(Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, NBY: Grove Press 1963, pp.210-11; quoted in Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz, ‘Joyce and the Tradition of Anti-Colonial Revolution’, Working Papers Ser., Washington State Univ. 1999, p.15.)

‘There is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters.’ [...; see full text in Classroom, infra]

[… decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon […] decolonisation is quite simply the replacing of a certain “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without any period of transition there is a total, complete and absolute substitution. […] The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed, called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonised. But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colonisers. (p.27.)

The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say his property, to the colonial system. (p.28.)

Decolonisation is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been colonised becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. (p.28.)

The naked truth of decolonisation evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. If the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. (p.28.)

The colonial world is divided into compartments .... its ordering and its geographical lay-out will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonised society will be reorganised. (p.29.)

In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and “bewilderers” separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence adn their frequent and direct action maintain contact with native and advice him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the languge of pure force. (p.29.)

[pied noir:] The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps at the sea, but you’re never close enough to see them. his feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clearn and even, with no holes and stones. (p.30.)

The colonised man is an envious man. [...] for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler’s place (p.30.)

In the colonies the economic superstructure is also a substructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. (p.31.)

The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ‘the others’. (p.31.)

The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world ... will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforth a mental picture of action which is very clear, every easy to understand ... The destruction of the colonial zone is no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country. (p.31.)

The natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view […] not a treatise on the universal […] The colonial world is a Manichean world. […]

At times this Manicheanism goes to the logical conclusion and dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. (p.32-33.)

[E]very time Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular lock-jaw. During the period of decolonisation, the native’s reason is appealed to. He is offered definite values, he is told frequently that decolonisation need not mean regress ... But it so happens that whenthe native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife - or at least he makes sure it is within reach. (p.33.)

In the period of decolonisation, the colonised masses mock at these very values, insult them and vomit them up. (p.34.)

The colonialist bourgeoisie, when it realises that it is impossible for it to maintain its domination over the colonial countries, decides to carry out a rear-guard action with regard to culture, values, techniques and so on. [...] the immense majority of colonised people is oblivious to these problems. For a colonised people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. But this dignity is nothing without the dignity of the human individual […] the well known principles that all men are equal will be illustrated in the colonies from the moment that the native claims he is the equal of the settler. In fact, he has already decided to eject him and to take his place […] (p.34.)

Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. [...] For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice no longer turns me into stone. I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence; in fact, I don’t give a damn for him. [..] I am soon preparing [...] efficient ambushes for him [...] (p.35.)

Decolonisation unifies that people by the radical decision to remove from it its heterogeneity, and by unifying it on a national, sometimes racial basis. (p.35.)

[Remarks on Senghor: “... now Africanising the Europeans” 35]

Individualism is the first to disappear. … where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity … Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. [...] The native intellectual takes part, in a sort of auto-da-fé, in the destruct of all his idols: egoism, recrimination that springs from pride, and the childish stupidity of those who always want to have the last word. (pp.36-37.)

Self-criticism [37] period of austerity [38]

The native intellectual … once he begins to militate among the people he is struck with wonder and amazement; he is literally disarmed by their good faith and honesty. … Not the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth. (p.38.)

[The intellectual:] if a local defeat is inflicted, he may well be drawn into doubt, and from thence to despaire. The people, on the other hand, take their stand from the start on the broad and inclusive positions of Bread and land [...] (p.39.)

Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the natives, and ruins the foreigners. In this colonial context there is no truthful behaviour: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for “them”
  Thus we see that the primary Manicheaism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonisation; that is to say that the settler never ceases to be the enemy ... that must be overthrown. (p.39.)

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. (p.40.)

The colonised man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people. (p.40.)

The dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess [40] The native’s muscles are always tensed ... ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter. [... The] impulse to take the settler’s place implies a tonicity of muscles the whole time [...] (p.41.)

The natives’s muscular tension finds outlet regularly in bloodthirsty explosions - in tribal warfare, in feuds between septs and in quarrels between individuals ... a suicidal behaviour which proves to the settler that these men are not reasonable human beings. In the same ay the native manages to by-pass the settler. A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God; He is Fate. (p.42.)

One of the characteristics of underdeveloped societies is in fact that the libido is first and foremost the concern of a group, or a family. (p.43.)

The atmosphere of myth and magic frightens me and so takes on an undoubted reality. By terrifying me, it integrates me into the traditions and the history of my district or of my tribe, and at the same time it reassures me, it gives me status, as it were an identification paper. In underdeveloped countries the occult sphere is a sphere belonging to the community which is entirely under magical jurisdiction. [...] Believe me, the zombies are more terrifying than the settlers; and in consequence the problem is no longer that of keeping oneself right with the colonial world and its barbed-wire entanglements, but of considering three times before urinating, spitting or going out into the night.
  The supernatural, magical powers reveal themselves as essentially personal; the settler’s powers are infinitely shrunken, stamped with their alien origin. We no longer really need to fight against them since what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths. We perceive that all is settled by confrontation on the phantasmic plain. (p.43.)

In the colonial world, the emotional sensitivity of the native is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent; and the psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and find outlet in muscular demonstrations whcih have caused certain very wise men to say that the native is a hysterical type [...] (p.44.)

One step further and you are completely possessed. In fact, these are actually organised séances of possession and exorcism; they include vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by Legba, the famous god of the Voodoo. This disintegrating of the personality, this splitting and dissolution, all this fulfils a primordial function in the organism of the colonial world [...] During the struggle for freedom a marked alientation from these practices is observed. [...] After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life - the forces of colonialism. (p.45.)

The national political parties never lay stress on the necessity of a trial of armed strength, for the good reason that their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system. (p.46.)

[W]hen can one affirm that the situationis ripe for a movement of national liberation? [...] What are the forces which in the colonial period open up new outlets and engender new aims for the violence of the colonised peoples? (p.46.)

[Account of the nationalist parties:] The national political parties never lay stress upon the necessity of a trial of strength, for the good reason that their objective is not the radical overthrowing of the system [...] to the colonialist bourgeoisie they put bluntly enough the demand which to them is the main one: “Give us more power”. on the specific question of violence, the élite are ambiguous.
  This characteristic on the part of the nationalist political [46] partiers should be interpreted in the light both of the make-up of their leadres and the nature of their followings. (p.46.)

Thus there is very easily brought into being a kind of class of affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free. [...] On the other hand, the mass of the people have no intention of standing by and watching individuals increase their chances of success. What they demand is not the settler’s position or status, but the settler’s place. (p.47.)

The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties. It is clear that in colonial countries the peasantry alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. [...] For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonisation and decolonisation are simply a question of relative strength. (p.47.)

At this decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained inactive, comes into the field. It introduces the new idea which is in proper parlance the creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and the economic élite of the colonised country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as them and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good. (p.48.)

[Fanon evokes the idea that the cycle of exploitation has given way to the cycle of economic exploitation when ‘the colonies have become a market’ and that the mother country will not destroy a market for its manufactured goods, ergo it will not massacre the population (50ff.)]

the monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a governemtn 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”. (p.51.)

The military will of course go on playing with tin soldiers which date from the time of the conquest, but higher finance will soon bring the truth home to them.
  This is why reasonable nationalist political parties are asked to set out their claims as clearly as possible, and to seek with their colonialists opposite numbers, calmly and without passion, for a solution which will take the interests of both parties into consideration. (p.52.)

The colonialist bourgeoisie is helped in its task of calming down the natives by the inevitable religion. All those saints how have turned the other cheek [...] are held up as examples. [...; 52] At this moment, as if there existed a dialectical concomitance, the colonialist police will fall upon them [...] Then it is that they will realise bewilderedly that the peasant masses catch on to what they have to say immediately, and without delay ask them the question to whcih they have not yet prepared an answer: “When do we start?” (p.52.)

[I]t is the intuition of the colonised masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force. […] How can they hope to triumph? [57; …] The truth is that there is no colonial power today which is capable of adopting the only form of contest which has a chance of succeeding, namely, the prolonged establishment of large forces of occupation. (p.58.)

Cold War (59ff.) competing blocs; the Third World is not cut off from the rest. Quite on the contrary, it is at the middle of the whirlpool. (p.60.)

Castro [52] Kennedy [60] Mr Khrushev’s shoe [61]

The Americans take their role of patrons of international capitalism very seriously [62]

The native and the underdeveloped man are today political animals in the most universal sense of the word. [64]

The appearance of the settler has meant in terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler. This, then is the correspondence, term by term, between the two trains of reasoning. (p.73.)

At the level of the individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the natives from his inferiority complex and form his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. (p.74.)

The geography of hunger [...] the European nations sprawl [...] ostentatiously opulent. [...] 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 the underdeveloped world. The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer.’ (p.76.)

If conditions of work are not modified, centuries will be needed to humanise this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers. (p.79.)

Not long ago Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony. The governments of various European nations called for reparations and demanded the restitution in kind and money of the wealth which had been stolen from them. […] We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. (p.81.)

The great mistake, the inherent defect in the majority of political parties in under-developed regions has been, following traditional lines, to approach in the first place those elements which are the most politically conscious: the working classes of the towns, the skilled workers and the civil servants - that is to say, a tiny portion of the population, which hardly represents more than one per cent. (p.86.)

Competition with the feudal lords [87] resists dictatorship [94]

The trade-union leaders, steeped in working-class political action, automatically go from there to the preparation of a coup d’état. But here again the back-country is left out; this is a limited settling of accounts only, between the national middle class and the union workers. (p.98.)

Maquisards: these men get used to talking to the peasants. They discover that the mass of the country people have never ceased to think of the problem of liberation except in terms of violence, in terms of taking back the land from the foreigners, in terms of national struggle, and of armed insurrection. (p.101)

As for the people, they join in the new rhythm of the nation, in their mud huts and in their dreams. Under their breath and from the heart’s core they sing endless songs of praise to the glorious fighters. The tide of rebellion has already flooded the whole nation. Now it is the parties’ turn to be isolated. (p.102.)

Juvenile delinquency in the colonised country is the direct result of the existence of the lumpen-proletariat. (p.103.)

Traitors will be punished (p.105.)

Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organised and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. (p.118.)

[…] National consciousness, instead of being the all-embracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilisation of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesy of what it might have been. The faults that we find in it are quite sufficient explanation of the facility with which, when dealing with young and independent nations, the nation is passed over for the race, and the tribe is preferred to the state. These are the cracks in the edifice which show the process of retrogression that is so harmful and prejudicial to national effort and national unity. We shall see that such retrograde steps […] are the historical result of the inccapacity of the national middle class to rationalse popular action, that is to say their incapacity to see into the reasons for that action. (p.119.)

[…] traditional weakness … almost congenital to the national consciousness of under-developed couontries … the result of the intellectual laziness of the national middle-class … its spiritual penury, and of the profoundly cosmopolitan mould that its mind is set in. (p.119.)

In an under-developed country an authentic national middle class ought to consider as its bounden duty to betray the calling fate has marked out for it, and to put itself to school with the people: in other words to put at the people’s disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched when going through the colonial universities. But unhappily we shall see that very often the national middle class does not follow this heroic, positive, fruitful and just path […] (p.120.)

The racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear. Essentially it is no different from vulgar tribalism. (p.131.)

After independence, the party sinks into an extraordinary lethargy. […] The intellectuals who on the eve of independence [137] rallied to the party, now make it clear by their attitude that they gave their support with no other end in view than to secure their slices of the cake of independence. The party is becoming a means of private advancement. (p.137-138.)

[…] With its [i.e., the national bourgeoisie] wave-lengths tuned in to Europe, it [the national bourgeoisie] .continues firmly and resolutely to make the most of the situation. The enormous profits which it derives from the exploitation of the people are exported to foreign countries. The young national bourgeoisie is often more suspicious of the regime that it has set up than are the foreign companies. The national bourgeoisie refuses to invest in its own country and behaves towards the state that protects and nurtures it with, it must be remarked, astonishing ingratitude. It acquires foreign securities in the European markets, and goes off to spend the week-end in Paris or Hamburg. The behaviour of the national bourgeoisie of certain under-developed countries is reminiscent of the members of a gang, who after every hold-up hide their share in the swag from the other members who are their accomplices and prudently start thinking about their retirement. Such behaviour shows that more or less consciously the national bourgeoisie is playing to lose if the game goes on too long. (p.139.)

[…] In under-developed countries, the bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for its existence and its growth. In other words, the combined effort of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful middle class. (p.140.)

A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe is able to elaborite an ideology and at the same time strengthen its own power. Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular, has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a minimum of prosperity. In under-developed countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature. (p.141.)

[…] The national bourgeoisie of under-developed countries must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must simply be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing. This bourgeoisie, expressing its mediocrity in its profits, its achievements and in its thought, tries to hide this mediocrity by buildings which have prestige value at the individual level, by chromium plating on big American cars, by holidays on the Riviera and week-ends in neon-lit night-clubs. (p.141.)

Nationalising the intermediary sector means organising wholesale and retail cooperatives on a democratic basis; it also means decentralising these cooperatives by getting the mass of the people interested in the order of public affairs. (p.141.)

From the beginning the national bourgeoisie directs its efforts towards activities of the intermediary type. The basis of its strength is found in its aptitude for trade and small business enterprises, and in securing commissions. It is not its money that works, but is business acumen. It does not go in for investments and it cannot achieve that accumulation of capital necessary to the birth and blossoming of an authentic bourgeoisie. At that rate it would take centuries to set on foot an embryonic industrial revolution, and in any case it would find the way barred by relentless opposition of the former mother country, which will have taken all precautions when setting up neo-colonial trade conventions. (p.144.)

The bourgeois caste in newly independent countries have not yet the cynicism nor the unruffled calm which are founded on the strength of long-established bourgeoisies. From this springs the fact that they show a certain anxiety to hide their real convictions, to side-track, and in short to set themselves [145] up as a popular force. But the inclusion of the masses in politics does not consist in mobilising […] spectacular gatherings [which are] akin to the old tactics that date from before independence […] The political education of the masses proposes not to treat the masses as children but to make adults of them. (pp.145-46.)

We have more than once drawn attention to the baleful influence frequently wielded by the leader. This is due to the fact that the aprty in certain districts is organised like a gang, with the toughest person at its head. The ascendancy of such a leader and his power over others is often mentioned, and people have no hesitation in declaring, in a tone of slightly admiring complicity that he strikes terror into his nearest collaborators. (p.148.)

In an under-developed country the party ought to be organised in such a fashion that it is not simply content with having contact with the masses. The party should be the direct expression of the masses. The party is not an administation responsible for transmitting government orders; it is the energetic spokesman and the incorruptible defender of the masses. In order to arrive at this conception of the party, we must above all rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. (p.151.)

The large proportion of young people in underdeveloped countries raises specific problems for the government, which must be tackled with lucidity. The young people of the towns, idle and often illiterate, are a prey to all sorts of disintegrating influences. It is to the youth of an under-developed country that the industrialised countries most often offer their pastimes. (p.157.)

A government which calls itself a national government ought to take responsibility for the totality of the nation; and in an under-developed country the young represent one of the most important sectors. They level of consciousness of the young must be raised; they need enlightenment. (p.162.)

The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. The collective building up of a destiny is the assumption of responsibility on the historical scale. Otherwise there is anarchy, repression and the resurgence of tribal parties and federalism. (p.165.)

When we consider the effort made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality. [See full text. ]

On the conscious 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 as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

In such a situation the claims of the native intellectual are no luxury but a necessity in any coherent programme. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation’s legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people. (pp.169-70.)

The native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given back its value. […] Culture, extracted from the past to be dispalyed in all its splendour, is not necessarily that of his own country […] The culture which is affirmed is African culture. The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realise that history point out a well defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a Negro culture exists. (p.170.)

[...; see full-text version of this chapter, infra.]

Negro-ism therefore finds its first limitation in the phenomena which take account of the formation of the historical character of men. Negro and African-Negro culture broke up into different entities because the men who wished to incarnate these cultures realised that every culture is first and foremost national, and that the problems which kept Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Léopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. (p.174.)

[… T]he fact is that the political regimes of certain Arab states are so different, and so far away from each other in their conceptions that even a cultural meeting between the states is meaningless. (p.174.)

He [the intellectual] sets a high value on the customs, traditions and appearances of his people;’ but his inevitable, painful experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism. The sari becomes sacred, and shoes that come from paris or Italy are left off in favour of pampoooties, while suddenly the language of the ruling power is felt to burn your lips. […] The native native intellectual decides to make a inventory of the bad habits drawn from the colonial world, and hastens to remind everyone of the good old customs of the people, that people which he had decided contains all truth and goodness. (p.178.)

The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realise that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation. (p.179.)

The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner. […] He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. […] the man of culture, instead of setting out to find this substance, will let himself be hypnotised by thes mummified fragments which because they are static are in fact symbosl of negation and outworn contrivances. Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. When a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes. All that has made up the technique of passive resistance in the past may, during this phase, be radically condemned. In an under-developed country during the period of struggle traditions are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies. This is why the intellectual often runs the risk [180] of being out of date. (pp.180-81.)

The responsibility of the native man of culture is not a responsibility vis-à-vis his national culture, but a global responsibility with regard to the totality of the nation, whose culture merely, after all, represents one aspect of that nation. The cultured native should not concern himself with choosing the level on which he wishes to fight or the sector where he decides to give battle for his nation. To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible. There is no other fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle. To take an example, all those men and women who are fighting with their bare hands against French colonialism in Algeria are not by any means strangers to the national culture of Algeria. The national Algerian culture is taking on form and content as the battles are being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine and in every French outpost which is captured or destroyed. (p.187).

The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years’ time the type of jazz howl hiccuped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who [195] believe in it as an expression of niggerhood, and who are faithful to this arrested imageof a type of relationship. (pp.195-96.)

We believe that the conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. […] The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. [197] After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised man. / This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. (pp.197-98.)

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. (p.199.)

Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture. (p.199; End Chap.)

[Fanon lists psychiatric cases involving traumas brought on by colonial regime, or else cases of violence among the colonised stigmatised as irrational killers by the colonist medical experts but actually accountable in terms of colonial conditions.]

Here we discover the kernel of that hatred of self which is characteristic of racial conflicts in segregated societies. / The Algerian’s criminality, his impulsivity and the violence of his murders are therefore not the consequence of the organisation of his nervous system nor of a peculiar trait in his character, but the direct product of the colonial situation. [...] When the nation stirs as a whole, the new man is not an a posteriori product of that nation; rather, he coexists with it and triumphs with it. This dialectic requirement explains the reticence with which adaptations of colonisation and reforms of the façade are met. Independence is ot a word wich can be used as an exorcism, but an indispensable condition for the existence of men and women who are truly liberated, in other words who are truly masters of all the matieral means which make possible the radical transformatioin of society. (p.250; End Chapter.)

[...] It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man, a nhistory which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted in the pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity. And in the framework of the collectivity ther were the differentiations, the stratification and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen thousand millions of men.
 so, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. / Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. [...; 254] For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turnover a new leaf, we must work out new conccepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (p.255; End.)