Discourse on Colonialism

“The fact is that the so-called European civilization—'Western’ civilization—as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of ‘reason’ or before the bar of ‘conscience’; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.” 

For Césaire, colonialism and class conflict are intertwined issues stemming from Europe. For two centuries, the bourgeois or privileged middle class has influenced European social and political policies, particularly towards colonialism and expansion. According to Césaire, the bourgeoisie are responsible for producing and disseminating knowledge that not only justifies but advances colonial activity. Thus, the issue of colonialism must be discussed alongside the class problem in Europe.

“Europe is indefensible.” 

In the opening section, Césaire makes a strong claim that there is nothing justifiable or forgivable about Europe’s colonial efforts. He argues that Europe’s colonial efforts make the colonizers morally and spiritually bankrupt. He also notes that the U.S. political strategists have identified these weaknesses in Europe’s colonial logic as they compete to become another Western power. 

“But then I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best? I answer no.” 

Césaire addresses counter claims to his earlier points against colonialism. He anticipates that supporters of colonialism might accuse him of being against cultural mixing. He defines healthy cultural mixing as civilizations making “contact” with one another as part of mutual exchange. However, colonization’s purpose is not about establishing contact between different civilizations but rather one of domination over others. Thus, colonization can never be an adequate form of cultural mixing.

“[A]t the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery.” 

Césaire performs a reversal of colonial logic by reassigning the notion of “savagery” to Europe when it has previously been applied to colonized people. Césaire argues that the logic of Europe as a superior race of people acts as a poison that will inspire the most brutal violence towards non-Europeans. This violence makes Europe more barbaric than the “savage” people they colonize.

“Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him.” 

While Europe associates the brutality of mass violence with Hitler and his ideals about an Aryan superior race, Césaire introduces the idea of the 20th century colonizer who is the Christian bourgeois. This Christian bourgeois is an academic and thinker whose ideals may present themselves to be humanistic, but which ultimately reify Hitler’s notions of domination and mass extermination.  

“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonized innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.” 

To emphasize the severity of colonial violence, Césaire pathologizes European colonization as “sick” and “morally diseased.” He argues that Europe’s reliance on acquiring and asserting power over new territories to ensure its power is not sustainable as it will only lead to its detriment. There are consequences for the depraved moral and spiritual logic that informs colonization.

“[T]he colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.” 

The colonizer views the colonized people as animals in order to justify his subjugation by colonial powers. In the process of viewing colonized people as animals, the colonizer becomes an animal himself as colonization forces him to enact barbaric violence upon the other. Césaire discusses this “boomerang effect of colonization” to complicate the logic of colonization as a civilizing force when it tends to produce the opposite effect.

“I see clearly the civilizations, condemned to perish at a future date, into which it has introduced a principle of ruin: the South Sea Islands, Nigeria, Nyasaland. I see less clearly the contributions it has made.” 

Césaire questions the contributions of colonization that French writer, Carl Siger defends in his Essai sur la colonisation. According to Siger, colonization is imperfect but has overall improved the societies that it has colonized. Césaire sees the contrary, which is the suffering of colonized countries that will be endured for a long while due to colonization. These colonized countries cannot recuperate from colonization and therefore will not possess the benefits that Siger speaks of.

“No human contact, but the relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.” 

Césaire returns to the distinction between colonization and contact. Whereas contact between separate cultures ensures a mutuality, colonization creates a power imbalance between the colonizing force and the colonized people. Under colonization, the colonizer wields control over the knowledge production, administrative life, and labor. The colonized people are only permitted to be laborers under this system. 

“They talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but I note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.” 

Césaire addresses the colonizer’s belief that colonization has reformed the tyrannical governance of the colonized people. He finds that rather than create more democratic governance, the colonizer conspires with local tyrants to further subjugate the colonized people. The colonizer draws from the tyrant’s local knowledge of his people to gain power over them, and in return, he rewards the tyrant by sharing this power with him.

“They were fact, they did not pretend to be the idea; despite their faults, they were neither to be hated nor condemned. They were content to be. In them, neither the word failure nor the word avatar had any meaning. They kept hope intact.” 

Césaire contrasts European civilization with non-European societies. While Europe gains its identity through inflation of colonial logic, the colonized people do not have such disastrous aims for power. They understand their identity clearly because they do not have to acquire new territories to establish their own growth. They thrive without European intervention whereas Europe cannot exist without its colonies.

“My only consolation is that periods of colonization pass, that nations sleep only for a time, and that peoples remain.” 

As the effects of colonization are devastating, Césaire can only find consolation in its eventual end. According to him, colonialism is already weakening as a force despite Europe’s feeble attempts to extend its power. The colonized people are already revolting against colonial powers. He hopes that this political unrest will ensure colonization’s end and the liberation of the colonized people.

“I have said—and this is something very different—that colonialist Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality.” 

Césaire wants to distinguish the violence of modern colonialism from existing abuses. Whereas inequality has always existed, he argues that colonial violence amplifies these former injustices by introducing abuses in new forms. This includes racism and other more brutal forms of violence. 

“[It] is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.” 

Césaire addresses the accusation that by challenging colonization, he is advocating for a return to a pre-colonial past. He counters this accusation by arguing that it is the colonizer who wants to remain in the past while the colonized people strive for social advancement. He notes the example of how the colonized people will demand schools and improved infrastructure whereas the colonizer refuses these requests for social enhancement.

“I repeat that I am not talking about Hitler, or the SS, or pogroms, or summary executions. But about a reaction caught unawares, a reflex permitted, a piece of cynicism tolerated.”

Césaire returns to the idea of the 20th century Christian bourgeois whose ideas supporting colonization are not unlike Hitler’s fascist ideals. While this modern bourgeois thinker does not explicitly endorse mass genocide as Hitler had done, he reveals in subtle ways an endorsement of colonial violence. Césaire warns that we must be mindful of the dangers of the modern bourgeois thinker’s ideas for this reason.

“With fine phrases as cold and solemn as a mummy’s wrappings they tie up the Madagascan. With a few conventional words they stab him for you. The time it takes to wet your whistle, they disembowel him for you. Fine work! Not a drop of blood will be wasted.”

According to Césaire, the modern bourgeois thinker endorses colonial violence through the dissemination of formal knowledge supporting colonization. This formal knowledge disguises the brutality of colonial violence through clever and masterful phrasing. Césaire describes this as a spectacle as the modern bourgeois thinker creates a violent performance of knowledge production and dissemination.

“A significant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.” 

According to Césaire, European civilization’s continued colonization will not just lead to the dissolution of its political and social life but will corrode Europe morally and spiritually. Colonialism requires the colonizer to abandon all positive moral and spiritual value in order to justify its continued violence. Over time, this will weaken Europe’s core, as no civilization can sustain itself without moral and spiritual sustenance.

“For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.”

Césaire imagines a future where colonization has run its course, leaving only the colonized people the power to move forward. He makes clear that the end of colonization does not suggest a return to a pre-colonial past but rather that it suggests new possibilities for the colonized people. Without the oversight of the colonizer, he imagines that the colonized people can steer the world into a more socially vibrant future.

“One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything. Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois’ clear conscience.”

Césaire argues that the modern bourgeois thinker is knowledgeable and not ignorant. The issue with the modern bourgeois thinker is that he is selective about what he considers to be pertinent knowledge about his position on colonialism. He omits any knowledge that may cause him to question his own complicity in colonial violence to protect his conscience.

“Because, after all, we must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.”

Césaire describes the ways in which the modern bourgeois thinker has progressed from subtle oppressive thinking to more overtly racist ideas of social categorization. As his ideas become more brutal, he also grows less cognizant of the nearing end of colonialism. When he ignores the social reality of colonialism’s end, he will not see the ways in which his European society is also nearing its own demise as it tries to keep colonialism alive.

“Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d’État, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.” 

Césaire take the bourgeoisie to task for not only the role that they have played in the rise of colonialism but for their participation in the historical events that have led to European colonization of non-European countries. Throughout European history, the bourgeoisie have positioned themselves as “incarnation of human progress,” which falsely belies their complicity in maintaining the inequalities that have persisted throughout time. Césaire charges the bourgeoisie with fostering the moral and spiritual ideals that underlie colonialism.

“Gobineau said: ‘The only history is white.’ M. Caillois, in turn, observes: ‘The only ethnography is white.’ It is the West that studies the ethnography of the others, not the others who study the ethnography of the West.” 

By placing the ideas of French social scientist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and ethnographer Robert Caillois side by side, Césaire hopes to illustrate the proximity of their racist notions. While Gobineau’s ideas appear more explicitly racist, Caillois operates under the guise of European paternalism to assert Western intellectual dominance over non-Europeans. Caillois’s academic work might appear more benign than Gobineau’s scientific racism, but his notion of Western superiority still retains a power imbalance between Europe and the colonized people. He believes that only the West can be the center of knowledge production and not the rest of the world.

“No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.” 

Césaire continues his critique of Robert Caillois, who believes museums that showcase the cultural value of non-European cultures are necessary sites of knowledge. Césaire questions the importance of museums with this mission, as this still centers Western knowledge and renders non-Western life ornamental. Furthermore, this does little to generate Western empathy towards the people they have colonized.