A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage.

However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.