As for M. Mannoni, in view of his book and his observations on the Madagascan soul, he deserves to be taken very seriously. Follow him step by step through the ins and outs of his little conjuring tricks, and he will prove to you as clear as day that colonization is based on psychology, that there are in this world groups of men who, for unknown reasons, suffer from what must be called a dependency complex, that these groups are psychologically made for dependence; that they need dependence, that they crave it, ask for it, demand it; that this is the case with most of the colonized peoples and with the Madagascans in particular. Away with racism! Away with colonialism! They smack too much of barbarism. M. Mannoni has something better: psychoanalysis. Embellished with existentialism, it gives astonishing results: the most down-at-heel cliches are re-soled for you and made good as new; the most absurd prejudices are explained and justified; and, as if by magic, the moon is turned into green cheese. But listen to him:

"It is the destiny of the Occidental to face the obligation laid down by the commandment Thou shalt leave thy father and thy mother. This obligation is incomprehensible to the Madagascan. At a given time in his development, every European discovers in himself the desire…to break the bonds of dependency, to become the equal of his father. The Madagascan, never! He does not experience rivalry with the paternal authority, "manly protest," or Adlerian inferiority-ordeals. It is clear that I am not attacking the Bantu philosophy here, but the way in which certain people try to use it for political ends which the European must pass and which are like civilized forms...of the initiation rites by which one achieves manhood''.

Don't let the subtleties of vocabulary, the new terminology, frighten you! You know the old refrain: "The-Negroes-are-big-children." They take it, they dress it up for you, tangle it up for you. The result is Mannoni. Once again, be reassured! At the start of the journey it may seem a bit difficult, but once you get there, you'll see, you will find all your baggage again. Nothing will be missing, not even the famous white man's burden. Therefore, give ear: "Through these ordeals" (reserved for the Occidental), "one triumphs over the infantile fear of abandonment and acquires freedom and autonomy, which are the most precious possessions and also the burdens of the Occidental." And the Madagascan? you ask. A lying race of bondsmen, Kipling would say. M. Mannoni makes his diagnosis: "The Madagascan does not even try to imagine such a situation of abandonment. He desires neither personal autonomy nor free responsibility." (Come on, you know how it is. These Negroes can't even imagine what freedom is. They don't want it, they don't demand it. It's the white agitators who put that into their heads. And if you gave it to them, they wouldn't know what to do with it.) If you point out to M. Mannoni that the Madagascans have nevertheless revolted several times since the French occupation and again recently in 1947, M. Mannoni, faithful to his premises, will explain to you that that is purely neurotic behavior, a collective madness, a running amok; that, moreover, in this case it was not a question of the Madagascans' setting out to conquer real objectives but an "imaginary security," which obviously implies that the oppression of which they complain is an imaginary oppression. So clearly, so insanely imaginary, that one might even speak of monstrous ingratitude, according to the classic example of the Fijian who burns the drying-shed of the captain who has cured him of his wounds. If you criticize the colonialism that drives the most peaceable populations to despair, M. Mannoni will explain to you that after all, the ones responsible are not the colonialist whites but the colonized Madagascans. Damn it all, they took the whites for gods and expected of them everything one expects of the divinity! If you think the treatment applied to the Madagascan neurosis was a trifle rough, M. Mannoni, who has an answer for everything, will prove to you that the famous brutalities people talk about have been very greatly exaggerated, that it is all neurotic fabrication, that the tortures were imaginary tortures applied by "imaginary executioners." As for the French government, it showed itself singularly moderate, since it was content to arrest the Madagascan deputies, when it should have sacrificed them, if it had wanted to respect the laws of a healthy psychology. I am not exaggerating. It is M. Mannoni speaking:

"Treading very classical paths, these Madagascans transformed their saints into martyrs, their saviors into scapegoats; they wanted to wash their imaginary sins in the blood of their own gods. They were prepared, even at this price, or rather only at this price, to reverse their attitude once more. One feature of this dependent psychology would seem to be that, since no one can serve two masters, one of the two should be sacrificed to the other. The most agitated of the colonialists in Tananarive had a confused understanding of the essence of this psychology of sacrifice, and they demanded their victims. They besieged the High Commissioner's office, assuring him that if they were granted the blood of a few innocents, "everyone would be satisfied." This attitude, disgraceful from a human point of view, was based on what was, on the whole, a fairly accurate perception of the emotional disturbances that the population of the high plateaux was going through''.

Obviously, it is only a step from this to absolving the bloodthirsty colonialists. M. Mannoni's "psychology" is as "disinterested," as "free," as M. Gourou's geography or the Rev. Tempels' missionary theology! And the striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of "tropicality" in Gourou. What has become of the Banque d'Indochine in all that? And the Banque de Madagascar? And the bullwhip? And the taxes? And the handful of rice to the Madagascan or the nhaque?10 And the martyrs? And the innocent people murdered? And the blood-stained money piling up in your coffers, gentlemen? They have evaporated! Disappeared, intermingled, become unrecognizable in the realm of pale ratiocinations.

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