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The Colonizer and the Colonized
Albert Memmi
Translated by Howard Greenfield.
2003
Earthscan Publications, London
197 pages
Reviewed by Gavin O’Toole
It is difficult to discern the motive behind the republication of Albert Memmi’s classic examination of the political psychology of colonialism. The illustration on the front of this new edition is clearly of white US troops looking down imperiously from their armoured vehicle over a black society, probably Somalia.
If the choice of image seeks to suggest that contemporary US interventions are a modern expression of the colonial condition Memmi sought to explore in 1957, with its then sharp contemporaneity yet heavy historical burden, this is clearly mistaken.
The unease prompted by the ill-fated US adventures in Somalia and, as we are now witnessing, Iraq, are, if anything, proof of Washington’s resistance to the traditional imperial temptation to colonize in the style of the Old World that Memmi was immersed in, a temptation extinguished definitively with the second world war. That new styles of international domination have evolved since then is beyond doubt, but they are not colonization - even if referred to as "neocolonialism".
| "The colonizer's offspring would simply have to live with their newly impoverished historical status" |
While parallels, at one level, might be drawn between the subjugation Memmi was writing about and how powerful metropolitan states resort to force in the contemporary era in order to achieve their strategic aims, that is about as far as the similarities can be taken. Although Jean-Paul Sartre argues in his introduction that all dependency is determined by racism, what Memmi was exploring was a social condition that belonged to that period on the very eve of decolonization in which he was writing – an ideology shaped over generations. Moreover, even at the time Memmi was writing this may have been a backwards glance: he was taking an ideological snapshot precisely when the Old World’s imperial pretensions had begun to appear comprehensively doomed.
The contrast between how dependencies old and new are understood and depicted is, to an extent, reflected in the initial and new introductions to this book by Sartre and Nadine Gordimer. Sartre situates the complex of attitudes constituting the colonial enterprise that are highlighted by Memmi firmly within a structural explanation - "he sees a situation where I see a system". Memmi's acute subjectivity delivers up to us the main parameters of this structure almost unwittingly. To Sartre, just as the secret of the proletariat is that it bears within it the destruction of bourgeois society, "colonialism creates the patriotism of the colonized". The contradictions engendered by the mutual dependency at the heart of imperialism inevitably give rise to its collapse.
Gordimer, by contrast, pays scant attention to structure beyond hailing the continuing validity of Memmi's work in a world of globalised dependency, and instead juggles with the moral dilemmas facing the liberal orphans of decolonization, the "colonizer's offspring". As such, she finds herself both more in tune with the psychological tenor of Memmi's work, yet at the same time having to find fault with his prognostications about the "racially congenital deficiencies" of the colonizers. She displays clear discomfort at any implication that the contributions of such titans as Joe Slovo and Ronnie Kasrils might be dismissed as the romantic delusions of "colonizers who refuse", and one can detect a frisson of alarm in her colour-blind insistence that the progeny of the Left can earn a civic, national status in the new dispensation.
Sadly, if we are to apply the implications of Sartre's structural perspective to this essentially liberal position, we would soon arrive at a point where we could depict the ideology of multiracialism as a conscious product of the British effort to legitimise continuing minority domination under neocolonial conditions. The early failure of Britain's preferred solution of a multiracial constitution in Kenya was a demonstration that the colonizer's offspring would, in fact, simply have to live with their newly impoverished historical status, warts and all.
So one is left wondering from the preamble what really inspired the desire to republish Memmi's work - an important consideration when seeking to determine which potential readers will gain most from it. At the same time, this book clearly deserves a greater profile and would be of immense value to students of introductory international relations courses. It takes a fascinating journey into the mind of the colonizer and colonialist, and to a lesser extent the colonized.
Thus, Memmi begins by drawing attention to the cynical economic ambitions of colonialism when stripped of all cultural paraphernalia. While he concedes that many European "colonials" are also victims of colonial exploitation, he insists that there is no escaping the relative privilege of their condition. Despite the presence of deeply ambivalent identities - such as that of his own, Jewish minority - a hierarchy of interests is constructed at the base of which, devoid of all rights, exists the wretched, colonized majority. The "colonial", therefore, does not exist: there are only colonizers and colonized.
That established, Memmi enters the mind of the colonizer, and it quickly becomes clear from his initial examination of the "colonizer who refuses" - the small minority of colonizers debilitated by humanitarian romanticism who reject colonialism - that this is a polemic aimed as much at confronting confusion on the anti-colonial Left as it is a journey of literary discovery. Memmi dissects the moral dilemmas facing the colonizer who refuses with acuity, skilfully steering his discussion round to the difficulties posed for the Left by the nationalism of the colonized. The way in which he pauses at this socialist blindspot is of great interest, for nationalism represents an unresolved dilemma for the Left in all its forms. In particular, Memmi identifies how nationalistic traits assumed by the anti-colonial movement - baptised and duly classified by the great structuralists as "national liberation" movements - provoked unease on the European left, an uneasiness that generates for the leftwinger in the colony confusion about the meaning of the struggle giving way to a bitter realisation that the connection between the liberation of the colonized and the application of a leftwing programme is, at best, tenuous. The dilemmas facing the colonizer who refuses persist into post-colonial life, and Memmi's prognosis for the leftwinger bears close scrutiny: he will have no place in the future nation, for "Being oppressed as a group, the colonized must necessarily adopt a national and ethnic form of liberation from which he cannot but be excluded." Memmi's later dismissal of the potential chauvinism of national liberation initiatives as solely the province of militants is halfhearted, for alongside it he argues that to expect the colonized to be humanist and internationalist is ludicrous: "He is still regaining possession of himself, still examining himself with astonishment..."
Memmi then turns to the "colonizer who accepts", and his analysis here is what would have interested Sartre most, a structural tour de force without intending to be so in which Memmi links the attitudes generating hatred of the colonized closely to the economic prerogatives of the colonizer. Thus, he explains how in his native country the warm friend and affectionate father is transformed once he steps upon colonial soil into a conservative reactionary displaying an exaggerated patriotism. "The colonial situation manufactures colonialists, just as it manufactures the colonized." In particular, Memmi highlights the deep conservatism of the colonialist - any change in the mother country spells doom for his way of life - giving rise to a species of "colonial fascism" which can only tolerate the most reactionary and oppressive form of rule. Yet at the same time, the colonizer who accepts is always destined to be disappointed with his notional homeland: its decaying grandeur will never quite live up to his hopes and will always be remote.
Lastly, Memmi explores the dull resignation of the colonized, identifying and explaining traits so often conjured up by the colonial apparatus to legitimise their subordination, devices that are in effect functional to the process of depersonalisation unpinning the relationship between colonized and metropolitan society. What is revealing about his portrait of the colonized is that they do not possess the quality of individualism and so lie beyond the reach of liberal concerns in the metropolis - the inevitable product of any society where no autonomous state has evolved to delineate and regulate the respective spheres of the public and the private. "The colonized," writes Memmi, "enjoys none of the attributes of citizenship; neither his own, which is dependent, contested and smothered, nor that of the colonizer."
While at the end of this very personal odyssey, and a rejection of the loose parallel with US interventionism, we are still left wondering what inspired the republication of Memmi's work, it does have a contemporary resonance - although not in the ways one assumes were intended by its publisher.
First, its characterisation of the flimsy connection between the liberation of the colonized and the application of a leftwing programme is instructive for latter-day liberals, some of whom seem unable to confront uncomfortable home truths about the reactionary chauvinism of the movements they find themselves in instinctive solidarity with. One calls to mind how the Left often assumes a moral equivalence between Islamic fundamentalism - by contrast with other religious fundamentalisms - and the genuinely noble struggle against Western colonialism that Memmi's work was an early attempt to legitimise, despite the former's fascistic excesses.
Second, this book provides an insight into the mechanics and methodology of legitimacy: it is an analysis of ideology above all else. And in some senses the main ideology which it explores – racist colonialism – persists in the discourse of the far right, both in Britain and France. Just as the contemporary politics of identity in France can be traced to the return of the pieds noirs, when Britain withdrew from Africa and Asia so its colonial mentality was preserved at home, festering amid the drudgery of post-colonial modernisation. Ideas which legitimised British colonialism can be found alive and kicking on the political right, albeit dressed in contemporary garb. Attitudes towards race and immigration and the attribution of specific traits to distinct cultural groups in the UK, for example, are less the legacy of doctrinaire European racism and more the peculiar product of Britain’s own unique imperial experience, its very own species of Memmi's colonial fascism. What this book can teach British readers is that we should understand the reactionary ideas of a resurgent right less as a derivative of European "fascism" and more as the product of an essentially colonialist ideology, one as old as political conservatism itself and largely distinct from the European nationalist tradition. Memmi’s characterisation of the "colonizer who accepts" could have been written for hardline loyalists in Northern Ireland and for the British National Party, both of whom occupy an immobile niche carved out for them upon the hard rockface of global capitalism by the consequences of imperialism. This ideological outcrop was, and remains, one from which the colonizer can only stare into the abyss of decolonization.
Gavin O'Toole teaches politics at Queen Mary college, University of London. |
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