The Wretched of the Earth is in part a celebration of the outburst of creativity and self-organization that sprang from the Algerian masses in the course of their decade-long armed struggle.Īs Fanon wrote on the book’s second page:ĭecolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor captured in a virtually grandiose fashion in the spotlight of History.Īt the same time, he issued a stark warning that the newly independent states would regress into authoritarianism, ethnic chauvinism, and tribalism if they failed to advance to a social revolution that could uproot the “reified” form of human relations that defined racialized capitalism. This bloody counterinsurgent war killed close to a million people.įanon held that if the Algerian revolution was defeated or failed to bring forth a “new humanism” in response to the dehumanization that European colonialism produced, the newly independent African states would become subjected to the more subtle but no less insidious power of neocolonialism. Paris mobilized tens of thousands of troops into a bid to suppress the revolution. The country contained a large percentage of European settlers with close ties to France, and virtually every major French political tendency opposed its independence - including the Socialist and Communist Parties. While French and British imperialism were willing to concede political independence to some of their African colonies by the late 1950s, matters were very different in Algeria. The Algerian Fulcrumįanon had good reason to see the Algerian revolution as the fulcrum and vanguard of the wider African revolutions.

Its focal point is rather a detailed mediation on the Algerian revolution, in which its author had directly participated since shortly after his arrival in Algiers in 1953. Several focused on what Fanon called his “testament”: his pathbreaking evaluation of the African revolutions in The Wretched of the Earth, completed only weeks before his death from leukemia at the age of thirty-six.Īlthough many hailed The Wretched of the Earth at the time of its publication as a “bible of Third World revolution,” the book only makes passing reference to developments in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, and does not attempt to provide an exhaustive analysis of the many African liberation movements that were active at the time.

The sixtieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death on December 5 last year has prompted a number of reconsiderations of his legacy.

Fanon the wretched earth