Frantz Fanon and the struggle against colonisation

Frantz Fanon’s defence of armed resistance against colonialism is timely in the light of the genocidal violence currently being carried out by Israel, armed and supported by the U.S. and Britain.

He reminds us that all colonial settler states were created by massive violence, whether Israel, Australia, Brazil or the USA. And that the violence continues in the demeaning of the oppressed:

The colonized people are presented ideologically as a people arrested in their evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing their own affairs, requiring the permanent presence of an external ruling power. The history of the colonized peoples is transformed into meaningless unrest.

Fanon was a psychologist and a revolutionary who took part in the Algerian revolution. His political ideas developed explosively in his relatively short politically active life from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1961, aged just 36. His philosophical, poetic, political writing is still vital reading, particularly, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Fanon was born in 1925 on the Caribbean Island of Martinique, then part of the French empire, and he grew up in a culture that was hypersensitive to nuances of race.

Colonies in the Caribbean had been won through the genocidal murder of native populations and in wars with Britain and Spain. The imperial powers of the day considered them worth fighting for because of the almost unimaginable profits reaped from plantation production built on the gruelling labour of enslaved Africans. Until the enslaved population rose up and won independence Saint- Domingue (now Haiti) was the most profitable.

But Fanon grew up in a middle-class black household identifying with France. “My mother sings me French love songs in which there is never a word about Negroes,” he would later recall. “When I disobey, when I make too much noise, I am told to ‘stop acting like a n—’.” His family had internalised the racial categories that colonialism placed on them.

Early in the Second World War, France was defeated and occupied, but the so-called Free French forces fought on, largely based on the country’s colonial empire. Fanon volunteered, aged 17. He was shocked by the level of racism he encountered both in the army and later in France itself. Still, after the war he trained in France as a psychiatrist and wrote Black Skin, White Masks, about the psychological damage racism and colonialism inflict on both the oppressed and the oppressor.

Fanon argued that for colonised people “an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality.” In this situation the oppressed are often driven to find their identity through “the culture of the mother country”, or the occupier.

This echoes an earlier insight by the great U.S. anti-racist WEB Du Bois. In 1903, Du Bois wrote that black people always have to view themselves not only through their own eyes, but also through those of the racists that rule over them:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Fanon moved to the French colony of Algeria in North Africa to work as a psychiatrist. He arrived in 1953 on the cusp of the great anti-colonial uprising. France’s rulers had invaded in the 1830s and incorporated the country into their empire. By the mid-twentieth century they claimed Algeria was an indivisible part of France and the population were French citizens, though the mass of the Arab population was certainly never treated this way.

At the end of the Second World War, victory celebrations shaded into calls for independence. To wipe out this demand white settlers killed thousands in a massacre at Sétif. Typically for such colonial settler wars, the French tried to present themselves as the victims of irrational Arab violence, despite the horrific Arab casualties.

Fanon joined the underground resistance organisation, the FLN. He found himself treating French soldiers in the day and guerrillas at night. Though he would come to see violence as cleansing and necessary, he never romanticised it. As he became more active in the resistance he had to flee, living in exile in Tunis and travelling around building support for the revolutionary cause. He developed leukaemia and dictated The Wretched of the Earth rapidly to get his ideas on paper. Sadly, he died at the end of 1961, so didn’t live to see Algerian independence in July 1962.

Much of the French left, and particularly the mass Communist Party (PCF), did not support the armed resistance in Algeria. The PCF said it wanted rights for Algerians, but only as part of France—thus denying them the right to self-determination. It was suspicious of the FLN, which it did not regard as part of the left. This attitude meant the PCF downplayed the role of racism and colonial oppression and effectively sided with imperialism.

Disgust at this crude, reductionist attitude to class unity is one reason why—though he was sympathetic to Marxist ideas—Fanon never came to identify with them.

However, it is worth remembering that Les Damnés de la Terre, the French title of The Wretched of the Earth, is taken directly from the French lyrics to the revolutionary anthem, the Internationale (“Arise, the wretched of the Earth!”).

In part the book is a brilliant critique of imperialist hypocrisy. He compares the imperial attempts to reoccupy their colonial empires after the war with the German occupation of Europe:

Not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony. The governments of the various European nations called for reparations and demanded the restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them: cultural treasures, pictures, sculptures, and stained glass have been given back to their owners.

As Fanon developed his anti-colonial theories, he was particularly inspired by two recent struggles. The first in Vietnam had seen the French militarily defeated in 1954 at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, while in the second Britain fought a savage colonial war against rebels known as the Mau Mau in Kenya, east Africa.

His Wretched of the Earth is not always right on the solutions it proposes, however. Fanon argues that nationalist parties should not look to the working class and civil servants as their base, because they make up a small minority of the population, and are anyway a privileged “bourgeois” fraction of the colonized people. Against this he recommends relying on “the landless peasants, who make up the lumpenproletariat”. Such people, he believes, are always prepared to throw themselves “into the battle”. But while this layer are the people with least to lose, they are also inconsistent and hard to organise. Fanon acknowledges that the colonialists “will be extremely skilful in using that ignorance and incomprehension which are the weaknesses of the lumpenproletariat” to recruit them into gangs to defend the existing system. He was adept at understanding the changeable nature of classes.

But this is also why he was wrong to assert: “So long as the uncertainty of colonialism continues, the national cause goes on progressing, and becomes the cause of each and all”. In many countries the middle-class elements preferred compromise with the existing powers over risking anything too radical.

The Mau Mau, or Kenya Land and Freedom Army as they called themselves grew out of a radical trade union movement and a general strike. This was not an aberration in a rural country. The revolutionary minority in Kenya looked to the working-class movement for an organisational core. The same happened in Malaya, also revolting against British rule.

Fanon wrote, ‘A Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue’. As the author Peter Hudis rightly says, this means ‘slightly stretched, but not rejected or abandoned.’

But given these criticisms, why is it so important to remember Fanon’s anti-imperialism now? He was right about the unremitting struggle needed to challenge imperialism, and he was right to be contemptuous of those who pretend that the violence of the oppressed is not only not equal to but somehow worse than the violence of the colonialists who started it, and whose military resources always dwarf those available to the oppressed.

In the magnificent, if partly fictionalised film about the Algerian revolt, The Battle of Algiers, a journalist chides a spokesperson for the FLN about their “cowardly” tactic of leaving bombs in baskets in civilian cafes. The revolutionary replies,

And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.

Fanon’s unremitting anti-colonialism made him a hero to resistance movements through the 1960s. Furthermore, he was right to be suspicious of post-independence governments. Despite the heroic anti-colonial struggle it had waged Algeria soon became a dictatorship. The period he lived through was one of savage repression, but also of resistance, and of hope that an alternative existed to capitalism and colonialism.

Fanon’s ideas are part of rekindling such hope in our violent imperial age.

Ken Olende is researching a PhD on race, racism and economic crisis at Brighton University. He has previously worked as a journalist for British Socialist Worker, an editor for Stand Up to Racism and a history tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association.

Further reading