Basil Davidson, who died in 2010 at the age of 95, was a regular contributor to the LRB in the 1990s. His pieces draw on his experiences as a member of Special Operations Executive during the war, for which he was awarded the Military Cross (he was dropped by parachute into Yugoslavia in 1943 and remained there for just over a year, building links with Tito’s resistance), and his subsequent fascination with Africa.
He wrote a series of books on precolonial Africa, taking in great swathes of time and space, in such books as West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850. He also covered the liberation struggles in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, and wrote about the evils of the ‘post-colonial nation-state’. Jeremy Harding wrote about his ‘old-fashioned courage’ and the ‘energy and passion’ of his writing in the LRB after Davidson’s death.
Travelling in West Africa a little over forty years ago, Basil Davidson was shown around the chamber of the new territorial assembly in Bamako, built by the French as a concession to the growing...
For a few years in the mid-Seventies I lived in Tanzania, my husband being at the time one of the horde of expatriate ‘advisers’ who flocked there hoping to be of service to...
Soon, no doubt, some statistician of the absurd will tell us that the tonnage of books about the Second World War has finally exceeded the weight of ammunition expended in its course. On the face...
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