Discourse on Colonialism by Césaire Aimé. Kelley Robin D. G

Author:Césaire, Aimé.,Kelley, Robin D. G.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 1972-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

But listen to him:

It is the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid down by the commandment Thou shalt leave thy father and thy mother. This obligation is incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time in his development, every European discovers in himself the desire … to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his father. The Madagascan, never! He does not experience rivalry with the paternal authority, “manly protest,” or Adlerian inferiority—ordeals through which the European must pass and which are like civilized forms … of the initiation rites by which one achieves manhood…

Don’t let the subtleties of vocabulary, the new terminology, frighten you! You know the old refrain: “The-Negroes-are-big-children.” They take it, they dress it up for you, tangle it up for you. The result is Mannoni. Once again, be reassured! At the start of the journey it may seem a bit difficult, but once you get there, you’ll see, you will find all your baggage again. Nothing will be missing, not even the famous white man’s burden. Therefore, give ear: “Through these ordeals” (reserved for the Occidental), “one triumphs over the infantile fear of abandonment and acquires freedom and autonomy, which are the most precious possessions and also the burdens of the Occidental.”

And the Madagascan? you ask. A lying race of bondsmen, Kipling would say. M. Mannoni makes his diagnosis: “The Madagascan does not even try to imagine such a situation of abandonment... He desires neither personal autonomy nor free responsibility.” (Come on, you know how it is. These Negroes can’t even imagine what freedom is. They don’t want it, they don’t demand it. It’s the white agitators who put that into their heads. And if you gave it to them, they wouldn’t know what to do with it.)

If you point out to M. Mannoni that the Madagascans have nevertheless revolted several times since the French occupation and again recently in 1947, M. Mannoni, faithful to his premises, will explain to you that that is purely neurotic behavior, a collective madness, a running amok; that, moreover, in this case it was not a question of the Madagascans’ setting out to conquer real objectives but an “imaginary security,” which obviously implies that the oppression of which they complain is an imaginary oppression. So clearly, so insanely imaginary, that one might even speak of monstrous ingratitude, according to the classic example of the Fijian who burns the drying-shed of the captain who has cured him of his wounds.

If you criticize the colonialism that drives the most peaceable populations to despair, M. Mannoni will explain to you that after all, the ones responsible are not the colonialist whites but the colonized Madagascans. Damn it all, they took the whites for gods and expected of them everything one expects of the divinity!

If you think the treatment applied to the Madagascan neurosis was a trifle rough, M. Mannoni, who has an answer for everything, will prove to you that the famous brutalities people talk about have

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