Aimé Césaire, négritude, and the Papuan struggle

Today we commemorate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Aimé Césaire, a black emancipation activist from Martinique, French Caribbean.

In his writing entitled 'Discourse on colonialism', Aimé said that 

"Colonialism dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial acts, colonial undertakings, colonial conquests, based on contempt for the native man and justified by this contempt, inevitably tend to transform the one who performs them; that the colonizer, who, in order to give himself a clear conscience, becomes accustomed to seeing the other as a beast, training himself to treat him as a beast, tends objectively to transform himself into a beast. Colonization works to uncivilize the colonizer, to dumb him in the truest sense, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to lust, to violence, to racial hatred, to moral relativism."

Aimé actively fought in the 1950s against the French systemic racism towards black people. At that time, France had many colonies, especially in Africa. 

Together with his colleagues in the négritude movement, Aimé strongly opposed the French government's efforts to assimilate the black colonized people. Aimé's pamphlets were read by African intellectuals and inspired them to fight for independence from their colonial masters. Aimé's approach proved that a pen can be far more effective than a gun, and that the thoughts of an honest and courageous scholar are more powerful than an atomic bomb. 

Today, Aimé Césaire's writings are still a reference for the emancipation of black people around the world. They are also very relevant to the struggle of Papuans in Indonesia.

Indeed, during Indonesia's sixty-year occupation of Papua, indigenous Papuans have experienced "the terrible violence of colonial rule, with death, dispossession, deprivation of liberty and, above all, the profound denial of human dignity through political, economic and cultural domination." To two and a half million Papuans, Indonesia has cleverly instilled "fear, inferiority complex, trembling, kneeling, despair, larbinism."

With Aimé I would like to say:

"I am of the race of those who are oppressed. My mouth will be the mouth of the unfortunate who have no mouth, my voice, the freedom of those who slump in the dungeon of despair".

In the twists and turns of the Papuan independence struggle,

"I still have hope because I believe in man. Maybe it's stupid. Man's path is to achieve humanity, to become self-aware. I refuse to despair because to despair is to refuse life. We have to keep the faith."