Page 36 - Afrika Must Unite

COLONIAL PATTERN OF ECONOMICS 21
of exchange, the influence of speculations, all these move in a
circle which extends to the ends of the world.
Colonies are for rich countries one of the most lucrative
methods of investing capital. . . . I say that France, which is
glutted with capital, and which has exported considerable
quantities, has an interest in looking at this side of the colonial
question. It is the same question as that of outlets for our manu­
facture.
Colonial policy is the offspring of industrial policy, for rich
states in which capital is abundant and is rapidly accumulating,
in which the manufacturing system is continually growing and
attracting, if not the most numerous, at least the most alert and
energetic part of the population that works with its hands, in
which the countryside is obliged to industrialize itself, in order
to maintain itself, in such states exportation is an essential factor
of public property. . . . The protective system is like a steam
boiler without a safety-valve, unless it has a healthy and serious
colonial policy as a corrective and auxiliary. European con­
sumption is saturated r i t k necessary to raise new masses of con­
sumers in otherjparts^TlHe globe, eise~we^KalTput modern*
society into bankruptcy and jjre pare for the dawn of the!
"twentieth century a cataclysmic social liquidation of which we J
cannot calculate thBnconsequen.ces.,- ^ *

Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Secretary of State in 1923,
spoke in even stronger terms, at the Ecole Coloniale in Paris:

What is the use of painting the truth ? At the start colonization
was not an act of civilization, nor was it a desire to civilize. It was
an act of force motivated by interests. An episode in the vital
competition which, from man to man, from group to group,
has gone on ever increasing; the people who set out to seize
colonies in distant lands were thinking primarily of themselves, (
and were working for their own profits, and conquering for their
own power.

Sarraut concluded his speech with these w ords: ‘The origin of
colonization is nothing else than enterprise of individual interests,
a one-sided and egotistical imposition of the strong upon the
weak.5 He thus exposed the falsehood of the theory of the ‘white
man's burden5 and the ‘mission civilisatrice\