But the colonized intellectual introduces a variation on this demand and in fact, there seems to be no lack of motivation to fill senior positions as administrators, technicians, and experts. The colonized, however, equate this nepotism with acts of sabotage and it is not unusual to hear them declare: "What is the point of being independent then . . . ?"
Wherever an authentic liberation struggle has been fought,
wherever the blood of the people has been shed and the armed phase has lasted long enough to encourage the intellectuals to withdraw to their rank and file base, there is an effective eradication of the superstructure borrowed by these intellectuals from the colonialist bourgeois circles. In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values-meaning Western values-remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man. The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.
And first among them is individualism. The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. But the colonized intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of this theory. Involvement in the organization of the struggle will already introduce him to a different vocabulary. "Brother," "sister," "comrade" are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeosie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fe, the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. This colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will
also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people's commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings. Personal interests are now the collective interest because in reality everyone will be discovered by the French legionnaires and consequently massacred or else everyone will be saved. In such a context, the "every man for himself' concept, the atheist's form of salvation, is prohibited.
Self-criticism has been much talked about recently, but few realize that it was first of all an African institution. Whether it be in the djemaas of North Africa or the palavers of West Africa, tradition has it that disputes which break out in a village are worked out in public. By this I mean collective self-criticism with a touch of humor because everyone is relaxed, because in the end we all want the same thing. The intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people. In this respect then we can genuinely say that the community has already triumphed and exudes its own light, its own reason.
(...)
In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has had to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being.
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle- the defeat of colonialism. p.10-12,13
(...)
In 1789, after the bourgeois French Revolution, the humblest French peasant gained substantially from the upheaval. But it is common knowledge that for 95 percent of the population in developing countries, independence has not brought any immediate change. Any observer with a keen eye is aware of a kind of latent discontent which like glowing embers constantly threatens to flare up again.
So they say the colonized want to move too fast. Let us never forget that it wasn't such a long time ago the colonized were accused of being too slow, lazy, and fatalistic. Obviously the violence channeled into the liberation struggle docs not vanish as if by magic after hoisting the national colors. It has even less reason to disappear since nation building continues to operate within the framework of critical competition between capitalism and socialism...
... Every peasant revolt, every insurrection in the Third World fits into the framework of the cold war. Two men are beaten up in Salisbury and an entire bloc goes into action, focuses on these two men and uses this beating to raise the issue of Rhodesia linking it to the rest of Africa and every colonized subject...
...And there is no reason to believe that demagoguery alone explains the sudden interest by the major powers in the petty affairs of the underdeveloped regions. Every peasant revolt, every insurrection in the Third World fits into the framework of the cold war... the full-scale campaign under way leads the other bloc to gauge the flaws in its sphere of influence. The colonized peoples realize that neither faction is interested in disengaging itself from regional conflicts. They no longer limit their horizons to one particular region since they are swept along in this atmosphere of universal convulsion.
When every three months we learn that the sixth or seventh U.S. Fleet is heading toward some coast or other, when Khrushchev threatens to come to Castro's aid with the help of missiles, when Kennedy envisages drastic solutions for Laos, the colonized or newly independent peoples get the impression they are being forced, whether they like it or not, into a frantic march. In fact they are already marching. Let us take, for example, the case of governments of recently liberated countries. The men in power spend two thirds of their time keeping watch over their borders, averting any threat of danger, and the other third working for the country. At the same time they are looking for support. Governed by the same dialectic, the national opposition gives parliamentary channels the cold shoulder. It seeks allies who agree to support them in their ruthless endeavor at sedition. The atmosphere of violence, after having penetrated the colonial phase, continues to dominate national politics.
As we have said, the Third World is not excluded. On the contrary, it is at the very center of the convulsion. This is why in their speeches the statesmen of underdeveloped countries maintain indefinitely a tone of aggressiveness and exasperation which normally should have disappeared. The often-reported impoliteness of the new leaders is understandable. What is less noticeable is the extreme courtesy these same leaders show toward their brothers and comrades. Their impolite behavior is first and foremost directed against the others, against the former colonialists who come to observe and investigate. The excolonized too often get the impression that the findings of these investigations are a foregone conclusion. The journalist is on assignment to justify them. The photos that illustrate the article provide proof that he knows what he is talking about and was actually there. The investigation sets out to prove that "everything went wrong as soon as we left."
The [foreign] journalists often complain they are badly treated, are forced to work under poor conditions, and come up against a wall of indifference or hostility. All this is quite normal. The nationalist leaders know that international opinion is forged solely by the Western press. When a Western journalist interviews us, however, it is seldom done to render us service. In the war in Algeria, for example, the most liberal-minded French reporters make constant use of ambiguous epithets to portray our struggle. When we reproach them for it, they reply in all sincerity they are being objective. For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him. Understandable, too, is that new tone of voice which dominated international diplomacy at the United Nations General Assembly in September 1960. The representatives of the colonial countries were aggressive and violent in the extreme, but their populations found nothing exaggerated. The radicalism of the African spokespersons brought the abscess to a head and shone the spotlight on the unacceptable nature of the veto, on the collusion between the major powers, and above all on the insignificant role allotted to the Third World.
Diplomacy as initiated by the newly independent peoples is no longer a matter of nuances, innuendoes, and hypnotic passes. Their spokesmen have been assigned by their population to defend both the unity of the nation, the welfare of the masses as well as the right to freedom and self-sufficiency.
It is therefore a diplomacy in motion, in rage, which contrasts strangely with the petrified, motionless world of colonization. And when Mr. Khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the United Nations and hammers the table with it, no colonized individual, no representative of the underdeveloped countries laughs. For what Mr. Khrushchev is showing the colonized countries who are watching, is that he, the missile-wielding muzhik, is treating these wretched capitalists the way they deserve. Likewise Castro attending the UN in military uniform does not scandalize the underdeveloped countries. What Castro is demonstrating is how aware he is of the continuing regime of violence. What is surprising is that he did not enter the UN with his sub machine gun; but perhaps they wouldn't have allowed that. The revolts, the acts of desperation, the factions armed with machetes or axes find their national identity in the unrelenting struggle that pits capitalism against socialism. p.35-38
Different book Excerpt from Black Skin, White Masks
It’s in the name of tradition that the anti-Semites base their “point of view.” It’s in the name of tradition, the long, historical past and the blood ties with Pascal and Descartes, that the Jews are told: you will never belong here. Recently, one of these good French folks declared on a train where I was sitting: “May the truly French values live on and the race will be safeguarded! At the present time we need a national union. No more internal strife! A united front against the foreigners [and turning to me] whoever they may be.”
It should be said in his defense that he stank of cheap red wine. If he could, he would have told me that as a freed slave my blood was incapable of being inflamed by the names of Villon or Taine.
Disgraceful!
The Jew and I: not satisfied with racializing myself, by a happy stroke of fate, I was turning more human. I was drawing closer to the Jew, my brother in misfortune.
Disgraceful!
At first glance it might seem strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe. p.121-122
(...)
So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, “standing at the helm,”governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and it’s not a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, “porous to every breath in the world.” I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a “certain world,” lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being unused to such reactions. The reason was that above the objective world of plantations and banana and rubber trees, I had subtly established the real world. The essence of the world was my property. Between the world and me there was a relation of coexistence. I had rediscovered the primordial One. My “speaking hands” tore at the hysterical throat of the world. The white man had the uncomfortable feeling that I was slipping away and taking something with me. He searched my pockets, probed the least delineated of my convolutions. There was nothing new. Obviously I must have a secret. They interrogated me; turning away with an air of mystery, I murmured:
Tokowaly, uncle, do you remember the nights gone by
When my head weighed heavy on the back of your patience or
Holding my hand your hand led me by shadows and signs
The fields are flowers of glowworms, stars hang on the grass and the
trees
Silence is everywhere
Only the scents of the bush hum, swarms of reddish bees that drown
the crickets’ shrill sounds,
And muffled drums, the distant breathing of the night,
You Tokowaly, you listen to what cannot be heard, and you explain to
me what the ancestors are saying in the sea-like serenity of the
constellations,
The familiar bull, the scorpion, the leopard, the elephant and the fish,
And the milky brilliance of the Spirits in the shell of celestial infinity,
But here comes the complicity of the goddess Moon and the veils of
the shadows fall,
Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and
shining.
So here I was poet of the world. The white man had discovered poetry that had nothing poetic about it. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and as a friend who taught in the United States told me: “The Blacks represent a kind of insurance for humanity in the eyes of the Whites. When the Whites feel they have become too mechanized, they turn to the Coloreds and request a little human sustenance.” At last I had been recognized; I was no longer a nonentity. p.127-129
There is no such objective thing as "the west" because it is a globe and it is relative to where you stand and the cultures which make up the "west" are varied with very different histories and very tangled and difficult to separate throughlines where they do exist, and the defining lines of what is and isn't "the west" get less-and-less clear the more you zoom in or try to look objectively. So when people say "western values," it is all of this and more, in the history and the dialectical relationships of the "western world" with the "other"; in the religious, social, sociological, scientific, cultural, political, military, economic, imperial, colonial, etc. relationships and interactions through history unfolding through reality and living through now. It is through the history and power dynamics and the dialectical relationship toward and coming from these "others" that out of "the west" produced a construct of "west vs east" in which it centers itself as the central pivot point and axiomatically superior, by way of the "other," the "east", the "colonized" the "black/brown/yellow races" or whatever manifestation-angle you're looking at, being as axiomatically as an "inferior" and an "exotic" and altogether an "other" to the historical forces of Europe which became the global dominators.
It is this same kind of socio-political dialectical relationship as "whiteness" to "non-whiteness," (racialization and white supremacy being itself a representation and one of the manifested constructs of this "west vs east" "us vs them,") where it is an elastic and evolving superstructural construct, purely invented but self-organized into a practical reality by the "superior/master" in the relationship dialectic; with many specific relations and implications of its existence and current form, undergirded by the huge webs of material historical realities and dynamics from which they arose; unfolded to now on the lines of these dialectical relationships and their contradictions, between these different parts of the world in their geographies and their people --- ruling classes, militaries, academics, artists, and all that these theorists quoted above said and more. There is no real biological bases for "white" vs "black" races. Just like there is no objective "white" values vs "black" values, because even within those classifications as we know them today there are many diverse groups with many diverse cultures and histories and material conditions. "white values" and "black values" only exist as they were self-organized and self-reinforced within and out of the wider material systems of interaction, power and exploitation, colonialism and slavery, imperialism and violence, which gave rise to and perpetuated the itself-materially-baseless constructs of racialization and racial categorization, which itself gives rise to and perpetuates as "values" certain outcomes and perspectives generated in the dialectical interactions and struggles in this inhrently antagonistic relationship between the 'us' and the 'them', the master and the slave, the colonizer and the colonized, etc; which then are carried and evolved through the superstructural mechanisms of culture, art, science and academia and historiography, etc. to cyclically reinforce the base and cycle back through this process as a living evolving social phenomenon
Also see this: https://hexbear.net/comment/5474294
Different book Excerpt from Black Skin, White Masks
There is no such objective thing as "the west" because it is a globe and it is relative to where you stand and the cultures which make up the "west" are varied with very different histories and very tangled and difficult to separate throughlines where they do exist, and the defining lines of what is and isn't "the west" get less-and-less clear the more you zoom in or try to look objectively. So when people say "western values," it is all of this and more, in the history and the dialectical relationships of the "western world" with the "other"; in the religious, social, sociological, scientific, cultural, political, military, economic, imperial, colonial, etc. relationships and interactions through history unfolding through reality and living through now. It is through the history and power dynamics and the dialectical relationship toward and coming from these "others" that out of "the west" produced a construct of "west vs east" in which it centers itself as the central pivot point and axiomatically superior, by way of the "other," the "east", the "colonized" the "black/brown/yellow races" or whatever manifestation-angle you're looking at, being as axiomatically as an "inferior" and an "exotic" and altogether an "other" to the historical forces of Europe which became the global dominators.
It is this same kind of socio-political dialectical relationship as "whiteness" to "non-whiteness," (racialization and white supremacy being itself a representation and one of the manifested constructs of this "west vs east" "us vs them,") where it is an elastic and evolving superstructural construct, purely invented but self-organized into a practical reality by the "superior/master" in the relationship dialectic; with many specific relations and implications of its existence and current form, undergirded by the huge webs of material historical realities and dynamics from which they arose; unfolded to now on the lines of these dialectical relationships and their contradictions, between these different parts of the world in their geographies and their people --- ruling classes, militaries, academics, artists, and all that these theorists quoted above said and more. There is no real biological bases for "white" vs "black" races. Just like there is no objective "white" values vs "black" values, because even within those classifications as we know them today there are many diverse groups with many diverse cultures and histories and material conditions. "white values" and "black values" only exist as they were self-organized and self-reinforced within and out of the wider material systems of interaction, power and exploitation, colonialism and slavery, imperialism and violence, which gave rise to and perpetuated the itself-materially-baseless constructs of racialization and racial categorization, which itself gives rise to and perpetuates as "values" certain outcomes and perspectives generated in the dialectical interactions and struggles in this inhrently antagonistic relationship between the 'us' and the 'them', the master and the slave, the colonizer and the colonized, etc; which then are carried and evolved through the superstructural mechanisms of culture, art, science and academia and historiography, etc. to cyclically reinforce the base and cycle back through this process as a living evolving social phenomenon
Also see this: https://hexbear.net/comment/5474294