Social Text

Culture and Colonization

Aim Csaire

For the past few days, many of us have wondered about the meaning of
this Congress.
In particular, we have wondered what is the common denominator
of an assembly that brings together men as diverse as Africans from black
Africa, North Americans, Antilleans, and Madagascans.
To me the answer seems obvious: the common denominator is the
colonial situation.
It is a fact that most black countries live under a colonial regime. Even
an independent country such as Haiti is in fact in many respects a semicolonial country. And our American brothers themselves are, by force of racial
discrimination, artificially placed at the heart of a great modern nation in a
situation is comprehensible only in reference to a colonialism, abolished to
be sure, but one whose aftereffects still reverberate in the present.
What does this mean? It means that, however much we might desire
to maintain the debates of this Congress in all their serenity, we cannot,
if we want to grasp reality, avoid confronting the problem of what at the
present time most thoroughly conditions the development of black cultures
[cultures noires]: the colonial situation. In other words, whether we wish it
or not, we cannot today pose the problem of black culture without posing
at the same time the problem of colonialism, because all black cultures are
developing at the present hour in this odd conditioning that is the colonial
or semicolonial or paracolonial situation.
But what, you may ask, is culture? It is important to define it in order to
dissipate a certain number of misunderstandings and to reply in the most
precise manner to a certain number of preoccupations that have been
expressed by some of our adversaries, and even by some of our friends.

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For example, questions have been raised about the legitimacy of this
Congress. If it is true, it has been said, that culture is only national, is it
not an abstraction to speak of Negro-African culture?
But isnt it clear that the best solution is to define with care the words
we use?
I think that it is quite true that the only culture is national culture.
But it is immediately apparent that national cultures, as particular
as they are, are grouped by affinities. And these great cultural relationships, these great cultural families, have a name: they are civilizations. In
other words, if it is self-evident that there is a French national culture, an
Italian, English, Spanish, German, Russian national culture, etc. . . . it is
no less evident that all these cultures display among them, alongside real
differences, a certain number of striking resemblances which make it the
case that if one can speak of national cultures particular to each of the
countries that I have just listed, one can just as much speak of a European
civilization.
In the same way, one can speak of a great family of African cultures,
which deserves the name of Negro-African civilization, and which includes
the different cultures of each of the countries of Africa. And we know that
the misadventures of history have caused the field of this civilization, the
area of this civilization, to exceed today Africa itself. And it is in this sense
that we can say that there are if not centers then at least margins of this
Negro-African culture in Brazil or in the Caribbean, as much in Haiti as
in the French Antilles, or even in the United States.
This is not a view that I have invented for the purposes of the present argument; it is a view that seems to me implied by the sociological and
scientific approach to the problem.
The French sociologist Marcel Mauss defines civilization as an
ensemble of phenomena of civilization that are sufficiently large, sufficiently numerous, sufficiently important in both quality and quantity. It is
also a fairly large ensemble of societies which present these phenomena.1
We can infer from this definition that civilization tends to universality
while culture tends to particularity: that culture is civilization as it is proper
to a people, to a nation, shared by no other, and that it carries the indelible mark of that people or nation. To describe it externally, one would say
that it is the ensemble of material and spiritual values created by a society
in the course of its history; and of course, by values we mean elements
as diverse as technical capacities [la technique] and political institutions,
things as fundamental as language and as ephemeral as fashion, and the
arts as well as science or religion.
If on the contrary one wants to define it in terms of its purpose and
to present it in its dynamism, we would say that culture is the effort of any
human collectivity to endow itself with the wealth of a personality.
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This is to say that civilization and culture define two aspects of a

single reality: civilization marks the perimeter of culture, its most exterior
and general aspects, whereas culture in its turn constitutes the intimate
and radiant kernel of a civilization, its most singular aspect.
We know that Mauss, in seeking the reasons for the compartmentalization of the world into clearly defined civilization areas, found them
in a profound quality that was according to him common to all social
phenomena and that he defined as arbitrary. All social phenomena, he
explained, are, to some degree, the work of collective will, and this is to say
the work of human will, the choice among different possible options. . . .
It follows from this nature of collective representations and practices that
the area of their extension is necessarily finite and relatively fixed, as long
as humanity does not form a single society.2
Thus each culture is specific. Specific in that it is the work of a particular, unique will, choosing among different options.
We see where this idea leads us.
To take a concrete example, it is quite true to say that there is a feudal
civilization, a capitalist civilization, a socialist civilization. But it is immediately apparent that in the humus of the same life economy, the same life
passion, the same lan de vie of any people, very different cultures take
root. This does not mean that there is no determinism from base to superstructure. It means that the relationship of the base to the superstructure
is never simple and must never be simplified. On this point we have the
opinion of Marx himself, who writes:
It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of
production to the immediate producersa relationship whose particular
form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the
type and manner of labor, and hence to its social productive powerin
which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social
edifice. . . . This does not prevent the same economic basethe same in its major
conditionsfrom displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance,
as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions,
racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only
be understood by analyzing these empirically given conditions.3

There is no better way to say that civilization is never so particular that

it does not imply and invigorate an entire constellation of ideational
resources, of traditions, of beliefs, of ways of thinking, of values, an entire
intellectual toolkit, an entire emotional complex, an entire wisdom that is
precisely what we call culture.
It seems to me that this is what legitimizes our meeting here. There
is a double solidarity among all those who are gathered here: first, a
horizontal solidarity, a solidarity created by the colonial or semicolonial
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or paracolonial situation that has been imposed on us from without. And

on the other hand, another solidarity that is vertical, a solidarity in time,
which comes from the fact that out of an initial unity, the unity of African
civilization, there has been differentiated a whole series of cultures that
all owe something to that civilization.
As a result, we may consider this Congress in two different ways, both
equally valid: this Congress is a return to origins [un retour aux sources]
that all communities undertake at their moment of crisis, and at the same
time it is an assembly bringing together men who have to grasp the same
harsh reality, and hence of men fighting the same fight and sustained by
the same hope.
For my part, I do not believe that there is an antinomy between the
two things. I believe on the contrary that these two aspects complement
one another, and that our approach, which can seem like hesitation and
confusion between the past and the future, is on the contrary the most
natural, inspired as it is by the idea that the shortest route to the future is
always the one that involves the deepened understanding of the past.
I now come to my main concern: the concrete conditions giving rise to
the problem of black cultures at the present time.
I have said that this concrete conditioning can be described in brief
as the colonial, semicolonial, or paracolonial situation in which the development of these cultures is taking place.
In consequence, a problem arises: What influence can this conditioning have on the development of these cultures? And, first of all, can
a political status have cultural consequences? This is not self-evident.
Obviously, if one believes with Frobenius that culture is born of mans
emotion in the face of the cosmos and that it is only Paideuma, then politics
can have little or no influence on culture. Or if one thinks like Schubart
that the key factor is geographic, if one believes that it is the spirit of the
landscape that forges the soul of a people, there can be little or no influence of politics on culture.4
If, however, one believes, as it makes good sense, that civilization is
first and foremost a social phenomenon and the result of social facts and
social forces, then the idea that the political has an influence on the cultural
seems an obvious conclusion.
This influence of politics on culture is explicitly recognized by Hegel
in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History when he writes the following
innocent little passage that Lenin, however, must have considered less
innocent than it appears, because he quotes and underlines it twice in
his Philosophical Notebooks: The importance of nature should be neither
overestimated nor underestimated; the mild Ionic sky certainly contributed
much to the charm of the Homeric poems, yet this alone can produce no
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Homers. Nor in fact does it continue to produce them; under Turkish government no bards have arisen.5
This can only mean one thing: a political and social regime that
suppresses the self-determination of a people thereby kills the creative
power of that people.
Or, in what amounts to the same point, wherever there has been
colonization, entire peoples have been emptied of their culture, emptied
of all culture.
It is in this sense that the historic conference in Bandung can be said
to have been not only a great political event; it was also a cultural event of
the first order, because it was the peaceful uprising of peoples hungry not
only for justice and dignity but also for what colonization had taken away
of the greatest importance: culture.
The mechanism of this death of culture and of civilizations under
the colonial regime is beginning to be well known. In order to flourish,
any culture must have a framework, a structure. But it is certain that the
elements that structure the cultural life of a colonized people disappear or
are debased [sabtardissent] as a result of the colonial regime. This is first
of all a matter of political organization, for it must not be forgotten that
the political organization freely developed by a people is a prominent part
of that peoples culture, even as it also conditions that culture.
And then there is the question of language. It has been said that language is psychology petrified.6 When it is no longer the official language,
the administrative language, the language used in school, the language
of ideas, the indigenous language suffers a loss in status that hinders its
development and at times even threatens its existence.
One must be absolutely clear about this. When the English destroy
the state organization of the Ashantis in the Gold Coast, they deal a blow
to Ashanti culture. When the French refuse to recognize Arabic in Algeria
or Malagasy in Madagascar as official languages, thus preventing them
from achieving their full potential in the modern world, they deal a blow
to Arab culture and Madagascan culture.
Given this limitation of the colonized civilization, this suppression
or debasement of its entire structure, how can one be surprised at the suppression of one of the characteristics of any living civilization: the faculty
of self-renewal?
As we know, it is a commonplace in Europe to disparage nationalist
movements in the colonial countries by representing them as obscurantist
forces striving to revive medieval ways of life and thought. But this is to
forget that the power to go beyond oneself [se dpasser] is part of any living civilization, and a civilization is living when the society in which it is
expressed is free. What is happening at the present time in liberated Africa
or Asia seems to me highly significant in this regard. Let it suffice for me
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to note that it is liberated Tunisia that is suppressing the religious tribunals

and not colonized Tunisia; that it is liberated Tunisia that is nationalizing
Habu properties and abolishing polygamy and not the Tunisia of the colonialists; that it was the India when the English were there that maintained
the traditional status of the Indian woman, and India rid of British tutelage
that is making the Indian woman the equal of the Indian man.
We must not be deluded: limited in its action, its dynamism halted,
the civilization of the colonized society from the first day enters the twilight
that is the precursor of the end.
Spengler, in his The Decline of the West, quotes these lines from
Goethe:
So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape.
So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told.
Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape
Impressed, that living must itself unfold.7

The great reproach that we justly level at Europe is that it broke the
momentum of civilizations that had not yet reached their full promise,
that it did not permit them to develop and to realize the full richness of
the forms held within them.
It would be superfluous to study the process of the death of this
ensemble. Let us say simply that it was struck at its base. At its base, and
thus irrevocably.
We recall the schema established by Marx for the societies of India:
little communities that break up because foreign admixture breaks up their
economic base. This is only too true. And not only for India. Wherever
European colonization has burst in, the introduction of a money-based
economy has led to the destruction or weakening of traditional ties, the
pulverization of the social and economic structure of the community as
well as the disintegration of the family. When one says this and one is a
member of a colonized people, the propensity of European intellectuals is
to cry ingratitude and to recall with self-satisfaction all that the world owes
to Europe. In France, one can still remember the impressive picture painted
by M. Caillois and M. Bguin, the former in a series of articles entitled
Illusions rebours [Illusions against the Grain], 8 the latter in his preface to M. Panikkars book on Asia.9 Everything is there: science, history,
sociology, ethnography, morals, technical methods. And in comparison
to such a long list of benefits, what weight can be given, these writers ask,
to a few acts of violence that were unavoidable in any case? There is certainly much that is true in this picture. But neither of these gentlemen can
prevent the fact that in the eyes of the world, the great revolution brought
about by Europe in the history of humanity is constituted neither by the

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introduction of a system founded on respect for human dignity, as they

so desperately try to make us believe, nor by the invention of intellectual
rigor; instead, this revolution was founded on an entirely other order of
consideration, which it would be disloyal not to look straight in the face:
that is, Europe was the first to have invented and introduced everywhere it
has been dominant an economic and social system founded on money, and
to have mercilessly eliminated everythingI repeat, everything, culture,
philosophy, religionseverything that could have slowed or stopped the
march toward enrichment of a group of privileged men and peoples. I know
very well that for some time now it has been argued that the harms caused
by Europe are not irreparable. It has been claimed that by taking certain
precautions, the devastating effects of colonization could be mitigated.
UNESCO has taken up this problem, and recently (in the UNESCO
Courier of April 1956) Dr. Luther Evans, the director general, declared
that under certain conditions technological change may be introduced in
a manner to fit the prevailing culture.10 And a renowned ethnographer,
Dr. Margaret Mead, noted that if we bear in mind that every culture is
a systematic and integrated whole and that a change in any one part of
the culture will be accompanied by changes in other parts, it should be
possible by taking the necessary precautions that changed agricultural or
industrial practices, new public-health procedures, new methods of child
and maternal health care, and fundamental education can be introduced so
that the culture will be disrupted as little as possible, and so that whatever
disruption does occur can either be compensated for, or channeled into
constructive developments for the future.11
All this is certainly steeped in good intentions. But one has to take
a side [il faut en prendre son parti]: there is not one bad colonization that
destroys indigenous civilizations and attacks the moral health of the colonized people, and another colonization, an enlightened colonization, a
colonization backed up by ethnography that could harmoniously integrate
the cultural elements of the colonizer within the body of the indigenous
civilizations without risk to the moral health of the colonized people.
One has to take a side: the tenses of colonization are never conjugated with
the verbs of an idyll.
We have seen that in the short run or in the long run, all colonization
comes to mean the death of the civilization of the colonized society. But if
the indigenous civilization dies, can it be said that the colonizer replaces it
with another type of civilization, a civilization superior to the indigenous
civilization: that is, with the colonizers own civilization?
This illusion, to parody a fashionable expression, I propose to call
the Deschamps Illusion, after Governor Deschamps, who, at the opening of this Congress yesterday morning, recalled pathetically that Gaul
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had once been colonized by the Romans, adding that the Gauls had not
retained too unhappy memories of that colonization.12 The Deschamps
Illusion is, moreover, as old as Roman colonization itself and might just as
well be called the Rutilius Namatianus Illusion, as I find among Governor
Deschampss ancestors a man who was not governor but palace chamberlain, which is not indeed without some analogy, who in the fifth century A.D. expressed in Latin verse a thought entirely analogous to that
expressed by M. Deschamps yesterday morning in French prose. Of course
even this parallel poses problems. One may in particular wonder if the
comparison is valid for such different historical situations; if for example
one can compare, on the pretext that colonization has occurred, a precapitalist colonization with a capitalist colonization. Nor does this absolve us
from wondering incidentally whether the position of governor, or palace
chamberlain, is one that best qualifies a man to judge colonization and
to pass an impartial judgment on colonialism. In any case, let us listen to
Rutilius Namatianus:
Fecisti patriam diversis gentibus unam;
Profuit injustis te dominante capi
Dumque offers victis proprii consortia juris
Urbem fecisti quod prius orbis erat.
For nations far apart thou hast made a single fatherland;
under thy dominion captivity hath meant profit even for those who knew
not justice:
and by offering to the vanquished a share in thine own justice,
thou hast made a city of what was erstwhile a world.13

We may note in passing that the modern colonialist order has never
inspired a poet; never has a hymn of gratitude resounded in the ears of
modern colonialists. And that in itself is a sufficient condemnation of the
colonialist order. But no matter. Let us come to the heart of the illusion:
just as in Gaul a Latin culture was substituted for an indigenous culture,
so there will occur throughout the world offshoots of French, English,
or Spanish civilizations as a result of colonization. But, again, this is an
illusion.
And the diffusion of this error is not always unconscious or disinterested. In this respect we shall confine ourselves to recalling that in 1930
at a meeting of philosophers and historians to define the word civilization,
when a politician like M. Doumer interrupted the historian Berr or the
ethnographer Mauss, it was to point out to them the political dangers of
their cultural relativism and to insist that the idea that France had a mission to spread civilizationby which he meant French civilizationto
her colonies must remain intact. An illusion, I say, for we must be quite
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convinced of the opposite: that no colonizing country can lavish its civilization on any colonized country, that there is not, there has never been,
and there never will be scattered throughout the world, as was thought in
the early days of colonization, a New France, a New England, or a
New Spain.
This is worth being insisted upon: a civilization is a coordinated
ensemble of social functions. There are technical functions, intellectual
functions, and functions of organization and coordination. To say that
the colonizer substitutes his civilization for the native civilization can
only mean one thing: that the colonizing nation ensures to the colonized
nation, that is to the natives in their own country, the fullest mastery over
these different functions.
But what does the history of colonization teach us? Exactly the opposite. That technical methods [la technique] in colonial countries always
are developed on the fringes of indigenous society without the colonized
ever being given the chance to master them. (The great poverty of technical education in all colonial countries, and the effort of the colonizers
to refuse technical qualification to native workersan effort that finds
its most odious and most radical expression in South Africaare highly
significant in this respect.) That with regard to intellectual functions there
is no colonial country that is not characterized by illiteracy and the low
level of public education. That in all colonies, with regard to functions
of organization and coordination, political power belongs to the colonial
authorities and is directly exercised by the governor or resident-general,
or is at least controlled by them.
(This, incidentally, explains the vanity and hypocrisy of all colonial
policies based upon integration or assimilationpolicies clearly recognized by the native people as the snares and booby traps they are.)
You see the extent of the exigencies. I will sum them up by saying
that, for the colonizer, to export his civilization to the colonized country
would mean nothing less than to undertake in the most deliberate manner
the establishment of an indigenous capitalism, an indigenous capitalist
society, the image and also the competitor of metropolitan capitalism.
One has only to glance at the facts to realize that nowhere has metropolitan capitalism given birth to an indigenous capitalism. And if an
indigenous capitalism has not arisen in any colonized country (I am not
referring to the capitalism of the colonists themselves, which is directly
linked to metropolitan capitalism), the reasons must not be sought in
the laziness of the natives but in the very nature and logic of colonial
capitalism.
Malinowski, though open to critique on other issues, once had the
merit of drawing attention to a phenomenon that he called the selective
gift:
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The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things

are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology
to see that the European give is always highly selective. We never give
any native people under our controland we never shall, for it would be
sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitikthe
following elements of our culture:
1.The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison
gas, and all that makes effective defence or aggression possible.
2.We do not give our instruments of political mastery. Sovereignty remains
always in the British or Belgian crown, French Republic, or Italian or
Portuguese Dictatorship. The natives, except for an insignificant minority, have no votes. They are not equal citizens of the Empire, Republic,
or Dictatorship. Even when they are given Indirect Rule, this is done
under control.
3.We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages. The metal which comes from the gold or copper mines does not
flow into African channels, except the inadequate wage. Even when under
indirect economic exploitation, as in West Africa and Uganda, we allow
the natives a share of profits, the full control of economic organization
remains in the hands of Western enterprise.
4.We do not admit them as equals to Church Assembly, school, or drawingroom. Under some Colonial systems, notably the French, African individuals can climb high in the political hierarchy. In British West Africa,
race discrimination is less sharp than in the East or South. But full political, social, and even religious equality is nowhere granted.
In fact, from all the points here enumerated, it would be easy to see that it
is not a matter of give, nor yet a matter of generous offering, but usually a matter of take. Lands have been alienated from Africans to a large
extent, and usually in the most fruitful regions. Tribal sovereignty and the
indulgence in warfare, which the African valued even as we seem to value
it, has been taken away from him. He is being taxed, but the disposal of the
funds thus provided is not always under his control, and never completely
so. The labour which he has to give is voluntary only in name.14

Several years later, Malinowski drew the following conclusion in The

Dynamics of Culture Change:
Selective giving influences the process of change perhaps more than any
other element in the [colonial] situation. The selective withholding on the
part of the Europeans is both significant and well determined. It is really
the withdrawal from culture contact of all those elements which make up
the full benefitseconomic, political, and legalof the higher culture. If
power, wealth, and social amenities were given, culture change would be a
comparatively easy and smooth process. It is the absence of these factors

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our selective givingwhich makes culture change such a complicated and

difficult process.15

As we see, it is never a matter of a total gift; and if it is never a matter of a civilization being lavished out, there can never be a question of a
civilization transfer. In The World and the West, Toynbee propounds a most
ingenious theory concerning the psychology of encounter of civilizations.
He explains that when the ray of civilization strikes a foreign social body,
the assaulted foreign bodys resistance diffracts the culture-ray into its
component strands, just as a light-ray is diffracted into the spectrum by
the resistance of a prism.16 And it is the resistance of the foreign social
body that impedes the total diffusion of one culture in another, causing
a kind of entirely physical selection that retains only the least important
and most harmful elements.
The truth is very different; Malinowski is right and Toynbee is
wrong. The selection of cultural elements offered to the colonized is not
the result of a physical law. It is the consequence of a political decision, the
result of a policy chosen by the colonizer, a policy that may be summed
up in the following manner: as the import-export of capitalism itself, by
which I mean its foundations, its virtues, and its power.
But, it will be said, there remains another possibility: the elaboration of a
new civilization, a civilization that will owe something to Europe as well
as to the indigenous civilization. Having set aside the two solutions of the
conservation of the native civilization, on the one hand, and of the export
overseas of the colonizers civilization, on the other hand, could we not
conceive of a process that would tend toward the elaboration of a new
civilization that would reduce to neither of its component parts?
This is an illusion into which many fall, many Europeans who imagine that they are witnessing in countries of British or French colonization
the birth of an Anglo- or Franco-African or an Anglo- or Franco-Asiatic
civilization.
In order to believe in it, they rely on the idea that all civilizations live
by borrowing. And from this it is inferred that as colonization puts two
different civilizations into contact, the indigenous civilization will borrow
cultural elements from the colonizers civilization, and from this marriage
there will result a new civilization, a mixed civilization [une civilization
mtisse].
The error inherent in such a theory is that it rests on the illusion that
colonization is a civilization contact like any other and that all borrowings
are equally good.
The truth is very different, and borrowing is only valid when it is
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tively within the body that assimilates it in making it its own, that makes
the external become internal. Hegels view finds its application here. When
a society borrows, it takes possession. It acts, it does not submit. The
object being subjected to force, the mechanical process passes over into
the internal, by means of which the individual appropriates the object in
such a manner as to deprive it of its peculiar nature, making it its means
and giving it the substance of its subjectivity.17
Colonization is an entirely different case. Here there is no borrowing
that is called for by need, no cultural elements spontaneously integrated
within the subjects world. And Malinowski and his school are right to insist
that the process of cultural contact must be regarded first of all as a continuous process of interaction between groups having different cultures.
What does this mean if not that the colonial situation, which sets the
colonizer and the colonized face to face, is in the last resort the determining element?
And what is the result?
The result of this lack of integration by the dialectic of need is the
existence in all colonial countries of a veritable cultural mosaic. By this
I mean that in all colonial countries the cultural features are juxtaposed
and not harmonized.
What is civilization, though, if not a harmony and a whole? It is
because culture is not just a simple juxtaposition of cultural features that
there cannot be a mixed culture [une culture mtisse]. I do not mean that
people who are biologically mixed [mtisse] cannot found a civilization. I
mean that the civilization they found will only be a civilization if it is not
mixed. And it is for this reason as well that one of the characteristics of
culture is style, that is, that mark proper to a people and an era, which is
to be found in all fields in which the activity of that people is manifested
at a given period. It seems to me that what Nietzsche says in this regard
deserves to be taken into consideration: Culture is, above all, unity of
artistic style in all the expression of the life of a people. Much knowledge
and learning is neither an essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if
needs be can get along very well with the opposite of culture, barbarism,
which is lack of style or a chaotic jumble of all styles.18
No more accurate description could be given of the cultural situation into which all colonized countries have plunged. In every colonized
country we note that the harmonious synthesis of the old indigenous
culture has been dissolved and replaced by a hodgepodge of features of
different origin, overlapping one another without harmonizing. This is
not necessarily barbarism through lack of culture. It is barbarism through
cultural anarchy.
You may be shocked by the word barbarism. But this would be to
forget that the great creative periods have always been periods of great
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psychological unity, periods of communion, and that culture only lives,

intense, and develops where a system of common values is maintained.
And that on the contrary, where society is dissolved, fragmented, mottled
by a colored pattern of values that are not recognized by the community,
there is room only for debasement and, in the final analysis, for sterility.
Another objection is that any culture, no matter how great, or better yet,
the greater it is, is a mlange of appallingly heterogeneous elements. We
recall the case of Greek culture, formed out of Greek elements but also
of Cretan, Egyptian, and Asiatic elements. We can even go further and
declare that in the realm of culture, the composite is the rule and the
uniform the harlequins suit. The American anthropologist Kroeber has
made himself the spiritual interpreter of this point of view:
It is as if, let us say, a rabbit could graft into itself the ruminant digestive system of a sheep, the breathing gills of a fish, the claws and teeth of a cat, some
of the tentacles of an octopus, and an assortment of other odd organs from
elsewhere in the animal kingdom; and then not only survive, but perpetuate
its new type and flourish. Organically, this is of course sheer nonsense; but
in culture it is a near-enough figure of what happens.19

It is no doubt true that the rule here is heterogeneity. But be careful: this
heterogeneity is not lived as such. In the reality of a living civilization it is
a matter of heterogeneity lived internally as homogeneity. Analysis may
reveal the heterogeneity, but the elements, however heterogeneous they may
be, are lived in the consciousness of the community as its own, exactly like
the most typically autochthonous elements. The civilization does not feel
the foreign body, for it is no longer foreign. Scientists may well prove the
foreign origin of a word or a technical method, yet the community feels that
the word or the technique is its own. A process of naturalization, arising
from the dialectic of having, has taken place. Foreign elements have become
mine, have passed into my being because I can dispose of them, because
I can organize them within my universe, because I can bend them to my
needs. Because they are at my disposal, not I at theirs. It is precisely the
operation of this dialectic that is denied to the colonized people. Foreign
elements are dumped on its soil, but remain foreign. White mens things.
White mens ways. Things that sit alongside the indigenous people but over
which the indigenous people has no power.
But, it may be said, once this unity is broken, one can imagine that the
colonized people might be able to reconstitute it and integrate its new
experiences, hence its new wealth, with the framework of a new unity, a
unity that will no longer be the old unity, but a unity nevertheless.
Very well. But it must be stated clearly: such a solution is impossible
under the colonial regime because such a mingling, such a commingling,
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can only be expected from a people if that people retains the historical
initiative, in other words if that people is free. Which is incompatible with
colonialism.
Recall what I said earlier about the dialectic of need. Yes, Japan has
been able to commingle traditional elements with those borrowed from
Europe and melt them down into a new culture that remains a Japanese
culture. But Japan is free and acknowledges no law but that of her own
needs. Let me add, moreover, that such a commingling postulates a psychological condition: historical audacity, self-confidence. But this is precisely
what from the first day the colonizer has endeavored to take away from
the colonized in a thousand ways.
And here it must be clearly understood that the famous inferiority
complex in the colonized, which some take pleasure in pointing out, does
not come about by chance. It is a result sought by the colonizer.
Colonization is a phenomenon that, among other disastrous psychological consequences, brings about the following: it unsteadies the concepts
on which the colonized could build or rebuild the world. To quote Nietzsche: As cities collapse and grow desolate when there is an earthquake
and man erects his house on volcanic land only in fear and trembling and
only briefly, so life itself caves in and grows weak and fearful when the
concept-quake caused by science robs man of the foundation of all his rest
and security, his belief in the enduring and eternal.20
This lack of courage to live, this vacillation of the will to live, is a
phenomenon often noted among colonial populations. The best-known
case is that of Tahiti, analyzed by Victor Segalen in Les immmoriaux. 21
Thus the cultural position in colonial countries is tragic. Wherever
colonization breaks in, the indigenous culture begins to wither. And among
the ruins there is born not a culture, but a kind of subculture that, because
it is condemned to remain marginal in relation to European culture, to
be the lot of a small group, an elite placed in artificial conditions and
deprived of life-giving contact with the masses and with popular culture,
has no chance of blossoming into a true culture.
The result is the creation of vast territories of culturally empty zones
or, in what amounts to the same thing, of cultural perversion or cultural
by-products.
Such is the situation that we black men of culture must have the
courage to face squarely.
The question then arises: in such a situation what should we do,
what can we do? It is clear that grave responsibilities fall on our shoulders.
What can we do? The problem is often summarized in the form of which
option to take. A choice between autochthonous tradition and European
civilization. Either to reject indigenous civilization as puerile, inadequate,

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bypassed by history, or else, in order to preserve the indigenous cultural

heritage, to barricade oneself against European civilization and refuse it.
In other terms, we are summoned: Choose between fidelity and
backwardness, or progress and rupture.
What is our response?
Our response is that things are not as simple as they seem; it is a false
alternative. Life (I say life and not abstract thought) does not recognize,
does not accept this alternative. Or rather, if this alternative is put forward,
then life itself will have to transcend it.
The question does not arise in black societies alone; in every society
there is always an equilibrium between old and new, always precarious,
always to be remade, always remade in practice by every generation.
Our societies, our civilizations, our black cultures will not escape
from this law.
For our part, and with regard to what is particular to our societies,
I believe that in the African culture yet to be born, or in the para-African
culture yet to be born, there will be many new elements, modern elementseven elements borrowed from Europe. But I also believe that many
traditional elements will subsist in these cultures. I refuse to yield to the
temptation of the tabula rasa. I refuse to believe that the future African culture could totally and brutally reject the old African culture. To illustrate
what I have just said, let me offer a parable. Anthropologists have often
described what one of them proposes to call cultural fatigue. The example
they cite is worth recalling, as it takes on the power of a symbol. Here is
the story: It takes place in the Hawaiian Islands. A few years after Cooks
discovery of the islands, the king died and was succeeded by a young man,
Prince Kamehameha II. Won over by European ideas, the young prince
decided to abolish the ancestral religion. It was agreed by the new king and
the high priest that a great festival should be organized and that during the
festival the taboo should be solemnly broken and the ancestral gods repudiated. On the appointed day, at a sign from the king, the high priest threw
himself upon the images of God, stamped on and broke them underfoot,
as a great cry went up: The Taboo is broken! Of course, some years later
the people of Hawaii welcomed the Christian missionaries with open arms.
The rest of the story is well known; it has passed into history. This is the
simplest and clearest example we know of a cultural subversion preparing
the way for subservience. And I ask, is this renunciation by a people of its
past and its culture, is this what is expected of us?
I say it bluntly: there will be no Kamehameha among us!
I believe that the civilization that has given Negro sculpture to the
world of art; that the civilization that has given to the political and social
world original communitarian institutions such as village democracy, or

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age-group fraternities, or familial property, that negation of capitalism, or

so many institutions bearing the stamp of the spirit of solidarity; that this
civilization that on another level has given to the moral world an original
philosophy based on respect for life and integration within the cosmos; I
refuse to believe that this civilization, insufficient though it may be, must
be annihilated or denied as a precondition of the renaissance of black
peoples.
I believe that our particular cultures contain within them enough
strength, enough vitality, enough regenerative power to adapt themselves,
when objective conditions have been modified, to the conditions of the
modern world, and that they will be able to bring valid and original solutions to all political, social, economic, or cultural problems, solutions that
will be valid because they are original.
In our culture that is to be born, without a doubt, there will be old and
new. Which new elements? Which old elements? Our ignorance begins only
here. And in truth it is not for the individual to give the answer. The answer
can only be given by the community. But at least we can confirm here and
now that it will be given and not verbally but by facts and in action.
And this is what finally allows us to define our own role as black men
of culture. Our role is not to build a priori the plan of future black culture,
to predict which elements will be integrated and which rejected. Our role,
infinitely more humble, is to proclaim the coming and prepare the way
for those who hold the answerthe people, our peoples, freed from their
shackles, our peoples and their creative genius finally freed from all that
impedes it and renders it sterile.
Today we are in cultural chaos. Our role is to say: free the demiurge
that alone can organize this chaos into a new synthesis, a synthesis that
will deserve the name of culture, a synthesis that will be the reconciliation and surpassing of old and new. We are here to say and to demand:
Let the peoples speak. Let the black peoples come onto the great stage of
history.
Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards
Notes
Translators note: I have provided all of the footnotes that follow. Aside from one
parenthetical mention of the UNESCO Courier, Csaire gives no citational information in his text. Nevertheless, I have located sources for each of the quotations in
Culture and Colonization. In the cases where Csaire uses French translations of
texts by Russian or German authors such as Marx, Hegel, Goethe, Nietzsche, and
Lenin, I have used the available English translation for the quoted passages, but on
a few occasions (indicated below), I have modified the English version, when Csaire
emphasizes something peculiar to the French version that is inadequately captured
in the English. (In some quotations, Csaire underlines a particular phrase for
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emphasis; I have noted this added emphasis in the endnotes.) One intriguing element
of the speech is that Csaire quotes from a surprising number of sources originally
in English: Mead, Malinowski, Toynbee, Kroeber, and so on. Some of these books
would have been available to Csaire in French translation; others he seems to have
translated himself. With all of these sources, I have simply used the English original.
(In Csaires French versions of these passages, I did not discover any deviation from
the English original drastic enough to alter the broader argument.)
1. Marcel Mauss, Civilisations, Their Elements and Forms (1929/1930), in
Techniques, Technology and Civilization, ed. and trans. Nathan Schlanger (New York:
Berghahn, 2006), 62.
2. Mauss, Civilisations, Their Elements and Forms, 6768 (translation
modified).
3. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage,
1981), 92627 (translation modified; emphasis added by Csaire).
4. See Leo Frobenius, Paideuma: Umrisse einer Kultur- und Seelenlehre
(Munich: Beck, 1921); Leo Frobenius 18731973: An Anthology, ed. Eike Haberland,
trans. Patricia Crampton (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1973); Walter Schubart, Europa und
die seele des Ostens (Luzern: Vita Nova, 1938); translated by Ameth von Zeppelin
as Russia and Western Man (New York: Ungar, 1950).
5. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree
(London: Bell, 1890), 83 (translation modified; emphasis added by Csaire). Csaire
is alluding to V. I. Lenin, Conspectus of Lectures on the Philosophy of History
(1915), in Collected Works, vol. 38: Philosophical Notebooks, ed. Stewart Smith, trans.
Clemens Dutt (Moscow: Progress, 1961), 310.
6. See Friedrich Max Mller, Lectures on the Science of Language, Delivered at
the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861 (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1866), 420.
7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Orphische Urworte, quoted in Oswald
Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York:
Knopf, 1928), 157.
8. Roger Caillois, Illusions rebours [part 1], Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Franaise 4 (1954): 101024; Caillois, Illusions rebours [part 2], Nouvelle Nouvelle
Revue Franaise 5 (1955): 5870.
9. Kavalam Madhava Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1953). Csaire is referring to the preface by Albert Bguin to the French
edition of the book, LAsie et la domination occidentale du XVe sicle nos jours, trans.
Paule and Ernest Bolo (Paris: Seuil, 1956).
10. Luther Evans, The Human Side of Progress, UNESCO Courier 8, no.
11 (April 1956): 14. In his speech, Csaire erroneously gives the February 1956 issue
as the source of this quotation.
11. Margaret Mead, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (New York:
UNESCO/New American Library, 1955), 12, 13, 1516.
12. Hubert Jules Deschamps, the gouverneur gnral of the French colonies,
addressed the Congress. A transcription of his remarks is included in the Messages
section of the Prsence africaine special issue, which includes letters and telegrams
from abroad and written declarations of support (38992). Csaire is referring to
Deschampss comment that we French have also been colonized. Yes, it was a long
time ago, of course. We were colonized by the Romans, and my God, I will say
nothing bad about that colonization; in general we French do not think badly of it.
Because colonizationalthough I do not want to sing its praises, there are many bad

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things to say about itbut in the end, there might be a positive side. In any case,
with regard to us French, I think there was a positive side (391).
There is a prefatory note to the transcription in which the editors of Prsence
africaine explain the peculiar circumstances of his involvement:
We have been asked why we authorized only Hubert Deschamps to ascend to
the podium when many others among the observers would have clearly been happy
to take advantage of the same privilege.
It was a matter of a simple incident. The general rule was that only delegates
could speak during the Congress. But while we were reading the messages, friends
in the room were bringing up others from associations and from various individuals.
Among the latter was M. Hubert Deschamps. He slipped a word to the chairman
of the session requesting permission to say aloud (and from his seat) a few words of
sympathy before leaving the room. He had to go to Madagascar. On these terms he
was granted the floor. But it was very difficult to hear him from his seat. So he was
invited to come to the podium.
It seems that this intervention has been exploited (without success) to make
believe that M. le Gouverneur Hubert Deschamps presided over the Congress. The
various phases of his intervention (which was longer that he had himself announced)
were photographed and filmed and widely diffused in France (38990).
The translation is my own.
13. Rutilius Namatianus, A Voyage Home to Gaul, in Minor Latin Poets,
ed. and trans. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical
Library/Harvard University Press, 1935), 770. Csaire quotes the passage in Latin
without giving a French translation.
14. Bronislaw Malinowski, Introductory Essay: The Anthropology of Changing African Cultures, in Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (Oxford:
International African Institute/Oxford University Press, 1938), xxiixxiii.
15. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into
Race Relations in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), 58.
16. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, The World and the West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 67.
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. 2, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G.
Struthers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1951), 412 (translation modified).
18. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, David Strauss, the Confessor and the
Writer, in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 56 (Csaires emphasis).
19. A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 260.
20. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History
for Life, in Untimely Meditations, 120.
21. Victor Segalen, Les immmoriaux (Paris: Socit du Mercure de France,
1907).

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