Discourse on Colonialism

by

Aimé Césaire

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Themes and Colors
Colonial Racism and the Moral Corruption of Europe Theme Icon
The Consequences of Colonial Plunder Theme Icon
Scholarship and Power Theme Icon
Class Struggle and Revolution Theme Icon
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The Consequences of Colonial Plunder Theme Icon

Ever since the Roman Empire, Europe has used the concept of “civilization” to justify colonizing places it has deemed “barbarian.” The word is still frequently used today, often to explain why so-called “Western” countries are wealthy and most “non-Western” countries are not. This common argument claims that because of the unique scientific, economic, philosophical, political, and religious advantages of “Western civilization” stretching back to Ancient Greece and Rome, “Western” countries have been able to “develop”—or grow wealthy and create democratic institutions—more quickly than “non-Western” countries. However, in the Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire bluntly points out that this argument is a self-serving lie: Latin American, African, and Asian countries are comparatively poor now because of too much involvement from the “West,” not too little, over the last several centuries. In reality, these regions were home to culturally complex, politically organized, artistically sophisticated, and ecologically self-sustainable societies long before European colonizers arrived. Europe impoverished the rest of the world rather than “civilizing” it, and the concept of “Western civilization” is a meaningless platitude that distorts history in order to prevent people in the “West” from taking responsibility for the systematic robbery of colonization and modern globalization.

Césaire emphasizes that, before colonization, the non-European world was home to several complex, organized civilizations that were at least as advanced as European ones. He cites Vietnam’s “exquisite and refined” courtly culture, Madagascar’s established system of “poets, artists, [and] administrators,” and the elaborate artistic and musical traditions of various West African empires. But these examples are only representative: virtually all colonized territories had established governments before Europeans arrived. These non-European civilizations were in many ways more advanced than Europe, which means it is not true that Europe’s power was the result of historical destiny: for instance, Césaire notes that Egypt invented “arithmetic and geometry” and Islamic philosophers invented rationalism long before European Enlightenment thinkers got around to those subjects. Europe conquered the rest of the world because of mundane historical factors, not some inherent superiority.

However, European colonizers destroyed most of these civilizations, subjugated the people who lived under them, and expropriated the material resources they formerly controlled. This accounts for present-day differences in economic development across the world: poorer countries have, in most cases, had too much of Europe’s so-called “civilization,” not too little. In the second section of his Discourse, Césaire refutes the most common defenses of colonialism. For instance, while Europeans bragged about building “roads, canals, and railroad tracks” in their colonies, this infrastructure was usually built by slaves or indentured laborers and almost always served to help the colonial government more quickly transport resources and goods out of the colony. Similarly, while Europeans prided themselves on introducing crops like “cotton or cocoa” to colonized territories, these crops deteriorated the land and were grown exclusively for export, which meant that locals could no longer sustainably grow their own food. Of course, the profits always went to Europeans, so the development of infrastructure and agriculture were actually just more efficient ways of dispossessing and squeezing labor out of native populations. In turn, Western Europe’s modern-day prosperity is built directly on the profits it extracted and resources it stole from the rest of the world.

Césaire argues that the concept of “Western civilization” is the “principal lie” told by European colonizers and that it serves to distort history. Many people continue to believe that Europe is wealthy because of its so-called civilization, which implies that imposing Western culture on other places will make those nations wealthier, too. Césaire argues that the opposite is actually true. Notably, the idea that civilization must be Western only arose after colonization began: it justified the violence of colonization by falsely suggesting that it was good for native people. In other words, the idea of civilization is circular: European nations destroyed non-European civilizations, then portrayed the very fact of their rule as evidence that those non-European people never had a civilization in the first place, could not govern themselves, and therefore needed colonialism. To combat this widespread assumption, Césaire consistently inverts its language, using terms like “savagery” and “barbarism” to refer to Europe, which he says produces “the negation of civilization, pure and simple.” This is his way of pointing out not only European hypocrisy, but also the way that the language people use to talk about colonialism, international relations, and global development is loaded with colonial-era assumptions about what is good and evil (or civilized and barbarous). 

When an interviewer asked him what he thought of “Western civilization,” Mahatma Gandhi reportedly answered, “I think it would be a good idea.” Like Césaire, Gandhi was well aware of the contradictions between the values Europeans publicly espoused and the way they treated their colonies. Just as the French converted Césaire’s native Martinique into a society of sugar plantations based on slave labor and the English orchestrated famines that killed tens of millions of people in Gandhi’s native India, colonialism has always systematically redistributed resources, power, and wealth from colonies to colonizers. Countries that developed after winning their independence did so despite their colonial history, not because of it. While Césaire considers it impossible to know how non-European civilizations would have developed if colonialism had never interrupted their growth, he is confident that they would have remained “alive, dynamic and prosperous” rather than being undermined, robbed, and “mutilated” by Europe.

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The Consequences of Colonial Plunder Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism

Below you will find the important quotes in Discourse on Colonialism related to the theme of The Consequences of Colonial Plunder.
Section 1 Quotes

A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a sick civilization.
A civilization that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilization.
The fact is that the so-called European civilization—“Western” civilization—as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience”; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.
Europe is indefensible.
Apparently that is the conclusion the American strategists are whispering to each other.
That in itself is not serious.
What is serious is that “Europe” is morally, spiritually indefensible.
And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism
Page Number: 31-2
Explanation and Analysis:

Colonization and civilization?
In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.
In other words, the essential thing here is to see clearly, to think clearly—that is, dangerously—and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization nor philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism
Page Number: 32-3
Explanation and Analysis:

I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best?
I answer no.
And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism, The Museum
Page Number: 33-4
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 2 Quotes

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker), Adolf Hitler
Page Number: 36
Explanation and Analysis:

For my part, if I have recalled a few details of these hideous butcheries, it is by no means because I take a morbid delight in them, but because I think that these heads of men, these collections of ears, these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this steaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of. They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:

My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification.”

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living.
I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.
[…]
They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or cocoa that has been exported, the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines.
I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted—harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population—about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:

The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; that it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score; that it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 3 Quotes

Once again, I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations.
So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of “either-or.” For us, the problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 51-2
Explanation and Analysis:

One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything.
Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive systems. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois’s clear conscience.
Before the arrival of the French in their country, the Vietnamese were people of an old culture, exquisite and refined. To recall this fact upsets the digestion of the Banque d’Indochine. Start the forgetting machine!

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 52-3
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 4 Quotes

The supreme goal of the People-State is to preserve the original elements of the race which, by spreading culture, create the beauty and dignity of a superior humanity.

Related Characters: Adolf Hitler (speaker), Aimé Césaire
Related Symbols: Civilization and Barbarism
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Section 6 Quotes

American domination—the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred.
And since you are talking about factories and industries, do you not see the tremendous factory hysterically spitting out its cinders in the heart of our forests or deep in the bush, the factory for the production of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to preserve; the machine, yes, have you never seen it, the machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples?

Related Characters: Aimé Césaire (speaker)
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis: