Colonization

Summary

Dominique Pagani starts from his experience as a colonists' child in Benin and Togo. A cook points out to him that no white man works on the hospital construction site, and he concludes that class relations weigh more than race or identity. He also pays tribute to the African schoolteachers who taught him French1. He mentions the extermination of the Caribbean Indians in connection with the savage, the one who flees from the civilized2. With Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'Aventure ambiguë, he reads the arrival of the Whites as a clash of worlds, in which the foreign school is both dreaded and necessary3. He treats colonization as a cunning of reason: the colonial school trained the leaders of independence, such as Ben Bella or Ho Chi Minh. He specifies that he is not praising colonization, but the good use the colonized made of it4. In 2024, speaking about the Sahel, he presents colonialism as a species of imperialism. In his view, the United States is the only case of fully accomplished colonization, and the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union dominate Africa today5.

1. 1N for Niger28 Dec 2014
2. 2S for Savagery2 Jan 2015
3. 3Worldliness in Clouscard: the clash of worlds?9 Jul 2023
4. 4Worldliness in Clouscard: the world as “cunning of reason”22 Jul 2023
5. 5Sahelian Africa and imperialism: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger23 Mar 2024

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.