72 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
the question: Who am I in reality?” By
the time he wrote the book, however, his
focus had shifted. “The misfortune of the
colonized African masses, exploited, sub-
jugated, is first of a vital, material order,”
he wrote, against which the grievances
of educated Black men like him did not
appear as urgent. In a withering review,
published in 1959, of Richard Wright’s
“White Man, Listen” (1957), Fanon wrote
that “the drama of consciousness of a
westernized Black, torn between his white
culture and his negritude,” while painful,
does not “kill anyone.”
For much of “The Wretched of the
Earth,” Fanon raises an issue that he
thought Wright, obsessed with the ex-
istential crises of literary intellectuals,
had ignored: how “to give back to the
peoples of Africa the initiative of their
history, and by which means.” Distrust-
ful of the “Westernized” intelligentsia
and urban working classes in the na-
tionalist movements fighting for liber-
ation, he saw the African peasantry as
the true wretched of the earth, and the
main actor in the drama of decoloniza-
tion. According to Fanon, “In colonial
countries only the peasantry is revolu-
tionary,” since “it has nothing to lose and
everything to gain” and, unlike bourgeois
leaders, brooks “no compromise, no pos-
sibility of concession.”
F
anon did not seem to realize that he
shared the indignities of racism and
his self-appointed tasks with many anti-
colonial leaders and thinkers. Gandhi,
after all, had once been as loyal to the
British Empire as Fanon was to the
French, and, while working as a lawyer
in South Africa in the late nineteenth
century, had likewise been racially hu-
miliated into a lasting distrust of the
identity politics of whiteness. So, too,
did Gandhi’s vision of political self-de-
termination draw on a need to heal the
wounds inflicted by white-supremacist
arrogance. His concept of nonviolence
fashioned a new way of thinking and
feeling, one in which human good would
not be defined only by Western males.
Many other Asian and African lead-
ers of decolonization had a similar intel-
lectual and political awakening. Educated
in Western-style institutions and inhab-
iting the white man’s world, these men
were often the first in their countries to
be directly exposed to crude racial prej-
udice. Renouncing their white masks,
their failed attempts at mimicry, they
took it upon themselves to rouse and mo-
bilize their destitute and illiterate com-
patriots, who had passively suffered the
depredations and insults of white colo-
nialists. As members of a tiny privileged
élite, they saw it as their duty to devise
non-exploitative economic and social sys-
tems for their people, and foster a cul-
ture in which alienating imitation of the
powerful white man gives way to pride
and confidence in local traditions.
It was Fanon’s broader experience of
the colonial world in the nineteen-fif-
ties that refined his political conscious-
ness. In 1954, a year after moving to Al-
geria to take up a psychiatric residency,
he witnessed the beginning of the Al-
gerian revolution. Within a couple of
years, his opposition to the colonial
crackdown got him thrown out of the
country. He joined the revolutionary
movement, the Front de Libération Na-
tionale, and, from a new base, in Tunis,
travelled across Africa—Ghana, Ethi-
opia, Mali, Guinea, Congo—as a rep-
resentative of the F.L.N. and its provi-
sional government-in-exile.
By this time, Africa and Asia had
manifested a range of ideological alter-
natives to racial capitalism and imperi-
alism: the peasant Communism of Mao
Zedong, in China; in Indonesia, Sukar-
no’s brand of Islam-inflected socialism,
Pancasila; Kwame Nkrumah’s Positive
Action protests, in Ghana. Meanwhile,
the Cold War was drastically curtailing
the autonomy of newly liberated na-
tions. To protect their interests, West-
ern powers were replacing costly phys-
ical occupations with military and
economic bullying. They cast about for
collaborators among élites and some-
times overthrew and murdered less trac-
table leaders. One of the most promi-
nent victims of a Western assassination
plot was a friend and an exact contem-
porary of Fanon: Patrice Lumumba, the
first elected Prime Minister of Congo,
who was killed in 1961. Political and eco-
nomic incapacity in many fledgling na-
tion-states also forced their leaders to
seek help from their former overlords.
A few months after Kenya, Uganda, and
Tanganyika gained independence from
Britain, their leaders sought the British
Army’s help in suppressing mutinies
over low pay.
Oddly, “The Wretched of the Earth,”
published during this partial transfer of
power from white to Black and brown
hands, barely mentions Asia or much
of Africa, and has nothing at all to say
about the Middle East. Fanon appears
not to have intimately known any of the
societies he travelled through, not even
Algeria. Yet, by reflecting scrupulously
on his experience as a powerless Black
man in exile, he was able to see through
the Cold War’s moralizing rhetoric to
the insidious new modes of social and
political coercion. It was probably during
his time in Nkrumah’s Ghana that he
developed his view of single-party rule:
“the modern form of the bourgeois dic-
tatorship stripped of mask, makeup, and
scruples, cynical in every aspect.” The
formulation has, in the past six decades,
accurately described the political sys-
tems in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, Sri
Lanka, and many other countries.
Fanon also presciently described the
politically explosive gap between urban
prosperity and rural poverty, and the
toxic consequences of inequitable de-
velopment, even in countries he never
visited. Those bemused by the specta-
cle of an educated middle class and a
globalized business élite devoted to In-
dia’s Narendra Modi, a far-right auto-
crat, can find a broad outline of this sit-
uation in “The Wretched of the Earth”:
The national bourgeoisie increasingly turns
its back on the interior, on the realities of a
country gone to waste, and looks toward the
former metropolis and the foreign capitalists
who secure its services. Since it has no inten-
tion of sharing its profits with the people, it
discovers the need for a popular leader whose
dual role will be to stabilize the regime and to
perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie.
T
he defects and omissions in Fanon’s
book are also revealing. His relent-
lessly male perspective reduced libera-
tion from colonialism to the frustrations
and desires of men like him. Proposing
that the native’s virility and will to power
could counter the violence of the colo-
nialist, he reinforced a hypermasculin-
ist discourse of domination. Not sur-
prisingly, politics remained a vicious
affair in Algeria for decades after the
French departed.
As an heir to the secular French En-
lightenment, and seemingly unaware of
non-Francophone cultural traditions,
Fanon was blind to the creative possi-
