by Himal Ramji
Aime
Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, first
published in 1955, reads as a passionate and scathing piece of prose, laying
heavy but warranted criticism on Europe, the oppressive classes and those who continue
to allow such oppression to continue. While being written around 1955
specifically about colonialism, it bears many explicit and metaphorical
statements which can be applied to our situation today both in terms of racial
struggles as well as struggles against capitalism and imperialism. While all
these struggles are intimately intertwined, it is important not to conflate
them, emptying each of their specificity.
Born
in 1913 in the French colony of Martinique, Aime Cesaire went on the serve as
mayor of Fort-de-France and representative of Martinique at the French national
assembly for 47 years (Rosello, 1995). He famously taught and mentored Frantz
Fanon, a fact that should not or, rather cannot overshadow Cesaire’s own
intellectual accomplishments. He is, after all, one of the ‘fathers’ of
Negritude, a title the likes of Senghor and Cesaire could not shake off
considering the somewhat dominant, patriarchal but definitive role their theories
have played in the movement.
CHANGES
IN CESAIRE’S POLITICS
Cesaire’s
politics – like most others – did not remained stubbornly stagnant. Rather, he
has proved quite responsive to situational changes, constantly tweaking his
thought in reaction to the conditions he found around him. His politics are
marked by several shifts which seem, on paper, to be quite drastic but are
actually rather fluid developments for the most part. The shifts seem to begin from
his early immersion in French political theory and culture, particularly as a
young man in Martinique, to his part in the Negritude movement accompanied by a
distancing from Europe and wholesome embrace of blackness and the idealisation
of Africa as the homeland, to 1946 and the decision to make Martinique a French
DOM (Department d’outremer/Overseas Department) – a decision that fed the
lingering infection of cultural, economic and political colonisation (Rosallo,
1995: 18-19).
He
left Martinique eagerly to study at the prestigious Lycee Louis-le-Grand and,
later, Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) (Rosallo, 1995: 20) – elite
establishments which boast such alumni as Robbespierre, Sartre, Derrida,
Diderot, Senghor, a number of French presidents including Jacques Chirac and a
fair few members of foreign royalty. At ENS, he would come into contact with
the seminal works of Western philosophy. Despite this ultra-elite schooling,
Cesaire came to realise, in France, the true value of his homeland, Martinique.
It was in Paris that Cesaire came into contact with black intellectuals from
other parts of the Caribbean and Africa as well as a more well-rooted, more
insidious white racism. Here, in the heart of colonial oppression, Cesaire’s
certainty of white hypocrisy and black truth and equality (and even
superiority) took root.
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Negritude
Alongside
Senghor, Cesaire helped formulate the concept of Negritude during their studies
France. It was during his return voyage to Martinique from these studies that
Cesaire first used the actual term in reference to the Haitian revolution in
his Notebook of a Return to My Native
Land (Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal, 1956/1995): “Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and
said it believed in its humanity” (Cesaire: 91). Human equality, black freedom
in mind and in politics and in culture, and freedom from the confines of a
supposed inferiority constructed by the oppressive and the opportunistic
members of a fair-skinned race – these were the goals of Negritude. The term
was chosen, in part, so as to re-appropriate the term ‘negro’ and all its
relatives for black people – to disempower or, rather, reconfigure the terms
themselves.
It
seems that it was in Paris that solidarity against a common enemy was found.
Negritude marks a break from the French educations of its creators (including
Cesaire, Senghor, Damas). It marks a break from French as a language, culture
and identity; a break from black inferiority, passivity and assimilation into
French-ness, European-ness, white-ness. This idea of taking pride in one’s
blackness coursed through the veins of Negritude and was taken on by the likes
of Fanon and Biko, playing a critical role in the struggle to emancipate black minds
from myths of naturalised inferiority and subservience to white folk. It
changed the concept of blackness forever in an attempt to erase its association
as symbolically bad or evil. It took pride in the cultures of black people, in
their histories, in their everyday practices – their very existences. Negritude
was thus largely a movement in search of black identity: for African
self-writing. Cesaire affirmed this search for identity, writing in his Notebook (93): “Who and what are we?
Admirable question”.
This
call for self-discovery, self-actualisation came as a reaction to, among other
things, the proliferation of imitation among, in particular but not only, the
educated black elite. That is, they tended to attempt to imitate the Western
model so kindly provided by their European teachers. These were (and still are)
the epitome of colonised minds. Minds so heavily saturated with the idea that
whiteness was goodness and purity and truth and to be striven for – those who
would refuse their own culture – those who would qualify in Sartre’s terms as
inauthentic. Let us take a moment to allow our own minds to settle on the
examples of this closest to home: those who don their Italian-tailored suits[1], and those drive (or are
driven by chauffeurs) in their blue-lighted German cars[2], and those who live in
their lavish homes but are soon to move to the wondrous crime that is
Zumaville, and those who continue to marginalise the poor and those seeking refuge
from the colonial-constructed violence in their own countries, and those who implement
policies so as to appease China, USA, faltering European Union, and
international corporations like Anglo-American.
Conversely,
Negritude has been criticised for essentialising the concept of race and for
being rather racist itself. That is to say, its most radical followers tended
to idealise blackness, forgetting the undeniable complexity of each individual
in a sometimes blind focus on blackness and race in general. Some saw blackness
itself as superior to whiteness in a twist of colonial logic. Of course, in
terms of theory, this may well be true, since after much theory has seemed to
detach thought from experience. Experience in this world is very much
socially-conditioned and perceptions are very much aesthetic and physical. That
is, you cannot escape the tone of your flesh.
Importantly,
however, by the time Cesaire wrote Discourse
on Colonialism (1955) he was arguing against any sort of racism or
assertion of innate racial superiority. He himself drew heavily from the likes
of Rimbaud, Lautreamont and, notably, French surrealism (Depestre, 1967: 25).
Despite these European influences, he understood the particularity of the black
experience; and the particularity of the black Martiniquan experience. He was critical of the logic of colonialism
– the mindset, the attitudes that allowed for such inhumane criminal activities
to occur. And yet all this criticism of Europe came not long after he had
ushered in a neo-colonial relationship between Martinique and France. Nevertheless,
the piece is extremely powerful in its scathing critique of bourgeois Europe
and affirmation of the existence of a very well-concealed African history and even
better concealed history of European brutality and savagery.
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Acceptance of DOM status
Cesaire
met much criticism for his part in the agreements make Martinique a French DOM –
a title which largely serves to shroud and preserve a colonial relationship in
which France seems to leech economically and culturally from the island, retaining
a political stranglehold on Martinique. What makes this more surprising from a
man who heavily criticised assimilation and fathered and advocated Negritude is
the fact that all this occurred when many colonies were claiming their
independence or at least fighting for it. Cesaire, perhaps, raised a white
flag. Still, this decision did provide Martinique with the same educational and
welfare systems as other French Departments. The standard of living on the
island is, apparently, “not as low” as the “so-called Third World” (Rosello,
1995: 18).
DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM
But
it would do Discourse on Colonialism and
much of Cesaire’s work discredit to focus too heavily on this moderate moment.
The work in question is, on its own, a much-needed critique of (particularly)
European bourgeois society (although the metaphor can be carried through to all
of us), a group who have to often been allowed to distance themselves
(ourselves?) from the atrocities committed in our name, atrocities allowed to
occur through our own ignorance or, more likely, disinterest, indifference and
comfort. In Discourse on Colonialism, Cesaire
points out that the society that allowed for colonialism to occur is complicit
in its brutalities. It is they who allowed the savagery to occur – it is for
their benefit that colonialism occurred and was and still is preserved.
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Hypocrites and Holocausts
European
society is a profoundly hypocritical society, for it was only when colonial
logic and tactics were brought home and turned against them that they became
very terrified and very critical. But they criticised it under the title
“Nazism” or “totalitarianism” or “fascism” or “despotism” instead of simply
“colonialism”. Perpetrators were forwarded like “Hitler” or “Mussolini” or
“Stalin” or Mao” or “Louis” instead of simply “Kitchener”. But it was in
Africa, Asia and the Americas that Europe tested and developed its systems and
mechanisms of control. After all, it was the Spanish that first introduced
concentration camps in Cuba in 1896, with the British soon to follow suit
against the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the century (Agamben, 1998:
166). The British establishment – particularly the colonial authorities – have
always been a cautious, tentative but cruel people, testing their methods of
domination outside their own borders before implementing them more subtly at
home: they first tested their take on the activity colonisation on the Irish
before exporting it to the rest of the world. Furthermore, much like the Nazis,
many French have for long sought for French national purity, seeking to
maintain this myth against the threat of (‘god forbid!’) intermingling with
lesser folk (say, for example, Moroccans or Algerians or Haitians or
Martiniquans or (‘the horror!’) Congolese folk. In their quest for racial,
cultural, national and linguistic purity, the French – and most other European
nations – did nothing more than build the structure and provide a very clear
blueprint for Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism, despotism. And the blueprint is
headed “Colonialism”.
In
a very fair point, Cesaire notes that colonialism was not merely destructive in
the colonies. Colonialism as a practice brought home the savagery implicit in
its activity – it turned not only the colonist himself but every comfortable,
well-nourished European into the blood-soaked, murderous figure of General
Kurtz who directly or by association was responsible for the horrors of
colonialism. Those who benefit from such practice in any way and utter not more
than a feebly-mumbled token of admonishment are complicit in the crimes of that
practice.
And
it is because of this European ‘regression’ that Cesaire refers to these
civilisations as “decadent”, “stricken” and “dying” (Cesaire, 1955: 1). They
are civilizations so tainted that they may not heal the morality they suspended
in the colonies – a suspension that came home and manifested itself most
clearly in concentration camps, in Gulags, in gas chambers, in genocide.
And
yet it seems as if these Europeans who enjoyed the fruits of colonialism were
so deluded as to believe that they were doing the people they exploited a
service. They claimed that, while the white man had a natural desire to
question authority and revolt against it (referring to the French revolution,
obviously), they claimed that black folk did not “experience rivalry with the
paternal authority” (Mannoni in Cesaire, 1955: 14). Of course, this can easily
be countered with countless examples, starting with the Haitian revolution and
ending when resistance truly capitulates or oppression finally ends. Additionally,
Europeans somehow managed to create the myth of an ahistorical Africa, a land
with no real past except that formed by Europe. Cesaire (1955: 10) quotes
Faguet as writing: “civilisation has never yet been made except by whites… If
Europe becomes yellow, there will certainly be regression, a new period of
darkness and confusion, that is, another Middle Ages”. What Faguet doesn’t
realise is that, by entering into the colonial endeavour, Europe effectively
returned itself to the Middle Ages, spreading the regression like a cancer to
other continents, onto other people who were on a developmental trajectory that
the West found it far too difficult to comprehend or accept as real. To Europe,
Africa existed in a vacuum of historical stagnation, as if nothing had changed
on the continent since some biblical boot gave mankind an evolutionary nudge.
And
it was in this way that they allowed themselves to think, ‘Colonialism is okay,
we’re helping out the natives. They are, after all, merely under-evolved,
child-like savages’. There was a belief that, merely because they were not
Westernised, black and yellow and brown folk were inferior. ‘Stupid due to
blackness’, as if it were a disease that came with the ‘curse’ of blackness.
And it is the essentialism here, that nature is defined by race, that came to
infect thought and morality. White intellectuals – like many Negritude thinkers
– had, and still have, the tendency to see race as something that is
essentially closed-off, something that is so unchangeable that it is the definitive characteristic of a
person. The post-revolutionary French intellectual, Renan, quoted by Cesaire (1955:
4), explicitly refers to the essentialised, racialised natures of people, and
the inferiority and natural servitude of all races to the white race:
“Nature
has made a race of workers, the
Chinese Race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honour; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such government, an ample
allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the
Negro, treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the
European race. Reduce this noble race to working in the ergastulum like Negroes and Chinese, and they
rebel.” [own emphasis]
Clearly, according to
Renan, everyone has a very specific role to play in society. It is very curious
what conclusions can be made from such events as the French revolution, as if
Haitians were not revolting around the time Renan and others were making such
claims.
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Marxism and particularity
In
his Discourse, Cesaire makes
reference to Marxism and the role that socialism could play in the liberation
of colonised people. He writes: “It is a new society that we must create… For
some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union” (Cesaire,
1955: 11). He goes on to blanket all oppressed people under the term proletariat, referring to them as “the
only class that still has a universal mission, because it suffers in its flesh
from all the wrongs of history, from all the universal wrongs” (Cesaire, 1955: 24).
Clearly, the influence of Marx and, particularly, Lenin runs thickly through
his politics in his Discourse.
But
only a year after Discourse on
Colonialism was published, Cesaire removed himself from association with
Marxism and the influence of the USSR, resigning from the PCF and forming his
own party, Parti Pregressiste Martiniquais (Rosallo, 1995: 35). Perhaps, in
part, this is due to the atrocities of Stalinism that could not be ignored.
More
powerful, however, was Cesaire’s realisation of the particularity of black
struggle; that the decolonisation of the black mind could only be done by black
people themselves. It was a specificity of the struggle that even white allies
could not understand for they had not (indeed, they could not have) endured the
experience of blackness in a very, very racist world. Herein lies an important
lesson: that it is dangerous or, rather, it would be careless and irresponsible
to conflate the struggle of the proletariat and the struggle of black people.
As has already been noted, there is an important distinction that cannot be
ignored between race and class: you can change your class or your children’s
class by playing the cruel games posed by the system well enough, but you can
never change your skin-colour. You may be wealthy, you may well be a genius,
but you’ll never change the fact of your blackness.
PROPHECY
AND FANON
Cesaire
seemed to have something of a prophetic habit. Two instances are notable: that
he foresaw the spread of American imperialism even at a time when many saw the
USA as a liberatory force; and that he foresaw the implosion of African states
fallen to “a caste of ‘greedy and voracious dogs’ who were about to confiscate
the revolution for their own benefit” (Cesaire, 1956: 42). Of course these are
two points which Fanon was only too aware of.
In
terms of the first Fanon writes that the third world was thought to have to
“choose between the capitalist system and the socialist system. The
underdeveloped countries, which made use of the savage competition between the
two systems in order to win their national liberation, must, however, refuse to
get involved in such rivalry. The Third World must not be content to define
itself in relation to values which preceded it” (Fanon, 1963: 55).
In
terms of the second, he writes of how “the colonialist bourgeoisie frantically
seeks contact with the colonised elite” (Fanon, 1963: 9), referring to the
intention of colonial powers to maintain control of the colonies through
control of their supposedly independent governments. Further on, he writes: “In
order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor…the colonised subject has had
to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions… one of the things he has had
to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks… He turns into the
kind of mimic man” (Fanon, 1963: 13). Colonised minds can do nothing but serve
their master – they can have no hope for emancipation if their minds are not
first freed. Furthermore, in tune with Cesaire’s resignation, Fanon wrote: “The
nationalist political parties never insist on the need for confrontation
precisely because their aim is not the radical overthrow of the system” (Fanon,
1963: 22).
Perhaps
this is also a break from Cesaire in Fanon. Cesaire’s work, while being heavily
critical of Europe and those who imitate it, doesn’t really call for violence,
whereas Fanon himself called for violent revolution, emphasised explicitly in
his chapter ‘On Violence’.
Cesaire’s
moderate tendencies manifested in his prolonging of Martinique’s neo-colonial
situation. This could well have been a reaction to the prospect of violent
civil conflict in Martinique, which could have predictably been spurred on by
France or the USA or the USSR. In 1946 one could easily imagine an aversion to
conflict, and particularly a reluctance to become a satellite of the Cold War.
Prolonging Martinique’s French relation to this day is, perhaps, in part an
avoidance of the isolation endured by Haiti and, particularly, Cuba. There is
always a price for claiming independence, this is made certain by neo-colonial
powers. The price is often higher for islands.
CESAIRE’S
INFLUENCE
Aime
Cesaire’s influence on later theorists and writers cannot be underestimated.
His thought can be traced through the works of Bantu Steve Biko, Chinua Achebe,
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ayi Kweyi Armah and, more
contemporarily and very originally, Kgafela oa Magogodi (to name only a few).
The
effects of Negritude and Cesaire’s thinking as a whole in the South African
Black Consciousness Movement cannot be ignored. Indeed, the very basis of Black
Consciousness is based in Cesaire’s and Negritude’s mode of thought: that black
is beautiful, that blackness is not inferior etc. Biko’s ideas are about taking
pride in one’s blackness – in one’s intrinsic particularity – so as to cast off
the burden of inferiority, servitude or dependence. The black South African can
think for himself, can decide things for himself – the BCM was a defiant and
very definite claim for black agency. This, too, is a link between Biko and
Cesaire: in both the BCM and Negritude, those who joined each respective
movement made certain that whites were left out – indeed, in Biko’s case, white
students and company could not be trusted to understand the black condition
simply because they could not possibly experience it. The co-opting of NUSAS
into the apartheid regimes aims bears testament to this. It is impossible to
represent what you cannot experience, what you cannot fully understand for
yourself. Biko, like Cesaire, realised that it was up to black folk to
emancipate their own minds. Perhaps in this way the BCM surpassed or, rather,
transcended Negritude by virtue of the fact that its definition of ‘black’ came
to represent all oppressed people. Unlike Cesaire’s Negritude, the BCM came to
represent liberation of all oppressed folk, thus eliminating the racial
prejudice implicit in Negritude.
And
it is for these thoughts – and the fact that he voiced them – that Biko was
killed. His mission to emancipate minds from mental slavery was such a great
threat to the apartheid regime that he was banned as a person (a ludicrous idea
itself!) and, later, killed in detention (like so many others who dared similar
missions). In truth, Biko’s mission and his fate are strikingly similar to that
of Frantz Fanon – death at the hands of an oppressor whose oppression had
become perhaps too clear.
Chinua
Achebe’s famous work Things Fall Apart (1958),
published only three years after Discourse
on Colonialism, bears many similar themes to Cesaire’s Discourse. It comes as a narrative critique of, among many things,
the practice of colonialism. Perhaps the final paragraph of the book provides a
sufficient summary of Achebe’s views. Just after the story’s protagonist,
Okonkwo, commits suicide in a moment of despair at the fall to colonial power
of his village, the Commissioner in charge of the mission muses to himself,
reflecting on what had occurred: “In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilisation to different parts of
Africa he had learnt a number of thing…The story of this man who had killed
a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost
write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable
paragraph, at any rate… He had already chosen the title of the book, after much
thought: The Pacification of the
Primitive Tribes of Lower Niger” (Achebe, 1958: 183). There is little
thought for the fall of a man who was once quite highly revered in his region.
Furthermore, it is due to his village’s collusion with colonial authority that
Okonkwo is driven to kill himself – it is a moment of choosing death and
authenticity and freedom over the prospect of being ruled by an all-invasive
force. It is this same people who betray the Okonkwo who only a short while
earlier sang of those who allied themselves with the missionaries, “Kotma of the ash buttocks, He is fit to
be a slave. The white man has no sense, He is fit to be a slave” (Achebe, 1958:
154). As we have seen in Cesaire’s politics, the only constant is change.
Ngugi
wa-Thing’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1986) provides a rather more balanced view of
things, looking at a fictionalised account of Kenya preceding independence
through the lens of various characters. Like Cesaire, Fanon and most other
African writers, wa-Thiong’o is none-too-positive about colonials. John
Thompson, the ‘chief colonial’ of the narrative, asserts that “We are not
beaten… Africa cannot, cannot do without Europe” (Ngugi, 1986: 161). In his
notes he writes of “primitive minds”, the “darkness and mystery of the forest”,
that “The Negro is a child, and with children, nothing can be done without the
use of authority”, and regarding the violence of the Mau Mau that “One must use
a stick. No government can tolerate anarchy, no civilisation can be built on
this violence and savagery. Mau Mau is evil: a movement which if not checked
will mean complete destruction of all the values on which our civilisation has
thriven” (Ngugi, 1986: 54). Perhaps Thompson has missed out on the atrocities
committed by his fellow colonials. Or perhaps he prefers to ignore them.
Armah’s
work, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
(1968), explores post-colonial Ghana. It is drenched in metaphors of decay
and rot – a moral decay largely attributed to the effects of colonialism and
the impregnation of capitalism and self-serving (im)morality into African
culture. The protagonist of the narrative is a man who refuses a bribe and is
thereafter spurned by his wife for refusing to do what everyone else is doing.
In taking a moral stand, he is despised, criticised, seen as an outsider. And
all this because minds are so colonised, so fully contorted by the logic of
Western capitalism and the conditions enforced by colonialism. But Armah is
careful to insert the pervasive idea that it is the agency of these people –
their refusal to attempt to overcome, to improve upon, to transcend this
‘excremental’ state. He is explicitly critical of African people, to varying
degrees, for having failed to overcome the confines of a culture contorted by
colonial interruption.
Linton
Kwesi Johnson has often been seen as one of the finest exponents of the
creolisation advocated by Cesaire in his later work. LKJ’s work has been
important in the affirmation of creoles, Jamaican creole in his case, as
languages in their own right, rather than being accepted merely as dialects of
English or French. Like Cesaire, LKJ used his poetry as an act of revolt
against the prescribed norms retained through decolonisation and into
neo-colonialism. To contrast Cesaire’s surrealist sensibilities, however, LKJ
makes an appeal to reality and decisiveness (or, if one prefers Fanon’s
terminology, one must become “actional”): “dis is di age af decishan/so mek wi
leggo relijan/dis is di age af decishan/soh mek wi leggo divishan/dis is di age
af realit/so mek wi leggo mitalagy/dis is di age aff science an teknalagy/mek
wi hol di clarity/mek wi hol di clarity.” (2006: 34, 34-42).
In
a similar vein, Kgafela oa Magogodi tears into the English language, inserting
pieces of Southern African languages including Sotho, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu and
Afrikaans with expert precision and fluidity. In terms of self-writing, it
proves difficult to find someone so radical. He writes in ‘i mike what i like’:
“i mike what i like/i dis what i dislike/i carry the spirit of graffiti/i obey
no law of religious gravity/the spoken word is my shepherd/i shall not want
shit” (2004: 1-2: 11-16). Further, in quite a Negritude moment, he writes in
‘Outspoken’: “i rip voortrekker diaries/to pieces…it sounds hip/when i wreck
van riebeeck’s ship/i crush history’s kak
stories/to ground zero” (2004: 23: 27-34). Clearly, he is not a supporter
of the colonial history that Africa has had written for it. And this, too, is perhaps
a jibe at America’s imperialist endeavours and its repercussions. At one point,
in reference, obviously, to the white Western world, specifically the emphasis
on psycho-analysis that has been endeavoured upon to understand the human
(mental) condition, he writes of those “who are hooked on psycho-analytic
articles/who lick hideous lies/from encyclopedias/who say their
ancestors/chained us to save us” (2004: 108: 83-86) and continues, “how did i
get here?/not by slaveship/or a trip through a passage in the middle/of
monsters/who ate up my people/in plates of human platter/who lived happily ever
after” (2004: 109: 121-126). Clearly, he bears similar views regarding
colonialism to Cesaire.
Of
course, all of these writers bear the mark of the influences other than
Cesaire. Often, in fact, most of them are far more radical than Cesaire. But
his influence can be traced through their texts because of the massive
influence he had on writers of emancipatory texts since the late 1930’s. In
these examples of Cesaire’s influence one can see a distinct search for
identity and meaning independent of the dominance of the West. In language, in
politics, in culture, Cesaire and those around him – from Senghor, Fanon all
the way to oa Magogodi – sought and still seek to continue the Haitian
revolution. While some might say that Cesaire in Negritude went too far, merely
turning colonial logic around to point the other way, it remains that his
thought was pivotal to mere realisation of
racial equality, particularly in the mind. If only for this fact, we should
remain eternally grateful to the work of Aime Cesaire.
REFERENCES:
Agamben,
G. 1998. Homo Sacer. Meridian.
Armah,
A.K. 1968. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet
Born. Heinemann, 1988.
Achebe,
C. 1958. Things Fall Apart.
Heinemann, 1971.
Cesaire, A. 1955. ‘Discourse
on Colonialism’ in Monthly Review Press.
New York and London, 1972. (originally published as Discours sur le colonialism Discours sur le colonialisme. Editions
Presence Africaine, 1955).
Cesaire, A. 1956. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land.
Bloodaxe, 1995. (Introduction by Rosello, M., 1995)
Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press:
New York, 2004.
Johnson, L.K. 2006. Mi Revalushanary Fren. Ausable Press.
oa Magogodi, K. 2004. Outspoken. Laugh it Off Media.
Wa Thiong’o, N. 1967. A Grain of Wheat. Penguin, 2002.
[1] On this point, observing the dress-codes of different thinkers is
useful. Fanon wore Italian suits and yet his views were of a most radically
democratic nature, Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) often wears tweed jackets and
English-style hats; and yet Mobutu is often pictured in his leopard-skin
outfits. Perhaps dress-code is not directly proportional to one’s politics. But
I do not argue that one’s dress should endogenously reflect one’s culture, or
some remnant of a subdued culture. Rather, my issue is with the actual cost of
the suit, who is buying it, for what
reason they are buying it, and who is suffering because they are buying it.
Invariably, the suit is expensive, politicians – including some self-proclaimed
‘communists’ – are buying them, they are buying them in emulation of some model
of grandeur transported from colonial times (think back to the extremes of old
colonial court dress), and it is the people that they should be serving that
are suffering as a result. The ‘suit’ itself is a symbol of masculine power and
thus one must overcome this obstacle in an argument regarding freedom and
equality – its relevance has been ignored for too long. Of course, we should
not deny ourselves the ‘nice things’; rather, we should re-evaluate what we
regard as the ‘nice things’.
