Albert Memmi grew up in Tunis, a colonized, but French-educated enough to know the colonizer almost as well as he knew himself. He was in a position to draw both portraits from the inside.

The colonizer: In his own words, the colonizer "is a privileged being and an illegitimately privileged one; that is, a usurper." Skin color and passport hand you the privilege whether you asked for it or not. This sounds very familiar nowadays. According to Memmi, the colonizer has three options: leave the colony, stay silent, or stay and fight the system. He argues that few would opt for the third option with success. He has a term for the second one though: "humanitarian romanticism”. Again another very contemporary dynamic; think about aid workers today, who draw hardship pay and a security detail while ostensibly there to fight poverty.

The Colonized: Memmi wrote in 1957 that a qualified worker among the colonizers earned three or four times more than the colonized worker, without producing three or four times as much. He presents an economic argument that the colonized had no incentive to be more productive with such an imbalance. Memmi described colonized women who tried desperately to uncurl their hair and lighten their skin, chasing an acceptance that never actually occurred. No matter how fluent or how polished a colonized became, he argued they would still be met with disdain.

In commenting liberation movements, Memmi rejected half-measures like a negotiated "French Union" outright. His final word was that the colonized refusal "cannot be anything but absolute" Not just revolt, but revolution, breaking what he called an iron collar.

We discuss the book at length in our podcast Threads of Ifriqiya, and we try to draw parallels to contemporary times of which we identify many. I will link the podcast in the comments.

Most my stuff is Egyptian Sudan campaign

Literally hitchhiking through western Sahara while their being colonized

While Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were all absorbed into European empires, Siam (modern Thailand) stayed independent — and it wasn't luck. Two 19th-century Siamese kings, Mongkut and his son Chulalongkorn, ran a deliberate strategy to avoid the same fate.