Basil Davidson

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.

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.

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?

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. There may be leaders who still believe that patience and courage can save the day for the sovereignties they claim to govern. In other cases, more numerous, governments without talent and politicians without conscience wade ever deeper into the miseries of failure.

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. The author, Emil Torday, turned out to have been a Hungarian; he meant even less to me, but his book proved interesting. Published in 1925 but drawing on oral records collected some seventeen years earlier, it boldly advanced the view that pre-literate communities as remote and obscure as the Kuba (of whom the Bushong are a branch), whom Torday had found living along the Sankuru river in the veritable heart of Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’, could be said to possess a knowable and even notable history of their own social and political development. Unsurprisingly in the Europe of those times the book appears to have made no mark; and Torday’s employers in the Leopoldian Congo Free State, then about to become the Belgian Congo colony, were men of solidly commercial good sense. They must have thought the claim absurd in so far as they may have noticed it, and after them the colonial decades soon thoroughly established history in equatorial Africa as having begun, in any sense to be taken seriously, with the advent of Christianity as well as Commerce during the 1840s.