Just Finished Reading: The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (FP: 1961) [255pp] 

This is one of those books that seem to be referenced everywhere I looked. I’d heard of it over the years but until recently hadn’t really thought of hunting it down to read. Funnily, as is sometimes the case with me, my idea of what the book was actually about was off by quite a bit. I had thought that this was, essentially, a look at global poverty from an anthropological point of view. Well, it turned out to be something very different indeed!  

The author was a French West Indian born in Martinique so had first-hand experience of French colonial activities. Moving to Algeria in the early 1950’s he became chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital until his deportation in 1957. Again being witness to French colonial practices – and abuses – he joined the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) in 1954 and worked actively for Algerian independence from the French. Being at the heart of things deeply informed this impressive narrative. Fanon dissects colonialism, and not just that of the French, with surgical precision. He understands just how colonialism works and how it corrupts not only the people it is supposedly ‘administering’ but also those in charge – both the colonists themselves and their local proxies. What this analysis shows is exactly why colonies are purposefully underdeveloped (except in certain areas of interest to the colonists and home country interests) and how the few local ‘intelligentsia’ are corrupted or perverted by intimate contact with the colonising power. Over time, because of the nature of the colonising process, opposition arises within the local population and, at some point, these local ‘leaders’ choose sides. Unfortunately, those who choose their own people over the colonists who trained and educated them (to the extent that required of them to perform their colonial duties) have by this education and training become divorced from their own culture and find it incredibly difficult to function as native leaders of a native revolt. Worse is to come. If the revolt is successful and the colonising forces finally admit defeat, those now in charge – having been drawn from the tiny minority of educated local elites – all too often try to enforce their interpretation of the colonial ideas on a reluctant and restless population all too ready, still, to throw off these very ideas that have been imposed upon them. Needless to say, along with the inevitable interference from the colonising home country, this generally does not go well. 

I have often wondered why post-colonised countries around the world either spectacularly fail economically or fall rapidly into dictatorship of a single man, a single ethnic group or single tribe. This book enlightened me on this subject. After reading this incisive work I will never look at the post-colonial world in quite the same way again. For that alone it was definitely worth a read. Those of a more delicate disposition are recommended to skip/skim the last section ‘Colonial War and Mental Disorders’ which contains case studies of survivors of torture or witnesses to atrocities. This will not detract from the rest of the book and seemed, to me at least, like a bolt on to the main narrative function of the book. Recommended. 

Translated from the French by Constance Farrington.