The Crimes of Colonialism
Hồ Chí Minh toàn tập, Tập 1, Chính trị Quốc gia - Sự thật, Hanoi, 2011, pp. 61-62.
Translation: Foreign Languages Press, Paris, 2021.
“Under the aegis of France, Indochina is pursuing its destination in peace, and the strongest proof of its happiness is what you have seen of it, gentlemen.” This is what M. Outrey, deputy of Cochinchina, said to his colleagues in the French Parliament.
In its August issue, the League of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen [Ligue des droits de l’homme et du citoyen] has provided us with proof of how happy Indochina is and how well France is represented there.
We will summarize these findings in a few lines:
Like all the provinces, the Tonkinese provinces have their own Residents of France.26 Like all the Residents of France in Tonkin, the Resident of the prov-ince we are going to discuss is invested with unchecked power. He is a prefect, a mayor, a judge, a bailiff, a garrison keeper. He holds all kinds of powers: justice, taxes, life and property of the native people, elections of chiefs, rights of civil servants, etc., etc.
This high magistrate studied all the political and administrative sciences in the Latin Quarter [in Paris, “Quartier latin”] where he used to be a… soup merchant. Riddled with debts and out of money, he was fortunate enough to be parachuted in as Resident of a province of several thousand inhabitants by an influential politician.
Native “volunteers” were recruited to serve in the “tirailleurs” military corps and to pass the medical examination. They were illiterate and intimidated men, to whom Mr. Resident addressed himself personally and who were beaten by him with his bare fists and cane because they did not respond quickly enough.
He brutally beat three militiamen who had allowed a prisoner to escape, dragging them to the ground by their hair, banging their heads against the wall of his residence.
To interrogate his prisoners, the Resident would stab them in the thigh with his administrator’s sword. Some of them collapsed on their return to the prison.
Poorly fed, the prisoners were dressed in squalid rags; were up from dawn to dusk; wore a cangue around their necks and big chains on their feet, tied to each other, pulling the roller—a huge steamroller—that had to be driven over the thick layers of sandstone. Completely exhausted, they painfully moved forward under an implacable sun. Then the Resident arrived, carrying a big stick and, for no reason, with an inconceivable sadism of bestiality, hit these unfortunate people with it, accusing them of being lazy.
One day, our civilizer, after having scolded a European agent and not knowing on who to continue to direct his anger, took an iron ruler from his desk and used it to break two fingers of an unfortunate native writer who was not involved in the matter.
Another day, he spat in the face of a native sergeant in the presence of his men.
On another occasion, he had militiamen who displeased him buried up to their necks, digging them up only when they were half-dead.
When he visits the roadworks where he more or less obliges the native peo-ple to work for one or two pennies a day, after having made them buy back their “corvée”27 at the price of fifteen pennies a day, it is by the dozen that one counts the legs purposely broken with shovels and pickaxe handles.
Once, at a construction site, he took the rifle of a guard and used it to hit a prisoner. After the latter successfully escaped, the Resident turned on the guard and hit him with the same rifle. His beloved wife, Mrs. La Résidente, also intervened, hitting the prisoners and punishing the militiamen on several occasions. Recently, the Resident has been spotted poking out the eye of a sergeant with his cane.
Can you see, gentlemen, how happy Indochina is under the protectorate of good old France? And this is merely a small sample of what the superior civilization has in store.
Nguyen ai Quac
27 “Corvée” is a form of unpaid, forced labor, which is intermittent in nature, and which lasts limited periods of time: typically, only a certain number of days’ work each year. In French West Africa the “corvée” was abolished as late as 1946.
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