Discourse on Colonialism Summary

In his 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, the intellectual and politician Aimé Césaire makes a powerful accusation against “the so-called European [or ‘Western’] civilization” that reigns supreme in the contemporary world. This civilization, Césaire argues, is “indefensible” and must be overthrown by a popular revolution of the global proletariat (or working classes). Europe is indefensible because of history: from the 15th through 20th centuries, Western European governments progressively conquered the rest of the world through brute force in order to amass power and profit. During this conquest, they committed genocides and enslaved native peoples on four different continents. So speaking from his home, the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, in the aftermath of World War II, Césaire cannot not help but see the profound hypocrisy in Western Europe and the United States portraying themselves as the world’s saviors. They celebrate themselves for stopping the genocidal policies and imperialist ambitions of Nazi Germany and its allies, while continuing to maintain empires of their own and indiscriminately slaughtering the people they rule over.

In the first section of his essay, Césaire presents the fundamental contradiction between Europe’s professed moral values and its actions throughout history. While Europeans believe that they have brought freedom, justice, and “civilization” to the world through colonization, in fact this idea is a convenient lie that served to “legitimize [Europe’s] hateful solutions” to problems that it completely imagined. There is nothing noble about forcibly converting people to Christianity or stealing their art and locking it up in Western museums: rather, the concept of European “civilization” was an excuse for Europe’s savage exploitation of the non-European world’s labor and resources.

In the next section, Césaire points out that Europe’s “civilized” savagery was catastrophic not only for the lives and wellbeing of non-European peoples around the world, but also for the moral culture of Europe itself. Namely, because the European ruling class (or bourgeoisie) had to invent lies like “civilization” in order to justify its brutal policies, it corrupted itself morally, blinding itself to the humanity of nonwhite people. The horrific violence of the Holocaust, Césaire argues, is not an aberration in European history: rather, it is the culmination of European history. Most European governments pursued expansion through genocide just like the Nazis, and bourgeois European intellectuals—even self-proclaimed humanists—vigorously defended the same white supremacist ideologies that motivated Hitler’s policies. Césaire notes how French conquerors made a point of enjoying the rape and murder of nonwhite civilians, which further proves how colonialism “dehumanizes even the most civilized man.” “Colonization = ‘thingification,’” he famously concludes: it turns nonwhite people into inhuman objects in the eyes of colonizers, who then lose their own humanity by committing and justifying atrocities. Despite Europeans’ claim to bring “civilization” to the world, Césaire emphasizes, that world was already full of complex, advanced, democratic civilizations, which Europe actually destroyed in the process of “civilizing.”

In his third section, Césaire continues this thread of argument and points out that colonial violence continues: the French have just finished murdering tens of thousands of innocent people in response to the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar, and prominent French intellectuals actively defend white supremacism even after World War II. Responding to this unjust world requires building a new civilization that democratically uses “the productive power of modern times” to ensure that all people can access the freedom and human rights that European and American elites hoard for themselves.

In the next two sections of his essay, Césaire specifically calls out journalists and academics whose writings make them just as responsible for the brutal violence of colonization as the “sadistic governors and greedy bankers” who originally planned it out. Namely, even if they claim to be searching for scientific truths, colonial-era scholars—most of all anthropologists—ultimately serve as “watchdogs of colonialism” because they spend their days formulating the lies that Europeans repeat to themselves in order to justify their actions overseas. In other words, they have invented the myth of European “civilization” and based it on the self-serving idea that only white people are capable of legitimate scientific knowledge. Césaire looks at the geographer Pierre Gourou, who argued that non-European people were incapable of science and civilization because they lived in tropical climates, and the missionary Reverend Tempels, who invented a theory of “the Bantu philosophy” that made it sound like the people of the Congo wanted to be enslaved and murdered by Belgians. There is the psychoanalyst Dominique-Octave Mannoni, who asserted that colonialism in Madagascar was the natural result of inherent psychological differences between Europeans (who needed to progress by conquering others) and Africans (who actually have a “dependency complex,” enjoy being dominated, and are guilty of “collective madness” when they revolt in the name of national independence). And finally, there is the anthropologist Roger Caillois, who openly admits that he does not think that nonwhite people are capable of doing science or ethnography (even though, as Césaire points out, Egyptians invented mathematics and Arab philosophers invented rationalism). All these arguments are obviously false: they are not attempts to prove that racism is true, but rather they assume this as one of their basic premises, and then they use this assumption to justify European rule.

In his concluding section, Césaire returns to his call for global revolution. Just like Rome fell after overextending itself, he suggests, Western Europe is reaching a breaking point, in which its own excesses are threatening it with collapse. The peoples Europe colonized are, as of 1950, seeking independence and imagining a more equal future. And while the United States looks poised to perpetuate the evils of colonialism through its economic dominance and capitalist orthodoxy, it is still possible for Latin American, African, and Asian nations to create a “classless society” that would truly provide them with the sovereignty, independence, freedom, and abundance that the West falsely promised them for centuries.