The Wretched of the Earth

“The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized laureates are over. An ex-native, French-speaking, bends that language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only: ‘Natives of all underdeveloped countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches.” 

Sartre predicts that the colonial period, during which the colonized subjects strove to imitate their masters by inscribing their work within the European cultural framework, is over. Members of former colonies begin producing art for other oppressed nations, disregarding the West. Thus, Sartre divides colonialism into two periods, the first being cultural assimilation and the second being the celebration of local culture.

“Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother country, apply the ‘numerus clausus’ to the human race: since none may enslave, rob, or kill his fellow man without committing a crime, they lay down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow men. Our striking power has been given the mission of changing this abstract certainty into reality: the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden.” 

Sartre illustrates the mechanism of dehumanization that is necessary in a colonized country to excuse the mistreatment of locals. If a settler treats the native population as equals, there is no moral justification for taking away their land and exploiting their labor. As a result, it is necessary to invent reasons, such as race, as to why one group of people is more deserving than and superior to another. Once the conquered population has been categorized as inferior, it becomes permissible to treat it as less than human.

“I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church, the foreigner’s Church. She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.” 

Fanon denounces Christianity, as practiced by European settlers, as a tool of oppression. Religious ideas are chosen selectively to aid the colonizers’ interests and to subdue any dissatisfaction on the part of the oppressed. Fanon rejects such practices as not truly Christian.

“We have said that the colonial context is characterized by the dichotomy which it imposes upon the whole people. Decolonization unifies that people by the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity, and by unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial, basis.” 

Fanon alludes to his framing of the process of colonization as a fundamental social separation between settler and local. He often calls this division Manichean, implying that it is absolute and irreconcilable. Thus, the reversal of this social fissure is the removal of the concept of racial difference underlying colonialism. Decolonization, in this way, becomes not only a political struggle for independence but also a social and even a philosophical reversal of the status quo.

“A blind domination founded on slavery is not economically speaking worthwhile for the bourgeoisie of the mother country. The monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factory-owners and finance magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own ‘legitimate interests.’” 

This quote discusses the complicity that exists between capitalism and colonialism. Even when violence is no longer sufficient to control the colony, the mother country can employ economic measures to safeguard its interests. Colonialism, in a way, is driven by the demands of capitalism.

“We have said that the native’s violence unifies the people. By its very structure, colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces it and separates them. The colonial system encourages chieftaincies and keeps alive the old Marabout confraternities. Violence is in action all-inclusive and national. It follows that it is closely involved in the liquidation of regionalism and of tribalism.”

This quote encapsulates Fanon’s arguments for the need of violence in the decolonization process. If colonialism, combined with capitalism, aims to divide people into social and racial groups, to better control them, then finding one common cause, such as liberation, can bring down these cultural barriers. Fighting is the one action open to every person, it has the potential to destroy the existing flawed system and make way for a better society.

“This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races.” 

Fanon expands on the idea that Western prosperity stems from the oppression and exploitation of others. Europeans are proud of their culture and history, as well as their material wealth, but it is all a façade that hides various crimes against humanity committed in a place geographically removed locals. Consequently, holding Europe up as a role model is wrong, unless African societies are also willing to exploit and mistreat others.

“It cannot be too strongly stressed that in the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position.”

This quote is in dialogue with Marx and Engels’s ideas. In Marxism the urban wage workers comprise the social class that is most oppressed but also the best organized and most politically aware, so it is the proletariat that would eventually revolt against the existing social order. Fanon takes this concept and adjusts it to the colonial context, where urban dwellers are actually relatively privileged.

“Thus their enemy is not at all the occupying power with which they get along on the whole very well, but these people with modern ideas who mean to dislocate the aboriginal society, and who in doing so will take the bread out of their mouths.” 

Fanon denounces local shamans, tribe leaders, and medicine men who prefer to keep their positions of relative power and prosperity at the price of keeping their entire people subjugated by the colonizers. These men function as an obstacle between the peasants and the progressive urban activists who attempt to modernize Algerian society.

“For them [the national middle class], nationalization does not mean governing the state with regard to the new social relations whose growth it has been decided to encourage. To them, nationalization quite simply means the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period.” 

Another social group denounced by Fanon is the local bourgeoisie, which he sees as the native version of its colonial equivalent. This privileged class has no interest in overturning the system as a whole; they just want to take over from the settlers. Consequently, their nationalistic rhetoric cannot be trusted, as it serves only a small group rather than the entire nation.

“From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism, and finally to racism. These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked, and in fact the government of the Ivory Coast commands them to go, thus giving their nationals satisfaction.” 

The border between nationalism, or love for the homeland, and chauvinism, or hatred of the foreign, is extremely thin. The danger of promoting hostility toward everything that is deemed foreign, Fanon cautions, is that it can easily become extreme. Racism, once fostered, is not limited to only one group, such as Westerners, but shapes all aspects of society and colors all interactions.

“Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country’s industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.”

This observation directly counteracts colonial rhetoric of helping and benefiting the colonized. In economic terms colonialism is simply a legalized system of exploitation. Such a situation also explains why many former colonies experience an economic crisis after liberation. They are unprepared to enter the global market because most of the country is underdeveloped. This logical explanation for the financial struggles in the postcolonial period contradict European claims that Africans (or other colonized subjects) are lazy, stupid, or somehow responsible for their own hardships.

“The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh-eating animals, jackals, and vultures which wallow in the people’s blood.” 

This passage is one of the instances where Fanon most closely echoes Marxist ideas about distribution of wealth and labor relations. The author conceptualizes wealth not as something abstract or as a numeric sum but as a relationship of power imbalance. In the context of a village economy, it is easy to discern how economic inequality becomes possible as one person prospers due to exploitation of another rather than hard work or good fortune.

“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”

On one hand this quote conveys Fanon’s trust is the ability of peasants to grasp political and economic concepts; on the other, it expresses the author’s disdain of native politicians who approach their task of leading the country in a superficial and narrow-minded way. Political leaders who come from the city to raise support in the countryside often assume their audience is simple and uneducated, so they take the easy way out of giving a speech. Additionally, Fanon debunks the “savior” myth—the idea that one person can singlehandedly change the situation or save the country. He reminds his readers that building a new society is a communal project that depends on everyone’s participation.

“On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts.” 

This quote subverts the French “civilizing mission” (or mission civilisatrice) pretext for colonizing indigenous people. In public discourse the colonizers see themselves as an advanced society whose moral obligation is to intervene benignly, or “civilize,” a less developed society. Fanon points out that for such a relationship to work out, the natives must be depicted as “perverse” and “evil,” which consequently requires strict control and punishment.

“You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes. At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with stamping these instruments with a hallmark which he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner.” 

This passage highlights the extent to which colonial values permeate colonized society. Since local intellectuals usually acquire higher education in the mother country, they unconsciously internalize the ideas and worldview of their oppressors. As a result, artists and politicians often fall into the trap of trying to recreate Western superstructures within non-Western contexts. It is impossible to create or find national culture, in the sense in which the word is used in Europe, in a place that has not undergone the same sociopolitical processes.

“It is around the peoples’ struggles that African-Negro culture takes on substance, and not around songs, poems, or folklore.” 

Fanon highlights that culture is a living thing that develops alongside the people who create it. During periods of intense political upheaval and struggle, turning to the past or to folklore for inspiration is irresponsible and ineffectual. Rather, artists should be inspired by people’s actions to create artwork that reflects the efforts to achieve liberation. This makes culture much more meaningful and contemporary.

“We believe that the conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterward gives validity and vigor to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it.” 

This quote summarizes Fanon’s view on the innate relationship between national culture and nationhood. The cultural process cannot develop naturally in a colonized space as the ruling elite do everything to devalue and suppress it. Consequently, a colonized people cannot hope to bring their culture back to a privileged place until they have achieved independence. Furthermore, the struggle for liberation impacts local artists who, by adapting to and participating in current events, find new and relevant sources of inspiration and means of expression.

“Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” 

Fanon’s psychiatric approach to colonialism is key to understanding the psychological trauma of oppression. Being treated as less than human is not simply about material success or political rights but also identity. A colonized subject might know instinctively that they should have the same rights as their oppressor, but the systematic attempts to convince them of the opposite creates a cognitive dissonance that leads to ontological uncertainty.

“It must in any case be remembered that a colonized people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French.” 

Fanon makes an important distinction between occupation and colonization. Whenever a European country is dominated by its neighbor, its citizens are still treated as humans. However, when a Western power invades a territory abroad, where the local population is at a different stage of economic or scientific development, it treats the natives as less than human. The inhabitants of a colony are dehumanized to such a degree that they are seen as being of the same order as the landscape, not much different from a palm tree or a mountain.

“Who is going to take the punishment? […] Up above there is Heaven with the promise of a world beyond the grave; down below there are the French with their very concrete promises of prison, beatings-up, and executions. You are forced to come up against yourself. Here we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies.” 

This is a key passage examining the mechanisms of interiorizing self-hatred. When part of society is systematically mistreated and demeaned for a long time, its members are filled with dissatisfaction with their conditions and hatred for the misery they endure. However, they are powerless to change things and are aware that it would be impossible to go against the oppressors. Thus, the negative feelings turn inward—hatred of their living conditions becomes hatred of themselves. If they had not been born Algerian, they would not suffer in this way. Consequently, this self-hatred is easily externalized in the form of mistreating others in the same position.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.”

This quote condemns the United States, which in world politics often presents itself as the defender of liberty and liberal values but in fact is even more hypocritical than France in its exploitation and oppression of others. Fanon clearly expects no help from the United States and dismisses the country as a corrupted “second Europe.”

“Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe? The West saw itself as a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the spirit, in the name of the spirit of Europe, that Europe has made her encroach­ments, that she has justified her crimes and legitimized the slavery in which she holds the four-fifths of humanity.” 

This is one of the few passages where Fanon uses the term “comrade,” which in this context alludes to the communist way of addressing others. The title is meant to erase social class distinctions inherent in other modes of address, such as “sir” or “mister.” The second Europe is presumably the United States, a colony that achieved independence but followed in the steps of its former masters and became a racially divided and exploitative society. Consequently, Fanon is afraid that newly liberated African countries might attempt to imitate European society, which would have negative consequences for their citizens.