70 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
BOOKS
THE INITIATIVE OF HISTORY
Frantz Fanon’s enduring legacy.
BY PANKAJMISHRA
EV
ER
ET
T
“
K
illing a European is killing two
birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul
Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into
France’s brutal suppression of the Al-
gerian independence movement. After
all, such a killing eliminates “in one go
oppressor and oppressed: leaving one
man dead and the other man free.” Sar-
tre, despised in France for his solidarity
with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted
to goad people into seeing the “strip-
tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You
who are so liberal, so humane, who take
the love of culture to the point of affec-
tation, you pretend to forget that you
have colonies where massacres are com-
mitted in your name.”
Sartre wrote these incendiary words
in a preface to “The Wretched of the
Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the
French and West Indian political phi-
losopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon.
Fanon, who had spent years in Alge-
ria agitating for its liberation, was, at
the time of the book’s publication, lit-
tle known and dying from leukemia.
He was thirty-six years old. Sartre’s
celebrity brought Fanon’s work wide-
spread attention but also colored its
initial Western reception. For the book’s
sixtieth anniversary, it has been reis-
sued, by Grove, with a new introduc-
tion by Cornel West and a previously
published one by Homi K. Bhabha. It
now emerges as a strikingly ambiva-
lent account of decolonization.
Hannah Arendt criticized Sartre’s
preface at length in her essay “On Vio-
lence” (1970), but she mostly ignored
Fanon’s text, with its many pages on the
degeneration of anti-colonial movements
and its case notes about psychiatric pa-
tients in Algeria. In 1966, a writer in these
pages claimed that Fanon’s “arguments
for violence” are “spreading amongst the
young Negroes in American slums.” A
reporter for the Times worried about
their effect on “young radical Negro lead-
ers.” Indeed, Stokely Carmichael de-
scribed Fanon as a mentor, and the found-
ers of the Black Panther Party regarded
“The Wretched of the Earth” as essen-
tial reading. Those delighting in, or
alarmed by, the spectre of armed Black
men on American streets barely noticed
the specific context of Fanon’s book—
his experience of a ferocious Western re-
sistance to decolonization that by the
early nineteen-sixties had consumed hun-
dreds of thousands of lives.
In 1954, when France normalized mas-
sacre and torture in its Algerian colony,
Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in a
hospital in Algiers. Confronted in his day
job with both French police torturers and
their Algerian victims, he became con-
vinced that psychiatric treatment could
not work without the destruction of co-
lonialism—an “absolute evil.” He joined
the Algerian rebels, with most of whom
he shared neither a language nor a reli-
gion, and, while moving from country to
country in Africa, wrote a series of works
on the necessity, the means, and the scope
of a revolt by what W.E.B. Du Bois, in
1915, called the “darker nations.”
Fanon’s basic assumption—that co-
lonialism is a machine of “naked vio-
lence,” which “only gives in when con-
fronted with greater violence”—had
become uncontroversial across Asia and
Africa wherever armed mutinies erupted
against Western colonialists. In 1959, in
Guinea, the killing of striking dockwork-
ers by Portuguese police had persuaded
the poet and activist Amilcar Cabral to
abandon diplomatic negotiation and em-
brace guerrilla warfare. A year later, Nel-
son Mandela, a disciple of Gandhi, led
the African National Congress into
armed struggle in response to a massa-
cre of Black South Africans in Sharpe-
Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” appeared just before his death, in 1961. ville. “Government violence can do only
