°The gift of colonisation
[Recent television ad for right-wing newspaper, The Australian.]
In the chapter “Of Commandment”, Mbembe turns over some significant dispositions of colonial sovereignty. On one of those, he writes:
Yet the colonial potentate also portrays itself as a free gift, proposing to relieve its object of poverty and free it from debased condition by raising it to the level of a human being. That is what A. Sarraut called “the right of the stronger to aid the weaker.” Colonial conquest, he specified, “is not the right, but the fact of one who is stronger; the true right of the stronger is the generous right that he assumes to help, assist and protect the weaker, to be his guide and his guardian.” Raising the native to where he/she can contemplate the recovery of his/her rights requires moral education. The chief means of acheiving this is kindness, and its main aim is labor. Kindness is supposed to soften command. As for labor, it is supposed to make possible the creation of utilities, and to produce value and wealth by putting an end to scarcity and poverty. In addition it is supposed to ensure the satisfaction of needs and enhancement of enjoyments.
The state that flows from this sovereignty defines itself as protective. The native is its protege. The strength of this state lies as much in the feeling that arises from the right to protect the weak as frim the hard-headed quest for metropolitan profit. Its strength is a strength for good and goodness. It is also a family state, and to that extent a “family and filial bond binds the colonies to the mother country.” Yet the protective state could in no way look kindly on any abdication of the family guardianship over its “protege,” the native. The same is true of sovereignty - its moral superiority, the force of the good that brings as a gift.
[…] The figure of obedience and domination in the colony rests on the assertion that the state is under no social obligation to the colonised and this latter is owed nothing by the state but that which the state, in its infinite goodness, has deigned to grant and reserves the right to revoke at any moment.
