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On 18th May 2018 the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge hosted the vernissage of the art book exhibit “Wifredo Lam: Livres d’artistes”. One of the display cases contained a surprise for the Césaire specialists present in Cambridge. On two sheets of Assemblée Nationale letterhead an unknown autograph manuscript began : “Intense countries, where the creative force, never exhausted...”. At first glance, one might have taken it for an early draft of “Wifredo Lam and the Antilles”, which Cahiers d’art published under the title “Wifredo Lam” in its double issue (20-21) during the last trimester of 1946. However, the biobibliography edited by K. Véron and T. Hale in 2013 confirmed that this was the manuscript of Césaire’s contribution for the catalogue of Lam’s work exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas, Venezuela, between 8th and 22nd May 1955.

Cet article propose de lire le manuscrit d’une nouvelle inédite de Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo comme une fable de l’Histoire dans laquelle se condenserait, d’une part, une veine ethno-nationale marquée par l’État centralisateur précolonial (le royaume de l’Imerina) irriguée par les mouvements régionalistes français ; et, d’autre part, une conscience d’intellectuel colonisé qui emprunte autant aux théories raciales des années folles qu’elle articule un discours critique sur la présence française à Madagascar.

This article aims to present and to analyse two texts the French-Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi wrote in his youth : the first of them has never been published before ; the second one has been issued in a local magazine. Before Memmi’s thinking ended up as the famous The Coloniser and The Colonised, (Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur) which was a bible of the anti-colonial fight throughout the world, it was worked up progressively, groping in the dark. The analysis of manuscripts and typescripts of the both texts emphasises it. Indeed, the first text discussed above is limited to recommending a deep reform of the colonial system, while the second text deeds the implacable iniquity of colonialism and comprehends the Tunisian (and beyond North-African) problem in a global way, not only by its economical aspect, as the French Left conceived it at that time.