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Reverend Tempels
Dominique-Octave Mannoni was a prominent French psychoanalyst who spent two decades living in Madagascar, including the years of the Malagasy Uprising, and is best known for the 1950 book Prospero and Caliban. According to Césaire, like the work of Pierre Gourou and Reverend Tempels, Mannoni’s thinking is not only completely worthless, but it is actually a way of justifying European colonization and covering up the violence committed in its name. Namely, Mannoni argued that colonizers needed to dominate others in order to symbolically confront their parents and pass through “initiation rights” into “manhood,” while colonized people secretly wanted to be controlled because of their “dependency complex.” Mannoni explained revolt against the French colonial government in Madagascar as “purely neurotic behavior, a collective madness” aimed at undoing “an imaginary oppression.” Césaire sees Mannoni’s work as an attempt to validate “the most absurd prejudice” and justify colonialism by any means possible. Like other colonial intellectuals, Mannoni invents ideological justifications for French empire in order to ignore the concrete oppression that it caused in places like Madagascar. Rather than admitting that his country was responsible for brutally murdering thousands upon thousands of people, he blamed Madagascar’s natives for somehow desiring their own deaths. Césaire sees little difference between this logic and the Nazis’ justification for committing genocide, and he takes Mannoni’s work as another example of how scholars willfully gave up on seeking the truth in order to become dedicated servants of the colonial empires that paid them.
Dominique-Octave Mannoni Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
The Discourse on Colonialism quotes below are all either spoken by Dominique-Octave Mannoni or refer to Dominique-Octave Mannoni. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Section 4
Quotes
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…
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(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.)
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And the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of “tropicality” in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that? And the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan or the nhaqué? And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations.
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Dominique-Octave Mannoni Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
The Discourse on Colonialism quotes below are all either spoken by Dominique-Octave Mannoni or refer to Dominique-Octave Mannoni. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Section 4
Quotes
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…
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(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.)
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And the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of “tropicality” in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that? And the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan or the nhaqué? And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the bloodstained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations.
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