Colonizer And The Colonized Summary

In this excerpt from The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi claims that the power established by a colonizer is doubly illegitimate and is maintained at the detriment of the natives. Memmi argues that the colonizer has not obtained his power “by virtue of local laws… but by upsetting the established rule and substituting his own.” This is the first layer of illegitimacy. The second layer of illegitimacy is that the usurper is conscious of their own invalid power. Memmi also argues that the colonizer’s illegitimate power can only be retained through the exploitation of the colonized people as the colonizer must always be the most privileged in the land despite other natives being more powerful by the original local law. Memmi’s contentions

This claim made by Memmi is supported by many accounts of imperialism. Kincaid, in On Seeing England for the First Time writes “make me feel awe and small whenever I heard the word "England": awe at the power of its existence, small because I was not from it.” The power of England made others feel small and insecure for not being from there. This slowly makes the colonized feel irrelevant because they are from a “lesser” place. The colonizers are trying to make the colonized feel lesser than them too because this is the only way in which their power can be maintained. The colonized must believe that they are lesser than the English for nothing other than not being English. Without this kind of brainwashing, England could not maintain their power in Antigua, where this story takes place. This is also seen in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant when the state of some of the native people is described. Orwell writes about the state that the criminal live in as “stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been bogged with bamboos.” The poor treatment of the native people, the description of their dejected, hopeless faces shows the immense suppression of the colonized. They must be quelled and every glimmer of hope must be taken from them in order for the colonizer to maintain his power. As long as the colonized believe

Many of the tribesmen in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart are not interested in fighting the missionaries because they brought economic success to the tribe. However, in order for this form of imperialism to be truly well intentioned, there exists a necessity for mutual respect of both cultures. The colonized must respect the ideas of the colonizer and most importantly the colonizer must respect the culture and traditions of the colonized. This is very rarely seen. Joseph Conrad writes "I had no difficulty in finding the Company's offices. It was the biggest thing in the town, and everybody I met was full of it. They were going to run an over-sea empire, and make no end of coin by trade," (pg 14) in Heart of Darkness. This quote shows the mindset of British conquerors that colonies are seen as businesses for monetary gain. There is no hint at their intentions being to improve the life of the indigenous, ‘less civilized’ people. There is also something inherently racist in the idea that any culture is less civilized than another. Achebe beautifully frames this thought in his essay An Image of Africa by saying “it is the desire-one might indeed say the need- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe’s own state