Discourse on Colonialism

“Certainly, because the relationships between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. That's why it is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society.”

The truth is that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin of Europe itself, and that Europe, if not careful, will perish from the void that it has created around itself. They thought that they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea Islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.

And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally-that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul-they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.

Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies--Ioftily, lucidly, consistently-not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress--even if it means denying the very possibility ofProgress--all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action.

Every day that passes, every denial of justice, every beating by the police, every demand of the workers that is drowned in blood, every scandal that is hushed up, every punitive expedition, every police van, every gendarme and every militiaman, brings home to us the value of our old societies.

l am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population-about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. They pride themselves on abuses eliminated. I too talk about abuses, but what I say is that on the old ones-very real-they have superimposed others--very detestable. 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.

They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the 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.

What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes 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 conse quence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind-it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.

As the true radicals of postcolonial theory will tell you, we are hardly in a "postcolonial" moment. The official apparatus might have been removed, but the political, economic, and cultural links established by colonial domination still remain with some alterations.

But this is all a mystification; the fact is, while colonialism in its formal sense might have been dismantled, the colonial state has not.

Le progrès est qu'aujourd'hui, c’est le détenteur des « vertus chrétiennes » qui brigue- et s'en tire fort bien -l'honneur d'administrer outre-mer selon les procédés des faussaires et des tortion- naires.

Pour ma part, si j'ai rappelé quelques détails de ces hideuses boucheries, ce n'est point par délec- tation morose, c'est parce que je pense que ces tếtes d'hommes, ces récoltes d'oreilles, ces mai- Sons brûlées, ces invasions gothiques, ce sang qui fume, ces villes qui s'évaporent au tranchant du glaive, on ne s'en débarrassera pas à si bon compte. Ils prouvent que la colonisation, je le répète, déshumanise l'homme même le plus civilisé; que l'action coloniale, I'entreprise coloniale, la conquête coloniale, fondée sur le mépris de P'hommne indigène et justifiée par ce mépris, tend inévitablement à modifier celui qui l'entreprend; que le colonisateur, qui, pour se donner bonne conscience, s'habitue à voir dans l'autre la béte, s'entraîne à le traiter en bête, tend objectivement à se transformer lui-même en bête. C'est cette se action, ce choc en retour de la colonisation qu'il importait de signaler.

Pour ma part, si j'ai rappelé quelques détails de ces hideuses boucheries, ce n'est point par délec- tation morose, c'est parce que je pense que ces

Poursuivant mon analyse, je trouve que l'hypocrisie est de date récente; que ni Cortez découvrant Mexico du haut du grand téocalli, ni Pizarre devant Cuzco (encore moins Marco Polo devant Cambaluc), ne protestent d'ếtre les fourriers d'un ordre supérieur; qu'ils tuent; qu'ils pillent; qu'ils ont des casques, des lances, des cupidités; que les baveurs sont venus plus tard; que le grand responsable dans ce domaine est le pédantisme chrétien, pour avoir posé les équations malhonnêtes: christianisme civilisation; paganisme sauvagerie, d'où ne pouvaient que s'ensuivre d'abominables conséquences colonialistes et racistes, dont les victimes devaient être les Indiens, les Jaunes, les Nègres.