The treads of anti-colonialism have worn smooth with the hard running of the last decade or so. Only a few colonial dots remain now on the world's map and the only anti-colonial war still going on is taking place obscurely in remote Portuguese Angola. The fine, clear, simple passions and sympathies that anti-colonialism could arouse have been replaced by the more turgid manipulations of “non-alignment” and “neo-colonialism,” and the power that everybody fought for, or had handed to them, has turned out in new nation after new nation to be one form or another of oligarchic, military, single-party, or one-man rule. Colonialism's Sauls have been succeeded by “freedom's” Davids. The prisons are fuller than they ever were, and nobody writes books in the jails run by Nkrumah, Sukarno, or Castro. Had he lived to end up—as he most probably would have—in one of Ben Bella's prisons, we would never have known what Frantz Fanon might have written as a sequel to The Wretched of the Earth, which first appeared in its original French in 1961, the year he died, while the Algerian war was still going on.¹ In this book, however, Fanon has left behind him a reminder of just how strong those anti-colonialist and counter-racist passions were and how complicatedly unappeased they still are. To the disenchanted who thought that the invisible men in all these places were pure-democrats-seekers-after-manhood and fighters-for-the-oppressed and are now disturbed, unhappy, and repelled by the lot of Ugly Asians and Ugly Africans who have become visible on all sides, Fanon also brings the sharp warning that they have not really seen anything yet.

Frantz Fanon was a black man born on Martinique who studied medicine and psychiatry in France. In 1951, when he was twenty-seven years old, he published a book called Peau Noir Masques Blancs (“Black Skin, White Masks”), in which he dealt with what it meant to be a black man in a white-dominated world, or more particularly a black man dominated by whites who were French. It used to be held by some (Frenchmen or Francophiles) that the French were really much more gentlemanly colonizers and rulers than any other Europeans. Did not black men sit in the French National Assembly? Did not French, or at least Parisian society, clutch so many of its exotically primitive children to its political, artistic, and individual male and female bosoms over the years? Did not French colonial policy aim to create small clusters of black, brown, and yellow Frenchmen to form colonial elites that would forever be France's own? It is a partial truth that the French kept a fuzzier kind of color line between themselves and their subjects, but the greater truth was that the French style of mastery—as Frantz Fanon was not the first to show—aroused a deeper and more virulent hatred in the mastered than could be found anywhere else in the colonial world. The sources of the difference between this aspect of the French and, say, the British colonial experience have never really been plumbed; if they could be, we would know much more than we know now about the links between culture and personality. There was clearly always more physical and psychic violence in French domination than in any other. It was no “accident” that the longest and most brutal wars for the maintenance of colonial power were fought by the French in their major colonies, Indochina and Algeria, and it is also no “accident” that a Frantz Fanon, a very French black man indeed, should have become an apostle of violence and proclaim anew the primeval doctrine that manhood is won only by the drawing of blood.

Fanon joined the Algerian rebel cause, serving as physician and psychiatrist and, as a writer, becoming also a chronicler and tribune of that long and bitter struggle. He identified himself wholly with it—referring in his writing repeatedly to “we Algerians.” It was around his own perceptions of the heroic fighting phase of the Algerian war that he developed the notions and “theories” which he set down in his book, Les damnés de la Terre, which appeared not long before he was flown to Washington for treatment of a long-neglected cancer condition. It is this book that now appears in English translation and is presented by its publishers as a work that has become “a handbook for the revolutionary movement throughout the world.” This may or may not be so—all kinds of revolutionary handbooks now fill the stalls from Nairobi to Santo Domingo to Hanoi—but it is a book to be noted, for Frantz Fanon was an uncommon man and there is much instruction in what he wrote, especially if one reads him with a feeling for his own place in our current history and not, like Jean-Paul Sartre, to snatch eagerly and cringingly at the violence Fanon so passionately espouses.

In his introduction, Sartre dances around Fanon like an excited small satyr, tremblingly taking the blows that Fanon offers as coming from the “Third World”—which remains as Actively elusive in his pages as the “First” and “Second” worlds—and writes about it all as though he were discovering the emotions of colonial nationalism for the first time in Fanon's book and finding in Fanon its first spokesman. Sartre, always the non-responsible fellow-traveler—he carried his pen like a spear along Stalin's French literary flank for years—now scurries alongside the more modish ranks of Maoist revolutionism or what might be described in somewhat fresher American terms as right-wing Malcolm X-ism. Sartre explodes his oral barrage at “Europe” but he seems to be straining mainly to relieve himself of the bulging revulsion he feels over what French culture revealed itself to be in the process of decolonization. The pleasure he gets out of Fanon's assault is positively orgasmic.

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This assault—in which “Europe” is also an enlarged euphemism for “France”—comes out of the many layers of Fanon's own experience. The sources of his passion will be found in his earlier work, Peau Noir Masques Blancs (which Grove Press also promises to issue soon in English translation), written before he took on the role of pamphleteer-theoretician-of-the-revolution. He closed that work with a more personal kind of manifesto:

I am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanized my fathers. . . . I am not a prisoner of history. I do not have to seek in it the meaning of my destiny. . . . In the world where I make my way, I create myself unendingly. . . . I am my own foundation. . . . I find myself in the world one day and I claim one right: to demand human behavior from others. . . . I do not want to become the victim of the ruse of a black world. My life does not have to be devoted to drawing up the balance of black assets. . . . If the white contests my humanity, I will show him by bringing to bear on his life all my weight as a man. . . .

He found the way to do this in Algeria, where the open violence of the war released all the pressures built up in him during his years on Martinique and in France, and brought him to the view that only by violence could a man purge himself of the debasement and indignity of colonial and racial subjection. For generations, he points out, the “settler” operated on the principle that the “native” could be dealt with only by force. Now, he goes on, it is the native who “has chosen the argument furnished by the settler. . . . It is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.” In the French colonial setting, and particularly in Algeria where the guardians of French culture turned out to be wanton murderers and sadistic torturers, this turnabout carried with it a strong sense of inescapable justice, and for Fanon it became the key to a better future. “Violence,” he cues, “violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.” And the greatest of these “social truths” which only the people can discover and apply is: “The last shall be first.”

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But now Fanon, the black man seeking dignity, the psychiatrist sensitively touching upon the inwardness of individual experience, has become a man of action, a pamphleteer, agitator, and spinner of revolutionary strategy. Like so many other writers-turned-politicians and psychiatrists-turned-historians—all of a great variety of creeds, colors, and national origins—he takes off into a succession of wild and blurry yonders. Since he deeply needs to stand on his “own foundation” and to create himself unendingly, his ideas appear without reference to any sources or associations or past history; they all appear as fresh revelation churned out of his own mind by his own experience. He retreads much of the rocky and rubbly road of ideological controversy over the role of the “national bourgeoisie” in backward or colonial countries. He indicates at one point that he is aware that these arguments go back more than half a century among Marxists of all varieties, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Leninist-Trotskyists, Leninists-Stalinists, Leninists-Maoists, but he nowhere mentions any of them or refers to the issue in any other settings but the ones he gives it. His more or less conscious or unconscious borrowings are heaviest from Mao. Perhaps they can be better called affinities, especially with the early Mao, since Fanon really speaks out of what might be thought of as Algeria's Yenan period. Hence the inevitability and inescapability of armed violence as wielded by the armed masses, and essentially the armed rural masses; hence the prime role of the “peasantry” or the country people, in contrast to the corrupted town dwellers with their “deep distrust toward the people of the rural areas.” For Fanon, the “national bourgeoisie” appears to include all European-trained civil servants and all other white-collar wearers, and even such “workers” as “tram conductors, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, nurses, and so on” who because they occupy such a “privileged place” in the colonial system have to be included in “the ‘bourgeois’ fraction of the colonized people.” This “bourgeoisie” is too tightly tied to the colonialists to carry out the tasks of the revolution. Only the city poor, the “lumpen-proletariat,” can serve as allies of the revolutionary countryfolk in the making of the revolution. Only revolutionary leaders who leave the towns and return to the bosoms of the “people” out in the country will be capable of organizing the masses for the kind of true and virtuous violence that will bring about the emancipation of all and make “the last the first.” All others, who remain in the corrupting and debilitating atmosphere of the towns, who keep their connections with the colonialists or even just stay to breathe the European-poisoned atmosphere, will never lead the “people” or, worse, will betray them. The people cannot trust politician-intellectuals morally or intellectually imprisoned by their European education, or soldier-politicians “cleverly handled by foreign experts.” In the struggle for independence they will seek to avoid violence and will settle for crippling compromises that will keep them chained to the old masters. After independence, they will sell the people's birthright for whatever porridge the wily Europeans set before them. “Colonialism pulls the strings shamelessly,” and soon these “leaders” are snarling at each other, reviving and utilizing regional, tribal, and racial animosities, and the dream of true freedom and unity is dimmed, subverted, and lost.

About all this Fanon writes without identifying any of his characters or settings. Once in a while, he cites an African name or place, and once or twice he seems to be alluding to China without naming it—“a gigantic and frenzied effort”—but what he does mostly is to describe Algeria as he sees it, again hardly ever naming it. Everything is described in general terms, universally applied, and in these terms he paints a whole world, his “Third World”—by which he means “Latin America, China, and Africa”—that is “rising like the tide to swallow up all Europe.” It is all happening as a collision between “the settler” and “the native,” all in the image of an Algeria in the midst of its war against the French, hence an Algeria idealized, romanticized, glorified. His villains are the “colonialists” and the “bourgeoisie” and his heroes are “the people”—the good, simple, humble, virtuous country folk, committing and sacrificing themselves on the altar of triumphant self-realization, and destined to win their way through to a great victory, provided they avoid all the pitfalls against which Fanon warns them and follow only the leaders who heed them and stay with them.

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There is appeasement in his passion and his violence for those who want to loose the storms they feel inside of them—the publisher's blurb quotes LeRoi Jones as urging “every black person in the world” to read Fanon's book and “every white person” to read Sartre's preface. Yet—and this must be especially unsettling to readers like Jones whom he otherwise delights—Fanon wants no part of any kind of counter-racism, no part of négritude (awkwardly translated in this book as “Negro-ism”), no part of a “black culture,” no part of leaning on specious glorifications of the past, no part of adopting the white man's follies as his own. In this Fanon remains true to himself, which cuts him off rather sharply from a great many who will undoubtedly want to claim him as one of their own.

As always, Fanon names no names and hides particulars behind his sweeping cloak of generalized descriptions. Thus the reader is left to provide his own cast of characters when Fanon speaks of leaders who “find nothing better to do than to erect grandiose buildings and lay out money on what are called prestige expenses” and engage in “scandalous enrichment” while the people “continue to die of starvation.” Most sharply of all, he denounces the new leaders and their single-party machines as bringing on “the disaster of an anti-democratic regime depending upon force and intimidation.” The party becomes “a means to private advancement . . . more and more clearly anti-democratic, an instrument of coercion.” As for the “leaders”:

We have more than once drawn attention to the baleful influence frequently wielded by the leader. This is due to the fact that the party in certain districts is organized like a gang, with the toughest person at its head . . . and people have no hesitation in declaring, in a tone of slightly admiring complicity, that he strikes terror into his nearest collaborator. . . . An unceasing battle must be waged to prevent the party from ever becoming a willing tool in the hands of a leader. . . . The nation ought not to be something bossed by a Grand Panjandrum.

To be sure, Fanon lays all these evils at the feet of the “bourgeoisie” and the string-pulling colonialists and their secret agents, but his descriptions cover quite a lot of ground. The only individual he actually mentions is Youlou, the since-deposed leader of Congo Brazzaville, but one wonders how his reference to “Grand Panjandrums” is read by Kwame Nkrumah's ambassador, Quaison-Sackey, who is also quoted in the publisher's blurb as urging all to read Fanon who want to know “what it means to fight for freedom, equality, and dignity,” or, for that matter, by admirers of Castro, Sukarno, or Mao Tse-tung, or whether Fanon would today apply his description to Ben Bella. It is not easy to play Fanon's game without a scorecard to tell you who the players are, and Fanon nowhere goes on to describe what kind of ideal regime he does want to grow out of his ideal revolution. The nearest he comes to it is a suggestion that the “party” stand apart from the “government,” that it remain pure and dedicated by keeping its militants out of the seats of power and, in fact, out of the polluted cities altogether. They are to stay in the unpolluted countryside where they will remain the constant and vigilant instruments “through which the people exercise their authority and express their will.” He wants the capital itself moved away from the cities and out into the hinterland, likewise to free it from the contamination of “bourgeois” and foreign villains who wait on all sides to trap the innocent and the unwary. Fanon never does say how he views “Third World” revolutionism as it now operates, say, in China or Cuba, and although he presumably admires Castro and Mao and is not calling them Grand Panjandrums, it is hard to see any resemblance between them and their regimes and the revolutionary dream world he talks of bringing into being.

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Fanon is a good deal sharper and clearer, however, in his rejection of tribal or racial chauvinisms. “Racialism and hatred and resentment,” he writes, “cannot sustain a war of liberation.” In place after place, he says, “from nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism.” African begins tearing at African all the more readily if he be of some other group, tribe, or nation. “We observe a permanent seesaw between African unity, which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion, and a heart-breaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form.” This again, of course, is a crime of the “national bourgeoisie,” and everywhere that it has “shown itself incapable of extending its vision of the world sufficiently, we observe a falling back toward old tribal attitudes, and, furious and sick at heart, we perceive that race feeling in its most exacerbated form is triumphing.”

But most stabbingly of all, Fanon takes note of the line drawn between black and non-black even in his “Third World” Africa. Needless to say, the wily colonialist is in on this, too, whipping up religious differences, and these differences bring on a “revival of the commonest racial feelings.” Thus in “white”—i.e., Arab—Africa, pointed pride is taken in having “a thousand year old tradition of culture” while “Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized, in a word, savage” and one gets “in certain regions of Africa . . . the loathsome idea derived from western culture that the black man is impervious to logic.” In “white Africa” a black man “hears himself called a ‘Negro’ by the children in the streets,” students from Black Africa suffer embarrassment, and in black Africa there are people who do not fear the colonialists so much as “those vandals of Arabs coming from the North.” All this, too, is “bourgeois” and has to be overcome by true revolutionism, but Fanon does not say how. He expresses his fear that the “racialization of thought” represented by the idea of negritude will lead Africans and black men everywhere else “up a blind alley.” He goes on to write, with painful and sympathetic sensitivity—for this problem is very much his own—of the “native intellectual” who desperately needs to find a “secure anchorage” for himself and who, “to escape from the supremacy of the white man's culture feels the need to turn backward toward his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people.” He is “terrified by the void” he finds there, but must still somehow “get away from the white culture,” which drives him back on “emotional attitudes . . . exceptional sensitivity and susceptibility . . . [and] withdrawal.” All of this brings him to “a reflex and contradiction which is muscular” and “muscular action must substitute itself for concepts.” Fanon is writing here of the world of poetry, but he might just as well be describing his own effort in the world of political struggle, and his own substitution of the muscular outlet of violence for any other way of meeting the problems of change and growth. “It is not enough,” he cries, “to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to. . . . It is to this zone of occult [i.e. cloudy or unclear] instability where the people dwell that we must come.”

But Fanon quickly leaves these deepest of his dilemmas, and propelled by his great angers, takes off again into the high orbit of his ultra-radical, ultra-romantic rhetoric. His signals get semi-incoherent or unreadable, his steeply-angled view of the earth takes him far, far away from the recognizable realities, and he heads for a landing, more probably “hard” than “soft” on some other planet where somehow man can start all over again. “Leave this Europe,” he commands in his closing manifesto. “The European game has finally ended, we must find something different. We today can do everything so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe . . . she is running headlong into the abyss.” America is Europe's child who imitated Europe so successfully that she became “a monster, in which all the faults, the sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions. . . . It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man.”

This tempts one to reach for the analogy of the adolescent's need for severance and self-assertion, to discover what he himself really is, to escape becoming a carbon copy of father, to cut away, slashing and flailing as he goes, to make his own way, to be his own self, to make his own world. This is what has made heroes out of Sekou Touré the only French African who said no to France, of Sukarno who shakes his little stick in the face of Western power, of Castro who defies towering America, and most of all of Mao, whose challenge to all other power is total and who is recreating Chinese power in an image all its own. It is true that the world deformed by Europe's rapacity nevertheless yearns after Europe's technology, but it yearns even more after the dream of a humane human society that also came out of the European experience. Men were asserting themselves and their power by rapacious violence long before the Europeans took their turn at the end of the long line of barbarians, enslavers, and dominators. But Europeans were the first to dream a libertarian, egalitarian dream and to try to translate it into social and political reality, and this, too, has been part of the European experience, and this part of the experience shaped the goals and the rhetoric of all the national self-reassertion that has been challenging European power in the last decades. Fanon is too modern and essentially too humane a man to want to regress all the way back to the non-European past; it is the libertarian, egalitarian dream he dreams and this dream also came out of the Europe from which he wants to sever himself and this is what he cannot do and this is what he cannot abide. Like the intellectuals he describes, the frustration becomes too great, he cracks into his own “emotional attitudes” and “extreme susceptibility” and makes his own “muscular response” in a high shrill summons to super-revolutionary violence and a fantasy of super-virtuous revolutionary emancipation.

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The re-shaping of our systems of power and of the human relationships they create is a process that has only just begun. A long agony stretches before us as they work themselves into their new forms. But this process will not much resemble the experience of parents and children living through the process of change and growth. Fanon, as ex-colonial subject and as psychiatrist, does not cast the colonialist in the role of father but rather as “a bloodthirsty and implacable stepmother” and this perhaps suggests why the parental metaphor cannot be carried very far. However deep and violent the parent-child relationship may become, there is love in it, and whatever else Western white men brought to their dominance over non-Western non-white men, it was not love, unless you use this word to describe what a man might feel for a useful animal, a slave, a creature over whom he exercises total control. The Fanons are the products of this experience, and it does not disappear with the stroke of a pen on a declaration of independence. Our sons and the sons of the Fanons will be living with the consequences and so will those who come after them, even to the third and fourth generations.

¹ Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 255 pp., $5.00.