Colonial rule itself generated the nationalist intelligentsia that overthrew it

Evidence

The anticolonial struggles that were increasingly mounted from the mid-nineteenth century on were the beginnings of the transformation of Black radicalism into an engaged confrontation with European domination. Indeed, it was as a response to the mass resistances to colonialism that the other human contradictions to which colonial domination was inherently vulnerable were catalyzed. The very nature of colonial dominance required the adaptation or creation of privileged strata among the dominated people. And from the conflict, which was inevitable between the native “bourgeoisie” and their colonial masters, a renegade intelligentsia was induced, one to which the idea of a total opposition, a nationalist confrontation and critique of Western society was necessary and natural. The experience of the Black petit bourgeoisies, their intimacy with European power, culture, society, and racism, and their contradictory relations to them, in time drew from their number nationalists and radical nationalists. While the nationalists generally confined their attentions to the struggles at home where their ambitions could most immediately be realized, the radical nationalists were really internationalists, settling into variants of Pan-Africanism or socialism. Invariably, some of the radicals would be ideologically attracted to the opposition movements gestated within Western society itself. Their ambivalence toward the Black masses, their social and psychological identifications with European culture made the analytical and theoretical authority of European socialism an almost irresistible political ideology. For some that proved sufficient. For others, however, the continuing formation of militant nationalist and workers’ movements in the colonial world raised questions about the breadth and acuity of European socialists. And as mass Black radicalism adapted to the instrument of people’s wars as the form of the anti-imperialist struggle, its revolutionary intelligentsia began the critique or relocation of socialist theory. For them, the struggles of the European working classes were linked with the anti-imperialist movements of the nonindustrial world. The gulf between class struggle and anti-imperialist and nationalist activity began to be closed. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1435

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial-era nationalists already turned European critical methods against their tutors — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 863; Historicist colonial governance trained the future nationalist leaders who decolonized