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

Many of Memmi’s conclusions, prognostications one might call them, have not been borne out by events. He considers the options of the coloniser, once he is aware ‘under the growing habit of privilege and illegitimacy’ that ‘he is also under the gaze of the usurped’. There is ‘his inevitable self-censure’. With the chapter ‘The Colonizer Who Refuses’ it is assumed that he is in this crisis of conscience for the sins of the fathers and his own. And now one must pause to set aside another of the confusions of terminology in the work. Memmi has visualised the coloniser as one in this condition who ‘immediately thinks of going home’ but ‘being compelled to wait until the end of his contract, he is liable to get used to the poverty [of the colonised]’. That man cited is a functionary of the colonial government, there is an official limit to his confrontation with guilt, he will leave it behind when his span of duty ends. The coloniser cannot be seen as one with him; the coloniser has no contract that will elapse. He has no determined span of the life he has been living; he is committed to it. Many continued to live as before, counting on the mother country to hold off change, keep the colonised at bay indefinitely.

Another coloniser ‘no longer agrees to become what his fellow citizens have become’. He is the genuine ‘Colonizer Who Refuses’. He remains — but vows not to accept the role of protagonist of colonisation. He will reject that disgraced position.

But how? Here Memmi’s analysis leaps — as it does impressively when he’s using his philosopher’s vision to relate a specific to an eternal human situation. ‘It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships. From now on, he lives his life under the sign of a contradiction which looms at every step, depriving him of all coherence and all tranquillity … What he is actually renouncing is part of himself … How can he go about freeing himself of the halo of prestige which crowns him?’ If the coloniser persists in refusal ‘he will learn that he is launching into an undeclared conflict with his own people’. Granted; but he will also discover others among colonisers who are ready to oppose, to one or another degree of courage, the regime that is defined in its very name — colonialism — as a give-away of injustice. 119

History has proved that there were more options open to the refusenik than Memmi would allow. There was the ‘humanitarian romanticism’ Memmi himself recognises, and says is ‘looked upon in the colonies as a serious illness … the worst of all dangers … no less than going over to the side of the enemy’. It is extraordinary that Memmi does not acknowledge that what was regarded as the worst of all dangers was not the reformist liberalism ‘humanitarian romanticism’ implies — in a black man’s definition ‘the role of the liberal as the conciliator between oppressor and oppressed’ 120— but the theory and tactics of Communism reaching the colonised.

Going beyond liberalism, the coloniser’s refusal has ‘closed the doors of colonialism to him and isolated him in the middle of the colonial desert’. No — he has isolated himself from the doomed false values of the colonial desert, voluntarily. But Memmi continues to follow the rebel’s downfall as he sees it: ‘Why not knock at the door of the colonized whom he defends and who would surely open their arms in gratitude?’ Memmi is dismissive of that knock at the door. ‘To refuse colonization is one thing; to adopt the colonized and be adopted by them seems to be another; and the two are far from being connected … To succeed in this second conversion, our man would have to be a moral hero.’ Memmi, still (out of habituation?) using the old condescending colonial vocabulary: ‘adopt’, ‘adopted’, evidently believes such men couldn’t exist. The hero ‘discovers that if the colonized have justice on their side, if he can go so far as to give them his approval and even his assistance, his solidarity stops there … He vaguely foresees the day of their liberation and the reconquest of their rights, but does not seriously plan to share their existence, even if they are freed.’ Memmi gives no example of a like situation he has observed. On what evidence — before the historical event — was his assumption based?

Again, I make no apology for the fact that as Memmi’s perspective peers into the subject from the Maghrib, mine comes from the Southern and Central African continent, with consonant limitations but also the experience implied. To suggest that the coloniser’s rebellion could serve no purpose in liberation of the colonised is to deny the possibility — outlawed, evidently, by what Memmi sees as the racially congenital deficiencies of all the colonisers — of a range of actions taken by rebels among them, from Stewart Gore-Brown accompanying UNIP’s Kenneth Kaunda to negotiate return of a territory, named for the arch-imperialist Rhodes, back from the British for rebirth as Zambia, to Ronnie Kasrils, white South African, becoming Head of Military Intelligence and Joe Slovo, white South African, as chief strategist, in South Africa’s liberation army, Umkhonto we Sizwe, during the guerrilla war against apartheid. Men and women Leftist colonisers in South Africa were imprisoned, as Nelson Mandela and thousands of his fellow black South Africans were, tortured as Steve Biko was, for activities with the liberation movements. Two of them, white South Africans Bram Fischer and Dennis Goldberg, were given life sentences.

This brings us to Memmi’s other summary dismissal of the Left in liberation from colonial regimes. For the Leftists of his generation, he states, ‘the word “nationalism” still evokes a reaction of suspicion, if not hostility’. For doctrinal reasons, yes, and in some experiences of his time, the 1950s, the Left felt ‘ill at ease before nationalism’. But political accommodation did not end there. In liberation movements that followed, from Ghana and Guinea-Bissau to Mozambique, Angola and beyond, the precepts and methods of the Left were adapted boldly in nationalism’s service. It was, if you like, ironical that an ideology from the white world should prove an effective tool of participation in overcoming the colonial powers of that world. (Of course it was the only solution, according to Marxist theory.) That Leftist ideology in Stalinist form overran nationalism, in some countries, with disastrous results for the freed colonised, is something one wonders how Memmi regards. Has he seen this as an extension of his thesis of the inadequacies of the colonised Left to take the true path of the Left and influence effectively the future of the colonised? And what does he think of the role of the Left today, in its renaissance after the collapse of the mother country, the Soviet Union, as now a force along with the Green and Feminist, Gay and Lesbian, multiple non-governmental groups, together against globalisation which leaves the former colonised still as the poorest in the world?

One of the tributary sources of Memmi’s failure of vision vis-à-vis the contribution of Leftist colonisers to the development of liberation movements is that he does not allow that the progeny of colonisers could earn a civic and national status other than that of coloniser, eternal outsider. Demonstrably, it is not valid to make the claim on natal grounds; that’s not enough. But he doesn’t allow that foreign plants might mutate and strike roots. As we have witnessed, history subsequent to his writing of this book has proved him in part right, in part wrong.

He is right, in that during the period of liberation movements arising and the post-colonial era that ensued, a majority of colonisers in many countries did not recognise the right of the colonised to liberation movements, nor were prepared to live under the independence of colonial rule these won. They made of themselves an anachronism, fossilised in the past. Many left; but deracinated from Europe, fled to wherever white rule might last a few more years — for example, from Angola, Mozambique and the Rhodesias to South Africa.