Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

He begins his book with ‘A Portrait of the Colonizer’, but in view of my homage to the nature of the work’s achievement, despite its shortcomings, I’ll reverse the order of chapters and begin with Chapter Two, ‘Portrait of the Colonised’. I take permission for this chronological impertinence from the very first sentence of the chapter: ‘Just as the bourgeoisie proposed an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested.’ That image is where colonisation begins; its premise, its ikon.

The subtitle of the chapter has the rider ‘The Mythological Portrait of the Colonized’ (my italics) — Memmi’s wry comment on the ‘dialectic exalting the colonizer and humbling the colonized’. In colonialist mythology the colonised is a litany of faults and inadequacies. He’s unbelievably lazy — at the same time this authorises his low wages. Skilled work is done by the coloniser’s compatriots, imported; and if Memmi’s typecast of their physique and demeanour is a caricature, it’s sketched with the quick flash of humour. Irony makes its point in that light: ‘The colonized … is asked only for his muscles; he is so poorly evaluated that three or four can be taken on for the price of one European.’ Memmi turns the reader to the conclusion left out of the coloniser’s evaluation: ‘… one can wonder, if their [the coloniseds’] output is mediocre, whether malnutrition, low wages, a closed future, a ridiculous conception of a role in society, does not make the colonized uninterested in his work’. The coloniser having established that the colonised is a ‘hopeless weakling’, from this, Memmi shows, comes the concept of a ‘protectorate’: it is in the colonised’s own interest that he be excluded from management functions, and that those heavy responsibilities be reserved for the coloniser. ‘Whenever the coloniser adds … that the colonised is a wicked, backward person, he thus justifies his police and his legitimate severity … The humanity of the colonised, rejected by the coloniser, becomes opaque … Useless … to try to forecast the coloniseds’ actions: (“They are unpredictable!” “With them you never know!”).’ Memmi chips in to these too-often overheard remarks: ‘The colonized must indeed be very strange, if he remains so mysterious after years of living with the coloniser.’

‘The colonised means little to the coloniser … The colonised is not this, is not that.’ This mythological portrait Memmi draws is of a stunning negation. For the coloniser, the colonised is nobody.

It is not only the rough-and-ready man who saw the conquered and colonised as the ultimate other. An intellectual began his work in Africa on the same premise. In 1928 a psychiatrist from Europe practising in a mental hospital for South African black men ‘made a startling discovery … the manifestations of insanity … are identical in both natives and Europeans … This discovery made me inquisitive to know if the working fundamental principles of the mind in its normal state were not also the same.’ 114But maybe Cecil Rhodes the empire-builder had the last word in assessment of the human worth of the colonised: ‘I prefer land to niggers.’ 115

‘We should not, however, delude ourselves … by thinking that if only the colonizers would have been more generous, more charitable, less selfish, less greedy for wealth, then everything would have been very much better than it is now — for in that case they would not have been colonizers.’ 116

‘Does The Colonial Exist?’ The title of the first part of Memmi’s analysis of the coloniser brings a semantic question to be got out of the way. Memmi’s use — or perhaps his translator’s use, in this English edition of the book — of the terms ‘colonial’ and colonizer’ as interchangeable. But a colonialist is one who advocates the policy of colonisation; further, he may be one delegated, within the Colonial Service, to administer that policy, a colonial functionary in the European power’s governance of territory taken by conquest of the original inhabitants. He is not a citizen of that territory, his country remains one across the world. A coloniser is a settler in the conquered territory, coming from another country but taking up residence and citizenship (usually granted after a period specified by the colonialist power). He occupies and owns, either under a settler dispensation to extend the ‘mother’ country’s domains, or purchased from it, land taken by that colonialist power from the indigenous people. The coloniser regards himself as a permanent inhabitant. The difference is important. Memmi does have a subcategory to his concept of the colonial/coloniser. This one, identified as the ‘European living in a colony having no privileges’ — a class distinction within the ruling class that places him barely above the colonised — certainly didn’t exist in the colonial countries I have known. The mere fact of skin colour guaranteed kith-and-kin privileges decreed by the colonial power. The category may have been singular to Tunisia.

It is with the coloniser’s indubitable existence that Memmi’s study recedes honourably to the shelves of the classic past. He sees the coloniser as one taking ‘simply a voyage towards an easier life’. There follows a fascinating account of the components of that easy life of the time — servants, climate, automatic qualification for superior status over the multitude. What Edward W. Said has defined as ‘How you supply the forces of world-wide accumulation and rule with a self-confirming ideological motor.’ 117The coloniser, Memmi continues ‘has not yet become aware of the historic role which will be his. He is lacking one step in his new status … the origin and significance of this profit … This is not long in coming. For how could he fail to see the misery of the colonised and the relation of that misery to his own comfort?’ The colonised kept underfoot are ‘no longer a simple component of geographical or historical decor. They assume a place in his life … He cannot even resolve to avoid them.’ He must constantly live in relation to them, for it is this very alliance which enables him to lead the life which he decided to ‘look for in the colonies; it is this relationship which creates privilege’. Memmi posits that the coloniser soon ‘knows, in his own eyes as well as those of his victim, that he is a usurper … He must adjust to being both regarded as such, and to this situation.’

What is missing in this analysis is what any coloniser knows — yes, I speak as a coloniser’s offspring — that the coloniser justified his/her situation by asserting that the colonisers brought enlightenment, technical as well as religious, to the indigenous people living in the heart of darkness. (It is almost obligatory to make a bow to Conrad, here.) On the coloniser’s scale there was a trade-off balance, a straight deal that could ignore morality. Memmi in turn seems to ignore this forced deal in its psychological impact on both sides. (He deals with it only in his 1965 preface.)

Studying the coloniser, Memmi gives much attention to the grades of privilege he says are accorded in the colonial situation, and it is here that it is most evident his perspective was coming from the Maghrib, culturally arabised territories, while only propositionally extended to the rest of the African continent and colonised countries everywhere. This leads to conclusions that do not necessarily hold good for colonisation generally. He draws interesting distinctions between the societal positions arrived at by colonisers coming from various countries to Tunisia and Algeria, for example, Italians, Maltese, Corsicans, Spaniards and Jews (who even if they are from Morocco evidently are from that non-place, the diaspora). These are candidates for assimilation at various levels. The different levels of their acceptance by the already settled coloniser population — what the colonised thought of the continuous invasion did not count — didn’t apply in any of the African countries I know. In these, if you were white you were welcomed by the colonial government and colonisers to shore up the white population, though as the colonial powers had been officially Christian since the Crusades, you were more welcome if you were of that faith. In South Africa right up to the end of the apartheid regime in 1994, whites only were accepted as immigrants. Once legally established, their situation in ‘black’ Africa was that of the indiscriminate privilege of being white. Even Jews did not, as Memmi avers in general, find themselves ‘rejected by the colonized’ and sharing ‘in part the physical conditions of the colonised, having a communion of interests with him’. In South Africa, which was to become the most prosperous and highly industrialised of countries on the African continent, some Jewish colonisers 118became founders of the gold and diamond industry, and their only share of the condition of the colonised was to employ them in their thousands to work underground as migrant labourers. Christian colonisers made the laws that ensured this labour supply, enforcing through taxes a cash economy in place of traditional land-based agricultural sufficiency.