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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Critical South
- Sprache: Englisch
We, the Decolonized is a passionate reflection on the pitfalls of the decolonial venture in postcolonial countries, with particular reference to North Africa. Hélé Béji shows that in many formerly colonized countries, the reality of independence took the form of elusive freedom, widespread disillusionment and the insidious survival of forms of domination bequeathed by former colonial powers.
Béji delivers an trenchant critique of decolonization: the saddest of all liberties, because it has not kept its promises. Those who had vanquished colonialism, vindicated civilization and struggled free from the yoke of illegitimate government found themselves ensnared in a new trap, having achieved emancipation without liberation. They remained entangled in a compulsive recycling of colonial impulses. To re-embark on the route to a truly free society, intellectuals and political figures must lead by example in acknowledging the reality of the past, adopting tolerant attitudes towards religions and embracing a new and secular democratic mentality.
Béji’s important contribution to the decolonial canon will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the politics of decolonization in Africa and the Maghreb and in the Global South more broadly.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Foreword – Nouri Gana
Notes
Author
1 The Right to Self-Determination
2 Before Independence
Notes
3 After Independence
4 Foreigners to Ourselves
5 Critique of Decolonization
6 Behind the Façade
7 Anti-Westernism
8 In Search of Tradition
9 Uncivil Civility
10 Death and Life of God
11 Freedom and Necessity
12 The Disappearance of Humanism
13 The Vanity of Origins
14 Here, There
15 A Troubled Democracy
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela, Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi and Leticia Sabsay
Marío Pinto de Andrade,
The Revolution Will be a Poetic Act
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Hélé Béji,
We, the Decolonized
Maurits van Bever Donker,
Texturing Difference
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Aimé Césaire,
Toussaint Louverture
Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi and Aaron Kamugisha,
The Caribbean Race Reader
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Diego Falconí Trávez,
From Ashes to Text
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Francisco-J Hernández Adrián,
On Tropical Grounds
Ailton Krenak,
Ancestral Future
Ailton Krenak,
Life is Not Useful
Premesh Lalu,
Undoing Apartheid
Karima Lazali,
Colonia Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
The Politics of Time
Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr,
To Write the Africa World
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe,
The Scent of the Father
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Suely Rolnik,
Spheres of Insurrection
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa
Rita Segato,
The War Against Women
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Maboula Soumahoro,
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name
Javad Tabatabai,
Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences
Dénètem Touam Bona,
Fugitive, Where Are You Running?
We, the Decolonized
Hélé Béji
Translated by Matthew B. Smith
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Nous, décolonisés © Arléa, 2008
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Cover painting: Vision © Nacer Khemir
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6265-7 – hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6266-4 – paperback
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Dedication
To Yadh, to Wassim
ForewordNouri GanaThe Unfinished Project of Decolonization
When I consider the extent of our dependence, it is hard to imagine we are in fact independent.
Hélé Béji, We, the Decolonized, p. 33
We thought we’d do better than you Europeans. But what came of it? No matter how hard I look for this second-stage humanism, I can’t find it anywhere.
Hélé Béji, We, the Decolonized, p. 129
Rarely had a scholar from the Maghreb been more unsparingly critical of self and other than Hélé Béji in her surgical reflections on the state of the postcolony in We, the Decolonized. Béji delves into the record of the postcolonial nation state to discern the failures of its leadership and the frustrations of an entire generation of intellectuals who took seriously the project of forging a new humanism, uninhibited by the pitfalls of European humanism and colonial racism. After heralding a promissory future for the newly independent nation states of Africa and Asia, decolonization became gradually but steadily a tool of oppression and despotism in the hands of the nationalist elites. Even the discourse of national self-determination, which galvanized the anticolonial thrust toward liberty, has slipped into identitarian visions of purism and given rise to chauvinistic and nihilistic tendencies that hastened the descent into spirals of uncivil violence. Keeping the balance between a critique of the decolonized – the policymakers, the elites, the public intellectuals as well as the misled and gullible masses – and a critique of the neocolonial encroachments of the Euro-American empire, Béji masterfully weaves a composite and complex narrative of the story of the postcolony in the throes of a constant struggle for survival.
We, the Decolonized was originally written in 2007 and published in French as Nous, Décolonisés in 2008, more than half-a-century after the independence of most of the formerly colonized countries of Africa and Asia. This 2024 English translation comes at a time when much has changed in the world at large, yet not much in the world of the nominally decolonized. Even though the hegemony of American imperialism is being challenged more than ever since the fall of the Berlin wall, Palestine is still settler-colonized and (as I write, May 2024) is undergoing a renewed ethnic cleansing of genocidal proportions. Decolonization remains from this perspective starkly incomplete, but whether it still warrants the same critique as any given political project that has been fully completed is a question that Béji neither readily dismisses nor addresses fully – only by implication. It is therefore best to understand Béji’s polemical reactions and critical reflections in a positive spirit, which is not only awake to the urgent task of pressing forward, like before, with the unfinished project of decolonization, but also highly mindful of the profound despair and resignation that would result from giving up on the promise of worldly humanism to come. As she incisively puts it herself, “[t]he time for bitter truths has come, and I won’t stand in the way of what they have to reveal. Whatever we confront by charging forward will be less devastating than what we lose by giving up” (pp. 6–7).
Béji begins We, the Decolonized with an autobiographical sketch that recounts her upbringing in a household in which the dividing lines between the private and the political were completely blurred. Political debate was not an anomaly or a luxury but tantamount to doing what comes naturally: it not only cemented the overall commitment of her family members to the cause of anticolonialism and national self-determination but also gave meaning and purpose to their lives. As she reminisces quite tellingly: “When something was off in my life, I sensed that something was going wrong on a national level, that a global affair didn’t bode well for our country. Since our passion for nationalism was a core part of our being, we felt, in our own bodies, the slightest tremor in the body politic.” The private is almost always political in the postcolony, but the intertwinement of the private and the political in Béji’s case is also a matter of fact: she belongs to an anticolonial family committed to the struggle for independence and nation-building (her father, for example, held leading positions in the postcolonial government of freshly independent Tunisia, under Habib Bourguiba [1957–1987]). In a nutshell, it is fair to say that Béji was in the loop of Tunisian politics but it is hard to assume that she was necessarily privy to much governmental, policymaking, or diplomatic information.
Béji writes We, the Decolonized from the unique perspective of someone who has had the opportunity to observe the formation and workings of the political system of the postcolony at close quarters. She did the same in 1982, when she wrote Désenchantement national: Essai sur la décolonisation (National Disenchantment: Essay on Decolonization) – a much earlier assessment of the state of the postcolonial state. More than two decades had passed since Béji announced her disillusion with the governmental process in the postcolony, yet not much had changed. Arguably – and this was, in my opinion, Béji’s position in 2007, when she wrote We, the Decolonized – things got worse and would culminate in mass social insurrection and revolt. On January 14, 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali would be ousted from power; he had assumed the presidency of Tunisia on November 7, 1987, after an orchestrated palace coup against his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba. Béji’s writings after January 14 take stock of the opening of a new corridor for hope and optimism, as well as of the uncanny resurgence of the same old mood of disenchantment and despair.1 The entrenchment and solidification of power structures and influence, both religious and neoliberal, cast a shadow of gloom on many of the promises of the Tunisian Revolution of Freedom and Dignity.
While National Disenchantment may be said to have portended the end of Bourguiba’s presidency for life, We, the Decolonized can be seen as foreshadowing the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. Each of the two books was published on the eve of the demise of an era of authoritarian rule and could, at least retrospectively, be seen as an obituary or a death certificate meted out to the regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali respectively. Béji wrote We, the Decolonized in the post-9/11 context of a global war on terror and of an imperialist politics of regime change that paved the way for the American military takeover in Afghanistan and Iraq. Besides, the brazen visit of Ariel Sharon – the orchestrator of the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut – to al-Aqsa Mosque sparked a massive intifada (2000–2004), which deployed the tactic of martyrdom operations to spread awareness of the plight of Palestinians who were living for decades under the illegal Israeli occupation. Regardless of the debatable character and aims of such a tactic, there is ample evidence to suggest that any form of resistance that Palestinians may adopt, be it peaceful or combative in style, will always be immediately painted by Zionist and Euro-American politicians, pontificators, and mainstream media as a form of terrorism. Zionist and Euro-American neoliberal expansionist hegemony is always in search of the ideal victim or puppet to simultaneously exploit and idolize. The vacuity of the humanist liberal rhetoric is not a novelty anymore, given the complicity of most western leaders with the genocidal Israeli onslaught on Gazans, but the combination of ferocity and delirium with which such a rhetoric has been endorsed and paraded beggars the imagination.
The crisis of the western humanist paradigm continues unchecked, even though it has clearly reached its peak at a time when the contradictions, double standards, and hypocrisies of this paradigm have been starkly exposed for the whole world to ponder about and rebuke them. Béji does remind the harbingers of the European Enlightenment and universal human rights of their longstanding incoherence and cognitive deficit, if not callous blindness: “While you were judging crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945, you were perpetrating the Sétif massacre in Algeria! You were condemning the very horrors you were committing on our soil. Did this irony escape you? Your humanism has perished” (p. 5). With an implicit allusion to Fanon’s rallying cry, at the end of The Wretched of the Earth, for a new vision of humanism forged in the smithy of the decolonized subject’s soul, Béji traces the development of this admirable project – which she herself calls a “second-stage humanism” – against the actual governance and functioning of the administrative structure of the postcolony. While unapologetic in her scrutiny of the pitfalls of decolonization, Béji does not fall into the trap of “blaming the victim,” a trap in which Albert Memmi deliberately falls (free-fall style) in his 2004 book Portrait du décolonisé arabo-musulman et de quelques autres (Portrait of the Decolonized Arab Muslim and a Few Others). This is not to say that Béji does not apportion part – if not most – of the responsibility for the failures of decolonization to the decolonized themselves, herself included, but, without taking into consideration the neocolonial and neoliberal stipulations placed on the decolonized in the wake of decolonization, it is impossible to reach an objective and balanced verdict.
Béji’s argument is episodic, giving way at times to a restless stream of consciousness and at others to a self-reflexive monologue, constantly shifting between her subject position as a singular decolonized individual and her position as member of a Tunisian collectivity, implicated in the failures and shortcomings of the community or polity to which she belongs and for which she reserves her most scathing critique. Throughout her back-and-forth dialectical shuttling (without sublation), she scrutinizes, at times with scrupulous meanness, the promise of decolonization against the sordid reality of the postcolony, more than fifty years after nominal independence: “Having attained sovereignty and a place in the assembly of nations, having earned the right to sign treaties, to challenge major powers, and to seat our representatives on international committees, we must now ask: what can we, as this emerging political entity, offer to humanity? What has our politics driven by nonwestern values yielded? Where is our democratic vision that promised to revolutionize all of humanity? Instead of enriching modern existence, it seems we have only diminished it” (p. 71). Obviously it would be naïve to expect the decolonized to achieve the kind of political consciousness and critical distance that would enable them to transcend their victimhood immediately or automatically after decolonization, much less to beat the former colonizer on its own turf of industrial and technological progress; but that is not, I think, what Béji is suggesting. Could it be, though, that the decolonized Arab, African, or Asian was not unaware of the façade of western values, and therefore never believed in, much less felt the urgency to adopt, the vaunted humanistic ideal of which Béji speaks? After all, had not Fanon urged us to leave Europe behind and search for a more worldly vision of humanity elsewhere?
Béji is certainly onboard with the vision of a new humanism, all the more as the tenets of western modernity are alien to the world of the decolonized and do not therefore sit well with the existing sociocultural formations and aspirations of its peoples. How come, though, that the nationalist elites accepted the ready-made power structures they inherited from the former colonizers, namely the form of governance of the modern nation state? Béji asks: “We, who had endured so much cruelty from others, have not learned our lesson. We adopted forms of governance modeled on those of colonial administrators, as if we wanted to prove them right, the ones who deemed us incapable of self-governance. We showed as much brutality as we faced as colonial subjects. Is freedom of the people merely a hollow concept?” (p. 8). This is not an easy question to answer, but part of the problem with the decolonized that Béji rightly discerns is their internalization of colonial oppression and their aggressive pursuit, in the postcolony, of the same colonial policies that were formerly despised. Hence the police officer in Ben Ali’s infamous police state bears uncanny similarities to the colonial officer: “When I happen to pass the unassuming figure of a police officer in the street, my vision seems to get blurry. His casual air, his stocky build, his friendliness, his scuffed boots and janissary moustache, his clear working-class origins, however reassuring they’re meant to be, trigger something in me from which I thought I had freed myself: my old fear of the colonial officer who haunts our streets in a national uniform” (p. 7). Part of Béji’s impatience with the decolonized Tunisians and Arabs at large stems from the fact that they not only continue to fall behind Europeans economically but have applied to themselves the same system of despotic colonial rule that Europeans applied to them.
Rather than creatively envisioning new forms of rule that foreground the all-too-human concerns for rights and freedoms and that would therefore constitute an upgrade on perfunctory European humanism, the decolonized seem to Béji to have taken to heart the most repressive lessons of colonial rule and optimized the techniques of despotism to perfection: “We, the decolonized, have shamelessly emulated the most troubling aspects of modern society and used its most dangerous tools” (p. 96). This might sound ironically tragic or cynical, but psychoanalysis considers such behavior the symptom of a compulsion to repeat the vagaries of the colonial system rather than work through and overcome them. The secret to this compulsive repeating behavior may have to do with a form of postcolonial identification with the former colonizer that had gone awry – ended up into the civil war zone of melancholization, where the paradoxical castigation and idolization of the former colonizer, the object of identification, goes in tandem with the unending dialectics of self-loathing and self-cultivation. The swift shift from colonization to self-rule had caught the decolonized unprepared for the new role and therefore more inclined, for the sake of expedience and convenience, to reproduce those same colonial anomalies that they had not long ago set out to defeat and discard. Identitarian and nationalist fantasies of omnipotence may have offered an immediate response to colonial racism and paved the way to a reverse form of colonial hegemony, orchestrated by the newly decolonized elites. “Ultimately chauvinism, the very thing we had set out to combat in our anticolonial fervor, suited us just fine. In this respect we were no better than our former oppressors. We, too, harbored contempt for the other, became racist and intolerant, as though the colonial spirit had slowly contaminated us and authorized us to exercise the same prejudices we had ourselves once suffered” (p. 55).
Having had an anticolonialist and nationalist politics inculcated into her from early childhood, in the religiously tolerant household where she grew up with a Christian mother and a Muslim father, Béji devotes her most scathing criticism to resurgent Islamist forms of orthodoxy and rule, which would not only embrace the neoliberal policies of the old regime but also make a mockery of the universalist and humanist appeal of the core message of Islam: “We believed ourselves to be driven by a secret mission to escape the darkness of history where we had been confined, to resist the machine of global powers. But we were wrong. We failed to spread the values of tolerance for which we had fought. Brandishing our traditions as weapons, we believed a new humanism would emerge by alchemy. Instead, cruelty and despotism were the political values we spread to the rest of the world. Obscurantism has even become a desirable utopia, an ideal of life” (p. 132). In short, the decolonized failed to meet the challenge of forging a new humanism à la Fanon – whose holistic understanding of decolonization straddled emancipation and individuation, and who therefore insisted time and again that the birth of l’homme nouveau, the new human, is coeval with the process of decolonization: “No alternative form of humanism from outside the western world has taken the place of the European model we believed to have dismantled” (p. 51).
The decolonized failed to implement a vision of decolonization that goes beyond the right to national self-determination and commits to the ideal of social and cultural transformation, the harbinger of a transcendental and capacious humanism, irreducible to the stale rhetoric of European humanism. What the Enlightenment has bequeathed to the world is a perfectible picture of humanism that the decolonized could have transformed and surpassed. “The cruelty of colonialism,” Béji boldly propounds, “was mitigated by the brilliance of this new philosophy” (p. 15). Whether or not this new Enlightenment philosophy resonates with the lived experiences of the newly decolonized is not a foregone conclusion, but what Béji seeks to stress is the actual and practical indebtedness of the decolonized to colonial Europe: “Colonization sowed the seeds of autonomy, which was promoted as a core value of civilization. The lessons to be learned through these contradictions were sweeping and transformative. The West had instigated and trained my rebellion against it” (p. 16). Béji’s observation may not be an exaggeration, but I wonder whether all the credit should go to the colonizers or to the colonized, who were able to discern and expose the hypocrisies, contradictions, and double standards of colonial discourse and rebel against them.
For Béji, pace Fanon, the decolonized owe Europe much more than can be admitted: “The French Revolution belonged to us through a lineage that wasn’t yet clear, but that stirred the hearts of us anticolonialists. We were late disciples of our enemies. Of whom did the Rights of Man speak if not us, since the individual in us was no longer to be condemned for their racial, national, or religious belonging? The Rights of Man was our birth certificate” (p. 15). Time and again, Béji reminds herself and us that the decolonized owe their emancipation almost entirely to colonial modernity, to colonial education, to the principles of the French Revolution and the 1789 Declaration of Rights, which resulted almost immediately in the first slave revolt in colonial Saint-Domingue, and to the subsequent abolition of slavery: “The fact remains that nationalists were trained in colonial schools. They received these subtle weapons of instruction, which they used to bring down colonization. I don’t see anything scandalous in this ‘positive’ aspect of colonization. The singularity of colonialism lies in the paradox that, beyond its racism, it also served an important pedagogical function. Of course, the paradox was too great to sustain, hence colonialism eventually fell. But that’s where the seeds of decolonization were sown” (pp. 13–14).
To what extent, then, one may ask again, does the indebtedness of the decolonized to European modernity compensate for the scars of colonialism? While colonial modernity had fallen short of fulfilling the Enlightenment’s humanistic ideal, bracketing Europe or reducing it to an eternal enemy and culprit on account of the cruelty of colonialism is, for Béji, both short-sighted and counterproductive. For one thing, the colonial damage is enormous and can hardly be redressed with formal apologies and calculated reparations. For another, the descendants of colonialists should not be made to pay for the crimes of their ancestors: “What do the great-grandchildren of our torturers have to do with this history? What role did they play? Human punishment cannot be passed down from generation to generation, skipping centuries, and make people repent for crimes they didn’t commit. Real remorse doesn’t exceed a life span; anything beyond this is hypocrisy and public spectacle, for the clear conscience of states and the angry masses” (p. 11).
The reason why Béji has a forgiving take on colonialism may relate not so much to her overall stance on the colonial legacy as to her immediate interest in awakening the decolonized to their urgent historical responsibilities and obligations. In other words, Béji is less inclined to let the decolonized off the hook than to hold the former colonizer accountable for the colonial insult. We are therefore left with a zero-sum game: apportioning all blame to the former colonizers will result in appropriating all attention away from the share of responsibility of the decolonized: “So long as we avoid deeper self-reflection, so long as we persist in blaming the West for all our troubles, we will not achieve anything great or noble. We’ll remain trapped in complacency and irresponsibility and, to some degree, will always feel dependent. We’ll never know the real potential of our independence. We won’t grasp its true significance. We’ll continue to be proud of our anti-western stance, which prevents us from examining ourselves. And, instead of striving to establish a genuine ethics, we’ll spend our time judging the rest of the world, taking care to spare ourselves from the worst of it” (pp. 69–70).
Béji’s final exhortation to the decolonized is to look inward rather than westward. Clearly her own inward gaze (which is performed and inscribed throughout We, the Decolonized) produced nothing but disenchantment and malaise with the fichue position (“blasted position”) of the decolonized. Arguably, the disenchantment with the world is inherent in the very European concept of civilizational and technological progress, which accelerated the destruction of the environment and the collapse of traditional and organic forms of life, producing the moral and spiritual vacuity of state capitalism with its banalization of warfare, dissemination of neoliberal norms, and normalization of profiteering at the expense of the wretched and of the earth. Perhaps our disenchantment has more to do with the terms of our engagement with the world, as dictated by Euro-America, than with our own choices (which some pessimists would say are nonexistent under the current neoliberal conditions, in which the survival of the fittest holds sway).
It could be argued nonetheless that, without such an affectively melancholic disposition as Béji’s own, it may not be possible to uncreate and simultaneously create the conditions of possibility that would make us agents of our own choices. Had she been indisposed to the powers of melancholia, Béji would not have been able to articulate a lucid critique of the crisis of the postcolony, as well as of the neocolonial and neoliberal dispensation in which the decolonized wallow. Unless malaise is turned into productive and critically constructive work, and this might be Béji’s final lesson, there can be no hope in sight for the formally decolonized. I will leave the last word of cautionary optimism to Béji: “While it’s true that international politics makes us reconsider how much latitude we, the decolonized, actually have to shift the global balance of power, decolonization nonetheless marks a profound shift in the human condition. It puts unprecedented pressure on the imperial powers, forcing them to bear in mind that the destiny of our humanity is inextricably tied to their own. The perception that we are ‘prisoners’ of History, bound by the dictates of those who claim freedom while denying us our voice, only perpetuates the notion that we are powerless to effect change. This resignation to historical inevitability is what we rejected when we refused to accept colonialism as a fait accompli” (p. 135).
Notes
1
See, for instance, her
Islam Pride: Derrière le voile
(Paris: Gallimard, 2011) as well as her tract
Dommage, Tunisie: La dépression démocratique
(Paris: Gallimard, 2019).
Author
I was born into an anticolonialist family. As far back as I can remember, all we spoke about at home was politics. It was the only thing we cared about, the only thing that excited our vehemence, our passion. Everything else paled in comparison. We were anticolonialists just as others were communists, Marxists, socialists, workerists, syndicalists, Zionists, or just as some are today alter-globalists, evangelists, Islamists … Which is to say, with unwavering commitment to the cause. Nothing else could command our respect. Anticolonialism gave meaning to our lives, made us bold and confident, inspired our dreams, gave glory to our family. An ode to solidarity, a tribute to the strength of the people and the nobility of the human condition, as well as to the unique splendor of our country, to intelligence, science, progress, and to the demise of all superstitions – in short, to the redemption of the world. In an old family photograph, I’m standing with my younger brother on a stage, both of us decked out in traditional attire, mouths agape, earnestly singing the national anthem into a microphone, with the solemnity children affect when performing for adults. We were on a mission to realize our fate as heroes, and the misty eyes of our parents amplified our fervor, our seriousness. Life, to us, was a patriotic song performed by pure hearts.
Nationalism was the essence of our existence. It dictated our emotions and shaped our daily lives. We were entirely devoted to it, and our devotion was an expression of passion, commitment, love, exaltation. It was a captivating pursuit whose heavenly light held the encroaching darkness at bay. To us, nothing was more noble and miraculous. Every splendid day seemed to confirm its truth. In my view, nationalists knew no gloom; only clear skies were fitting for their spirits. And how could one find joy in places where the days were dimmer than our nights? Nationalism was found nowhere else in the world.
