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Prospero and Caliban Prospero and Caliban THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLONIZATION - O. Mannoni O. Mannoni Prospero and Caliban THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COLONIZATION Translated by PAMELA POWESLAND With a Foreword by PHILIP MASON METHUEN & CO. LTD, LONDON 36 Essex Street, Strand, WC2 -3- First published in 1950 by Editions du Seuil, Paris, under the title Psychologie de la Colonisation; the present edition translated by Pamela Powesland First published in 1956 CATALOGUE NO. 5816/U PRINTED AND BOUND IN GREAT BRITAIN BY RICHARD CLAY AND COMPANY, LTD., BUNGAY, SUFFOLK CONTENTS AUTHOR'S NOTE 7 FOREWORD by Philip Mason 9 INTRODUCTION 17 Part i. Dependence Chapter I: Dependence and Inferiority 39 Chapter II: The Cult of the Dead and the Family 49 Chapter III: The Threat of Abandonment 61 Epilogue to Part I ‐‐Dreams 89 Part ii. Inferiority Chapter I: Crusoe and Prospero 97 Chapter II: The Colonial Situation and Racialism 110 Part iii. Psychological dependence and political independence Chapter I: Psychological Heredity and the Personality 125 Chapter II: National Independence 132 Chapter III: Repression, Stagnation, Progression 142 Chapter IV: Administration and Psychology 152 Chapter V: What can be done? 165 Chapter VI: The Experimental Spirit 187 Chapter VII: The Unity of Mankind 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 210 INDEX 215 -5- [This page intentionally left blank.] AUTHOR'S NOTE I N his foreword Philip Mason has, I think, said all that can be said to introduce this study to the English reader. I shall add a few words about one aspect of the question which only I am in a position to know, namely the conditions in which the book was written. The present edition is, apart from a few unimportant modifications, 1 a faithful translation of a work which was completed at the end of 1948. This is a significant date in the history of Madagascar and incidentally in my own life. For years I have been interested in everything I could find out about that country and its inhabitants, but for a long time I deliberately confined myself to ethnographical rather than psychological studies. However I realised, almost in spite of myself, that there was a back- ground of more disturbing psychological problems behind the ethnographical ones. I found myself taking part either in imagination or in reality in a kind of community life that was quite new to me, and realised with surprise that my own essence was being gradually altered. If for instance I took part in ceremonies concerning the cult of the dead I tried to do it in the spirit of a good ethnographer with questionnaires, photographs, etc.; but I discovered that this cult in its Malagasy form had an equal significance for me, and one which I could not ignore, surround it as I might with the ethnographical bric-a-brac that I was collecting. I seemed to have unearthed that single root, from which, according to a Malagasy proverb, the branches of the human race divide off like the shoots on a pumpkin plant. At the same time, driven like everyone else by my own private devil, I carried out various strictly personal experiments which led me to further discoveries, and during my leave in Paris after the end of the war I began a training analysis in the hope of clarifying my ideas. I had interrupted this analysis to make a further short stay in Madagascar when the 1947 rebellion broke out. A veil was torn aside ____________________ 1The end of the Introduction from the bottom of page 33 to the bottom of page 34 has been rewritten for the English edition. -7- and for a brief moment a burst of dazzling light enabled one to verify the series of intuitions one had not dared to believe in. By good luck I was in a position to understand what I so unexpectedly saw. The difficulties which had inhibited and confused my former impressions had, as it were, melted away. As I wrote it seemed to me that the things I had just begun to understand I had really, after a fashion, known for a long time. Several people who later read what I wrote had the same impression. At that particular time my own analysis had not got very far and I rashly employed certain theoretical concepts which needed more careful handling than I realised at the time. I must frankly admit that I am now disturbed by the obvious weaknesses of the book in this respect. I might have attempted to amend it for translation but I realised that in doing so I ran the risk of losing a more important quality. This is that the significant points, such as they are, are shown just as they arose in the natural sequence of the discovery itself, and it is through this sequence that the reader is led. The reader makes a kind of voyage of psychological exploration and it does not matter very much if the maps are not absolutely accurate. On the whole, what I regret is not so much these weaknesses in my book as the fact that I have not produced a much more openly personal study. Less explanation is needed as to why the date 1948 is of special significance in colonial history. That is obvious. I would add, however, because my book is rather silent on this point, that I do not think one can lay down clearly any natural laws about human behaviour. I have simply described a situation which existed at a particular time. It is now perhaps disappearing. O. M. -8- FOREWORD by Philip Mason Director of Studies in Race Relations at the Royal Institute of International Affairs T HERE are books -- not often met once thirty is past -- which open entirely new worlds of thought, others -- only less rare -- which are no less stimulating because they set in order what had hovered unformulated on the fringe of consciousness and express in words what had been on the tip of one's tongue. Mannoni Psychologie de la Colonisation, now appearing in English as Prospero and Caliban, for me falls into this second category. When I first read it, I had spent some twenty years in India as an administrator, living rather than studying Race Relations, and had written novels about what I saw and heard. One of these tried to show how the English criminal law worked in the lives of individual Indian villagers, another how education in Western thought and in an alien language might affect a boy who came from superstitious peasant stock in the remote hills. But I had made no attempt to generalise on such subjects and I found a fascination and delight in M. Mannoni's psychological explanations of what he had observed in Madagascar. Let me give one example in my own untechnical language. No one can have spent long among Europeans either in India before partition, or to-day, in East, Central or South Africa without hearing some such phrase as: 'The natives don't know what gratitude means.' 'There is no word for thanks in Urdu,'they would tell you, though I can think of three, and they will say the same of Swahili and CiNyanja. M. Mannoni had taken a few lessons from a Malagasy tenniscoach; hearing this man was ill, he went to see him and gave him some quinine. When he was better, the young Malagasy expressed no thanks, but began to ask instead for small presents, a pair of tennis-shoes, cigarette-paper, and so on. Most people who have lived -9- in what M. Mannoni calls a colonial situation can recall incidents of this kind. 'You have done something for me which you were under no obligation to do: therefore I am yours and you may command me but on the other hand I expect you to look after me,' -- that is the attitude. A young Englishman would soon learn not to feed a stray dog in an Indian village because he found that it would follow him for ever; with people too it was as well to be a trifle wary about setting up this kind of relationship; in the end the newcomer would often feel obliged to put on the colonial mask and become 'unsympathetic'. This need for caution does not arise if you do a trifling favour to someone who is part, like yourself, of a competitive society; he either repays you -- by thanks or some favour in return -- or is conscious of an unpaid debt, in which case he dislikes or avoids you. Why should this difference occur? Because, replies M. Mannoni, the structure of the personality is different in the two cases. In a static society, -- so long as it stays truly static -- the individual is safely dependent on a complicated social system which, in the case of the Malagasy, usually includes not only living members of the group but dead ancestors and unborn posterity. The arrival of even one representative of a competitive society -- immune from local forms of magic, blessed with a new magic of his own -- threatens the peace of this primitive but complicated structure; the dilemma is admirably expressed in the Victorian romances of the school of Rider Haggard, in which the white man among an unknown African people must either become king or be sacrificed to their god. 1 If he survives, he becomes, like Rajah Brooke, and a host of colonial administrators, the father and mother of his people. The phrase at first expressed on the level of consciousness a respectful affection; in India at least it came to stand as the symbol for a paternal, colonial system of administration, which has now long been regarded with just those mixed feelings of conscious respect merging into fear, of subconscious jealousy and dislike, that a Freudian would expect the word 'father' to arouse.
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