Discourse On Colonialism Analysis

Prompt #3 In “Discourse on Colonialism,” Aimé Césaire points out the similarities between Nazism and colonization. He takes the approach that the main difference between the two is that one happened to Africa and the other happened to Europe. In the Congo, brutality that took a different form than, but that can quite easily be compared to the holocaust took place under the rule of King Leopold II. Similarly, black South Africans were forced to abide by pass laws and were massacred at peaceful demonstrations. While the discriminatory violence was carried out differently in South Africa, the Congo, and through Nazism, all are comparable in that they involved one society dominating another society due to a sense of superiority. As Césaire bluntly

In World War II, there was a great deal of dehumanization and a separation between the victims and the perpetrators. In the Congo, physically cutting off the hand of someone else is extremely personal. Apart from treating the Congolese people as subhuman, it is difficult to separate the person to whom one is causing pain and mutilation from the act of cutting off someone’s hand as a trophy. The biggest difference in how the two acts of violence are treated in history is that one despicable act affected white Europeans and the other affected black

Those who opposed colonial rule were often arrested and tortured or starved until they died. The cause of death was not always reported truthfully. Additionally peaceful protests over injustices such as the pass laws ended in bloodshed. For example, “on 21 March 1960police in Sharpville, a black township fifty miles south of Johannesburg, opened fire on a crowd of PAC demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 186. Most of the casualties were shot in the back as they fled the gunfire” (Meredith 122). The retreating Africans were massacred without a second thought just as the Jewish people were killed in Germany with little to no hesitation. When a group of people are dehumanized and separated into a “them” rather than remain part of the “us” it can easily lead to discriminatory action and