To chosify is to decay! Chosifier, c'est déchoir!
English version "When a society grants itself the right to objectify someone, it is preparing its own moral decay." This line, which sums up Aimé Césaire's thinking in his Discourse on Colonialism, has a strange resonance this 4 November, as the excavators move into Okala, Lac Bleu and Diba-Diba, and evicted families are still waiting for a roof over their heads. Nearly eighty years after its publication, Césaire's thought remains a mirror held up to every society, including our own. It does not merely ask whether a government is effective. It asks how that government looks at the human beings it governs. What Césaire said In 1950, in the Discourse on Colonialism , Aimé Césaire summed up the colonial system in a brutal equation: "colonization = thingification." The colonized person is no longer a person, but labor, an obstacle, an item to be moved. His strongest argument lies elsewhere: this enterprise also degrades those who carry it out. To treat a human...
