From Among the Ruins

Quote:

Wherever colonisation is a fact, the indigenous culture begins to rot. And among the ruins something begins to be born which is not a culture but a kind of subculture, a subculture which is condemned to exist on the margin allowed by a European culture. This then becomes the province of a few men, the elite, who find themselves placed in the most artificial conditions, deprived of any revivifying contact with the masses of the people.

-- Not one of ours lamenting the marginalisation of voices that speak for us but Aimé Césaire in his address to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Paris, 1956. Apt to be nicked though, and the vital and topical thing is, of course, that the age of deprivation and marginalisation (short cycle, at least) appears to be coming to an end.