conceit which puffs itself up And which popular cant calls honour! What punishment, what poetic justice, You exact on souls that pursue you! To what deaths, what miseries you condemn Your heroes! What pains you inflict on them! ...”

“... I was attracted to the alleged possibility of a pre-colonial historiography of tropical Africa rather more than forty years ago, when thinking about a book entitled On the Trail of the Bushongo, the latter not being a rare quadruped, as I had at first thought when opening the book, but an equatorial tribe or people of whom I had not previously heard tell ...”

“... North beyond Sarajevo is where the hills of Bosnia become less grey and gaunt than they are elsewhere, and a little further north again they slope away to the plain of Semberija along the Sava River. It is a pleasant enough country in normal times although a hungry one, with its peasants inhabiting scattered hamlets and family homesteads. There are also some famous old towns such as Travnik and Gradacac and Tuzla, a good deal modernised since about 1960 but otherwise unchanged in their Muslim loyalties and love of talk and strong laughter, or so it was until the ‘ethnic cleansers’ arrived a year ago ...”

“... Someone was heard complaining, the other day, about the ‘absurd confusions’ of the recent war in the Balkans. Very well: but why absurd? Or when have such confusions been anything save absurd? In this respect, at any rate, the unmaking of Yugoslavia can be seen as par for the course. It happened to me on a chill April morning, 55 years ago, to be sitting by a roadside outside Belgrade waiting for transport during another absurd confusion ...”

“... Ever since the Trojan Horse, the telling of lies in wartime has been found honourable, along with the bedevilment of enemies and the invocation of gods, and has been practised more or less cheerfully by persons who would otherwise assert in all conscience that they had never told, or ever would tell, anything but the truth. Courage and hardware may win wars, but cunning deception is just as surely a helpful friend ...”

“... overall, been a surplus of cultivable land in relation to the number of people living on it. Basil Davidson argues in his new book, The Black Man’s Burden, that the blight that has settled upon black Africa in the present day is rooted in the nation-state. In developing his argument he spares no criticism of the African leaders who have used the ...”