Summary

These pages include two untitled, numberless chapters. Aimé Césaire opens Discourse on Colonialism with three statements about what makes a civilization decadent, sick, and dying. He then states that European, or “Western,” civilization is “incapable of solving…the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem” (31), that Europe is neither reasonable nor conscientious, and that it is therefore hypocritical. From this, he concludes that Europe is “morally, spiritually indefensible” (32). He writes that the people of the Third World know that their “‘masters’ are lying” (32).

The first lie that Césaire dissects regarding so-called Western civilization is the argument that a civilized society is one that colonizes. He defines colonialism not as evangelization or philanthropy but as the product of a so-called civilization who feels compelled to “extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies” (33). He rejects the “dishonest equations...