Discourse on Colonialism

A short polemical essay by the Martinican poet and politician, one of the founders of Négritude, first published in 1950 and revised in 1955. It opens by declaring that a civilisation unable to solve the problems it creates, and which uses its principles for trickery, is a decadent and dying one, and that Europe is indefensible. Césaire's central charge is that colonisation degrades the coloniser as well as the colonised. He argues that Nazism shocked Europeans because it applied to Europeans methods already used against Arabs, Africans and Indians, so that the humanist European bourgeois carries a Hitler inside him. Colonisation, in his formula, equals thingification: it turns people into instruments of production. He mocks the claim that colonialism brought civilisation, and attacks by name the scholars, missionaries and ethnographers who justified it. The essay ends by calling for a new society built with the help of the colonised, drawing on Marxist ideas of class and revolution.

It is the classic indictment of colonialism, short enough to read in an evening, and its argument linking racism abroad to fascism at home is still widely debated.