Discourse on Colonialism
From Urban Press
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Selected quotes from, Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme) by Aimé Césaire. These annotations are provided for educational purposes only and copyright is retained by the original author. If you find this information interesting seeking out a copy of texts in their entirety is, as always, recommended.
This work is among the earliest of a series of influential francophone critiques of colonialism, written by West Indian (in the case Cesaire and Fanon) and North African (in the case of Memmi) intellectuals but which were taken up by anti-colonial, civil and indigenous rights movements in many countries during the 60's and 70's.
It is perhaps the most lyrical and least clearly argued of these works, but is worth reading none-the-less.
Quotes
Through the mouths of those who considered - and consider - it lawful to apply to non-European peoples "a kind of expropriation for public purposes" for the benefit of nations that were stronger and better equipped, it was already Hitler speaking!(1972 [1950], p 17)
It is not the head of a civilization which begins to rot first. It is the heart.(p 28)
Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies - loftily, lucidly, consistently - ...not only corrupt, check licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academicians, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics...chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism...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 defence of Western bourgeois society, try ...to split up the forces of Progress - even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress - 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.(pp 33-34)
Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeois, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history...[for] everything which it protested...when as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.(p 49)
