Aimé Césaire - Discurso sobre o Colonialismo
Published in 1950, just a few years after the end of World War II, Discourse on Colonialism is a sharp critique of colonialism and of the French intellectuals who supported it ideologically. Without mincing words, the Martinican poet lays bare the violence of colonialism and its tacit acceptance within the polite and civilized academic spaces of the metropolis.
Questioning the very notion of civilization in relation to colonialism, Césaire presents the thesis that colonialism is a source of Europe’s decline and that of its middle class, arguing that colonial domination, rather than “civilizing” the “savages,” dehumanizes the colonizers.
This book, which became a reference for resistance and for exposing European hypocrisy among various anti-colonialist leaders, including those in the Pan-African movement and the Black Panthers, was also highly influential to Frantz Fanon, with whom Césaire shared many similarities. As Mário de Andrade states in the book’s preface:
“Everywhere colonized communities (especially those in Black African countries) were confronted with the deep need to express the truth of popular struggles, these texts were taken up as a nourishing source of revolt, as a lever of anti-colonialist consciousness.”
Europe is Indefensible
The opening of the book encapsulates its ideas and purpose with such force and clarity that it would be counterproductive to try to summarize or paraphrase his words:
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization. A civilization that plays tricks with its own principles is a dying civilization. The truth is that the so-called ‘European’ civilization, ‘Western’ civilization, as shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems that its existence has generated: the problem of the proletariat and the problem of colonialism; that this Europe, accused in the courts of both ‘reason’ and ‘conscience,’ finds itself powerless to justify itself and increasingly takes refuge in a hypocrisy all the more odious because it is ever less capable of deception.
Europe is Indefensible p. 13
The first point raised by Césaire is to ask whether colonization is civilization. He answers by affirming that, while bringing different civilizations into contact is a positive goal, the distance between colonization and civilization is infinite.
For Césaire, in fact, colonization is capable of decivilizing the colonizer, making him brutish, awakening in him violence, racial hatred, moral relativism. In this sense, Nazism, which had shocked Europeans and shaken Europe just a few years before the publication of this book, is actually nothing more than the result of the daily barbarities made possible by colonialism.
“You can kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in black Africa, assault in the Antilles. The colonized now know that they have an advantage over the colonialists. They know that their ‘temporary masters’ lie.
Therefore, that their masters are weak.” p. 14
“Whether one likes it or not: at the end of this dead-end called Europe—that is, the Europe of Adenauer, Schuman, Bidault, and some others—there is Hitler. At the end of capitalism, eager to survive, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophical renunciation, there is Hitler.” p. 19
“Where am I going with this? To this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, nor does anyone colonize with impunity; that a nation that colonizes, a civilization that justifies colonization—and therefore, force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization morally wounded that, inevitably, consequence by consequence, denial by denial, calls for its own Hitler, that is, its own punishment.” p. 21
After quoting French heroes, intellectuals, and religious figures justifying massacres and torture, Césaire concludes:
“(…) colonization dehumanizes, I repeat, even the most civilized man; that colonial action, the colonial enterprise, the colonial conquest, founded on contempt for the native and justified by this contempt, inevitably tends to change whoever undertakes it; that the colonizer, to reassure himself, grows accustomed to seeing in the other an animal, practices treating him as an animal, and thus objectively tends to transform himself into an animal.” p. 23
Instead of fostering human contact, which would be desirable, colonization brings only “(…) forced labor, intimidation, pressure, police, taxes, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, distrust, arrogance, smugness, rudeness, brainless elites, degraded masses.” (p. 25)
Colonization, then, is not synonymous with civilization but with objectification.
Black Civilizations and Césaire’s Vision of the Future
For Césaire, pre-colonial societies were communal societies, not only pre-capitalist but also anti-capitalist and democratic. However, when questioning if the response to the horrors of colonialism is a return to the courteous civilizations that were the old Black civilizations, Césaire disagrees:
“We are not people of ‘either this or that.’ For us, the problem is not a utopian and sterile attempt at duplication, but one of transcendence. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to lovers of exotica. Nor is it the current colonial society that we wish to prolong, the filthiest flesh that has ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we need to create, with the help of our enslaved brothers, rich with all the productive power of the modern age, warm with all the ancient fraternity.” p. 36
Still on the topic of ancient Black civilizations, Césaire calls [[ Cheikh Anta Diop ]]’s book Nations Nègres et Culture the boldest work ever written by a Black author at the time.
The Hypocrisy of French Intellectuals
Addressing the intellectuals who enable, accept, and benefit from colonialism, Césaire names examples from various fields, exposing the contradictions and violence of philosophers, anthropologists, religious figures, and others.
“And don’t bother asking whether these gentlemen are personally in good or bad faith, whether personally they are well or ill-intentioned, whether personally—that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul—they are colonialists or not; the essential point is that their very unreliable subjective good faith has no relation whatsoever to the objective and social impact of the vile task they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.” p. 40
Criticizing the French intellectuals who justify and support colonialist atrocities, he sums it up:
“This is where the French bourgeoisie has arrived, five years after Hitler’s defeat! And it is precisely here that their historical punishment lies: to be condemned to chew over Hitler’s vomit, returning to it as if by habit.” p. 50
Césaire quotes Baudelaire to remind us of how the sense of evil in Europe existed even before Hitler. Similarly, the author’s strategy of exposing the hypocrisies of French intellectuals on colonialism reminds me of Hegel and Haiti, in which [[ Susan Buck-Morss ]] brilliantly highlights the hypocrisy of Enlightenment philosophers on slavery. Indeed, Europe’s evil predates Hitler by far.
Just as Buck-Morss exposes the philosophers who preached universal freedom while comfortably coexisting with the horrors of slavery, Césaire exposes the French anthropologists who justify the difference between white men and Africans based on the supposed “respect for human dignity” inherent in Europeans, while death, torture, and every manner of disrespect for dignity prevail in the colonies.
The Nation and U.S. Colonialism
“Among the values once invented by the bourgeoisie and which it spread throughout the world, one is that of man and of humanism—and we have already seen what it has become—the other is that of the nation.” p. 65
Césaire’s conclusion offers a brief reflection on how the power vacuum caused by Europe’s destruction, along with the collapse of all alliances that might have protected it, must not be filled by the equally racist and colonialist United States.
Comparing colonial Europe to Ancient Rome, the author recalls that the obvious reason for Rome’s fall was that, by fighting neighboring peoples who once formed a complex network of protection through non-intervention, the Romans opened the doors to attacks from other peoples with whom no balance had been established. For the author, with the end of the Second World War, a historic opportunity emerged for the United States to fill the power vacuum created by the imminent fall of European colonialism, thus becoming the new center of equally racist and violent colonialism.