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Albert Memmi’s 23
humanity they wish to destroy; and, as they deny it to others, they find it everywhere like
an enemy force. To escape from this, they must harden, give themselves the opaque
consistency and impermeability of stone; in short they in turn must dehumanize
themselves.
A pitiless reciprocity binds the colonizers to the colonized, their product and their
destiny. Memmi has forcefully shown this; we discover with him that the colonial system
is a moving form, born around the middle of the last century, and which will produce its
own destruction. For a long time now it has been costing the colonizing countries more
than it brings in; France is crushed under the weight of Algeria and we know now that we
will abandon the war, without victory or defeat, when we are too poor to pay for it. But,
above all, it is the mechanical rigidity of the apparatus that is causing it to break down.
The traditional social structures have been pulverized, the natives ‘atomized’ and colonial
society cannot assimilate them without destroying itself; they will therefore have to
rediscover their unity against it. These people excluded from system will proclaim their
exclusion in the name of national identity: it is colonialism that creates the patriotism of
the colonized. Maintained at the level of animals by an oppressive system, they are not
given any rights, not even the right to live, and their condition worsens day by day: when
a people’s only remaining option is in choosing how to die, when they have received
from their oppressors only one gift – despair – what have they got left to lose? Their
misery will become their courage; they will turn the eternal rejection that colonization
confronts them with into an absolute rejection of colonization. The secret of the
proletariat, Marx once said, is that it carries within itself the destruction of bourgeois
society. We must be thankful to Memmi for reminding us that the colonized also have
their secret, and that we are witnessing the awful death throes of colonialism.