As part of my research for an essay on African writer Chinua Achebe, published in The Federalist this past February, I reread Albert Memmi’s monograph The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) in order to refresh my memory on some of the finer philosophical points of that seminal anti-colonialist treatise. Since my essay was arguing that Achebe, in his novel Things Fall Apart, had produced a remarkably balanced perspective on the incursion of the English into Nigeria despite being himself an ardent anti-colonialist, I thought I might benefit from reminding myself of some of the more trenchant points of that position from a writer who had laid significant groundwork for that now canonized critique.
No one has any reason to carefully enumerate these points any longer because the critique of the Western colonizer has been a three-quarter-century long project culminating in its being enshrined as intellectual gospel. And certainly no academic in his or her right mind would ever consider questioning even a small part of the argument that has led so definitively to the conclusion that the white man is objectively guilty of crimes against humanity for having colonized vast swaths of the earth and its inhabitants.
And that judgment may be correct. However, there is nothing under the sun that should be permanently shielded from examination. That’s religion, not intellectual inquiry, and not even all religions at that.
As I read Memmi’s small but incredibly influential book, I found that I had no arguments with his analysis and condemnation of the colonizer per se in its general formulation. Most reasonable people in the civilized world believe that one sovereign nation invading another is an act of war; that subjugating its peoples physically and psychologically is the behavior of a conquering force; and that outside of some specific deadly provocation there exists no justification for such an act. That people have engaged in such depredations for the entirety of human history is simply a miserable and unjust fact of life in this mortal coil.
However, as I read further I began to see a rather glaring problem with Memmi’s analysis that I’m sure was noted long ago but still needs mentioning now for reasons I’ll get to further on. His analysis of the degraded state of the colonized focused, reasonably enough, on the particular historical moment with which he was familiar—the French colonization of North Africa, specifically Tunisia where he was born—and focuses exclusively on that pairing without including any broader historical framework. And his treatise goes into great detail describing the myriad ways the Arab population was subjugated by their French overlords, physically, economically, and psychologically.
So what’s the problem with this? It’s the classic problem in argumentation of specific instances versus the generalities that support them. The claim that the Arab people’s humiliating oppression was wrong rests on the general notion that oppressing people is—wrong. Otherwise, there’s no support for the specific claim of injustice. And yet nowhere in his text is there any indication that Memmi is aware of the fact that the dehumanized objects of colonial disdain—in his lifetime Arabs—had themselves performed the self-same physical incursion into the region in the seventh century and the self-same psychological depredations on the Roman inhabitants of North Africa who lived there prior to the arrival of the Arabs.
Why is this important to note? After all, that incursion took place so long ago it’s as if the Arabs are the original inhabitants of all the countries of North Africa, as I’m sure many of them believe despite archeological evidence to the contrary. (El Djem, anyone?)
Well, it’s important to point this out because people in our age have been so brainwashed into equating “colonizer” with “white people” that it is doubtful that even academics are able to discern the severely truncated version of history required to make the argument that Europeans are exclusively agents of colonization. Most of us are aware that the university has replaced learning about subjects and history with meditating ad nauseam about power relations. It’s an idée fixe, and subsumes all of the cramped space in the minds of those who are supposed to be enlarging the intellectual horizons of others. But this particular idée fixe has had enormous consequences for all of Europe.
Muslim migrants to France, for instance, see themselves as “getting back” at the French colonizer by colonizing France themselves, and there are plenty of videos showing young migrants testifying to this intent. They’re issuing, in their minds, a historically justified payback and no one is calling them out on the irony.
That irony, to those who actually read history, extends far beyond the Mediterranean shores of North Africa, of course. The list of countries that were overrun by Arabs is long, as is the list of countries that are now nearly exclusively Islamic that weren’t prior to invasion. And that rather glaring historical fact needs to be trumpeted at those who are now invading Europe and those who are enabling it as if it is some sort of cosmic retribution for past wrongs.
Let’s get things straight, shall we? Very few cultures can escape the accusation of having once had imperial ambitions. And Islam most assuredly has since its inception–and still does.
Jocelynn Cordes is an author, essayist, and literary critic. She has published literary criticism and book reviews in scholarly journals as well as short fiction in anthologies. Her essays have appeared in The Federalist as well as her local newspapers. Under the pen name Plum McCauley she has produced two award winning novels, “It All Started with a Bicycle” and “Worthy of Prometheus.” Jocelynn has a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature and completed the coursework for the Ph.D. in modernism and critical theory. She is currently working on her third novel.