An Egyptian translator repeated the colonizer’s self-blame framing to his own people

Evidence

His aim in translating the book, he said, was to make people consider the causes of this inferiority, by comparing the Egyptian ‘character’ to the character of the English who had occupied their country. He enumerated what he considered the areas of weakness in the Egyptian character. They included weakness in affection and friendship, in determination, in dignity, and in the willingness to do charitable works. Above all there was the habit of relying for everything upon the government, whose real function was only to provide order and security, and to carry out justice. Weakness had been added to weakness he said, and the country’s wealth and affairs were now in the hands of foreigners. The foreigners could not be blamed for this, because they had benefitted by their own efforts, and by their social-scientific knowledge. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 359

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the expected dynamic: the colonized intellectual imported the colonizer’s diagnosis of his own people’s inferiority — echoes of internalized colonialism debates in Fanon.
• DEEPTHINKING: The colonized elite translating and endorsing a self-incriminating character diagnosis — adoption of the occupying power’s terms of self-assessment is a dense, generative insight.