Colonialism as a De-Civilizing Mission

This paper provides a comparative study of Amílcar Cabral and Ghassan Kanafani. It defends the thesis that both figures were responding to similar historical junctures. Moreover, it shows that they both converged in terms of how they theorized colonialism. For both thinkers, colonialism can be described as an attempt to halt the history of the colonized. A sustained analysis is provided of what the term ‘history’ means in this context. It is argued that they intended to speak of history in terms of progress. This in turn led them to argue that the colonized societies were dynamic societies before colonialism. If colonialism attempted to ossify the colonized societies, then anti-colonialism cannot be reduced to a defence of inherited cultural traditions.