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Humanism
The Malagasy Uprising was a war of independence fought by the people of Madagascar against French colonial rule from 1947 to 1949, after France had rejected legal petitions for independence by Madagascar’s political elite. In addition to capturing and executing independence fighters, the French arbitrarily slaughtered, raped, and burned down entire villages, which was not atypical of their behavior during the colonial era. Ultimately, in the war, the French killed as many as 100,000 Madagascan people, and about 500 French soldiers died. Writing less than a year later, Césaire cites this disproportionate body count as evidence that Western European governments treated slaughter like a sport or game because they did not see non-European people as human. Accordingly, Western Europe showed off its racism “in broad daylight,” which shows how morally bankrupt its culture had become by the mid-20th century.
Malagasy Uprising Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
The Discourse on Colonialism quotes below are all either spoken by Malagasy Uprising or refer to Malagasy Uprising. For each quote, you can also see the other terms 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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Malagasy Uprising Term Timeline in Discourse on Colonialism
The timeline below shows where the term Malagasy Uprising appears in Discourse on Colonialism. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Section 3
...the “cannibalistic hysteria” that passes for normal politics in places like France. He remembers the Malagasy Uprising , in which the French slaughtered tens of thousands of natives of Madagascar, and imagines...
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