Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Discourse on Colonialism, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonial Racism and the Moral Corruption of Europe
The Consequences of Colonial Plunder
Scholarship and Power
Class Struggle and Revolution
Summary
Analysis
Césaire explains that his readers’ “enemies” are not only the “sadistic governors and greedy bankers” who directly orchestrated colonization, but also the journalists and academics who justify colonization in the name of a “Progress” that never arrives. Regardless of their personal beliefs and best intentions, they must be held accountable for “the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.” Césaire offers some examples, like the anthropologist Pierre Gourou, who insisted “that there has never been a great tropical civilization,” and the missionary Reverend Tempels, who conveniently “discovered” a Bantu philosophy in the Congo that happened to sanction Belgium’s private property. Beyond ignoring the possibility that non-white races could be virtuous in any way, these academics contrast “the weakness of primitive thought” with their own “rationalism,” conveniently forgetting that the rationalist philosophers believed all humans were inherently rational.
Now that he has explained the fundamental contradiction between colonial Europe’s ideology and its actions, Césaire shifts his focus to the way that specific writers and academics have helped develop that colonial ideology. Notably, he focuses on academics who are popular and influential in France at the same time that he is writing, which allows him to demonstrate how white supremacy remains foundational to European culture even after World War II. While they pose as social scientists who are seeking the truth about non-European cultures, these scholars are actually instruments of the French empire, responsible for inventing narratives that make colonialism seem benevolent.
Themes
Césaire looks at these academics’ work more closely. Pierre Gourou absurdly argued that nonwhite people “have taken no part” in science and can be saved only through colonialism, but he also admits that the indigenous people he studied “suffered” from things like “forced labor, slavery,” and other “special new conditions” introduced by France. France had to choose between “economic stagnation and protection of the natives or temporary economic development and regression of the natives” for its colonies. The obvious solution, of course, was to give the natives their countries back, but Césaire suggests that Gourou chose not to challenge French empire because his “career [was] at stake.”
According to Césaire, the contradictions throughout Gourou’s thought demonstrate how political pressure prevented Gourou from speaking the truth: that colonialism was unjustified and repressive. In other words, Gourou’s material self-interest as a writer dependent on the colonial government for his income and reputation trumped his actual dedication to truth and justice. Of course, this is a good reason to think that academics should be completely independent of all outside interests, government and private alike, lest they come up with absurd conclusions like Gourou’s discredited belief that tropical civilizations could not “develop” without colonialism.
Themes
Similarly, Rev. Tempels was happy to let Belgium go to the Congo and “seize all the natural resources,” “stamp out all freedom,” and “crush all pride”. He just hoped to save “the Bantu philosophy” because it had no human face, and because he interpreted this philosophy as meaning that the Bantu wanted innate satisfaction rather than material wealth and safety. By putting white people at the top of “the hierarchy of Bantu life forces,” Tempels decided that the Bantu god wanted them to be colonized!
Tempels’s seemingly innocuous study of “Bantu philosophy,” like Gourou’s ostensibly objective study of tropical civilizations, aimed to justify European colonialism by means of distraction. Logically, Tempels’s error is assuming that culture can be reduced to a single, unified set of beliefs: nobody believes that Christian philosophy can account for everything about the structure of all European society, for instance. It is similarly unlikely that a single “Bantu philosophy” can explain everything about the lives of hundreds of millions of Bantu people, who speak roughly 500 different languages and live throughout virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa. Césaire has no doubt that Tempels’s real purpose was to find any argument that would justify Belgium’s rule and help the public think their government was benefitting the people of the Congo. Belgian rule in the Congo was one of the most brutal instances of colonialism anywhere: the Belgians killed at least five million native Congolese people. (The Belgians were famously required to murder enslaved rubber workers who did not meet quotas and bring these workers’ severed hands with them as proof; when these quotas proved impossible to reach, they started cutting off hands at random.)
Themes
The French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who lived in Madagascar, similarly justified colonial violence by insisting that certain people simply have a “dependency complex” and need to be controlled. His theory made “the most absurd prejudice” seem reasonable, “as if by magic.” Mannoni thought that while Europeans’ desire to conquer represented a progression through “civilized forms,” or passing through “initiation rights” into “manhood,” non-Europeans had no psychological need for such progress. In other words, Mannoni was repeating the common argument that nonwhite peoples, like children, don’t really want or appreciate freedom. When asked to explain actual nationalist rebellions in Madagascar, Mannoni blamed “purely neurotic behavior, a collective madness” in response to “an imaginary oppression.”
To Césaire and modern-day scholars, Mannoni’s argument is just as absurd and unjustifiable as Gourou’s or Tempels’s: he simply asserts that Europeans have a natural need to dominate people and Africans have a natural need to be dominated, which implies that French colonialism in Madagascar must be legitimate. Mannoni does not make an argument for some racist conclusion; rather, he accepts unprovable ideas about racial difference as the basic assumptions of his argument, and then uses this argument to justify colonialism. By dressing up racist assumptions in the complex academic language of psychoanalysis, Mannoni made them seem acceptable and intelligent to the European ruling classes whose power depended on believing in them.
Themes
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The commonality among Gourou, Tempels, and Mannoni is that they all tried to erase the actual material violence that was happening on the ground by reinterpreting colonialism through ideas, “comfortable, hollow notions” like “the dependency complex,” Bantu philosophy, and “‘tropicality.’” Nevertheless, the politicians and capitalists who orchestrated colonization progressively opt for “less subtle and more brutal” tactics, including open and flagrant racism like that of the writer M. Yves Florenne, who thought that exquisite French biology was under threat from the contact with foreign people brought about by colonialism. He said this after World War II, but he knew that he was borrowing from Hitler’s ideas. Césaire insists that his readers should not “be indignant,” but should rather “resign ourselves to the inevitable” and accept that the bourgeoisie will always to grow “more shameless” and “more summarily barbarous” as history progresses and European societies gradually lose power.
By examining the work of these three scholars, Césaire comes to an unsettling conclusion about the true purpose of early anthropology and the danger of university research in general. Especially in the social sciences, no research is completely neutral or independent of material interests. It always serves some purpose, and the political and career commitments of the people who write it inevitably affect the conclusions that come out of it. Gourou, Tempels, and Mannoni are more like mercenaries than scientists, and their work should serve as a cautionary warning to contemporary scholars, students, and readers: academic knowledge can only be understood in relation to its time, place, and concrete purpose.
Themes
