For a Diverse and Plural Millenium
http://alainet.org/publica/cmrx/en/

Inventing a Common Memory^*

Alain Gresh

"No philanthropy or racial theory can convince reasonable people that the preservation of a tribe of Cafre in South Africa...is more important for the future of humanity than the expansion of big European nations and of the white race in general", wrote Paul Rohrbach, responsible for German immigration to Southeast Africa, in his best-seller published in 1912, El pensamiento alemán en el mundo. And he added: "Whether it is peoples or individuals, beings who do not produce anything of value cannot pose claims on their right to existence".

European "superiority", "backwardness" of Africa, "hierarchy" of civilizations, the evolution theory applied to human societies served as an ideological basis for colonization. In the 19^th century this doctrine of supremacy was encouraged by the invention of the concept of "race", a concept invested with the aura of positivist science. Since then, the difference between human beings no longer corresponds to historical or cultural explanation, but to biological analysis. As Eric Savrèse points out, it "is not demonstrated, it is verified"¹. The hierarchy among Blacks, Whites, Yellows appears as evidence, in the same way as the roundness of the Earth.

The whole world knows the famous speech by Jules Ferry in the House of Representatives, on July 29, 1885: "I reiterate that for superior races there is a right because there is a duty for them. They have the right to civilize inferior races". Above all, he refuted the right of Blacks from Equatorial Africa to equality. But, if Blacks are not equal, who are? Where are they located in the scale going from animals to human beings? Are they even human beings?

In 1897 a particularly lethal ammunition was invented: the dum-dum bullet. Its use was prohibited by "civilized" States since 1899 by an international convention subscribed in The Hague. It was reserved for big game and...for colonial wars². At the same time, Heirich von Treischke, an expert in international politics dared to write: "International law becomes only words if we want to equally apply its principles to barbarian peoples. In order to punish a black tribe, one must burn their villages.* Nothing will be obtained if that doesn't serve as an example. If in similar cases the empire would apply international law, it would not be humanity or justice, but a shameful weakness". These theories are not limited to the Old Continent. At the end of his term, the North American president Theodore Roosevelt, a voice for colonization, declares that, after due consideration, "the expansion of white races has carried lasting advantages" for "backward" peoples. He even recognizes that "some savages were extinguished, whether well- or mistreated, because they were incapable of confronting civilization"³.

During this entire period, it was the humanity of the Other that was denied, since "savages" were closer to animals, separated from "us" by an insurmountable barrier. Frantz Fanon in Los condenados de la tierra stresses that: "Sometimes that Manicheanism goes to the end of its logic and dehumanizes colonized people. Properly speaking, it turns them into animals. And, indeed, the language of the colonizer, when he speaks of the colonized, is a zoological language. There are allusions to the slithering movement of Yellows, emanations from the indigenous village, hordes, pestilence, swarming, bustle, gesticulation. The colonizer, when he has to describe and find the right word, constantly resorts to the bestiary"⁴.

This representation allowed the West to justify its domination and its incredible brutality. Thus the use of torture during the war in Algeria makes sense. It was, in no way, an "accident", an "excess", an "abuse" due to exceptional circumstances of the war and it was hidden by political authorities who were too cowardly or too blind. It was of the same nature as colonization, from its origin. It was no more than the extension of a perception of the Other as fundamentally different, as naturally inferior, an Other that must be "civilized" and who, if necessary, may be eliminated without remorse. To broaden the debate on torture requires, therefore, to re-think colonization.

From August 31^st to September 7^th 2001, the World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance will be held in Durban, South Africa, sponsored by the United Nations. Various issues have been approached in preparatory meetings. African NGO's have specially requested that the slave traffic and slavery⁵ be recognized as "crimes against humanity". One of main contentious points with western delegations concerns the demand of old colonies to receive "reparations".

This demand, no matter how justified it may be, has no possibility of obtaining results if the West does not examine colonialism in retrospect, their crimes, the ideology that made them possible. It is not only a matter of making an inventory, although this will often produce shivers. We have a series of documents and testimonies on some of the massive crimes of the 20^th century. The genocide of Jews has been the subject of endless literature. The crimes of Stalinism, particularly since the Soviet Union sunk, have been well documented. On the other hand, the price of colonial conquests often appears only in the margins, between lines. On the occasion of the recent confrontations if Aceh, Indonesia, it could be read that "peace-building" in this island by the Netherlands at the beginning of the 20^th century, had taken 70 thousand deaths. In the Philippines, regarding a coverage on the hold-up of western hostages, we found out, in the margins, that the US American repression of an uprising (1899-1907) caused 200 thousand deaths. In the African Southeast (which would become Namibia), the German conquest was accompanied by genocide committed against the Herero population, whose extension only now begins to be known. "Inside the German border, every Herero, with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot", general von Trotha valiantly proclaimed in October 1904⁶. Examples could be multiplied, from Congo martyred by king Leopold II to India subjected to British domination; without forgetting, of course, the massacres of Setif in 1945 or the repression of the Malgache uprising in 1947.

This is not only history. The lives of millions of men and women continue being affected both by the massacres and by decades of stabs on societies that were to be so-called Third World. This certainly justifies the demand for "reparations", raised equally by descendants of slaves from the Antilles or the United States, as by formerly colonized countries. Couldn't this colonial debt be exchanged for the debt of the Third World?

For a long time France evaded the shady episode of Vichy. Decades of efforts, investigations, controversies were required to come out of the era of lies. An equivalent work is now necessary for the entire history of colonization, more so as this "colonial amnesia" also influences, in indirect ways, France's destiny. Millions of French people are originally from the formerly colonized territories. Nevertheless, contrary to their Italian or Spanish predecessors, they are perceived with the same lenses, the same cliches that produced colonization. "Imaginary Magrebians of the 80's are similar, to the point of becoming undistinguishable from Arabs known through the filters of imperial stereotypes," Eric Savarèse observes, "Roguish, cruel, thieves, incapable of freeing themselves from sexuality, violent, fanatic, dangerous, vane, cowardly: nothing, or almost nothing, is missing from the portrait established, a century before, by ethnologists and travelers". And he adds: "Besides, the problem of migration - identified with Magrebian immigration- does not exist today, except that the issue is widely conceived through the elements of a colonial memory"⁷.

Let us imagine for a while French youth leafing through history manuals. What image will a youth whose father fought in the NLF or simply "suffered" "peace-building" have? How will that other youth, of African origin, react towards the silence over decades of colonization of his/her country of origin? And that other of Vietnamese or even Antillean origin? Of course, "our ancestors, the Gales" have disappeared. But colonization, intermingled with a large part of the history of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics - not to mention the conquest of Algeria -, remains being approached in an allusive manner, almost as if it had to do with foreign history, which does not concern "us". Nevertheless, for these hundreds of thousands of French people "products of immigration", this history, transmitted by parents, are part of their identity⁸. In this new century, the claim for a French identity goes through the creation of a unifying "common memory". A common memory that returns colonization to the place, in the concrete and in the imaginary spheres, it occupied in the history of France.

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