Cð"©saire's Conviction

Consider CÐ"©saire's conviction that nothing about colonialism can be considered progressive. Do you agree? Why does this question bear heavily on the post-colonial nation building experiment?

"No one colonizes innocently, (that) no one colonizes with impunity either; (that) a civilization which justifies colonization Ð'- and therefore force Ð'- is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased." (CÐ"©saire, 17)

CÐ"©saire's evaluation of colonialism was not merely a critique of colonialism as a system of exploitation and domination; rather, it extended to the civilization that produced, perpetrated, supported, accepted and justified this phenomenon. The criticism of colonialism on the basis of European civilization is in fact been articulated by many theorists, predominantly those dealing with cultural and psychological aspects of colonialism. Fanon, Cabral, Memmi along with CÐ"©saire are some of the notable scholars who have dealt with this issue. They criticize colonialism for charging the native culture of the colonies to be barbaric and uncivilized at best, and to be non existent at worst. As a result, the national liberation movements of the colonies are also often couched as an attack on the Western civilization. This leads to the post-colonial dilemma for the state. In its essence this dilemma is the dilemma of choosing between the model of progress as idealized by the civilization that produced colonialism or to shun it.

This paper will study how and why the post-colonial nation state comes to deal with this dilemma and how it can response to it. It also grapples with the nature of true emancipation being that of cultural freedom along with political independence. It concludes that the dichotomy of progress being a quality of the West and tradition being a characteristic of the colonized world is a product of colonization. This dichotomy is misleading as modernity is a prerogative of both the colonizer and the colonized, and therefore the dilemma of the post-colonial nation is an artificial construct.

Colonization is most aptly considered as a whole system of exploitation rather than mere foreign rule. The principle over which colonialism is built is the extraction of surplus from the colony to the metropolitan. Consequently, the whole colonial structure is present to make possible this transfer of surplus. Cesaire's claim that colonialism is never innocent is also made by Sartre (129), "The fact is that colonization is neither a series of chance occurrences nor the statistical result of thousands of individual undertakings. It is a systemÐ'..."

Memmi (xii) further makes the point that the basic motivation behind colonialism is economic privilege and that this privilege is premised over the exploitation of the colonized. As Memmi (7) puts it, the colonizer "discovers the existence of the colonized as he discovers his own privilege."

However, economic exploitation is not enough to perpetrate colonialism, it must be accompanied by cultural imperialism which negates and distorts the civilization of the colonized people. As Cabral (12) points out, foreign rule "cannot be sustained except by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people in question. It can only firmly entrench itself if it physically destroys a significant part of the dominated people." Thus the colonizers begin on a systematic mission which denigrates and distorts the native culture to an extent that even the colonized people cannot associate proudly with their culture. Instead they must look up to the Western culture to provide them with progress, development and civilization itself.

Therefore, colonial rule, in order to justify and legitimize its rule portrays the colonized as barbaric and uncivilized (especially in the case of Africa) so that Europe can bear the responsibility of bringing progress and prosperity to colonized lands. Pennycook (34) describes this in the discourse of the Self and the Other where the colonizers create images of Us versus Them. Where the Self is portrayed as the harbinger of progress, the idea of backwardness and barbarism is permanently attached to the Other. As Metcalf (as cited in Pennycook, 47) elaborates,

as Europeans constructed a sense of self for themselves apart from the old order of Christendom, they had of necessity to create a notion of an Ð''other' beyond the seas. To describe oneself as Ð''enlightened' meant that someone else had to be shown a Ð''savage' or Ð''vicious'. To describe one self as Ð''modern' or as Ð''progressive', meant that those who were not included in the definition had to be described as Ð''primitive' or Ð''backward'.

CÐ"©saire (32) also observes, "the idea of a barbaric Negro is a European invention."

As a result, any progress and any development that comes out of this system of colonization cannot be of value to the colonized as it is premised on the denial of the native's owns self. Roads, trains and education cannot be meaningfully called Ð''progress' when it implies that the history and the culture of the colony is sacrificed in order to produce it. Western notion of Ð''modernity' cannot be generalized to mean progress for the colony. Also, as the structural view of colonialism suggests, all institutions of colonialism are designed to exploit and dominate the natives. Example of the railway network in India serving the interests of the metropolitan rather than local industry illustrates this point (Chandra, 11). Also, Western education which is often considered to lead to prosperity is inculcated to serve the needs of the colonizers as Macaulay suggested, by creating "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."

Liberation for the colonized, then, is not just a revolt against foreign rule, it is a revolt against the structure of colonialism and more importantly, it is revolt against the civilization that imposed this structure. It is a revolt against the Ð''thingification' of the native in CÐ"©saire's terms. (21)

According to CÐ"©saire (21), "between the colonizer and the colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crop, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self complacence, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses." This encapsulates the relations between the colonizers and the colonized. Mere political independence cannot guarantee the end of such social relations,