Culture and colonisation
Aimé CESAIRE
Address at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (1956)
(edited excerpt)
For the past few days we have been greatly exercised as regards the significance of this Congress. More particularly, we have wondered what is the common denominator of an assembly that can unite men as different as Africans of native Africa, and North Americans, as men from the West Indies and from Madagascar.
To my way of thinking the answer is obvious and may be briefly stated in the words: colonial situation.
It is a fact that most native countries live under the colonial system. Even an independent country like Haiti is, in fact, in many respects a semi-colonial country. And our American brothers themselves, thanks to racial discrimination, occupy within a great modern nation an artificial position that can only be understood within the context of a colonialism that has certainly been abolished but whose after-effects still persist down to the present day.
What does this mean? It means that in spite of our desire to maintain a note of calm in the discussions of the Congress we cannot, if we are to come to grips with the situation, avoid raising the problem that has the greatest influence upon the development of native cultures, namely, the colonial situation. In other words, whether we like it or not, we cannot pose the problem of native culture without at the same time posing the problem of colonialism, for all native cultures are to-day developing under the peculiar influence of the colonial, semi-colonial or para-colonial situation.
But what, you may ask, is culture? It is desirable that this should be defined in order to dissipate certain misunderstandings and reply very precisely to certain anxieties that have been expressed by some of our enemies, and even by some of our friends.
The legitimacy of this Congress has, for example, been questioned. It has been said that if culture must be national, surely, to speak of Negro-African culture is to speak of an abstraction.
Is it not obvious that the best way to avoid such difficulties is to choose our terms carefully?
I think it is very true that culture must be national. It is, however, self-evident that national cultures, however differentiated they may be, are grouped by affinities. Moreover, these great cultural relationships, these great cultural families, have a name: they are called civilisations. In other words, if it is an undoubted fact that there is a French national culture, an Italian, English, Spanish, German, Russian, etc., national culture, it is no less evident that all these cultures, alongside genuine differences, show a certain number of striking similarities so that, though we can speak of national cultures peculiar to each of the countries mentioned above, we can equally well speak of a European civilisation.
In the same way we can speak of a large family of African cultures which collectively deserve the name of Negro-African culture and which individually reveal the different cultures proper to each country of Africa. And we know that the hazards of history have caused the domain of this civilisation, the locus of this civilisation to exceed widely the boundaries of Africa. It is in this sense, there- fore, that we may say that there are, if not centres, at least fringes of this Negro-African civilisation in Brazil and in the West Indies, in Haiti and the French Antilles and even in the United States.
This is not just a theory invented for the purposes of the present argument; it is one that is, in my view, implied in a sociological and scientific approach to the problem.
The French sociologist Mauss defined civilisation as “a group of sufficiently numerous and sufficiently important phenomena spread over a sufficiently large number of territories". It may be inferred from this that civilisation tends towards universality and culture towards particularism; that culture is civilisation regarded as peculiar to one people or nation, not shared by any other, and that it indelibly bears the mark of that people or nation. To describe it from the outside, one might say that it is the whole corpus of material and spiritual values created by a society in the course of its history, and by values we mean, naturally, elements as diverse as technics and political institutions, things as fundamental as language or as fleeting as fashion, the arts as well as science or religion.
If, on the other hand, one were to define it in terms of purpose, revealing its dynamism, one would say that culture is the effort of any human collectivity to endow itself with the wealth of a personality.
This is tantamount to saying that civilisation and culture define two aspects of the same thing; civilisation defining the widest outskirts of culture, its most external and most general aspects, while culture represents an internal irradiant cell that is the most unique aspect of a civilisation.
It is known that Mauss, in his efforts to find reasons for the compartmentation of the world into clearly defined "civilisation areas", found them in a profound quality that was in his view com- mon to all the social phenomena and which he defined by the term arbitrary element. "All social phenomena ", he declared, "are to some extent the work of the collective will, and when we speak of human will, we infer a choice between different possibilities... It follows from this characteristic of representational collective practices that the area over which they spread, as long as humanity does not constitute a single society, is necessarily finite and relatively fixed". Thus, all culture is specific. Specific in that it is the work of a single particular will, choosing between different possibilities. We see where this idea leads.
To take a concrete example; it is indeed true to say that there is a feudal civilisation, a capitalist civilisation, a Socialist civilisation. But it is obvious that on the compost of the same economic pattern, life, the life passion, the élan vital of any people gives rise to very different cultures. This does not mean that there is no determinism running from base to superstructure. It means that the relation between base and superstructure is never simple and should never be simplified.
No better way could be found to say that civilisation is never so special that it does not pre-suppose, to breathe life into it, a whole constellation of ideational resources, traditions, beliefs, ways of thought, values, a whole intellectual equipment, a whole emotional complex, a fund of wisdom that precisely we call culture.
This, I submit, is what legitimises our present meeting. All who have met here are united by a double solidarity; on the one hand, a horizontal solidarity, that is, a solidarity created for us by the colonial, semi-colonial or para-colonial situation imposed upon us from without; and on the other, a vertical solidarity, a solidarity in time, due to the fact that we started from an original unity, the unity of African civilisation, which has become diversified into a whole series of cultures all of which, in varying degrees, owe something to that civilisation.
We may accordingly consider this Congress from two points of view, both of them equally valid, namely, that this Congress is a return to the sources, a phenomenon characteristic of all communities in times of crisis, while, it is at the same time an assembly of men who must get to grips with the same harsh reality, hence of men fighting the same fight and sustained by the same hope.
For my part, I can see no incompatibility between the two things. On the contrary, I believe the two aspects to be complementary and that our bearing, which may seem to indicate hesitation and embarrassment between the past and the future, is in fact only natural, seeing that it is inspired by the idea that the shortest way to the future is always one that involves a deep understanding of the past.
I now come to my main theme, namely, the concrete conditions underlying the problem of native cultures at the present day. I have said that this concrete conditioning may be briefly expressed as the colonial, semi-colonial or para-colonial situation in which these cultures are developing.
The question at once arises: What influences can such conditions have upon the development of these cultures? And first of all, can a political status have cultural consequences? This is not immediately obvious.
This influence of politics upon culture is expressly recognised by Hegel in the Lessons from the philosophy of history when he writes this innocent little phrase which Lenin, however, must have considered less innocent than it appears as he quoted it and underlined it twice in the Philosophical Notebooks:
"The importance of nature should be neither over- nor under- estimated; certainly the gentle sky of Ionia greatly contributed to the grace of the poems of Homer. Nevertheless, it cannot in isolation produce Homers. Nor does it always produce them. No bard arises under Turkish domination”.
This can mean only one thing, namely, that a political and social system that suppresses the self-determination of a people thereby kills the creative power of that people.
Or, what amounts to the same thing, wherever colonialism has existed, whole peoples have been deprived of their culture, deprived of all culture.
It is in this sense that the historic meeting in Bandung may be said to have been not only a major political event; it was also a cultural event of the first magnitude in that it was the peaceful rising of peoples athirst not only for justice and human dignity but for what colonialism had chiefly denied them, namely, justice.
The mechanism of the death of culture and of civilisations under the colonial system is beginning to be well known. In order to flourish, a culture must have a framework, a structure. Nothing can be surer than that the elements that buttress the cultural life of a colonised people disappear or become debased as a result of the colonial system. I am referring naturally in the first place to political organisation. For it must not be forgotten that the political organisation freely evolved by a people is a significant factor in the culture of that people and, moreover, conditions that particular culture.
Furthermore, there is the question of language. Language has been called "psychology petrified". The native language, the language learnt at school, the language of ideas, once it ceases to be the official and administrative language suffers a loss of status that hinders its development and sometimes threatens its very existence.
We must fully grasp this idea. When the English destroy the state organisation of the Ashantis in the Gold Coast, they deal a blow to Ashanti culture. When the French refuse to recognise as official languages Arabic in Algeria or Malgache in Madagascar, thus preventing them from achieving their full potentiality in the modern world, they deal a blow to Arab culture and Madagascan culture. Limitation of the colonised civilisation, suppression or debasement of all that it rests on, how in these conditions can we feel surprised at the suppression of one of the characteristics of all live civilisations, namely the faculty of self-renewal?
It is, we know, a commonplace in Europe to disparage nationalist movements in the colonial countries by representing them as obscurantist forces priding themselves on reviving medieval ways of life and thought. This, however, is to forget that the power to leave behind the past is one that belongs to a live civilisation, and that a civilisation is alive when the society in which it finds expression is free. What is happening at present in Africa or in free Asia is, in my view, highly significant in this respect. I shall confine myself to remarking that it is Free Tunisia that has abolished the religious tribunals, not colonial Tunisia, and that it is Free Tunisia that has nationalised Habu properties and abolished polygamy and not the Tunisia of the colonists; that it was the India of the English that maintained the traditional status of the Indian woman, but an India freed from British tutelage that gave the Indian woman equal rights with man.
Let us not delude ourselves! Limited in its action, its dynamism hampered, the civilisation of the colonised society from the first day enters the twilight that is the precursor of the end.
Spengler, in his Decline of the West, quotes these lines from Goethe:
"Thus thou must be, no man his face can change.
So saith Apollo, thus the prophet spoke
Develop in life the form graven in thee
That neither time, nor king, nor law can break".
The great reproach we may justly level at Europe is that she broke the upsurge of civilisations that had not yet reached full flowering, that she did not permit them to develop and achieve the full richness of the forms graven in them.
…
I believe that, once the external obstacles have been overcome, our particular cultures contain within them enough strength, enough vitality, enough regenerative powers to adapt themselves to the conditions of the modern world and that they will prove able to provide for all political, social, economic or cultural problems, valid and original solutions, that will be valid because they are original.
In the culture that is yet to be born, there will be without any doubt both old and new Which new elements? Which old? Here alone our ignorance begins. And in truth it is not for the individual to reply. Only the community can give the answer. We may, however, affirm here and now that it will be given and not verbally but by facts and by action.
And this is what finally enables us to define our role as black men of culture. Our role is not to prepare a priori the plan of future native culture, to predict which elements will be integrated and which rejected. Our role, an infinitely more humble one, is to proclaim the coming and prepare the may for those who hold the answer--the people, our peoples, freed from their shackles, our peoples with their creative genius finally freed from all that impedes them and renders them sterile.
To-day we are in a cultural chaos. Our part is to say: Free the demiurge that alone can organise this chaos into a new synthesis, a synthesis that will deserve the name of culture, a synthesis that will be a reconciliation and an overstepping of both old and new". We are here to ask, nay to demand: "Let the peoples speak! Let the black peoples take their place upon the great stage of history!"