The Colonizer and the Colonized

Memmi, a Tunisian Jew writing between the two camps, drew paired portraits showing how the colonial system corrupts both parties, granting the settler privileges he must endlessly justify and stripping the colonized of a usable past. Its cool, systematic tone and Sartre's preface made it a handbook for independence movements. It described the psychology of empire as a mutual trap rather than a simple crime.

Its legacy. It was read across the decolonizing world from the Maghreb to the Americas.