Aimé Césaire has died at the age of 94.
His words, however, remain with us.
I see clearly what colonization has destroyed: the wonderful Indian civilizations -
and neither Deterding nor Royal Dutch nor Standard Oil will ever console me for the Aztecs and the Incas.
I see clearly the civilizations, condemned to perish at a future date, into which it has introduced a principle of ruin: the South Sea Islands, Nigeria, Nyasaland.
I see less clearly the contributions it has made.
Security? Culture? The rule of law?
In the meantime, I look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, “boys”, artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.
I spoke of contact.
Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.
No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.
My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification.”
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialisme)
