Basil Davidson

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.

On the Stambul Train

Basil Davidson, 28 June 1990

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’. The Bluntschlis of the 1990s, romantic or otherwise, may even now be sharpening their sabres, or at any rate their wits, at the prospect of another bout of Balkan wars. The traveller on the Stambul train will expect adventures. It may be so.

Letter
With delay I notice a letter in your issue of 13 September that calls for a few words. Your correspondent, writing as a student of Romania, upbraids me for not having written about Romania when reviewing for you a book about wartime Macedonia. He should continue his studies: there was no Romanian presence in Macedonia, one of the great blessings upon which that usually unfortunate country has been...

Righteous Turpitudes

Basil Davidson, 27 September 1990

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. And this erasure of guilt for indulgence in ‘double standards’ has suited all sides and combatants, is quite in line with the manichaean ferocities of war, especially of big-scale war, and has proved altogether desirable in times of ideological strife. The removal of any obligation to refrain from deceit has generally survived, in the wake of any great war, as a widely-tolerated legacy of sanctioned economy with truth. When this or that authority has ‘lied to the House of Commons’ since 1945, he or she has been drawing on this legacy while standing on the family hearth as a model of veracity.

Bad Habits

Basil Davidson, 27 June 1991

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.’ I am all for getting rid of the malodorous Saddam, but would trying him for his crimes of war, however monstrous these have been, constitute a good thing for the world, morally: meting out punishment while assuaging pain and anger? Is there in answer to this a useful guide to be drawn from war crimes’ trials already held, or currently projected? British law, as Shawcross reminds us, although with what sounds like regret, is about to be altered ‘so as to permit the trial of a handful of old men’ long resident here but now accused of war crimes in the Europe of half a century ago. Do the Nuremberg trials therefore constitute a precedent to be followed to the world’s advantage? Doesn’t the concept of war crimes rather go to reinforce the conceptual possibility of crimeless war, and is this to be welcomed?

Letter
Basil Davidson writes: Experience with Chetnik apologists (usually non-Yugoslav, the native ones have some sense of shame) has long shown that rational discussion with them is fruitless. This correspondent is manifestly unaware of the vast bibliography of the subject, but is in no way dissuaded by this from joining irrelevant claim to squalid insult (as in his remarks on a book of mine of 1945). I...

The Partisan

Jeremy Harding, 23 June 1994

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...

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Who’s to blame?

Kathryn Tidrick, 25 February 1993

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...

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People’s War

John Ellis, 19 February 1981

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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