EVALUATION BETWEEN THE EXTREMES

Not all writers cluster around the far ends of the opinion spectrum. Many occupy positions between the extremes in portraying colonialism as having both costs and benefits. Exemplifying this balance-sheet approach is Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first president, who writes of

a strange mixture of advantages and disadvantages, curses and blessings.

The Congo’s first premier, Patrice Lumumba, shifted from one end of the spectrum to the other as political conditions changed. Writing in the mid-1950s, when he believed that Belgium would develop the country in the interests of all and that evolues like himself would serve as intermediaries between top officials and the populace, Lumumba was almost obsequious in praise of Belgian rule:

To whom do we owe our liberation from that odious trade practiced by the bloodthirsty Arabs and their allies, those inhuman brigands who ravaged the country?

At a time when our people were suffering from these atrocities, when they were being decimated by sleeping sickness and... when thousands of the inhabitants of the country were being carried away in chains to be sold like cattle in gruesome markets...

As regards the mistakes that were made, I have already said that they are inherent in any human activity, be it in Africa, Europe, or any other country of the world.... Let us stop railing against these few mistakes.²⁴

Subsequent events in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa profoundly radi­calized Lumumba’s views. Responding at Independence Day celebrations to a pa­tronizing address by King Baudouin, the premier departed from the program to launch an impassioned attack on the departing rulers:

[Our struggle was] noble and just, a struggle indispensable for ending the humil­iating slavery that was imposed upon us by force.

Considering what we went through during 80 years of colonial rule, our wounds are still too fresh and too painful to be erased from memory. We have known exhausting labor, extracted in exchange for wages too low to enable us to satisfy our hunger, or decently clothe and house ourselves, or raise our children as loved ones.

We have experienced sarcastic remarks, insults, beatings morning, noon, and night, because we were niggers [nfegres]. Who can forget that a black person was addressed as “tu”—most certainly not as one would speak to a friend—but because the honorific “vous” was reserved only for whites?...

We have known that in the towns there were magnificent homes for the whites and ramshackle huts for the blacks, that blacks couldn’t be admitted to the cinemas, the restaurants, and the stores designated for Europeans....

Finally, who can forget the gunshots that killed so many of our brothers, the prison cells into which were brutally thrown those who refused to submit any more to a system of oppression and exploitation?²⁵

A regime that at one point was perceived as a liberator from slavery became at a later point, under other circumstances, an agent of enslavement.

Karl Marx’s writings on the British in India illustrate a different kind of cost­benefit analysis. For Marx it is not that some of colonialism’s features are positive and others negative, but that the same features assume variable meanings depending on the time frame employed to interpret them. The costs imposed by capitalism and British rule were severe in the short term. But they were also a necessary condition for India’s eventual escape from economic and social stagnation. Marx subjects the greedy and often cruel behavior of the British to withering condemnation. But he does the same for traditional social structures the new rulers and industrial magnates are undermining. He writes in 1853 of India’s villages,

These small family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that pecu­liar combination of hand-weaving, hand-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized com­munities, by blowing up their economic basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness these myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual mem­bers losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and their heredi­tary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village commu­nities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all gran­deur and historical energies.... We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never- changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of na­ture, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

When uninvited outsiders use morally flawed methods to destroy a morally flawed social structure, what judgment should be passed? Marx continues:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about the revolution.²⁶

Marx advanced what might be termed the doctrine of regrettable yet progres­sive necessity. We hear echoes of this doctrine when Nehru writes decades later, “I feel sure that it was a good thing for India to come in contact with the scientific and industrial West. Science was the great gift of the West; India lacked this, and without it she was doomed to decay. The manner of our contacts was unfortunate and yet, perhaps, only a succession of violent shocks could shake us out of our torpor.”²⁷

In Marx’s view, “England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destruc­tive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.” This latter mission did not preclude industrial development. On the contrary,

when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrica­tion. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately con­nected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.²⁸

These views placed Marx sharply at odds with his putative disciple Lenin. The German revolutionary theorist insisted that capitalist colonialism plays a historically progressive role, at least in its initial impact on agrarian societies. The Russian revolutionary activist insisted that the impact of advanced capitalism was harmful in all circumstances, and only harmful. Marx envisaged the diffusion of industrial development to some backward areas under colonialism; Lenin denied such a pos­sibility. As the Marxist writer Bill Warren points out, Lenin’s views prevailed in sub­sequent socialist and communist interpretations of capitalism even though Marx’s analysis and predictions were far closer to the mark.²⁹