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Colonialism and Neocolonialism 22
deeply into the contradiction that was tearing him apart; and he presents them to us just as
they are: raw, still permeated with his subjectivity.
But let us leave these quibbles aside. The work establishes some solid truths. First of
all that there are neither good nor bad colonists: there are colonialists. Some among them
reject their objective reality: carried along by the colonial apparatus, they do each day, in
deed, what they condemn in their dreams, and each of their acts contributes to
maintaining oppression. They will change nothing, be of no use to anyone, and find their
moral comfort in their malaise, that is all.
The others – and they are the majority – sooner or later accept themselves as they are.
Memmi has provided a remarkable description of the sequence of steps which leads
them to ‘self-absolution’. Conservatism engenders the selection of mediocre people. How
can this elite of usurpers, conscious of their mediocrity, justify their privileges? Only one
way: diminish the colonized in order to exult themselves, deny the status of human
beings to the natives, and deprive them of basic rights. That will not be difficult as,
precisely, the system deprives them of everything; colonialist practice has engraved the
colonial idea
1 Does he not write: ‘The colonial situation manufactures colonists as it manufactures colonies’?
(p. 77) The only difference between us is perhaps that he sees a situation where I see a system.
on things themselves; it is the movement of things which designates both the colonist and
the colonized. Thus oppression justifies itself: the oppressors produce and maintain by
force the evils which, in their eyes, make the oppressed resemble more and more what
they would need to be in order to deserve their fate. The colonist can absolve himself
only by systematically pursuing the ‘dehumanization’ of the colonized, that is by
identifying a little more each day with the colonial apparatus. Terror and exploitation
dehumanize, and the exploiter uses this dehumanization to justify further exploitation.
The machine runs smoothly; impossible to distinguish between idea and praxis, and
between the latter and objective necessity. These moments of colonialism sometimes
influence one another and sometimes blend. Oppression is, first of all, hatred of the
oppressor towards the oppressed. Only one limit to this enterprise of extermination:
colonialism itself. It is here that the colonists meet their own contradiction: along with the
colonized, colonization, the colonizers included, would disappear. No more underclass,
no more exploitation: they would fall back into the normal forms of capitalist
exploitation, wages and prices would come into line with those in France; it would mean
ruin. The system wants the death and the multiplication of its victims at the same time;
any transformation will be fatal to it: whether the natives are assimilated or massacred,
labour costs will rise constantly. The heavy machine keeps those who are compelled to
turn it between life and death – always closer to death than to life; a petrified ideology
applies itself to considering men as animals that talk. In vain: in order to give them
orders, even the harshest, the most insulting, you have to begin by acknowledging them;
and as they cannot be watched over constantly, you have to resolve to trust them. Nobody
can treat a man ‘like a dog’ if he does not first consider him as a man. The impossible
dehumanization of the oppressed turns against the oppressors and becomes their
alienation. It is the oppressors themselves who, by their slightest gesture, resuscitate the