u/Boring-Perception429

I was expecting a dense theoretical slog and instead got one of the sharpest, angriest, yet most accurate essays I've ever read in a while.

In essence, Césaire says what actually horrified Europe about Nazism wasn't the cruelty itself. Europe had been fine with that cruelty for centuries — as long as it was aimed at colonized people in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. What made Hitler unforgivable, in his reading, was that he turned those same methods on white Europeans, on European soil. So the violence was not the problem, but the where and whom was.

This reminded me about the early coverage of the war in Ukraine, when reporters kept expressing shock that this was happening to "people who look like us." It seems that, 70 years later, the reflex (and maybe the underlying values?) is still the same.

The essay, albeit short, is rich with illuminating reflections. One other idea is the argument against then European claim that Africans and other colonized people were uncivilized before Europe brought them the "enlightenment". As an example, Césaire leans on the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius as a "good" European witness who admitted African societies were sophisticated. Interestingly though, and this is not in the essay, if you dig into Frobenius, he couldn't actually accept that Africans built those achievements themselves. He invented a whole lost "African Atlantis" theory to explain the art and sophistication. This idea is the intellectual cousin of "aliens built the pyramids."

Anyway. "Discourse on Colonialism" is wildly relevant for something written mid-colonial-era.

Do you think there's a meaningful causal link between Europe's colonial practices and the violence of Nazism?

We discuss Cesaire's essay at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, I will link it in the comments.

Migration is often discussed through numbers, policies, and borders. But what happens when we follow the journey of a single person?

And the story told in this book is so powerful. It is the kind of story that can fundamentally change the way you look at migrants — the people you may casually see wandering through your city, serving you coffee at a restaurant, or quietly cleaning your office building every morning. This could very well be the story of any one of them. Or maybe not. Because this story is also deeply unique.

Little Brother tells the story of Ibrahima Balde’s life. And one thing is incontestable - Ibrahima went through immense suffering. What begins as the story of a boy growing up in Guinea becomes an extraordinary search for a missing brother. Along the way, Ibrahima crosses the Sahara Desert, survives traffickers, prisons, forced labor, and some of the most dangerous migration routes in the world.

This is a story about family, responsibility, sacrifice, and the lengths a human being is willing to go for someone they love.

In Thread of Ifriqiya's latest podcast episode (link in the comments) we take you through the thrills and horrors of the trans-saharan and trans-mediterranean crossing along Ibrahima's path.