Aime Cesaire's passing is indeed a sad event for Africans, Africanists, and peoples of African descent everywhere. But Cesaire did his part in advancing he production of knowlegde not only about Africa, but also about the world of theory and academia in general. Below is a review of his classic treatise on colonialism. May his soul rest in perfect peace.
 
Baba
 
Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism
A Review
 
By Baba Galleh Jallow
 
Aime Cesaire begins his Discourse on Colonialism with a severe indictment of Western civilization. “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates,” he writes, “is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.” Western civilization, he suggests, is guilty of all three ‘crimes’ and is therefore a victim of the attendant consequences of such crimes.
 
Using an essentially Marxist theoretical framework of analysis, Cesaire proceeds to suggest that Western civilization has been shaped by “two centuries of bourgeois rule” and is incapable of solving two major problems to which it 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” (p. 31). The power of the colonized peoples in the face of colonial oppression and repression in the colonies, Cesaire suggests, lies in the fact that they know that Europe is lying and therefore weak. Colonialism, for Cesaire, is nothing more or less than “a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them” (p. 32).
 
Colonialism’s purported civilizing mission, Cesaire argues, is the biggest lie of Western civilization. By no stretch of the imagination is colonialism out to do any good. It is “neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law” (ibid). It is purely and simply designed to explore, to dominate, to exploit, by trickery and force, the lands, goods and persons of other peoples, pushed on by the shadow of a civilization that, “at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies” (ibid.) The hypocrisy inherent in colonialism, Cesaire points out, is actually of recent origin because the earliest European explorers never claimed that the people they encountered in their voyages of discovery were without civilization. Indeed, such early explorers as Cortez, Pizzaro, Cuzco and Marco Polo, among many others, never claimed that they were harbingers of a superior order, nor did they advocate the killing and plundering of the peoples they “discovered” far away from the shores of Europe. The chief culprit in the hypocrisy of colonialism, Cesaire argues, “is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes” (p. 33).
 
For civilizations, Cesaire submits, “exchange is oxygen.” But while Europe was the great “locus of ideas, the receptacle of philosophies, the meeting place of all sentiments” and therefore “the best center for the redistribution of energy”, the Western claim that colonialism placed civilizations in contact was of dubious veracity. Even if it did bring civilizations into contact, Cesaire argues, it certainly was not the best form of contact. Because the contact of civilizations colonialism brought about was based on exploitation and a plethora of unjust relations of power, Cesaire suggests, it is devoid of “a single human value” (ibid. 34).
 
Colonialism, Cesaire argues, decivilizes, dehumanizes, brutalizes and degrades the colonizer. Anytime colonialism commits a crime against the humanity of the colonized, there is a corresponding corrosion and degrading of the colonizer’s humanity and civilization. He puts it eloquently: “ . . . each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped . . . each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread . . .” a poison “is distilled into the veins of Europe and slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery” (pp. 35-36). This dehumanizing effect of violence on the oppressor is also examined by Albert Memmi in The Colonizer and the Colonized, and by Frantz Fanon in all his works, particularly in The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism.
 
At this point in his analysis, Cesaire makes a startling but very authentic claim. When Nazi Germany unleashed its war machine on the Jews and other nations of Europe, the colonial powers reacted with horror and indignation. Until that time, Cesaire suggests, the peoples of Western Europe were accomplices to horrendous crimes comparable to the crimes of the German Nazis and Italian Fascists. But before then, they did not call it Nazism or Fascism. Indeed, they assumed that the “things” on whom the brutal horrors of colonialism were being inflicted in Madagascar and elsewhere were really not people, not human beings. In a sense, Cesaire suggests, Nazism has its roots in the culture of colonialism and before the people of Europe were the victims of the daily barbarism of Nazism, “they were its accomplices; . . . they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, . . . they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples. . .” (p. 36). So for the Western Christian bourgeoisie to rail against Hitler, Cesaire argues, smacks of inconsistency because every Christian Bourgeois has a Hitler inside himself and was indignant at Hitler’s cruelty not because it was directed at humanity, but because it was directed at “White” humanity.
 
For far too long, Cesaire argues, Europe’s pseudo-humanism had diminished the rights of man. Europe is only concerned with the rights of man in relation to the White man, not Coolies and Niggers. So when Europe talks about universal human rights, its concept of rights is “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist” (p. 37). The fact, according to Cesaire, is that capitalist society “is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics.” Behind the blind alley that is Europe, he argues, “there is Hitler.” And behind capitalism, formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, “there is Hitler.”  One of Hitler’s statements, Cesaire points out, sounds very much like “civilized” Europe’s statements about its colonies. Nazi Germany, Hitler had declared, aspires “not to equality but to domination. The country of foreign races must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into law” (ibid.) Similar statements have been made by people like the French philosopher Renan, Indochina governor-general Albert Sarraut, and many other French religious and political leaders of the day.
 
Cesaire repeats that in exposing the Hitler element in the practice of colonialism, he is simply saying that colonialism is a willful act of barbarism that is perpetrated not with impunity, but with a very heavy conscience. The colonialist knows that he is engaged in acts of violence against fellow human beings, but he refuses to acknowledge the fact because his is a sick civilization. It is "a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler . . . its punishment" (p.39). Claiming to civilize barbarism, colonization negates civilization.
 
To further highlight the barbarism of colonization, Cesaire quotes a number of colonial officers recounting some of their actions against colonized peoples. Colonel de Montagnac, one of the conquerors of Algeria writes: "In order to banish the thoughts that sometimes besiege me, I have some heads cut off, not the heads of artichokes but the heads of men" (p. 40). Another colonialist, Count d'Herisson, declares: "It is true that we are bringing back a whole barrelful of ears collected, pair by pair, from prisoners, friendly or enemy" (ibid.). Yet another colonialist, Saint-Arnaud, gallantly declares: "We lay waste, we burn, we plunder, we destroy the houses and the trees" (ibid). Such sadistic delights as evident in the above quotations and many others, Cesaire argues, can only come from the minds of men belonging to a twisted and decadent civilization. Ultimately, what these statements prove is that colonization dehumanizes the colonizer. In seeing and treating other people as animals, the colonizer transforms himself into an animal. And here, Cesaire sends a plaintiff cry to heaven: "Truly, there are sins for which no one has the power to make amends and which can never be fully expiated" (p. 42).
 
Colonization, Cesaire posits, equals "thingification". The relations inherent in colonization are relations of power and domination. They are relations in which "there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses . . . of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army, a sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production" (p. 42). The colonized are not human beings worthy of human rights or human respect, but things merely to be used, driven around, beaten and, when the need arises, killed in the name of a law and order rooted in injustice and barbarism.
 
For Cesaire, colonialism is a totally destructive enterprise. It is "about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out . . . men sacrificed . . . torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life . . . taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair and behave like flunkeys . . . about natural economies destroyed . . . agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; . . . about the looting of products . . . of raw materials" (p. 43). No, he argues, colonialism is not about the destruction of local tyrants. It is about old tyrants cooperating with new ones to further oppress the people; about proleterarianization and mystification. The societies plundered by the forces of colonialism were democratic, cooperative and fraternal societies, not the backward, uncivilized, culturally void societies that colonialism claimed they were. His only consolation, he writes, "is that periods of colonization pass, that nations sleep only for a time, and that peoples remain" (p. 45). Africa's tragedy, he argues, was not that it was too late in making contact with the world, but the manner in which that contact was made at a time when Europe was under the control of "most unscrupulous financiers and captains of industry" (ibid.). He rejects Europe's a posteriori claim that it brought material progress and Europeanization to Africa. In reality, colonization had actually distorted material progress and slowed the process of Europeanization, because Europe was denying to the colonized peoples the roads, schools, ports and other facilities that it had provided and continued to provide in the home countries.
 
Cesaire claims that the racism of Europe does not bother him. He only examines it. And he is appalled at the hypocrisy and ignorance with which the cream of French society pretended that the French people were a superior race, destined to rule the world and to keep the black and yellow peoples in their own places. He rejects his critics' accusation that he is calling for a return to some past civilization. What he is doing, he says, is helping create a news society, "a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days" (p. 52), a marriage of the new possibilities offered by the forces of modern technology, with the beauties of an ancient culture based on courtesy and fraternity. As an example that such a marriage between past and present was possible, Cesaire, suggests, "we can look to the Soviet Union" (p. 52). But, as history has shown, the Soviet model, for whatever reasons, was doomed to failure and has since been relegated to the dustbin of history. Nevertheless, Cesaire was right in insisting that colonized peoples had great civilizations, reminiscent of Mazrui's Romantic Gloriana - empires, kingdoms; large, elaborate, well organized bureaucracies. And to buttress his point, Cesaire quotes Frobenius: "Civilized to the marrow of their bones! The idea of a barbaric Negro is a European invention" (p. 53).
 
The entire gamut of European elites, Cesaire argues - from journalists, to sociologists, theologians and academics - share responsibility for the crime of colonialism. All who supported the plundering activities of colonialism deserved condemnation as "inventors of subterfuges, . . . charlatans and tricksters,  . . . dealers in gobbledygook" (p. 55). He cites for special mention writers like Gourou, who claims that civilization is only found in the temperate zones, that the tropical zones never had civilizations; of men like the Belgian missionary Reverend Temple, whose book Bantu Philosophy purported to counteract the forces of "communistic materialism" and save the Negroes from being turned by that devilish ideology into "moral vagabonds." He cites as extremely ridiculous Rev. Temple's claim that the Negro was not interested in material progress, that all he needed was to be respected as a human being, and that when he came into contact with the European, the Negro "integrated us into their hierarchy of life forces at a very high level" (p. 59). Even more absurd, Cesaire argues, are claims by M. Mannoni that colonialism was a divinely ordained mission of the West, and that all the Madagascan craved was to be able to depend on somebody else: “He desires neither personal autonomy nor free responsibility" (p. 61). Point to the fact that the Madagascans had a history of revolt against French occupation, and Mannoni would tell you that was simply the expression of neurotic behavior. Raise any objection to colonialism, Cesaire says, and M. Mannoni, "who has an answer for everything", would come up with a fitting response and justification in favor of the superior civilization. It is evident, Cesaire argues, that all such pronouncements are the marks of little and chauvinistic minds that are unable to appreciate the universal reality that all men are endowed with reason.
 
 Colonialism - French colonialism in particular - Cesaire argues, could only contemplate the idea of other cultures being integrated into the French family. The idea of France being integrated into other families was too monstrous to imagine, because a superior civilization cannot possibly be integrated into an inferior civilization. That would be contrary to all logic. We could have a Negro Frenchman, but never a White Negro. The very idea was an oxymoron. But colonialism's civilizing mission, with all its Hitlerian undertones, was simply, Cesaire suggests, the parting whimpers of a dying civilization, a dying class, for "it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which flows 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" (p. 64).
 
Evil is nothing new to man, Cesaire admits. But bourgeois history is the history of evil and plunder. 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, war-mongering and the appeal to the raison d'Etat, racism and slavery, in short, everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at a time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress" (p. 67). The bourgeoisie, Cesaire suggests, had become victims of “the law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth, on the agenda of the bourgeoisie . . . there can be nothing but violence, corruption and barbarism" (p. 68). 
 
The West, Cesaire argues, did not invent science or ethics or morality, as M. Callois would have us believe. History and culture and ethnography, contrary to the claims of colonial apologists like Callois, belong to a universal cosmology. The statements of people like M. Callois, Cesaire indicates, are significant not only because they reflect the mind of the Western petty bourgeoisie, but also because while it touted the virtues of humanism, Europe was at that material point in time the furthest in reality from practicing the humanity it so loudly mouthed. In inflicting horrors on the colonized peoples, Europe was engaged in a process of self-destruction. It had "overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely" (p. 75).
 
But while the colonized peoples are rejecting Europe and breaking the chains of colonialism, Cesaire warns, they must beware of the emergent “liberator” - the United States. American domination, he warns, is "the only domination from which one never recovers . . . unscarred" (p. 77). For its part, Europe must generate itself anew or sink into "mortal darkness". And with that warning against impending American imperialism, Cesaire ends his discourse on colonialism in a flourish of Communist optimism. The salvation of Europe, he concludes, "is not a matter of a revolution in methods. It is a matter of the Revolution - the one which, until such a time as there is a classless society, will substitute for the narrow tyranny of a dehumanized bourgeoisie the preponderance of the only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs: the proletariat" (p. 78). Robin Kelly notes in his introduction to the 2000 edition of Discourse, however, that for Cesaire, the colonial struggle was not a fight between capitalism and socialism in the orthodox Marxist sense, but a struggle for the total overthrow of a racist colonialist system which would open the way to a bright new world of freedom and equality. It is to Cesaire's credit that he understood that it was much easier to formally dismantle colonialism, than to get rid of the colonial state itself.
 
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