That said, Memmi’s study was first published in 1957, before Ghana became the first colonially occupied country in Africa to become independent. The book therefore pre-dates by what ideological forms, specifically in terms of participation of Leftist colonisers with the colonised, freedom from colonisation has been achieved in many countries, over the forty-six years since then. Memmi’s predictions about the role of the Left have been proved a fallacy.
He begins his book with ‘A Portrait of the Colonizer’, but in view of my homage to the nature of the work’s achievement, despite its shortcomings, I’ll reverse the order of chapters and begin with Chapter Two, ‘Portrait of the Colonised’. I take permission for this chronological impertinence from the very first sentence of the chapter: ‘Just as the bourgeoisie proposed an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested.’ That image is where colonisation begins; its premise, its ikon.
The subtitle of the chapter has the rider ‘The Mythological Portrait of the Colonized’ (my italics) – Memmi’s wry comment on the ‘dialectic exalting the colonizer and humbling the colonized’. In colonialist mythology the colonised is a litany of faults and inadequacies. He’s unbelievably lazy – at the same time this authorises his low wages. Skilled work is done by the coloniser’s compatriots, imported; and if Memmi’s typecast of their physique and demeanour is a caricature, it’s sketched with the quick flash of humour. Irony makes its point in that light: ‘The colonized … is asked only for his muscles; he is so poorly evaluated that three or four can be taken on for the price of one European.’ Memmi turns the reader to the conclusion left out of the coloniser’s evaluation: ‘… one can wonder, if their [the coloniseds’] output is mediocre, whether malnutrition, low wages, a closed future, a ridiculous conception of a role in society, does not make the colonized uninterested in his work’. The coloniser having established that the colonised is a ‘hopeless weakling’, from this, Memmi shows, comes the concept of a ‘protectorate’: it is in the colonised’s own interest that he be excluded from management functions, and that those heavy responsibilities be reserved for the coloniser. ‘Whenever the coloniser adds … that the colonised is a wicked, backward person, he thus justifies his police and his legitimate severity … The humanity of the colonised, rejected by the coloniser, becomes opaque … Useless … to try to forecast the coloniseds’ actions: (“They are unpredictable!” “With them you never know!”).’ Memmi chips in to these too-often overheard remarks: ‘The colonized must indeed be very strange, if he remains so mysterious after years of living with the coloniser.’
‘The colonised means little to the coloniser … The colonised is not this, is not that.’ This mythological portrait Memmi draws is of a stunning negation. For the coloniser, the colonised is nobody.
It is not only the rough-and-ready man who saw the conquered and colonised as the ultimate other. An intellectual began his work in Africa on the same premise. In 1928 a psychiatrist from Europe practising in a mental hospital for South African black men ‘made a startling discovery … the manifestations of insanity … are identical in both natives and Europeans … This discovery made me inquisitive to know if the working fundamental principles of the mind in its normal state were not also the same.’114 But maybe Cecil Rhodes the empire-builder had the last word in assessment of the human worth of the colonised: ‘I prefer land to niggers.’115
‘We should not, however, delude ourselves … by thinking that if only the colonizers would have been more generous, more charitable, less selfish, less greedy for wealth, then everything would have been very much better than it is now – for in that case they would not have been colonizers.’116
‘Does The Colonial Exist?’ The title of the first part of Memmi’s analysis of the coloniser brings a semantic question to be got out of the way. Memmi’s use – or perhaps his translator’s use, in this English edition of the book – of the terms ‘colonial’ and colonizer’ as interchangeable. But a colonialist is one who advocates the policy of colonisation; further, he may be one delegated, within the Colonial Service, to administer that policy, a colonial functionary in the European power’s governance of territory taken by conquest of the original inhabitants. He is not a citizen of that territory, his country remains one across the world. A coloniser is a settler in the conquered territory, coming from another country but taking up residence and citizenship (usually granted after a period specified by the colonialist power). He occupies and owns, either under a settler dispensation to extend the ‘mother’ country’s domains, or purchased from it, land taken by that colonialist power from the indigenous people. The coloniser regards himself as a permanent inhabitant. The difference is important. Memmi does have a subcategory to his concept of the colonial/coloniser. This one, identified as the ‘European living in a colony having no privileges’ – a class distinction within the ruling class that places him barely above the colonised – certainly didn’t exist in the colonial countries I have known. The mere fact of skin colour guaranteed kith-and-kin privileges decreed by the colonial power. The category may have been singular to Tunisia.
It is with the coloniser’s indubitable existence that Memmi’s study recedes honourably to the shelves of the classic past. He sees the coloniser as one taking ‘simply a voyage towards an easier life’. There follows a fascinating account of the components of that easy life of the time – servants, climate, automatic qualification for superior status over the multitude. What Edward W. Said has defined as ‘How you supply the forces of world-wide accumulation and rule with a self-confirming ideological motor.’117 The coloniser, Memmi continues ‘has not yet become aware of the historic role which will be his. He is lacking one step in his new status … the origin and significance of this profit … This is not long in coming. For how could he fail to see the misery of the colonised and the relation of that misery to his own comfort?’ The colonised kept underfoot are ‘no longer a simple component of geographical or historical decor. They assume a place in his life … He cannot even resolve to avoid them.’ He must constantly live in relation to them, for it is this very alliance which enables him to lead the life which he decided to ‘look for in the colonies; it is this relationship which creates privilege’. Memmi posits that the coloniser soon ‘knows, in his own eyes as well as those of his victim, that he is a usurper … He must adjust to being both regarded as such, and to this situation.’
What is missing in this analysis is what any coloniser knows – yes, I speak as a coloniser’s offspring – that the coloniser justified his/her situation by asserting that the colonisers brought enlightenment, technical as well as religious, to the indigenous people living in the heart of darkness. (It is almost obligatory to make a bow to Conrad, here.) On the coloniser’s scale there was a trade-off balance, a straight deal that could ignore morality. Memmi in turn seems to ignore this forced deal in its psychological impact on both sides. (He deals with it only in his 1965 preface.)
Studying the coloniser, Memmi gives much attention to the grades of privilege he says are accorded in the colonial situation, and it is here that it is most evident his perspective was coming from the Maghrib, culturally arabised territories, while only propositionally extended to the rest of the African continent and colonised countries everywhere. This leads to conclusions that do not necessarily hold good for colonisation generally. He draws interesting distinctions between the societal positions arrived at by colonisers coming from various countries to Tunisia and Algeria, for example, Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, Spaniards and Jews (who even if they are from Morocco evidently are from that non-place, the diaspora). These are candidates for assimilation at various levels. The different levels of their acceptance by the already settled coloniser population – what the colonised thought of the continuous invasion did not count – didn’t apply in any of the African countries I know. In these, if you were white you were welcomed by the colonial government and colonisers to shore up the white po
pulation, though as the colonial powers had been officially Christian since the Crusades, you were more welcome if you were of that faith. In South Africa right up to the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, whites only were accepted as immigrants. Once legally established, their situation in ‘black’ Africa was that of the indiscriminate privilege of being white. Even Jews did not, as Memmi avers in general, find themselves ‘rejected by the colonized’ and sharing ‘in part the physical conditions of the colonised, having a communion of interests with him’. In South Africa, which was to become the most prosperous and highly industrialised of countries on the African continent, some Jewish colonisers118 became founders of the gold and diamond industry, and their only share of the condition of the colonised was to employ them in their thousands to work underground as migrant labourers. Christian colonisers made the laws that ensured this labour supply, enforcing through taxes a cash economy in place of traditional land-based agricultural sufficiency.
Many of Memmi’s conclusions, prognostications one might call them, have not been borne out by events. He considers the options of the coloniser, once he is aware ‘under the growing habit of privilege and illegitimacy’ that ‘he is also under the gaze of the usurped’. There is ‘his inevitable self-censure’. With the chapter ‘The Colonizer Who Refuses’ it is assumed that he is in this crisis of conscience for the sins of the fathers and his own. And now one must pause to set aside another of the confusions of terminology in the work. Memmi has visualised the coloniser as one in this condition who ‘immediately thinks of going home’ but ‘being compelled to wait until the end of his contract, he is liable to get used to the poverty [of the colonised]’. That man cited is a functionary of the colonial government, there is an official limit to his confrontation with guilt, he will leave it behind when his span of duty ends. The coloniser cannot be seen as one with him; the coloniser has no contract that will elapse. He has no determined span of the life he has been living; he is committed to it. Many continued to live as before, counting on the mother country to hold off change, keep the colonised at bay indefinitely.
Another coloniser ‘no longer agrees to become what his fellow citizens have become’. He is the genuine ‘Colonizer Who Refuses’. He remains – but vows not to accept the role of protagonist of colonisation. He will reject that disgraced position.
But how? Here Memmi’s analysis leaps – as it does impressively when he’s using his philosopher’s vision to relate a specific to an eternal human situation. ‘It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships. From now on, he lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every step, depriving him of all coherence and all tranquillity … What he is actually renouncing is part of himself … How can he go about freeing himself of the halo of prestige which crowns him?’ If the coloniser persists in refusal ‘he will learn that he is launching into an undeclared conflict with his own people’. Granted; but he will also discover others among colonisers who are ready to oppose, to one or another degree of courage, the regime that is defined in its very name – colonialism – as a give-away of injustice.119
History has proved that there were more options open to the refusenik than Memmi would allow. There was the ‘humanitarian romanticism’ Memmi himself recognises, and says is ‘looked upon in the colonies as a serious illness … the worst of all dangers … no less than going over to the side of the enemy’. It is extraordinary that Memmi does not acknowledge that what was regarded as the worst of all dangers was not the reformist liberalism ‘humanitarian romanticism’ implies – in a black man’s definition ‘the role of the liberal as the conciliator between oppressor and oppressed’120 – but the theory and tactics of Communism reaching the colonised.
Going beyond liberalism, the coloniser’s refusal has ‘closed the doors of colonialism to him and isolated him in the middle of the colonial desert’. No – he has isolated himself from the doomed false values of the colonial desert, voluntarily. But Memmi continues to follow the rebel’s downfall as he sees it: ‘Why not knock at the door of the colonized whom he defends and who would surely open their arms in gratitude?’ Memmi is dismissive of that knock at the door. ‘To refuse colonization is one thing; to adopt the colonized and be adopted by them seems to be another; and the two are far from being connected … To succeed in this second conversion, our man would have to be a moral hero.’ Memmi, still (out of habituation?) using the old condescending colonial vocabulary: ‘adopt’, ‘adopted’, evidently believes such men couldn’t exist. The hero ‘discovers that if the colonized have justice on their side, if he can go so far as to give them his approval and even his assistance, his solidarity stops there … He vaguely foresees the day of their liberation and the reconquest of their rights, but does not seriously plan to share their existence, even if they are freed.’ Memmi gives no example of a like situation he has observed. On what evidence – before the historical event – was his assumption based?
Again, I make no apology for the fact that as Memmi’s perspective peers into the subject from the Maghrib, mine comes from the Southern and Central African continent, with consonant limitations but also the experience implied. To suggest that the coloniser’s rebellion could serve no purpose in liberation of the colonised is to deny the possibility – outlawed, evidently, by what Memmi sees as the racially congenital deficiencies of all the colonisers – of a range of actions taken by rebels among them, from Stewart Gore-Brown accompanying UNIP’s Kenneth Kaunda to negotiate return of a territory, named for the arch-imperialist Rhodes, back from the British for rebirth as Zambia, to Ronnie Kasrils, white South African, becoming Head of Military Intelligence and Joe Slovo, white South African, as chief strategist, in South Africa’s liberation army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, during the guerrilla war against apartheid. Men and women Leftist colonisers in South Africa were imprisoned, as Nelson Mandela and thousands of his fellow black South Africans were, tortured as Steve Biko was, for activities with the liberation movements. Two of them, white South Africans Bram Fischer and Dennis Goldberg, were given life sentences.
This brings us to Memmi’s other summary dismissal of the Left in liberation from colonial regimes. For the Leftists of his generation, he states, ‘the word “nationalism” still evokes a reaction of suspicion, if not hostility’. For doctrinal reasons, yes, and in some experiences of his time, the 1950s, the Left felt ‘ill at ease before nationalism’. But political accommodation did not end there. In liberation movements that followed, from Ghana and Guinea-Bissau to Mozambique, Angola and beyond, the precepts and methods of the Left were adapted boldly in nationalism’s service. It was, if you like, ironical that an ideology from the white world should prove an effective tool of participation in overcoming the colonial powers of that world. (Of course it was the only solution, according to Marxist theory.) That Leftist ideology in Stalinist form overran nationalism, in some countries, with disastrous results for the freed colonised, is something one wonders how Memmi regards. Has he seen this as an extension of his thesis of the inadequacies of the colonised Left to take the true path of the Left and influence effectively the future of the colonised? And what does he think of the role of the Left today, in its renaissance after the collapse of the mother country, the Soviet Union, as now a force along with the Green and Feminist, Gay and Lesbian, multiple non-governmental groups, together against globalisation which leaves the former colonised still as the poorest in the world?
One of the tributary sources of Memmi’s failure of vision vis-à-vis the contribution of Leftist colonisers to the development of liberation movements is that he does not allow that the progeny of colonisers could earn a civic and national status other than that of coloniser, eternal outsider. Demonstrably, it is not valid to make the claim on natal grounds; that’s not enough. But he doesn’t allow that foreign plants might mutate and strike roots. As we have witnessed, history subsequent to his writing of this book has proved him in
part right, in part wrong.
He is right, in that during the period of liberation movements arising and the post-colonial era that ensued, a majority of colonisers in many countries did not recognise the right of the colonised to liberation movements, nor were prepared to live under the independence of colonial rule these won. They made of themselves an anachronism, fossilised in the past. Many left; but deracinated from Europe, fled to wherever white rule might last a few more years – for example, from Angola, Mozambique and the Rhodesias to South Africa.
Memmi was wrong, in that there was a minority of colonisers mainly of the Left spectrum, who identified themselves with the position that colonialism was unjust, racist and anti-human, and were prepared, first to act against it along with the great mass force of the colonised, and then to live under that force’s majority government. That is the logic of freedom; these colonisers saw that colonialism had misshapen them, too, its privileges were distortions, and the loss of these in post-colonial society would be and is normality they had never had a chance to experience. This logic reinforces, does not attempt to deny or diminish in any way, with white hubris, the fact that the colonised have freed themselves – no other could have done that in their name, out of the principles of any ideology. Theirs was ‘a kind of historical necessity by which colonial pressure created anti-colonial resistance’.121
In examining the anachronism ‘The Coloniser Who Accepts’, Memmi makes en passant an extraordinary statement. ‘Compared to colonial racism, that of European doctrinaires seems transparent, barren of ideas and, at first sight, almost without passion.’ This written by a Jew in the 1950s, after the Nazi doctrine had sent millions of Jews, Gypsies and others to their death on its fanatically pursued racist theory. The colonial racist doctrine, extremely interestingly examined by Memmi, is summed up by him: the coloniser and the colonised, a definitive category formed by the colonial mind to justify that doctrine, ‘is what it is because they are what they are, and neither one nor the other will ever change’. How was this racial stasis to be maintained?
Telling Times Page 70