Discourse on Colonialism

Césaire argues that colonization works to “decivilize” and “brutalize” (35) the colonialist by turning him towards escalating violence. He compares this violence to an “infection” (35) that leads Europe towards “savagery” (36). Colonization not only perpetuates violence towards colonized people but also incites Europeans to act violently towards one another. The bourgeoisie are surprised by this connection between violence abroad and violence so close to home. Yet this is the case with Nazism, which Césaire says emerges from violence abroad and which many Europeans do not see in connection with colonialism. Césaire believes that the “very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century […] has a Hitler inside of him” (36). This humanistic Christian bourgeois is like Hitler in that he experiences “the crime against the white man” (36) and uses colonialist methods against other Europeans in the perceived attack on whiteness.

Césaire explains that he chooses to discuss Adolf Hitler at length because his political force is a response to capitalism’s creation of widespread inequality. He believes that Hitler’s extreme ideas about superior races are no different than that of Ernest Renan, a French humanist philosopher who has once written in his book entitled La réforme intellectuelle et morale: “We aspire not to equality but to domination” (37). Further, Renan argues that it is part of the natural order of humanity to have superior and inferior races that designate different classes of people. He argues that the Chinese are an inferior race and therefore countries like China need to be colonized. According to Renan, the Chinese are “a race of workers” (38), while the Europeans are destined to be their masters.

There is no one willing to speak out against this naturalization of colonization. Even the European Christians believe that God has granted them the right to exploit the wealth of the colonized people who are thought to be incapable of ruling themselves. Césaire describes the beheading and other gruesome widespread murders that constitute colonial violence in Algeria and Madagascar as not merely sensational incidents but events that should not be forgotten despite the willingness of Europe to forget this history. Europeans will speak of improving the local infrastructure or acquiring new exports from colonized places as some of the benefits of colonization. However, Césaire insists upon the violent costs of colonization such as destruction of art and cultural life in colonized places, confiscation of land, and genocide. While colonized places were not perfectly governed before colonization, they were ultimately “communal societies” (44) that challenged capitalism.

People have accused Césaire of being a “prophet of the return to the pre-European past” (44) due to his criticism of European colonization. He argues that there is no such thing as “a return of any kind” (45), as the havoc that Europe has wreaked upon the colonized people can never be reversed. In fact, it is Europe’s historical tendency towards ruin, as evidenced by the tyranny of its feudal past, that forges the foundation for the violence they enact on non-Europeans. The struggles that colonized people endured prior to colonization have become further exacerbated by European intervention. Césaire further argues that some of the societal advances within colonized countries that Europe has taken credit for could have been accomplished without colonization. He closes this section by pointing out that colonized countries have asked European colonizers for schools and better ports and roads, but these markers of societal improvement are constantly refused, illustrating that Europe is the one who is stuck in the past while the colonized people are the ones trying to improve society.