Frantz Fanon: A Political Biography 9780755638215, 9780755638246, 9780755638239

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Leo Zeilig is a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is an editor of the Review of African Political Economy and has written mainly on modern African history.

Also by Leo Zeilig: Frantz Fanon: Voices of Liberation HSRC Press, 2014 ISBN: 978 0 79692 485 8 ‘Zeilig’s remarkable book about a remarkable scholar-activist, Fanon, tells the story of the man, his ideas and the milieu. Zeilig rescues the kernel of Fanon’s thought from hostile detractors and mistaken adulators showing that it was anti-racist, anti-capitalist, internationalist and humanist. This book is a subtle and sympathetic engagement with Fanon’s life project: decolonisation and the plight of the national liberation movement in Africa. Everyone concerned with the human emancipation project must read this book.’ Trevor Ngwane, Research Chair for Social Change, University of Johannesburg ‘A thought-provoking book that represents a new interpretation of Frantz Fanon, key thinker of the Third World anti-colonial revolution that transformed the twentieth century.’ Martin Evans, Professor of Modern European History, University of Sussex ‘Leo Zeilig identifies Frantz Fanon as the most important figure in the ideological struggle against colonialism in the twentieth century, arguing that his critical engagement with Marxism enabled him to go far beyond that project. He was a brilliant champion of national liberation, yet he turned into its most devastating critic. In this captivating and passionate biography, Zeilig argues that while Fanon’s legacy is ambiguous, its emancipatory message demands our continuing attention if we are to challenge the continuing oppressions and inequalities of global capitalism. This book is a magnificent addition to the already hugely impressive corpus of work on Fanon’s philosophy and politics.’ Roger Southall, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand

LEO ZEILIG

FRANTZ FANON

A PoliticAl BiogrAPhy

SECOND EDITION

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 Copyright © Leo Zeilig, 2021 Leo Zeilig has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xii xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Simon Goggin Cover image: Frantz Fanon, Paris, 1950. (© AFP/Getty Images) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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For Ian Birchall

vi

Contents

Abbreviations Maps Acknowledgments

viii x xii

Introduction to the second edition

xvi

Introduction

1

1.

Martinique, France and Beyond

15

2.

Towards Revolution

47

3.

Into the Eye of the Storm

77

4.

A Revolutionary in Tunis

101

5.

Year Five of the Algerian Revolution

136

6.

‘The Whole of Existence’ – Liberation and Leukaemia

171

7.

Legacies

223

Notes Bibliography Index

248 267 275

vii

Abbreviations

Groups AJAAS ALN AML CCE CNR CNRA CRUA ENA GPRA MNA MNC MPLA OAS PAIGC PCA PCF PCR POUM PPA SAS SDECE SFIO

Association de la Jeunesse Algérienne pour l’Action Sociale Armée de Libération Nationale Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution Convention nationale révolutionnaire Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne Comité Révolutionnaire pour l’Unité et l’Action Étoile Nord-Africaine Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne Mouvement National Algérien Mouvement National Congolais Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Organisation de l’Armée Secrète Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde Parti Communiste Algérien Parti Communiste Français Parti Communiste Réunionnais Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista Parti du Peuple Algérien Sections Administratives Spécialisées Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière viii

Abbreviations

UGEMA UGTA UPA UPC

Union Générale des Étudiants Musulmans Algériens Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens União das Populações de Angola Union des Populations Camerounaises

Works Cited in the Text BSWM SDC TAR WE

Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs) Studies in a Dying Colonialism (L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne) Toward the African Revolution (Pour la Révolution Africaine) The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre)

ix

Maps

ISH AN SP

SIDIOS PRE

ALGERIA

TUNISIA

MOROCCO IFNI

POLITICAL STATUS OF AFRICAN STATES IN 1960

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

SAHARAN DEPARTEMENTS

LIBYA

U.A.R. (EGYPT)

SPANISH SAHARA

RED

MAURITANIA

SEA

MALI

NIGER

(BR .)

TOGO FERNANDO PO

CO

RIO MUNI

BL U

To Angola

RE

P

IC BL PU

A

SO

M

AL

I

KENYA

INDIAN

THE CONGO

ZANZIBAR

TANGANYIKA

OCEAN

a

AT LANTIC

si

de

el eC

UB

ha

LIC

nn

E

ASY

REP

iqu mb za Mo

MA

LAG

IQ

d

SOUTH-WEST Rhodesia AFRICA BECHUANA-LAND PROTECTORATE

al a n

Southern

To Union of South Africa

U

B

o

M

Rh

ZA

N or t h e r n

FEDERATION OF RHODESIA AND NYASALAND

N yas

ANGOLA

OCEAN

Tropic of Capricorn

D AN

RUANDAURUNDI

IC

GABON

UG

REPUBLIC OF

OF

Equator

ETHIOPIA

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

RE

NIGERIA

MO

IVORY COAST GHANA

NGO

LIBERIA

CA M

SIERRA LEONE

ERITREA

SUDAN

FRENCH SOMALILAND

ER CA OO M NS ER OU N

UPPER VOLTA

PORT GUINEA GUINEA

DAHOMEY

CHAD

SENEGAL GAMBIA

SWAZILAND

Countries that achieved independence prior to 1960 Countries that achieved independence in 1960

UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA

Territories not yet independent in 1960

BASUTOLAND

0

International boundaries

300

600 ml

0 450 900 km © 2010 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Internal boundaries

Map of Africa 1960 x

Maps

Map of Martinique

xi

Acknowledgments

In 1960 Frantz Fanon addressed a pan-African summit in Accra. His analysis of events in Algeria and the torture of Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) militants by the French was penetrating, as he appealed in staccato phrases for African support in the brutal struggle being waged in the continent’s most violent war for decolonisation. Yet during this startling, brilliant speech Fanon seemed to become overwhelmed, exhausted. Afterwards, when a member of the audience approached him to inquire what was wrong, he explained that he had suddenly felt overcome at the thought that he had to stand there, before the assembled representatives of African nationalist movements, to try and persuade them that the Algerian cause was important, at a time when men were dying and being tortured in his country for a cause whose justice ought to command automatic support from rational and progressive human beings.

At the time Fanon was already working as the FLN’s representative in Ghana, which had won independence from the British in 1957. Fanon was both delighted and horrified at what he saw on the continent as it reached towards independence. For Fanon it was not enough to celebrate the achievements of decolonisation; it was necessary to educate, to strain at the limits of national freedom and to provoke and generate debate. He described how the national bourgeoisie, after independence, is only too happy to accept crumbs thrown to it from the departing colonial powers. Without social reform, without political and economic transformation, national liberation would be an empty shell. His warning to militants of the anti-colonial struggle was to make this xii

acknowledgments

independence for themselves, to maintain their mobilisation after the national flag is raised. Fanon always fought – with a certain frustration that he even needed to fight – in order to provide the continent (and the world) with a politics and with movements that could overcome the dreadful absence of ideology that he had observed in African parties, groups and anticolonial organisations. He explained that national liberation would be a curse unless it became a permanent, universal social and economic struggle that could move beyond the nation state. Reading Fanon’s final book for the first time in the early 1990s, I was struck, as readers continue to be today, by his foresight, the prophetic quality to his extraordinary writing. Confused, I would flick to the publication date of the book to remind myself that it had really been written 30 years before. I became determined to study the work of a man who captured the anger and possibilities of his time, but who urged and pushed us to go further. Fanon’s power, his resonance for us today, is the strength of his words, his capacity to reach to the challenge of human liberation that remains frustratingly elusive. In so many ways Fanon is still our guide. He wrote to develop our thinking, to make up for the lacunae in our politics and organisations, but he knew that a single book – or even three astonishing books – could not satisfy the weaknesses in our thinking and movements. It was in the realm of practice, in life, in the confusion and chaos of real activism that we would succeed or fail in creating an alternative world worthy of our humanity. There could be no substitute – no book, no great manifesto. Only with practice and action would our ideas be given their response. When Fanon raged at the end of his life – weeks after his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, was published – against the leukaemia that was killing him at 36, he understood this lesson. Only life can transform life. Still, our books are important in confronting and synthesising the lessons of life and the failed projects of emancipation that have littered the last 200 years. This book is a fraternal and critical consideration of Fanon’s work and life. I hope it avoids the uncritical, though good, philosophical homilies and the more rare attacks that have proliferated around Fanon’s work.

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The book has been long, too long, in preparation. I owe thanks to Joanna Godfrey and Lester Crook at I.B.Tauris for their heroic patience as the manuscript was delayed for another year (four in total) and for their continual optimism that the book would be worth the wait. I have met an extraordinary array of people who have devoted their time and generosity to this project. Some, like Pierre and Claudine Chaulet, were Fanon’s close friends, his brothers and sisters in struggle. Others have written brilliantly about his life and legacy. A year before he died, I met Fanon’s leading biographer, David Macey, in Leeds. We spent the day talking. David and I exchanged cigarettes and discussed Negritude, Algeria, post-colonialism. It was a dizzying, moving delight to be in David’s company, a man of such gentle erudition, broad reading, insights and kindness. Both David and Pierre died before I could finish the work. Many other friends, comrades and colleagues have helped develop my own understanding of Fanon. Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France was patient and generous with her time, agreeing to meet me in France and to answer my occasionally impertinent questions. Her work on her father’s legacy is deeply embedded in an understanding of the continued relevance of his ideas. Others also need to be mentioned: Andy Wynne, Gillian Zeilig, Maurice Caplan, Martin Evans, Hamza Hamouchene, Philip Murphy. I was also inspired by conversations and interviews with veterans of the Algerian war against the French while I was working in Algiers, particularly Miraoui Smain and Moutif Mohamed. Kim Wale has been a companion through the tribulations of this project. Her own deep understanding of Fanon, her penetrating questions and enthusiasm, ensured that I completed the project and reached a further appreciation of Fanon’s complex and prescient ideas on racism and identity. The book, the great unwieldy volume, thick, unpolished, would not have reached this stage of readiness if it was not for Sarah Grey’s phenomenal edit, her insistence on clarity, the reworked sentences, her vital questions, her engagement with the argument. It is an incredible, heady pleasure working with an editor of Sarah’s talents. Lila Chouli helped immeasurably in the early development of the manuscript, in conversations, suggestions and fraternal disagreements

acknowledgments

over several years. We have come to share an immense admiration for Fanon. In Lila’s extraordinary research and writing on contemporary struggles for liberation on the continent, she has continued Fanon’s work. Tragically Lila died in 2016 after this book was first published; she was 39 years old. Ian Birchall, the historian and socialist, has been a companion since the start of the research as I have attempted to understand Algeria, the French left and Fanon. For years he has answered my questions, urged me on and encouraged me to read more broadly. He has long been a model for me of an engaged, determined and brilliant researcher, writer and activist. For what it is worth, this book is dedicated to him.

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T h e f i r e l a s t t i m e – F r a n t z F a n o n , Wa l t e r Rodney and Black Power During the last great global uprising in 1968 – and for several years afterwards – perhaps the most important thinker and revolutionary of the period was Frantz Fanon. For almost all the protests and movements that emerged, from the French workers uprisings in 1968, the almighty Black Power movement in the United States and elsewhere, and the liberation movements in Africa, South East Asia and South America, it was Fanon’s last epoch-defining book, The Wretched of the Earth, which was on the lips – and in the hands – of activists and revolutionaries on the street, in meetings, and in rural guerrilla camps in Mozambique, Guinea Bissau and Angola, and was discussed by student militants and activists around the world. Dan Watts, the editor of Liberator – the radical publication of the Civil Rights Movement and anticolonial struggles in the States  – explained after Newark and Detroit riots in the long hot summer of 1967: You’re going along thinking all the brothers in these riots are old winos. Nothing could be further from the truth. These cats are ready to die for something. And they know why. They all read. Read a lot. Not one of them hasn’t read the Bible … The Bible? …. Fanon … You’d better get this book. Every brother on a rooftop can quote Fanon.1

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The fire last time, as the period of revolutionary global struggle, stretching from around 1968 to 1974, was Fanon’s – even though he had been dead for more than seven years when the great events took place in 1968. What was so appealing to such a variety, such a militant cacophony, of revolutionaries in Fanon’s final book, published as he lay dying in a Maryland hospital in November 1961? Fanon wrote in a hypnotic furious prose, in words that danced and vibrated off the page – expressing an anger better than anyone else and capturing a global mood of revolt. To students and workers in the streets of France, he declared that the French state was racist to the core and that their struggle for justice (and in some cases for revolution) was futile without recognizing the humanity of their Black brothers and sisters. The revolutionary movement could not liberate one side of humanity; for it to have meaning and purpose it had to ‘recognize’ the excoriating, literally breathtaking, violence against Black people. Fanon saw this category including all subjected people living in the Third World or in the global north. What is more, the revolutionary act, said Fanon, would involve a process of ‘recerebralizing’ all of us. Taking control for the first time in their lives in political action – frequently involving the ‘armed struggle’ – organizing demonstrations, standing up collectively to repression, resisting racist abuse, was a process that would reshape our brutalized humanity and, in the process, turn us into full human beings. This was Fanon’s message and it was hungrily interpreted across the world in the 1960s and 1970s. For those in the United States, many thousands already committed to the Black Panther Party – who were great advocates and readers of Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth had other important lessons. US society was ‘colonial’ in the sense that Fanon wrote about Algeria in 1961, they argued. Black people were under a cruel form of colonial occupation by the US state, and their resistance – confronting US power – was an indispensable first step to complete liberation. In this sense, for Black people in the United States, liberation was an anticolonial act similar to the wars for liberation being fought in Vietnam or in those parts of the African continent still struggling against Portuguese rule or against Western-backed regimes on the continent in the Congo or Gabon for example; in these places, independence had been a sham, a glittering prize that offered the poor nothing.

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In every continent, Fanon’s celebration, his strident advocacy, of revolutionary action involved the essential ‘radical mutation’ of our consciousness. Separating anti-racist struggle from revolutionary action was an absurdity, he argued. ‘Racism’ was born in the violent conquest of the world through slavery and colonialism and was an inextricable part of the fabric of global society. Racism could only be uprooted as part of a revolutionary movement, which ultimately needed to be international and would combine political and social transformation.

R o d n e y ’s 1 9 6 9 i n t e r v e n t i o n i n Ta n z a n i a Like elsewhere, Fanon’s ideas were quickly absorbed in the lively discussions in Tanzania in the late 1960s. Tanzania was undergoing its own efforts at radical change having recently thrown off its colonial past. Now its president, Julius Nyerere, promoted ujamaa or ‘familyhood’ as a model for an authentic socialism in the country. The university in the capital Dar es Salaam was awash with radical ideas and scholar-activists. One of the greatest of these was the Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney. In late 1969 Rodney was only 27 and lecturing at the university, having been kicked out of Jamaica the year before for radicalizing poor Rastafarian communities in the capital Kingston. On 12 December he spoke before a packed audience of students, activists and academics. Walter addressed the audience on the ‘Ideology of the Revolution’; known as a great orator, he spoke in the Nkrumah Hall at the university which was completely full. He spoke on Fanon’s pitfalls of national consciousness, the famous chapter in The Wretched of the Earth. In the chapter Fanon is scathing about the ‘caste of profiteers’ who assumed power across independent Africa with no project of transformation for the new states and were only too happy to accept the scraps thrown to them by the Northern elite. The chapter is an excoriating takedown of postcolonial power, and the national ‘caste’ of leaders that wield it, and it still reads with scintillating urgency; at the hands of Rodney speaking in Dar es Salaam in late 1969, it must have felt like a firework display. Independence was an illusion, he argued – a cruel mirage of freedom, and real liberation required an act of collective assertion and recognition. The startling analysis electrified the audience at the university as Rodney added his own attack on the new elite of independence to

i n t ro d u c t i o n t o t h e s e c o n d e d i t i o n

Fanon’s; independence obtained through negotiations with colonial powers was nothing more than ‘briefcase revolutions’. These states were little, impotent puppet regimes that served metropolitan power. The implications were clear; these pitiful governments needed to be overthrown in a popular revolution. The following day the main organ of the ruling party The Nationalist had an ‘editorial’ written by the president himself; the piece was entitled ‘Revolutionary Hot Air’ and targeted Rodney with vehemence. Though it stated that ‘discussions of socialism even led by our critics is welcome in Tanzania’, what is completely unacceptable, the editorial argued, is an appeal to ‘revolutionary violence’ to ‘overthrow the governments of independent African states’. Following Fanon’s arguments, Rodney had argued that the ‘armed struggle’ was ‘a logical means of obtaining freedom’ and that only this path would signal ‘real independence’. After 1959, Fanon had become enamoured by Cuba’s revolution and the Algerian struggle, in which he played an important part, but he remained deeply frustrated with the negotiated compromises that he saw ushering in independence elsewhere in Africa. Real independence required an act of ‘revolutionary violence’. Rodney followed his argument. Nyerere’s editorial was clear, ‘stripped of its verbiage’ Rodney’s speech meant ‘that “revolutionary youth” should be planning for, working for, and actively supporting, the violent overthrow of All Independent African governments – presumably including the Tanzanian government!’ Tanzania coexisted with its neighbours, many of them in the ‘neo-colonial’ camp that Rodney (and Fanon) had pilloried; for the ruling party in Tanzania, TANU, this was an unacceptable and dangerous argument. There was a limit to the degree of criticism that would be accepted in the country. Those who persist in this ‘revolutionary hot air’ that risks being blown across ‘our borders’ would cause havoc and hatred towards Tanzania, the editorial argued. Nyerere’s response was a thinly veiled threat: ‘Those who insist upon indulging in such practices will have to accept the consequences of their indulgence.’ Rodney quickly wrote a letter in response, which did not utter an explicit apology but clarified in a carefully worded statement the contribution he had made. It was a difficult line to straddle, between maintaining his forthright and radical opinions and respecting his role as ‘guest’ in a country towards whose political project he was

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sympathetic. Rodney explained that his paper ‘represented my own personal views, and did not pretend to speak for any party or movement inside or outside of Tanzania’. He did not intend to flout party discipline and acknowledged Tanzania’s need to maintain ‘good neighbourliness’. Further to this, he stated that all revolutionaries should respect the principle of ‘non-interference in a sphere beyond one’s experience’. The work of ‘interference’ is for the people in the country themselves; he would cease to intervene if it was deemed to be ‘in conflict with Tanzanian policy’. On the most important criticism in the editorial that stated Rodney was implicitly challenging the Tanzanian government, he wrote, ‘I drew distinction between two types of African governments emerging in the post-independence period’ – in the first, as Fanon wrote in 1961, were those movements who had hijacked the African revolution, while in the second category were those who understand that the revolution will mean nothing ‘unless it transforms the lives of workers and peasants’. Rodney had written a deftly formulated restatement of his speech that praised the ‘Tanzanian revolution’, but only in so far as it ‘transforms the lives’ of the downtrodden – without making any compromise or serious concession and even managing to urge and pressure Nyerere further along a radical path. Quite a feat for a ‘public apology’! Rodney explains in the letter his own commitment: ‘[I]n my day to day endeavours at the university of Dar es Salaam and in numerous talks and writings here and abroad, I have supported the efforts of the Tanzanian people and government to build a socialist society.’ He also stated that in 1967 he argued for a ‘defence of the Tanzanian revolution – through a committed people’s defence force, the National Service’. Concluding, he argued that his use of the terms ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’ should not be seen as masking a sinister intention. These terms are rather ways of exposing a barbarous and dehumanizing system – ‘one’, he argues, ‘which snatched me from Africa in chains and deposited me in far-off lands to be a slave beast, then a sub-human colonial subject, and finally an outlaw in those lands’. It is under these circumstances, as a former slave stolen from Africa, that he asked to be allowed to ‘learn from, participate in, and be guided by the African Revolution in this part of the continent; for this Revolution here is aimed at destroying that monstrous system and replacing it with a just socialist society’.

i n t ro d u c t i o n t o t h e s e c o n d e d i t i o n

Walter was not deported, as some had initially feared; far from it, his arguments and stature at the university grew as a result of the intervention. In his inimitable style he managed to stand his ground against the government and develop an argument at the same time. Fanon’s ideas, his merging of anti-racism and revolution, found a new audience in the 1960s and 1970s. Rodney was one of a number of brilliant revolutionaries and socialists who spoke of Black liberation and revolution, in both the newly independence Third World and in North America and the Caribbean, building on Fanon’s own analysis. Rodney helped to instil a sense of pride and militancy in being Black, and he saw Black Power as a potent vehicle for emancipatory struggle around the world.

Black Lives Matter and revolution today There was no part of the world immune to the radical thought of Frantz Fanon and its various interpretations. In Tanzania in 1969, at the height of the Black Power movement, and radical Pan-Africanism, Rodney took one aspect of Fanon’s ideas and applied them to African liberation. In his hands, Fanon’s ideas became fused with Black Power and Marxism. Today, in the context of multiple, connected movements and antiracist struggles, and the urgent search for an alternative to capitalism, Fanon has once again much more to teach us (but only if we read him closely, critically and historically as I hope this book encourages). His lessons on liberation, racism, mutual recognition and revolutionary action remain essential to humanity’s struggle to transform the world we live in today. The Black Lives Matter movement and ideas around it are reframing politics, similar to the period around 1968. There is a huge political and ideological crisis amidst the historical disasters of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy and the climate emergency. Our times are radical, and we need to radicalize with them in theory and practice. Frantz Fanon remains crucial to this process. Leo Zeilig August 2020 1. Cited in Nikhil Pal Singh, 1998, ‘The Black Panthers and the “Undeveloped Countries” of the Left’, in Charles E. Jones (ed.), Black Panther Party Reconsidered (Baltimore: Black Classic Press), p. 76.

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Many people spoke well that day. Delegates had come from across the continent to independent Ghana for the All-African Peoples’ Conference in 1958. Most spoke of the continuing struggle against colonialism. In the Congo, labelled the ‘empire of silence’, the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) faced repression by a colonial power that refused to entertain any notion of genuine independence. In South Africa, the apartheid regime was confident that it could keep at bay the increasing demands for change north of its borders. President Charles de Gaulle had offered limited sovereignty to French colonies; later that year Guinea, under Ahmed Sékou Touré, would insist on immediate independence: ‘We prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery.’1 In colonies where there was a large white ‘settler’ presence, the struggle against colonial rule was deeper and more protracted. In others, the colonial metropolis had begun to accept the inevitability of decolonisation. As the delegates gathered that day, only Ghana had become independent. Kwame Nkrumah led a black government, speaking openly of breaking the chains of colonialism and imperialism and of pan-African solidarity and socialism. After generations of slavery, colonialism and racism, here was a country that seemed to declare to the world what a victorious and united movement of liberation could achieve. Though Nkrumah had not defeated colonial armies militarily like Toussaint Louverture had in Haiti, Ghana stood proud and defiant in a world still dominated by racism. 1

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Frantz Fanon could not help himself. This intense, direct Caribbean-born doctor and revolutionary would soon have a reputation for capturing the world’s anger. When he mounted the podium to speak, most delegates did not know who he was, nor had they read any of his writings. His eyes, fixed on his text, shone with urgency and intensity. ‘If Africa is to be free, we cannot beg. We must tear away by force.’ All forms of struggle must be adopted, he argued, not excluding violence.2 The delegates were transfixed. The South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele wrote: Dr. Fanoh Omar [sic] of Algeria is certainly the highlight of the session. He does not mince words, what FLN man can afford the luxury anyway? Algerians have no other recourse but fight back, he says, and the FLN means to go through with it. In staccato French he carries the audience to the horrible scene of French atrocities on Algerians. [. . .] He gets the loudest and longest ovation of all the speakers.3

For Fanon it was not enough to celebrate the achievements of decolonisation. It was necessary to educate, to strain at the limits of national freedom and provoke debate. The All-African Peoples’ Conference was the place to do this, and to learn about other movements on the continent. Only two years later, in 1960, he would represent the Algerian provisional government (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne, GPRA) in independent Ghana, less than six years after he joined the Algerian struggle. Ghana was both a headquarters for independence movements and a laboratory for actually existing independent nationhood. It was already a collection of vivid and painful contradictions. Many white people had stayed on to assist the new government – even the army was temporarily being run by British officers – but Nkrumah was an outspoken advocate for pan-Africanism. For a generation of young militants he was a figure to emulate. Fanon learned much in Ghana. In 1961, his life ebbing away from leukaemia, Fanon dictated his masterwork, The Wretched of the Earth (WE), to his wife, friends and secretaries.4 Finding some strength after a new round of treatment, he travelled to the Tunisian/Algerian border (Ghardimaou in Tunisia)

introduction

and spoke to the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) as they prepared to fight the French and enter a free Algeria. In this last public appearance, he read to the assembled troops, many of them illiterate, from his draft of what would become the most famous chapter in WE, about the pitfalls of national consciousness. He described how the national bourgeoisie, after independence, is only too happy to accept what crumbs the departing colonial powers throw to it. Without social reform, without political and economic transformation, he warned, national liberation would be an empty shell. Make this independence for yourselves, he cautioned on the threshold of victory: ensure that the self-organisation and confidence you have developed in the fight against the French becomes a sustained and continuous programme of revolutionary transformation after you raise the Algerian flag: No leader, however valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government [. . .] ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein.5

Fanon’s final act was to encourage – and yet subvert – the revolutionary movement to which he had devoted the last and most important years of his life. Fanon had stubbornly refused to accept treatment in the United States, which he condemned for its racism, but in October 1961, after this final and exhausting resurrection, he flew there from Tunisia, his home in exile. His last Atlantic crossing was to no avail. On 6 December 1961 he died at 36 years of age. Since his death Fanon has been endlessly resurrected, sometimes bastardised, often deified. In his adoptive Algeria, which won independence in 1962 after a gruelling eight-year war that killed hundreds of thousands of Algerians, he has received uneasy recognition: his work translated into Arabic, his old hospital in Blida named after him, a school and large street that carry his name in Algiers. His warnings, however, were grimly fulfilled. In the mid-1960s a new Black Power movement, principally in the United States, took up Fanon’s writings, interpreting his analysis of racism and his insistence on the necessity of organising the wretched

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of the earth and on the therapeutic effects of violence as defence against oppression as tools to deploy against the ‘colonisation’ of black communities there. Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, cited the influence of ‘everything that Fanon said about violence and the spontaneity of violence, how spontaneous violence educates those who are in a position with skills to lead the people to what needs to be done’.6 Others who claimed to understand Fanon’s legacy were not so generous or hopeful. Critics and fellow travellers alike declared him a prophet of violent revolution, accusing him of championing the detoxifying and cleansing effects of violence without appreciating its destructive and degenerative whirlwind. Fanon scholar Nigel Gibson asserts that Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to WE contributed to this impression.7 In the 1980s and 1990s, renewed interest in Fanon painted him as a scholar and theorist of identity, masculinity, post-colonialism and subaltern studies. Some of these labels may be justified, but they are also misleading. The academy’s adoption of radical thinkers is always a sanitising process, turning revolutionary action into passive reflection, analysis into academic pontification. To read Fanon in the 1980s was to cherry pick from a post-modern orchard, divorcing his work on racism, subjectivity and lived experience from its wider revolutionary context and its untidy dialectic.8 For others, Fanon – the insistent revolutionary, arguing for education, analysis and practice – became a romantic myth-monger of the Algerian Revolution, positing liberation when none was on offer.9 Yet his philosophical work and interests were always contingent on action and contributing to real practice – even his most philosophical work, Black Skin, White Masks (hereafter BSWM), makes action central to its conclusions: ‘To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.’10 It would be churlish to dismiss this re-engagement with Fanon: his work was extraordinarily complex and its insights extended beyond disciplinary boundaries to include psychiatry, philosophy and politics. For more than 50 years dozens of important biographies, collections and studies have emerged on Fanon’s work and life. Lewis Gordon, Tracey Sharpley-Whiting and Renée White, writing

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in Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996), identify five stages in Fanon studies. The first stage was largely sympathetic in nature and includes various applications of and reactions to Fanon’s work, often, but not exclusively, by radical figures and activists such as Amílcar Cabral, Che Guevara and Bobby Seale. The second stage saw a number of biographical studies, especially in the early 1970s, including Pierre Bouvier’s slight Fanon and Peter Geismar’s Fanon (both 1971). Geismar’s remains the most intimate, though least analytical, biography. Also during this period came Irene Gendzier’s Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study, David Caute’s short Fanon, and a brief study by Fanon’s close friend Giovanni Pirelli.11 The third stage focused on the significance of Fanon’s social and political thought. Some of these later studies are still incredibly relevant: Emmanuel Hansen’s Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (1977), L. Adele Jinadu’s Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution (1980) and Hussein Bulhan’s wonderful Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (1985). The fourth stage saw authors critically engaging with Fanon from post-modernist and post-colonial perspectives. Included within this category is the work of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Henry Louis Gates, whose schoolmasterly 1991 article instructs us to rid ourselves of the need for a ‘grand unified theory of oppression’ and ensure that our theoretical reflections remain ‘provisional, reactive and local’.12 The final stage includes books that attempt to analyse and assess the ‘usefulness’ of Fanon’s thought rather than damning or deifying him. These include Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1996) and Lewis Gordon’s intriguing Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (1995). Other studies that do not focus specifically on Fanon make him a central part of their arguments; see, for an exciting example, Tsenay Serequeberhan’s The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (1994). Two more recent examples of work within Fanon studies speak to many of the concerns in this volume: Reiland Rabaka’s interesting Forms of Fanonism (2010) provides a useful overview of Fanon studies from a radical perspective, while Nigel Gibson’s recent Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (2011) is a fascinating application of Fanon’s politics to the South African context.13

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This book does not fall neatly into any of these categories; it is a biography that seeks to provide a total picture of Fanon’s life and work, while not pretending to be definitive or final. A number of books, apart from Fanon’s own, have had a particular influence on this study: Nigel Gibson’s thorough study draws a coherent and penetrating thread through Fanon’s entire work; what emerges is a clear picture of a sophisticated philosophical approach. While there are clear distinctions between Fanon’s books, an ‘untidy dialectic’ and a committed humanism run through them all.14 David Macey’s magisterial biography, which appeared for the fortieth anniversary of Fanon’s death in 2001, brings together the historical context of Fanon’s ideas. I was fortunate to interview Macey extensively in 2010 before he died the following year.15 Alice Cherki’s masterful and concise Frantz Fanon, Portrait has also influenced this work. This book attempts to place Fanon in his proper context. In the words of Bulhan, who has written powerfully on Fanon’s psychiatric practice, ‘we must find a way of placing biography in history, the crisis of personal identity in communal uprooting, clinical symptoms in relational systems and overreactions (or even inaction) in a social world that is open to intervention not as we wish in our wildest dreams, but in accordance with what historically we must and can’.16 Immodestly, this biography hopes to situate Fanon within the terribly brief period through which he lived. My research for this book involved a series of interviews that have left a most indelible mark, particularly my discussions with Pierre and Claudine Chaulet between 2010 and 2011. Pierre Chaulet, one of the revolution’s most committed and forthright militants, was Fanon’s close friend in Algeria and then in exile in Tunisia. He worked as a doctor, leading many of independent Algeria’s early immunisation programmes. From him I gained a real sense, stripped of the hyperbole, of Fanon’s strengths and failings – and a strong whiff of the excitement of Algeria’s imminent liberation. The Chaulet’s kindness was great. As I walked with Pierre in Algiers in October 2011, we were approached by a man he had treated years before who exclaimed, ‘If I am here, it is thanks to Professor Chaulet.’ Later that day, we stopped at a shop to have some documents copied, all the while talking loudly about the Algerian Revolution. Pierre described, at my urging, how Fanon would change his shirts twice a day and could be aggressive and

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argumentative. Papers and photos of Fanon were spread everywhere. A tall man in his late 50s pointed to one and asked if I knew about a film that had been made on Fanon’s life. He offered me the name of someone who could secure me a copy: ‘If you’re doing research on him, I must help you. You can’t know Algeria and not know Fanon. He made a great contribution to this country.’ Pierre introduced me, so I introduced him; the man’s eyes widened: ‘Ah, you are in good hands. Professor Chaulet I know. He worked to liberate Algeria.’ Pierre was silent, smiling faintly. ‘His work was in the background, not like this lot who speak too loudly and did nothing. Chaulet is different. Fanon was different, that’s why we haven’t let him go.’ Pierre died a year later.17 The original motivation for the study came from an academic seminar held to mark the publication of Macey’s biography in 2001 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where I was a graduate student. The Fanon ‘seminar’ was being hosted in the fashionable new Brunei Gallery, built with the Sultan’s oil and gas spoils. The director of the Centre of African Studies held up a copy of WE and discussed at length not its ideas, but the design of the book’s signature orange cover. It felt symbolic of the collapse of African studies into irrelevant (or at least not very relevant) details in place of real content. What was left of Fanon was the book’s surface, the pages forgotten or subsumed into a narrative that privileged such ephemera as equally worthy of cultural and political analysis. I was riled because I had just returned from teaching English in Dakar, Senegal, where I had been grappling with a set of paradoxes. Senegal was part of the first wave of states that acceded to independence in 1960, in a brief moment of continental ecstasy. The country was led by the brilliant poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had inspired a generation of young Africans to stand up as proudly black and to dare to contemplate independence and self-government for the colonised ‘native’ – ‘Night of Africa, my black night, mystical and bright, black and shining’ (BSWM 98). Yet I was working in a broken country, overrun with poverty, traffic and the ruins of a momentary development. Roads, buildings and neighbourhoods built in the 1960s and 1970s were crumbling back into the earth. The university where I taught, where the radical thinker and academic Cheikh Anta Diop had developed ideas of black history and civilisation, was in a state of

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advanced decay. The windswept corridors, broken benches, smashed windows and overgrown gardens made the university look, when it was not full of students, as if it had been abandoned years before. The tragedy of Senegal’s unfulfilled independence was amplified by the privatisation the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had advocated since the early 1980s. With this collapse and the decay of those hopes, a pervasive sense of inferiority had crept in. My students asked, ‘What is it about black people and Africans that we are unable to develop ourselves, our countries and our lives? White people are smarter than us.’ These sentiments are echoed in a range of recent literature. Some DIY guides by African entrepreneurs could more accurately be labelled a literature of self-hate.18 Others present the current underdevelopment of the continent as confirmation of the racist lie that black people are inferior; colonisation had failed, they argued, because it was not allowed to develop into the twenty-first century. Wanting to battle against these arguments, I read BSWM. Fanon wrote of racism and shame, of how the white gaze makes and defines black interiority. Africa became defined by the racist gaze of Europe, feeling, with all opportunities and alternatives seemingly shut down, an impossible desire to escape the failures of ‘blackness’. Fanon had believed decolonisation and national liberation would demystify racial oppression and recerebralise the poor and colonised subject. These processes, he thought, would lead to full, mutual self-recognition. Instead, the failure of independence seemed to confirm for my students the truth of the racist myths of stupidity and backwardness. My days were spent teaching, my evenings reading, an overhead fan cutting the thick, humid air. Next I reread WE. I found an even sharper analysis of the post-colony. Fanon wrote that after independence the national bourgeoisie became ‘an acquisitive, voracious, and ambitious petty caste, dominated by a small-time racketeer mentality, content with the dividends paid out by the former colonial power’ (WE 119). He provided a description, at once clear-sighted and furious, that broke open another paradox: a radical leadership had delivered only further servitude because it was tied to the narrow class interests of the ‘caste of profiteers’ who, Fanon wrote, were in league with the ex-colonial power. So stunned was I by Fanon’s insights that I kept flicking to the start of the book to establish once more in what year it had been written.

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If it still seemed a relevant warning and prophecy in 1999, how must it have seemed in 1961? Perhaps it was even more relevant today, I thought, than it was in the frenzy and optimism of 1961. In saying this I directly reject the analysis of Stuart Hall, the renowned cultural theorist, who stated that the book could only be seen as a ‘product of its time’.19 Fanon’s work continues to attract so many new readers precisely because it cannot and must not be read only as a product of its time. This book insists on the necessity of returning to Fanon and the period in which he lived, though not stopping there. Like Fanon, I consider myself an internationalist and regard ‘liberation’ as a hollow and impossible goal when contained within the nation state. For a truly human society to arise, national consciousness must be transcended, dissolved and broken down on the terrain of global society (and struggle). In this respect I stand with Fanon and against his critics in defending a ‘unified theory of oppression’. Unlike Fanon, I see Marxism as an emancipatory, internationalist project, a tradition that can be traced back to Marx and Engels but also to the political action and theoretical development of a range of militant thinkers and activists who grappled with revolutionary change in the early twentieth century. Amongst these were the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the German/Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg and the Italian Antonio Gramsci. But, like Reiland Rabaka, I see Fanon as having critically engaged with Marxism and Marxists. Fanon worked with Marxism, as Rabaka writes, ‘from his own critical subjective and radical political position’. Through this engagement Fanon’s work has helped to extend Marxism’s political reach.20 Unlike many critics, however, including Rabaka, I do not consider Marx’s writing or theory to be Eurocentric.21 The Marxist ‘tradition’, or political and theoretical practice, was enriched and extended by writers and activists in France who directly engaged with the question of Algeria. These included the brilliant libertarian Marxist and historian Daniel Guérin, the revolutionary Robert Louzon, the Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and, for a time, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard.22 In their different ways these militants saw Marxism as a living tradition that required revision and practice, but each regarded anti-colonialism as the sine qua non of the left.23 Others, including the Trotskyist Tony Cliff in Britain, maintained these habits of practice and inspired theoretical innovation after 1945.

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The analyses of Trotsky, Lenin, Gramsci, and other Marxists were based on an understanding of capitalism as riven by economic crisis and class divisions that intersect to produce complex political and social forms with huge contradictions. This has created and continues to create a global class of wage labourers divided by culture, ethnicity and geography – and comprises, despite these divisions, what Marx terms the ‘collective labourer’ – but this class also has the potential to transform the world. This tradition of thought is rooted in the conception of capitalism as an inherently global system divided into competing national blocs. At heart is capital’s insatiable and restless appetite for profit: new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and selfsufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.24

The tensions and contradictions of the capitalist system do not lead, as many early Marxists maintained, to its automatic and predetermined negation, communism. Socialist transformation is a possibility, but so is the mutual ‘ruin’ of society. The real historical momentum of capitalism is the possibility of liberation through political engagement. Such engagement takes place in constrained circumstances and must be founded on a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. At the heart of ‘classical’ anti-Stalinist Marxism is the self-emancipation of the working class. There can be no substitute for the self-activity of the oppressed; no enlightened, benevolent leader, ‘intelligentsia’, student movement or ‘peasantry’ can take the leading role in liberation from the global ‘collective labourer’ – even if most movements, revolutions and revolts have resulted in such ‘hijackings’.25 Why must this even be noted in a book on Frantz Fanon? After all, Fanon was not a Marxist. The tradition, bastardised by Stalinism,

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appeared dogmatic and Eurocentric to him. Trotskyism, if Fanon was even aware of it, too would have seemed abstract and sectarian. Marx’s notion of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not seem, at first glance, to bear any resemblance to the class that Fanon confronted in the late 1950s and 1960s. As Gibson has commented, I don’t think Fanon was that ‘versed’ in Marx. I don’t think he was a Marxist [. . .] I think the18 th Brumaire [Marx’s essay on the ‘French coup’ of 1851, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’] and the Communist Manifesto struck him in that the bourgeoisie he discovers on the ground, so to speak, are not the ones that Marx writes of.26

Nor could a theory developed in the hothouse of Victorian London, he believed, explain the processes of decolonisation, racism and anticolonial revolution. Fanon met and engaged with many anti-Stalinist Marxists. He was deeply involved in Sartre’s work, especially his philosophical engagement with Marxism and the Russian Revolution. Fanon was not attracted to small anti-Stalinist groups; his focus was Algeria and the anti-colonial revolutions. Stalinist Marxism’s justification of capitalist development and imperial intrusion as an essentially progressive force repelled Fanon. Many anti-colonial writers have unequivocally rejected Marx: Edward Said, for example, considered him the quintessential Eurocentric, commenting, ‘In article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution.’27 Similarly, such a position assumes a direct link from Marx to Stalin. This book will assert another, non-Eurocentric Marxism, one that has been developed and debated by a range of writers and activists. There are two reasons to state my position. First, Fanon was engaged in such a project himself. He was surrounded by leftists and radical Marxists who encouraged him to take seriously the history of the Russian Revolution and Marxist politics. The conservative dogmas of the French Communist Party relegated the Algerian struggle to a subsidiary role in a global revolutionary movement to be led by the French proletariat, which infuriated Fanon, but other Marxists inspired him, as his close colleague Alice Cherki notes. His first

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mentor, the brilliant psychiatrist François Tosquelles, was an antiStalinist who had fought as a senior member of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. Fanon’s political milieu was deeply influenced in the politics – bastardised or not– of Marxism. The very choices that were open to the national liberation movements he championed had been profoundly shaped by the collapse of the Russian Revolution and the hope for international communism in the 1920s.28 The Russian Revolution, for a moment, joined democratic reforms with socialist transformation in a single revolutionary movement linked inextricably to a global process of change. As Trotsky explained on the eve of the October revolution, ‘National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers.’ The fate of national revolutions in the modern world depended on the international ‘revolutionary response’.29 The possibility of international revolution briefly lit up the world, until the revolution failed to spread across Russia’s borders. National liberation and socialism were cleaved apart again. Fanon’s work can be seen as his own highly original attempt to pull back together – and examine – the twin strands of national freedom and international ‘humanist’ liberation. This book will explore that context while remaining aware of certain pitfalls, mistakes that Benjamin Stora, the historian of modern Algeria, has seen the left repeatedly make: Too often Trotskyists have had the tendency to bring down the classic grid of interpretation of the Russian revolution on the Algerian Revolution: an embryonic proletariat, an immense army of poor peasants, the formation of a political avant-garde that must lead the workers and peasantry to positions that will permit them to realise the tasks of national liberation, then socialism.30

Fanon’s last two books are alive with vital questions of radical change and the international emancipation of the oppressed. Here he focused exclusively on revolutionary transformation, violence, the role of intellectuals and the leadership and agency of national liberation and social movements. Any claim this volume can make to originality lies in its explicit and continued engagement with and critique of Fanon

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from the perspective of the radical left (from which he was formed and to which he belongs). No revolutionary is born ready. Fanon’s process of political education and activism in Martinique, France and Algeria involved sharp turns as well as gradual reflection. His peculiarly penetrating work stems from both his furious, brilliant intellect – his brother Joby Fanon described him as ‘fireworks on the inside, fireworks on the outside’31 – and his peculiar intellectual development and geography. He taught himself phenomenology and was later formally schooled in medicine and psychiatry. All of his work bears these birthmarks and is enriched by and insightful for them. He was influenced by diverse traditions and thinkers: French philosophers, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, provided him with insights that allowed him to unpick racism; his studies in psychiatry exposed him to Tosquelles and the ideas of ‘institutional psychiatry’ (see Chapter 2). This book is not a hagiography of Fanon; for that there are other places to turn.32 Fanon was, as Pierre Chaulet observed, neither a new Gramsci, nor a new prophet. He was a man of his time, marked by a peculiar experience, who thought and expressed himself (marvellously), who was mistaken on many points (like us all), but his essential message remains and continues to touch us today: work for the hominisation of humankind, this was his enduring contribution. We must abandon naïve notions of ‘constructing a new man’ which Stalin desired.33

Fanon’s work, always illuminating, carries several major tensions. Was he able to escape the nationalist prison he theorised? How could liberation be satisfied beyond independence within the confines of the new independent state? How do we account for the overwhelming absence of the colonial working class in Fanon’s last work, which explicitly denies that class agency and political engagement? Finally, his overly romantic notions of the peasantry as the ‘privileged’ ‘wretched of the earth’ raise far more questions than they answer. Any honest account of Fanon’s life and work must broach these questions, absences and contradictions.34 This book identifies an ‘Orwellian moment’ in Fanon’s work. In 1946 George Orwell wrote,

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The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.35

Though his former work had always been notable for its concern with poverty, literature and left-wing politics, he became an ‘affiliatedunaffiliated’ partisan. Spain was the fork in the road for Orwell. Algeria was the same for Fanon. Without Algeria, Fanon would have been a brilliant and courageous psychiatrist, probably practising in France, but not the revolutionary we celebrate today. Fanon, after departing France for Algeria in 1953, continued to write important psychiatric papers. But after he left Algeria at the end of 1956, all his major work spoke of his engagement with the FLN; he wrote for Algerian national liberation and against France’s genocidal war. Like Orwell’s, his work remained complex, but it was now openly the work of political agitation. Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (or Studies in a Dying Colonialism, as it is now known in the English translation, henceforth SDC) and WE are both marked by total commitment to the Algerian national cause. Given Fanon’s preexisting predilection and experiences, it is unlikely that he would have responded differently to the Algerian war, but he made a choice and threw his ferocious intellectual force and considerable physical energy into the violent war of liberation unfurling in Algeria. After 1956 he became a self-constructed revolutionary philosopher of Third World liberation, though he argued such liberation would only be complete when it extended beyond the Third World. This book is the story of Fanon’s transformation and his contribution to revolutionary thought and practice.

1

Martinique, France and Beyond

Frantz Fanon did not believe he was black; he thought of himself as Antillean and French. This is not an imaginative sleight of hand. His teachers, his family and friends, and most of his cultural references were ‘forever talking about “our ancestors, the Gauls” [. . .] the bringer of civilisation, the white man’ (BSWM 147). In the 1920s and 1930s, Martinique was a society deeply marked by colour and race. Fanon was born in 1925 to a middle-class family in Martinique. His childhood was comfortable and relatively unremarkable, but the island département was, and still is, a place of excoriating racism, in its composition and its relations to metropolitan France. The island’s communities were, in Fanon’s youth, obsessively demarcated by colour, divided into a small class of white planters and businessmen called békés, who could trace their descendants to plantation owners and original settlers, mulattoes and blacks. On the island, pigmentation, specifically the whiteness of your skin, to a large extent determined your trajectory in life and your sense of self-worth. Fanon’s family had some white ancestry and were ambitious and mobile. His mother was a proud shop owner, his father a civil servant in the customs service. Fanon attended Lycée Victor Schoelcher in the capital city, Fort-de-France, and gained a reputation as an avid reader and keen footballer, confident and insistent. The family considered themselves French, and no one felt this more keenly than their brightest son. 15

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Racism in Martinique Martinique was ‘founded’ in 1635 for the French by Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc. ‘Carib’ resistance to the invasion was eventually crushed with superior European arms. Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane had been part of France’s transatlantic empire in the seventeenth century. The colonial system was vicious, using indentured labourers frequently press-ganged from France’s Atlantic coast. France’s colonies produced primary products – cotton, tobacco, coffee – on plantations run by the French bourgeoisie. Apart from a brief period of British occupation at the end of the eighteenth century, Martinique remained solidly in French hands. It was an inherently unequal economy and society, producing goods for the global market in conditions of modern agricultural production; while tobacco was principally grown by smallholders, sugar required labour intensity, something independent producers could not satisfy. Labour for this new crop came from West Africa. In 1664, Martinique’s white population was estimated at 2,900 and its enslaved black population at 3,138. By 1750 the total population had grown to 56,000. The island economies were based purely on exploiting export crops for a growing capitalist market. Slave merchants from Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and Le Havre commissioned 2,800 ships for the Atlantic triangle trade,1 which exchanged products from France for captured men and women on the western seaboard of Africa, then transported this human cargo to colonies in the ‘West Indies’ to be exchanged for sugar and rum. More than one million people were shipped via this ‘middle passage’ to the sugar isles in the seventeenth century. As many as 13 per cent of them perished during the voyage.2 Slavery was established by the Code Noir, in force from 1685 to 1848 (though it was not the same everywhere). It was a nasty document. Striking a free man or master was punishable by death; runaways would have an eye removed and would be branded. A second bid to escape would result in the slicing of their hamstrings. The slave was a commodity and had no rights.3 Though slave revolts were a regular occurrence, nothing had prepared European powers for the scale of the revolution to come in what is now Haiti, led by Toussaint Louverture and inspired by the revolutionary events in France after the revolution of 1789.4 Not long

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after, in 1794, the Convention Nationale Révolutionnaire (National Revolutionary Convention, or CNR) in Paris declared ‘the abolition of Negro slavery in all the colonies . . . all men, without distinction of colour, residing in the colonies are French citizens and will enjoy all the rights assured by the constitution’.5 By 1802, when Martinique was returned to French control, Napoleon had restored slavery across the French colonies, but the memory of resistance was never completely destroyed. These events did not have a direct effect on Martinique, which was under British control during the revolutionary years. After the definitive abolition of slavery in 1848, the plantation economy continued. Colonial plantations were compensated for their losses; most free slaves were obliged to seek wages by working on the same plantations.6 Even without slavery, life on Martinique was miserable. Sugar could only be produced by seasonally, creating seasonal unemployment, which led to debt and credit. As David Macey wrote, ‘unofficial debt bondage replaced institutionalised slavery’.7 Abolition created other illusions: former slaves now became, officially at least, French citizens with the right to vote, but life was dominated by the békés, who sat at the top of a complex taxonomy of colour. One eighteenthcentury planter with mathematical pretensions identified 128 mixed blood types.8 The categories included other bodily attributes, all defined in relation to their degree of whiteness – eye colour, nature of hair (wavy, straight, curly, etc.). This taxonomy developed and grew in the twentieth century. Fanon’s youth was marked by a similar racism; in 1952 he wrote: When I am at home my mother sings me French love songs in which there is never a word about Negros. When I disobey, when I make too much noise, I am told to ‘stop acting like a nigger’ [. . .] little by little I take into myself the prejudices, the myths, the folklore that have come to me from Europe. [. . .] The black Antillean is the slave of this cultural imposition. (BSWM 192)

This racism did not necessarily drive the population away from the French; instead, Martiniquans developed a fraught ambiguity around notions of citizenship and the civilising mission. As Kristen Stromberg-Childers writes:

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France still represented a culture and system of values of which many Martiniquans yearned to be a part. Far from sullying French universalist ideals, the békés were treated as separate from the core values of republican France and as remnants of an unjust colonial system. [. . .] Black Martiniquans contrasted the racist attitudes of the local white minority to the liberal traditions of France itself, where racial prejudice theoretically did not exist.9

Plunged into this ambiguity, Fanon was disgusted by the békés and the island’s slave past, yet saw in post-revolutionary France a model of enlightenment. The Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe have since 1946 been a département d’outre-mer of the French Republic. Today these islands are holiday destinations for French tourists, with lush green mountains, turquoise oceans and whitewashed ‘colonial’ houses. They are marketed as exotic adventure destinations and romantic hideaways for the discerning, intelligent traveller. Their official assimilation into France was presented as a ‘humane’ alternative to colonisation at a time when other French colonies were beginning to speak of decolonisation and to revolt.10

Fanon’s early life When Fanon was born in 1925, Fort-de-France’s population had grown to 43,000, largely due to an agricultural crisis. Sugar production had gradually become less profitable. Agricultural wage-labourers in roughhewn sack clothes found work – or did not – in the dry docks and coal depot. The town centre became home to shopkeepers, lawyers and doctors. For the great writer and politician Aimé Césaire, Fort-de-France was a stifling and diseased place of ‘lepers, of consumption, of famines, of fears crouched in the ravines, fears perched in the trees, fears dug in the ground, fears adrift in the sky’.11 Easily eradicable diseases stalked the city, including elephantiasis, tuberculosis and leprosy; only in the 1950s was malaria eradicated. Open sewers could be smelt across the town. While Fanon’s own experience in Martinique was not touched by hunger and deprivation, its ready presence marked the boy’s first visions of the outside world.

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Fanon’s great-grandfather was the son of a slave. He owned land on the Atlantic coast and grew cocoa. Fanon’s mother, Éléonore, was born to unmarried parents. Her father’s white predecessors were said to have come from Strasburg, Austria; the name ‘Frantz’ was said to reflect this distant European ancestry. His father, Félix Casimir Fanon, became a customs inspector in Fort-de-France, Éléonore opened a store, and they became relatively well-to-do. Frantz was the fifth of eight children. In 1947, Fanon recalled a typical family Sunday: his mother chastising the servants downstairs, his father moving around the house in his slippers, and his sisters (Mireille, Gabrielle, Marie-Flore and Marie-Rose) and brothers (Félix, Joby and Willie) practising the piano. The sisters attended private school. The family owned a weekend house with a large garden. At the head of the family was Éléonore, a powerful matriarch and a strikingly intelligent woman with an impressive sense of irony that disguised warmth and generosity. Félix Casimir was no dominating patriarch; he worked hard and kept back from family life. Fanon was irritated by his father’s absence and criticised him openly: ‘If we, the eight children, have become something, maman alone should take all the glory.’12 Joby, two years older, shared Frantz’s bed, friends and passion for football. With his easy confidence, Frantz dominated his friends, even creating a weekend football club. But Joby and Frantz were also members of a gang; again Frantz was the dominant figure, organising petty misdemeanours and scuffles with rivals. As Fanon grew into adolescence, his interest in football waned. He spent hours every week in the public library, reading French literature and philosophy from its very limited array of classics. The library was poorly stocked; when Fanon arrived in France after the war, he threw himself at the libraries there. Children in Martinique were urged to abandon Creole for French. Antillean Creole French was intentionally developed as a plantation lingua franca. Fanon, like all children of his generation, was taught that it was not a proper language but a patois, a simplified ‘Negro French’. If children overheard speaking it were reprimanded as being no better than cane-field petit-nègre. Replacing Creole with French was another manner in which the white mask was pulled over the black face.13 This too had a French precedent: in 1789 there was a deliberate effort made

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to stamp out minority languages and nonstandard French dialects, first by the ‘linguistic terror’ in the Revolutionary period and later in the education system introduced by the arch-imperialist Jules Ferry. While French secular educational traditions led to the struggle for linguistic homogeneity in metropolitan France, its extension in Martinique assumed a racial dimension. French was the linguistic medium that would pull the ‘negroes’ from their ‘darkness’, while Creole would plunge them back into obscurity.14 As Fanon observed in a rare autobiographical passage in BSWM, ‘what the poets call the divine gurgling (listen to Creole) is only a halfway house between pidgin-nigger and French. The middle class in the Antilles never speak Creole except to their servants. [. . .] One avoids Creolisms’ (BSWM 20). Although representations of the nègres were commonplace in films, these images of black inferiority tended to exclude French West Indians; they belonged to the African jungle. One family story involved Fanon’s father bringing home some Tirailleurs Sénégalais, French infantry troops recruited from French West Africa who were making a brief visit to Martinique. They seemed to confirm the family’s perception of the distinction between French West Indians and proper nègres. Years later Fanon explained that the Antillean does not altogether apprehend the fact of his being a Negro. I was perhaps thirteen when for the first time I saw Senegalese soldiers. All I knew about them was what I had heard from veterans of the First World War. [. . .] My father went to the trouble of collecting two of them, whom he brought home and who had the family in raptures. (BSWM 162–3)

By now Fanon was attending the private Lycée Victor Schoelcher. The school’s fees were another marker of the family’s prosperity. Pupils were taught that they were French and European.15 Only his experiences during the war could fully disabuse Fanon of this distinction: in France he discovered that, to the white man, he was black and nothing more. His blackness was imposed and defined by white French society. Martinique was divided by ‘shadism’ and had the reputation of being less black and hence more civilised than its poorer, blacker island cousin, Guadeloupe.16 ‘During the Second World War’, Fanon writes,

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teachers went from Guadeloupe to Fort-de-France to correct examinations [. . .] and, driven by curiosity, I went to the hotel where they were staying, simply in order to see Monsieur B., a philosophy teacher who was supposed to be remarkably black; as the Martinicans say, not without a certain irony, he was ‘blue’. (BSWM 163–4)

The war declared in 1939 led to a frenzy of panic in Martinique: schools closed and trenches were dug, precautions for air raids that did not come. Frantz and Joby became more wayward in the chaos and were sent to their uncle Édouard Fanon, a teacher, in the countryside. Édouard became the controlling and domineering figure their father had never been, insisting that the brothers apply themselves to their studies. After two years the boys returned to Fort-de-France and to the reopened school. The return home was formative in another sense: Fanon met Aimé Césaire, who had come back to his island home. Césaire was born 12 years before Fanon and became Martinique’s most important politician and writer for almost 50 years. When Fanon met him in 1940, he was known locally for his extraordinary epic poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, which expressed the colonised subject’s rage and hope for freedom. However, it was only with the poem’s second edition in 1947 that the world began to take note of the full extent of Césaire’s prodigious talents. Césaire had pursued an elite education in France, then returned to his native home to teach at Lycée Schoelcher. After four years he started a career in politics. He was a flamboyant teacher and a radical and powerful force in the classroom. Often mounting a chair or desk, Césaire would recite by heart from his own writing: ‘It is not you who will prepare it with your disarmament; it is I with my revolt and my poor clenched fists and my bushy head. [. . .] There is not in the world one single poor lynched bastard, one poor tortured man, in whom I am not also murdered and humiliated’ (cited in WE 44–5). Fanon developed a lifelong and ambivalent17 admiration for Césaire, struck by his proud black presence and impressive learning. Soon he could recite large sections of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal from memory. He later wrote that ‘as late as 1940 no Antillean found it possible to think of himself as a Negro. It was only with the appearance of Aimé

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Césaire that the acceptance of Negritude and the statement of its claims began to be perceptible’ (BSWM 153). Césaire was a powerful proponent of Negritude, a cultural movement inspired by the work of black intellectuals from France’s colonies and dominions. Césaire described Negritude as the simple acceptance of being black and of the destiny and history of this colour. Negritude was the negation of European racism, turning the myths and lies of white superiority into pride at being black; inspired by surrealism’s rejection of the ‘modern’, it marked the first wave of black power. The significance of Césaire’s presence in Martinique cannot be understated – an apostle of Negritude declaring pride in his colour. Fanon’s life was marked by sharp confrontations that broke down his illusions that he was French, that he could reach out and expect equal treatment and that French civilisation was a source of pride. In 1952 he wrote: The black schoolboy in the Antilles [. . .] identifies himself with the explorer, the bringer of civilisation, the white man who carries truth to savages – an all-white truth. There is identification – that is, the young Negro subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression. [. . .] An eightyear-old child who offers a gift, even to an adult, cannot endure a refusal. Little by little one can observe in the young Antillean the formation and crystallisation of an attitude and a way of thinking and seeing that are essentially white. [. . .] As a schoolboy I had many occasions to spend whole hours talking about the supposed customs of the savage Senegalese. [. . .] The Antillean does not think of himself as a black man; he thinks of himself as an Antillean. The Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively, intellectually, the Antillean conducts himself as a white man. But he is a Negro. That he will learn once he goes to Europe; and when he hears Negroes mentioned he will recognise that the world includes himself as well as the Senegalese. (BSWM 147–8)

No doubt this was also Césaire’s experience, travelling to Europe a generation before Fanon. The two men, teacher and pupil, rejected the European world they had long craved. Fanon was about to undergo his own baptism in racism.

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Escape to war France’s capitulation to Germany was a humiliating blow. On 16 June 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain, a geriatric hero from World War I, declared further fighting futile and signed an armistice that divided the country between a ‘free’ southern France organised by the Vichy regime and an occupied north. French colonies fell to new occupying armies and administrations. In Martinique, Admiral Georges Robert, High Commissioner of the French West Indies and commander of the West Atlantic Fleet, followed Pétain slavishly. There were complicating factors: General Charles de Gaulle rejected the capitulation and launched an appeal – the famous appel du 18 juin 1940 – to continue the resistance. De Gaulle’s Free French Forces (Forces Françaises Libres) saw France’s extensive empire as the place to launch rearguard resistance. The colonies began to divide up. Though Martinique’s Conseil Général – the island’s decisionmaking body – initially welcomed the radical general’s call-to-arms, Admiral Robert did not. He fudged the challenge and released his own proclamation declaring France’s heroic fight over – thus handing Martinique to Pétain. In practice, he was obliged to negotiate with the Allies, who saw him as a possible threat. Admiral Robert, like most metropole figures at the time, saw the natives under his authority as simple and good, but essentially superstitious and easily led astray.18 But Robert was more than just a racist. Never had Fanon seen such overt and confident racism. In July 1940 Robert extended the death penalty to anyone collaborating with a foreign power and later to those who sought to join the Free French Army. The press was censored; before long Césaire’s cultural journal Tropiques was banned. Wartime rationing came with a vicious twist: queues for basic commodities were racially segregated. Troops from visiting naval ships who had been temporary sojourners on the island came on land permanently; housing and food prices soared. An economic blockade meant that Martinique, dependent on sugar exports to pay for imported food and manufactured goods, had to grapple towards self-sufficiency for the first time in more than 300 years.19 Fanon’s family struggled, like the rest of the island, to feed itself. They listened to the BBC in secret, 15-year-old Frantz charting Allied movements on a map (BSWM 195). For boys who planned to

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join the Allies, the only hope was to escape to the Free French on Saint Lucia and Dominica, though these islands were, respectively, 27 and 35 kilometres away, across a tempestuous sea. Approximately 4,500 Martiniquans fled in open boats to join de Gaulle’s forces. Fanon threw in his lot with them in spring 1943; he was just 17. Later he would tell his parents he had decided to leave because he was still faithful to an ‘obsolete ideal’ of French patriotism.20 He was outraged at the advice of his teacher Joseph Henri, who said, ‘Fire burns and wars kill. The wives of dead heroes marry men who are alive and well. What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When white men kill each other, it is a blessing for blacks.’21 Fanon had lived under the Pétain regime for more than two years, enough time to plan, discuss and justify the decision to flee. However, he was still a young man without money; to pay for his passage, he stole cloth that his father had been saving to make a suit. Fanon reached Dominica, where he would have been interrogated about his motivations and given basic military training, but his escape was abortive: Martinique’s brief Pétainist state was over. Demonstrations were held and the colonial infantry became caught up in the resistance. With Allied victories around the world, support for de Gaulle culminated in the foundation of the Comité Martiniquais de Libération Nationale. Tan Robe surrendered and Fanon, perhaps regarded as too young, was sent back to a free Martinique within weeks of his dash to freedom. He returned to school, but was not easily dissuaded. In March 1944, the American ship USS Oregon left Fort-de-France with a thousand black recruits. Not a single béké volunteered. Fanon again resisted the appeals of his teachers and friends, declaring the war was for freedom and against fascism: a battle in which ‘we are all involved, white, black or yellow.’ Fanon, at 18, was the youngest on the ship.22 After more than two weeks at sea, the Oregon reached the Moroccan port of Casablanca. Quickly, the troops started to split along racial lines. The French army was divided into distinct racial compartments: Europeans at the top, West Indians below them, sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africans and North Africans at the bottom. A war fought ostensibly against Nazism and fascism was racially structured to its core.23 Martiniquans and Guadeloupians, as ‘privileged’ troops from the old colonies, were regarded as superior to African troops and given certain

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rights, including the same uniforms as their white French comrades. Africans, however, were given uniforms that marked them out as separate. A mobile field brothel was established exclusively to ‘service’ the newly arrived Martiniquan contingent, an expression of the widely held racist assumptions that black French subjects had insatiable sexual appetites that would become a source of tension if not ‘serviced’.24 The mask of illusions was slipping quickly from Fanon’s face. Fanon also received a dramatic lesson in geography and history. Morocco, a French protectorate, was ruled by a pampered European class while the Muslim population lived in poverty. In July 1944 Fanon’s unit moved to Algeria, the base from which landings to France would take place. France had invaded Algeria in 1830 as an attempt, or so French schoolchildren were taught, to free the Mediterranean from Ottoman Turkish tyranny and a mission civilisatrice, a civilising mission. These stories of valiant and noble conquest were common justification for naked colonial intrusion and invasion (see Chapter 3). After the 1940 armistice there was hope that French Algeria would continue to fight. For the first years of the war it was a place of conspiracies and uneasy compromises between Gaullists and Pétainists struggling for influence and control. But before long the ‘department’ – Algeria was not officially a colony – fell behind Pétain. The pieds-noirs – European settlers in Algeria – were not inclined to fight but supported Pétain’s anti-Semitism. Jews were forced from public office and denied rights. Algeria had a large and diverse Jewish population, which Fanon would write about in 1959 (see Chapter 5). However, certain nationalists issued a radical and wide-ranging ‘manifesto of the Algerian people’ condemning colonisation, demanding self-determination and calling for Arabic to be recognised as a sovereign language and for free education for both sexes (see Chapter 3). In November 1942, Allied troops invaded Algeria and Morocco and the entire territory fell under American control. Six months later, de Gaulle arrived and made Algiers the base for the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale. It was from this white city – known in French as Alger la blanche for its elegant white buildings overlooking the Mediterranean (and southern France) – that de Gaulle organised Opération Anvil to liberate France from the south. This operation was

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intensely political. De Gaulle was determined that there must be a thrust of French forces from the south, rather than simply through Italy: troops from the entire French Empire must be seen to free France themselves. Otherwise, postwar France would be in danger of falling under a military government controlled by the Allies.25 In 1944 Fanon’s unit readied itself. Further revelations about the real nature of the war abounded. Fanon’s contact with the general population forced him to admit that ‘the French do not like Jews, who do not like Arabs, who do not like Negroes’.26 Like Martinique, wartime Algeria’s rationing was racially policed. Fanon did not stay long enough to make a detailed survey of Algeria’s realities, though what he saw aroused his anger. In September his unit crossed the Mediterranean, pathetically equipped with World War I rifles and machine guns. Opération Anvil had been launched a month before; Fanon’s first glimpse of the country he had been brought up to regard as his real home was of broken and war-torn coastal cities. How different to the image he had once held of France, from which ‘he received his knowledge of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire [. . .] a magic circle in which the words Paris, Marseille, Sorbonne, Pigalle become the keys to the vault’ (BSWM 23). Was the war a hothouse for ideas of decolonisation? Were troops from France’s empire locked in furious debate about the end of colonisation, hatching plans for liberation from the shackles of the French empire? If the claims that the army was a birthplace for independence are stated so categorically, then they can be dismissed with the same certainty. Recent studies question the thesis that the wartime experience acted as a catalyst for anti-colonialist and nationalist thought. Ali Mazrui, the great historian of Africa, argues representatively that ‘African military experience abroad in the 1940s contributed to the birth of African nationalism at home.’27 Fanon’s transformation in the war was undoubtedly replicated on a massive scale across the colonies, no matter that certain contemporary historians have claimed the opposite.28 Without question, the collective experience of the war raised questions and challenged racist assumptions about white European superiority. However, David Macey asks the right question: ‘What happens when the colonised liberate the coloniser and then realise that they themselves are still colonised?’29 The war was a gradual but profound process of

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‘consciousness raising’, with colonial troops witnessing both the faiblesse (weakness) of European power and the insidious racial divisions across European empires. Fanon and his friends were now charged with liberating France by shedding their own blood. In Algeria the war did have an impact on nationalist consciousness, but the contribution of the pre-war nationalist movement, in particular Ahmed Messali Hadj, played a central role (see Chapter 2). Unusually, Fanon and his Martiniquan friends remained together through the course of the war, even after they were incorporated into another regiment, the Sixth Regiment of Tirailleurs Sénégalais. By November the division had moved north of Lyon. Fanon was often snowed into his small tent, forced to dig his way out in the morning. Fanon noted that it seemed to be black troops who were sent into combat first. The Martiniquans maintained their peculiar rank, neither lowly natives nor complete Frenchmen, but as they progressed north the army made the decision to ‘whiten’ the division, sending the Senegalese back to fight in ‘warmer climes’ – disguising another racial motivation. Fanon remained part of the northern push. As Macey explains, It is hard to imagine how you’d get through the confusion – you invade from the South of France and they pull back the Senegalese troops who could not be allowed to liberate France and somehow you are reclassified as white. So that on the one hand you’re not a black person, you’re French, but you’re not French, you’re a black infantry soldier, fighting in the snow you have never seen before [. . .] so it’s not surprising the confusion about who you are, what you are and what on earth France is. It must have been a terrible sense of betrayal.30

Indeed, its impact on young Fanon cannot be underestimated. Fanon entered the war with a sense of France’s imperfection but also illusions of justice in an empire and nation indivisible. He would return with these ideas in tatters, his mental universe largely destroyed. On 25 November 1944, under attack by a German unit near Montbéliard, Fanon was injured with shrapnel to his chest. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his bravery and evacuated to the mountains north of Lyon. He recovered quickly but wrote to Joby, in

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January 1945, ‘I’ve grown a lot older than you. I’ve been deceived and I’m paying for my mistakes.’31 Fanon had learned that he was not French; he was a nègre and treated as such. In a letter to his parents in April 1945 he called the war a sham: If I don’t come back, and if one day you should hear that I died facing the enemy, console each other, but never say: he died for the good cause. [. . .] This false ideology that shields the secularists and the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong!32

As an earlier generation had done after World War I, he came to see his motivations for fighting as obsolete. The end of war a few weeks later did nothing to ease Fanon’s fury. If anything, the victory celebrations confirmed it. Some years later he wrote of the behaviour of white women [. . .] among Negroes at dances. Most of the time the women made involuntary gestures of flight, of withdrawing, their faces filled with a fear that was not feigned. And yet the Negroes who asked them to dance would have been utterly unable to commit any act at all against them, even if they had wished to do so. (BSWM 156)

Already he had experienced what the Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba described as the ‘ironies, insults, blows that we endured morning, noon, and evening, because we are Negroes. Who will forget that to a black one said tu, certainly not as to a friend, but because the more honourable vous was reserved for whites alone?’33 The hurt of casual racism cut deeper still as French platitudes about equality and democracy rang hollow across the empire. But Fanon experienced more than broken illusions in ruined postwar France. True, many of the farmers whose land he had helped to liberate had refused to play a part in their own liberation and were ungracious and racist, but he also met French people who showed solidarity and friendship and had actively resisted the Nazis. One prosperous family whose father had been involved in the resistance invited members of his unit to dinner. Fanon and his well-educated fellow Martiniquans were selected to attend. They were received with

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great hospitality and asked about their plans when they returned home; Fanon declared his desire to be a lawyer. The young men remained in contact with the family after their return to Martinique. Martinique was indelibly transformed by the war. His old teacher Aimé Césaire was elected as a communist deputy for Martinique in the 1945 French parliamentary elections. Fanon attended a meeting where Césaire spoke powerfully about a new Martinique, remembering later how ‘in the middle of his speech a woman fainted’ (BSWM 39). Césaire’s election did not alter the fact that his advice not to go to war had been right, but Fanon had needed to plough his own doubts and illusions in the soil of war. Fanon completed his baccalaureate, then tried to apply for a government grant to fund his university education in France. For a war veteran with a medal for bravery, being forced to scramble for a grant must have been humiliating, but Fanon succeeded. He decided that he would not study law but dentistry. This would fit with his family’s aspirations and perhaps excuse Fanon for his adolescent defiance.

Peacetime and medicine While the war was a great revealer of illusions, others still lingered. Perhaps something in France and Europe could be redeemed? Returning to France, Fanon had to brace himself for further shocks. His return to Paris in late 1946 was no easy undertaking: a 12-day crossing to patched-up Le Havre. The Fourth Republic was less than two years old and struggling, with essentials in short supply. In September 1947, protests broke out as bread rations were reintroduced. The government called in troops to pacify miners in northern France. Indeed the entire year had seen escalating strikes and protests, which caused President Vincent Auriol to write on 15 September, ‘The authority of the state is being challenged everywhere and violated. [. . .] This sorry state of affairs more closely resembles a true crisis of the regime than a temporary crisis of distrust in the government.’34 Two periods in French politics can be discerned in these years. From 1944 to 1947 the French Communist Party (PCF, Parti Communiste Français) was in government and, with the General Confederation of Labour (CGT or Confédération Générale du

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Travail), tried to suppress discontent, opposing all strikes. After the PCF was ousted in May 1947 it took a left turn, encouraging fierce, semi-insurrectionary strikes in the context of the emerging Cold War. There is no doubt the discontent was real and no doubt that the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO, the French Section of the Workers’ International, which stayed in government when strikers were being shot down) played a deplorable role, but the PCF’s position clearly fitted its international perspective and actually involved leading workers into a dead-end of ultra-militancy.35 Fanon’s studies in dentistry did not last long. Impetuous, he abandoned his studies in Paris almost immediately. Irritated by the claustrophobic Martiniquan community and disgusted by the racism of white society, he could not find his place. His contemporaries described him as écorché vif – literally, ‘skinned alive’. His nerves on edge, alienated and outraged, he packed his bags again and moved to Lyon to study medicine. This also distanced him further from his family and his brother Joby, who was in Paris. Lyon was a further plunge into the cold and unfriendly country. Though the city had a reputable medical faculty, it is still not renowned for its warm welcome – certainly not for a black man in 1946. Much of urban France was suffering from a housing crisis. No city was as bad as Paris, though Lyon came close. Fanon moved into an exbrothel transformed into student accommodation by the Ministry of Education. The city had a significant immigrant population. Before World War I Italians and Greeks had settled there, but Algeria’s economic depression brought new faces to the city’s factories, many from Kabylie. With a postwar shortage of industrial workers, Algerians moved to car- and steel-manufacturing areas in France. By 1954 the Algerian population had grown to 211,000. This put an end to the dominance of Kabylie workers; Algerian immigrants no longer automatically lived in familial or neighbourly communities based on Algerian village geography.36 This alienated and uprooted population would later become the subject of Fanon’s psychiatric enquiries. Yet Lyon was also a city of radical politics, particularly in its silk industry. These workers helped establish the city’s reputation for radicalism. The 1830 silk-workers’ strike had prefigured revolution in the rest of the country; Lyon’s 1848 general strike preceded that in Paris and almost exceeded its militancy. In 1870 a communist-

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influenced commune briefly ran the city. When Fanon arrived, 10 per cent of the population worked in silk and were occupying factories, though stripped of skin and bones by the war. Peter Geismar, an early biographer, described (with a certain degree of exaggeration) how the city influenced Fanon: ‘In 1947 and 1948 his political engagements threatened his academic career: He was always involved in debates, going to meetings, touring occupied factories.’37 In February 1947, Fanon heard that his father had died. Difficult though their relationship had been, Fanon was distraught. He left immediately for Rouen to see his sister Gabrielle. Anxious that their father’s death would leave an unbridgeable hole in the family, his sister offered to suspend her studies to return to Martinique. Fanon persuaded her not to; in the end, none of the children in France made the long and expensive journey back to the island. The family was weaker, but Éléonore was still a formidable matriarch; despite financial worries, she lived another 35 years. Fanon’s first relationship with a white woman was in 1948, when he was 23. His girlfriend, who has been identified publicly only as Michelle B., gave birth to a girl. Their student circles were shaken by the scandal: if the high racist morals of the city could only barely tolerate a mixed-race couple in public, a black baby out of marriage was too much. The crisis was infinitely worse for Michelle, a medical student, who failed her exams and never qualified. Fanon left her for Marie-Josèphe Dublé (known as Josie), but was eventually persuaded by his friends to recognise his daughter and allow her to take his name. Mireille Fanon, named after one of Fanon’s sisters, did not get to know her father but has become one of the greatest champions of his ideas. We can only imagine the anguish shared by daughter and father at their separation.38 Josie was a high school student when she met Fanon, a striking, dark-haired 18-year-old. She might have been younger than Fanon, but she had a character to match his. Her background was working class, her parents trade unionists in the postal service. Their politics meant there was no sotto voce racism about her eloping with a black man. Being welcomed into a white family with no racism or prejudice was a revelation to Fanon. The couple married in 1952. Fanon never learned to type and one of the couple’s first collaborations involved Josie typing the first drafts of Black Skin, White Masks her husband narrating

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passages as he paced up and down in their small rented room. For the rest of Fanon’s life, Josie was his companion and collaborator; after his death she remained in Algeria until her suicide in 1989. In 1952 Fanon made a brief return to Martinique on a working holiday. He had not been back since leaving in 1946; the passage back was a luxury he could ill afford. The trip was a mixed blessing. He saw his family and worked as a general practitioner from a friend’s house. When he arrived he presented his brother with a copy of his medical thesis. On the cover he wrote: To my brother Félix, I offer this work – The greatness of a man is to be found not in his acts but in his style. Existence does not resemble a steadily rising curve, but a slow, and sometimes sad, series of ups and downs. I have a horror of weaknesses – I understand them, but I do not like them. I do not agree with those who think it possible to live life at an easy pace. I don’t want this. I don’t think you do either.39

Perhaps he had entertained a hope that he could return to live and work on the island, but Fanon decided after a short time that Martinique would suffocate him and his island home would never be a place where he could work. After less than two months he returned to Lyon. Fanon never returned again to his home. A diligent student, Fanon became quickly aware of the gaps in his education. He had little enthusiasm for the more practical elements of his medical degree – dissection, surgery and autopsy; clearly he was not going to be a surgeon or an emergency doctor. Obliged to take a foundation course in biology, physics and chemistry, he also read philosophy, literature and poetry ferociously, refusing disciplinary boundaries. He read journals like Esprit from the Catholic left, Sartre’s famous Les Temps Modernes and Présence Africaine and attended lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His cosmopolitan intellectual appetite deepened the contrast between him and his adolescent classmates.40 Other black faces cleaned the labs where medical students studied or worked in factories and lived in slums. Fanon was a veteran of a war that had left him scarred and alienated, with a chip on

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his shoulder. Friends described him as aggressive and argumentative. He may have seemed bad company, someone to avoid. But he was also outgoing, passionate, committed and full of life, willing to dance, recite poetry and declaim his opinions loudly. Fanon also dabbled in student politics, his first foray into activism. He was reputedly close to the local PCF branch, though never a member, but participated in its anti-colonial demonstrations. This is not surprising; the PCF was unavoidable, ‘at the peak of its influence, with five million voters and hegemony over a trade union federation with some five million members’.41 Paul Vergès, head of the Communist Party of Réunion, had been arrested for murder. Under pressure from the anti-colonial movement, he was transferred to Lyon for trial and was acquitted. During a protest for him, Fanon was beaten by the police. This political involvement, combined with his reading, began to harden Fanon’s anti-colonial opinions, his understanding of racism and his fury at French arrogance and violence. Though Fanon come to see the PCF as deeply problematic, it was a formidable force, riding high after providing fighters for the resistance during wartime. So great was its influence, with 5 million voters and political dominance over a similarly sized trade union federation, that no self-respecting radical could avoid engaging (or confronting) it. Marxism had a grip over other organisations of the left, including the socialist SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière). The non-communist left had its own impressive publications, papers like Combat and Franc-Tireur and more academic reviews like La Revue Internationale, all of which frequently employed the language of socialism and revolution. Their framework was the possibility of radical social transformation. Not all contributors were Marxists, but most were committed to socialist discourse. Fanon too saw the possibility of another, militant France. Fanon wrote, edited and produced a magazine at the university. Its title, Tam Tam, indicating the African drum, points to Negritude’s influence on him. His private intellectual enquiry drew him to phenomenology, a philosophical discourse that did not speak directly to racism, but did talk of ‘lived experience’ – particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s La Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945) and JeanPaul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant (1943). Phenomenology gave Fanon an ‘embodied’ way of writing and thinking. He was particularly attracted

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by Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on using lived experience to explain black people’s lives in France. Fanon was fascinated by and passionate about Sartre, an engagement he maintained for the rest of his life. Fanon was in this respect a pragmatist, seeking out intellectual tools that could describe the ‘lived experience of black people’ (for this he was particularly interested in the writing of black novelists). His subsequent writings are all redolent of these influences. Fanon’s prose was often poetic, free of sociological jargon and rigid categories, touching the reader sensually. In his first book, BSWM, he used novels and poetry from writers on a similar quest. Richard Wright and Chester Himes, for example, described with force the experiences of racism and blackness. They were also part of a politically committed generation; Fanon identified with this commitment as well. Why, then, did Fanon leave out certain philosophical and political schools of thought? In early 1957 he stayed with the French Trotskyist Jean Ayme, who observed that although Fanon was incredibly smart, with an impressive knowledge of philosophy and psychiatry, he did not have much ‘political training’. He had not been an activist and did not have a thorough knowledge of revolutionary history. (Some accounts dispute this reading of Fanon’s political development.)42 The Marxism Fanon would have encountered through the PCF, however, would have struck him as unsubtle, illsuited to explain the complexities the racism he confronted. Fanon has been criticised for this failure. For example, British Communist Party member Jack Woddis accused him in 1972 of failing to develop a correct class theory of Algerian society.43 South African Trotskyist Baruch Hirson was almost entirely dismissive of Fanon: ‘If he was correct then the struggle against colonialism could not really get under way before force was employed. But because there were so few examples of war against the colonial powers his model was unsatisfactory.’44 Macey notes, ‘Fanon showed little interest in Marxist theory and whilst he had obviously absorbed its general principles there are few signs that he ever studied it in any depth.’45 As we shall see, Fanon’s relationship to Marxism was considerably more complex, but there were many reasons for him to turn his back on it. The PCF, like other communist organisations tied to the Soviet Union, had become hopelessly Stalinised. Gone were the promise of emancipation and the dialectic at the core of classical

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Marxism, which understood political change as a movement from below – not as teleological activity, an analysis that starts with the end already written, but as a theory grounded in the politics of possibility, potential and contingency, rooted in a radical practice. Marxism as a theory of agency and revolutionary change was replaced with an ugly, crude replica shorn of nuance and complexity. Marxism under Stalin’s hammer blows had become a codified practice where history proceeded in neat stages. In this view pre-capitalist societies (including colonies) were backward and needed capitalist development. Colonialism was widely (and inaccurately) regarded as the violent handmaiden to such development. This Marxism did not celebrate the revolt of colonial peoples – as Marx so often did – instead advocating colonial intrusion on backward and feudal people, to develop a modern working class that eventually would struggle for socialism. The PCF, the official face of French communism, made these arguments, but was highly ambiguous. It was also the largest activist organisation on the left in France, mobilising against colonialism and developing solidarity for persecuted nationalist figures like Paul Vergès. It represented the most militant and consistent voice of protest in France and earned respect from its involvement in the resistance (and the insurrection in Paris after liberation).46 After it was ejected from the tripartite government in 1947, the party ran a vigorous campaign of direct action against the Indochina war. All this could not have failed to inspire Fanon, although his relationship with the party was ambivalent. As an intellectual maverick he would have been revolted by its formulas and dogmas but impressed by its network of militants and organisational prowess. He remained on its fringes, unconvinced. After his period in Algeria he would seek to engage with the French left, arguing for solidarity with the Algerian Revolution, but become frustrated with its political cowardice. Fanon saw himself part of a global project of emancipation with the left, no matter how hopeless and flawed.

Black Skin, White Masks In late-1940s Lyon, Fanon was still a long way from drawing these conclusions. Beginning to assemble an analysis of racism and blackness that reached beyond the narrow confines of a constrained

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and dogmatic Marxism, he began writing his extraordinary first book. Originally conceived in 1951 as a medical dissertation, it was swiftly rejected by his professors as defying all known thesis protocols. Fanon quickly wrote a more conventional dissertation that satisfied the university’s academic and scientific requirements.47 Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, BSWM), which Fanon claimed was the outcome of seven years of observations and experience, was published in 1952. It has remained in print ever since. This book – celebrated as a monument to philosophical antiracism – is full of profound reflections on racism, whiteness, blackness, human recognition and liberation, startling as much for its analysis as for the author’s astonishing prose. It made Fanon known for his ferocious delivery and uncompromising, angry language. The book attempts to describe the ‘lived experience of a black person’. To some extent it is autobiographical, as well as a call for ‘mutual recognition’ and an end to racism. Employing Sartre’s work on anti-Semitism, Fanon explains that blackness is created in confrontation with others and the racist gaze. Race and racism, Fanon argues in the book, denote a relationship of intersubjectivity orbiting around a superiority/inferiority complex, with whiteness at the centre of supposed superiority.48 Sartre’s 1944 Anti-Semite and Jew was a crucial, perhaps the crucial, influence on Fanon’s writing and style. It formed the backbone of Fanon’s theoretical framework in and beyond Black Skin, White Masks, which resounds with the philosophical approach it pioneered. Like Sartre, Fanon incorporates Hegel’s master/slave metaphor, using a similar psychological approach to racism, with prejudice as an expression of frustrated sexual desire, and moves between scales of analysis from society to the individual. Sartre deals with the extraordinary burden of anti-Semitic stereotypes confronting the Jew at every turn: seeing, speaking, voting are all circumscribed by the anti-Semitic portrait of the Jew. Although all of us, Sartre writes, are shepherded by the ‘Other’ into ways of being, the Jew who experiences a ‘doubling of the fundamental relationship with the Other. The Jew is over-determined’.49 The anti-Semite creates the Jew in the same way that the racist white gaze constructs the black person. Just as there is no escape for the Jew, Fanon writes of the impossibility, without struggle and transformation, of flight from the racist gaze. Both

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Jew and black person are perpetually over-determined. ‘How many Jews’, writes Sartre, ‘are deliberately generous, disinterested, and even magnificent simply because the Jew is ordinarily taken to be a man of money?’50 White society constantly confronts the black person with difference, through friendly curiosity or blatant racism. The ‘white masks’ of the book’s title speak of the naive, delusional hope for recognition through denial: the desire, as Sartre explains, to become a man, nothing but a man, cravings that destroy the Jew. His life is nothing but a long flight from others and from himself. He has been alienated even from his own body; his emotional life has been cut in two; he has been reduced to pursuing the impossible dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects him.51

Later, Fanon adopted exactly Sartre’s tone and condemnation. Sartre concludes his study by explaining that the victims of antiSemitism are the anti-Semite and the Jew. ‘What must be done is to point out to each one that the fate of the Jews is his fate. Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights.’52 It echoes like a siren across all Fanon’s (and Sartre’s) work: mutual recognition will liberate the oppressed and the oppressor – the dupe, the anti-Semite and the racist. To arrive at a society finally free of such prejudice required revolutionary transcendence.53 Following Sartre, Fanon argues that he is cast into his blackness by racism and becomes the stereotypes of the racist. A black person confronted with racism is immediately broken apart: ‘the negro is stupid, the negro is bad, the negro is wicked, the negro is ugly.’54 But as the black person is confined to blackness by the racist gaze, so the white person is trapped by whiteness. Using Hegel, Fanon appeals for a humanism that continues throughout his work, one that can only be acquired through recognition by others – the acknowledgement of the humanity of black (and colonised) peoples in Europe, not bestowed as a benevolent gesture but seized and reached for in struggle and collective action. Recognition and humanity cannot be granted. It is worth explaining these ideas in some detail. The colonial situation and ‘modern’ racism involve a systematic denial of the humanity of the black/‘colonised’ person. Humanity, for

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black and white alike, can only be reached through a relationship that depends on recognition: ‘It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depends’ (BSWM 217). If the personhood of only the white person is acknowledged, then the black person does not exist, is not present. Fanon uses Hegel’s metaphor of master and slave to illustrate his argument that only when the slave is prepared to risk his or her life can freedom and recognition be achieved. Here he cites Hegel: It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; only thus is it tried and proved that the essential nature of self-consciousness is not bare existence, is not merely immediate form in which it at first makes it appearance, is not its mere absorption in the expanse of life. (218)

For Fanon, to literally be seen it is necessary to grasp and seize recognition: ‘this human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies.’ Only through such ‘conflict’ can the non-person (the slave, the black person confronting racism, the colonised) be realised. ‘I go beyond life [Hegel’s ‘bare existence’] toward a supreme good [. . .] into a universally valid objective truth’ (218). As Bulhan has eloquently written, ‘If freedom requires the risk of life, oppression requires the fear of physical death.’55 For Hegel this risk was essential: ‘The individual, who has not staked his life, may, no doubt, be recognised as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent selfconsciousness’ (219). Fanon turns ‘risking life’ into the necessity for conflict and struggle, some sort of as-yet-unclear collective action. In a sense this process involves doing battle for a human world; to create something other than ‘bare existence’ requires a world of mutual recognition. Slavery might be over, Fanon argues, but all that has happened is that the black person ‘has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master’, literally to eat at the master’s table. Liberation without a death struggle is no liberation at all. Fanon is seeking something (uncertain as he still is in Black Skin, White Masks) much more fundamental, a world where there are no longer ‘slaves’ or masters – a future of shared

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humanity, black and white hand in hand. The former slave who can find in his memory no trace of the struggle ‘for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before the tightrope of existence’ (221). It is necessary therefore for such a person to ‘forever absorb himself in uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge’ (222).56 Here Fanon’s analysis assumes a further (Hegelian) depth. If the black person – in such racist circumstances – is denied his humanity and depersonalised, then so is the white person. As Lewis Gordon has written, the white man is ‘anti-man’ and needs also to discover humanity, ‘to emerge out of the ashes of the fact of his desiccation’.57 Fanon writes powerfully in his article ‘The ‘‘North African Syndrome’’’ from the same period of ‘this man whom you thingify by calling him systematically Mohammed, whom you reconstruct, or rather whom you dissolve, on the basis of an idea’. But such a process of ‘thingifying’ also degrades and dehumanises the racist, the master, the white man (his own humanity cannot not be fully realised and recognised). As Fanon concludes: If YOU do not demand the man, if YOU do not sacrifice the man that is in you so that the man who is on this earth shall be more than a body, more than a Mohammed, by what conjurer’s trick will I have to acquire the certainty that you, too, are worthy of my love?58

Simply put, if we do not recognise the humanity in the person who is before us, how can we can reclaim the humanity that is in us? These fundamental ideas would emerge in other forms in Fanon’s later work, as we will see. In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon develops a distinct, powerful style full of poetry and rhythm; his prose demands to be read aloud. He was never satisfied with academic language but craved to reach his readers emotionally. Here he seeks to tell a story about race relations as a prose poet. He does not analyse distant sociological categories (as will be seen, he became very critical of a static, non-dialectical sociology) but tries to invoke in the reader an experience of what race and racism really mean and how they are felt. This is a phenomenological approach that attempts to penetrate the meaning of being, rather than an epistemological understanding.

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Having learned from phenomenology, he writes an ontology of racism. Nothing like this had been published before.59 Towards the end of the book Fanon writes, There is no Negro mission; there is no white burden. I find myself suddenly in a world [. . .] in which I am summoned into battle. [. . .] There is no white world; there is no white ethic, any more than there is a white intelligence. There are in every part of the world men who search.60

He was still not clear on what this ‘struggle’ would entail or how practically to seek recognition. There is a tension in the book between Fanon’s need to assert himself individually, declaring that je suis mon propre fondement (‘I am my own foundation’),61 and the realisation that such a foundation can only be established collectively. The question of agency looms large: Who will seize recognition and assert their humanity? The people of Algeria would help to actualise Fanon’s philosophy.

Lyon and beyond In 1951, Fanon wrote an essay for Esprit on the lived experience of the black man. Nine months later he argued that the Algerian community was the most downtrodden of the foreign communities in France, but an inseparable part of the wider French working class. The article gave an intimate account of his experiences as a medical student and trainee psychiatrist in Lyon. In the Algerian quarter, in the slums around Rue Moncey, he had encountered North African men writhing in pain, pointing to their abdomens, worried that they were on the brink of death. On examination Fanon had discovered that they had no ‘organic’ symptoms: their illness was psychosomatic. The condition had been labelled ‘North African Syndrome’. Fanon identified its cause as the patients’ alienation from society – living without family, love, human solidarity or any meaningful ‘collectivity’. Fanon was beginning to realise that the entirety – the ‘wholeness’ – of the patient’s experience had to be understood. As the French scholar Caroline Izambert has noted, most new Algerians immigrants

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at this time were working-class men who ‘spent longer and longer periods of time in the metropole, had more clearly broken with their rural origins, and were less likely to go back to their birthplace’.62 This certainly brought about a new consciousness, but also a deracinated and fragmented social world without support networks and familial groupings. Fanon was witnessing deep and profound alienation. Pierre Chaulet recalls that this article about North African Syndrome, with its powerful indictment of poverty, desperation and racism in France, secured him a small following, more so than his first book did.63 Black Skin, White Masks was a hard book to pitch. The creative medley of literary, medical and psychological themes, personal reflections and proclamations would have completely thrown most conventional publishers, and the author was more or less unknown. Publishing was, as it is now, based in Paris and operated in the exclusionary ghettoised literary circles and intellectual cliques. It might have found an obvious home with Présence Africaine, the first black French publisher, founded in 1947 with the aim of planting an African presence in French literary soil. It does not stretch credulity too far to argue that Fanon did not consider Présence Africaine because of the publisher’s commitment to Negritude; his emerging political and intellectual worlds were situated elsewhere. Already labelled black, he did not want another compulsory appellation – which the Negritude movement would have attached. His ambiguous relationship with Negritude, even at this early stage, stemmed from a refusal to be pigeonholed by a narrow and romantic Africanism he saw as important but limited. Esprit was part of the non-sectarian, non-communist left, affiliated with Catholic radicals, and had a close relationship with Éditions du Seuil, which published Black Skin, White Masks. The manuscript was handled by Francis Jeanson, also an editor at Les Temps Modernes, a 29year-old radical intellectual with an interest in Algeria that stemmed from his time there during the war. By the early 1950s Jeanson was analysing France’s colonial tyranny over Algerians. Fanon’s book had a very distinct project, as Jeanson notes in the original preface of the book. Fanon was addressing ‘the Negro snatched away from his village, the young black gynaecologist who cannot practise his profession, this Tirailleur Sénégalais forced to fight in Vietnam in a war that is not his, the political prisoner in Madagascar’. Yet, Jeanson argued, this

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constituency was only half of Fanon’s audience: he was also addressing white European society because they ‘fail to recognise their black brothers and sisters’ and ‘challenge their membership of the human race, therefore fail[ing] to recognise themselves and excluding themselves from the human race’.64 With Black Skin, White Masks Fanon was also asserting his own place as a thinker of profound depth charting news areas of vital contemporary concern. To him the job of thinking was essential – having the correct ‘understanding’ through reading – but also action. Theory was important for clarifying about the ‘tasks’ of action, the fundamental work of changing the world. Fanon writes powerfully about the relationship between theory and practice: ‘To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act’ (BSWM 222). Fanon plunged into the intellectual debates around him. Even in slightly provincial Lyon, the environment was charged with new musical and cultural forms: jazz, surrealism, existentialism, Negritude. Fanon necessarily framed his work and life in the context of French intellectual and political traditions. His work – and later even friendship – with Jean-Paul Sartre testified to his desire for a connection with the best elements of the French left. But his involvement was wider than Sartre and de Beauvoir: around him were anti-Stalinists who influenced, criticised and debated with him.65

Revolutionising the asylum As Fanon continued his medical studies, he developed an interest in psychiatry. (In this respect Black Skin, White Masks can be read as an extended self-analysis.) In the late 1940s in France, psychiatry was a marginal medical discipline. At Fanon’s medical school the subject was dominated by a professor who was obsessed with psychosurgery and neurology. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was the standard treatment for depression and anxiety; psychoanalysis was unheard of. On graduating in 1951 Fanon took a post as a houseman (a junior doctor) in Saint-Ylie Hospital in the Jura, where he began making copious notes on patients and their neuroses that he would later use in his books.

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Fanon kept up with major trends in his chosen field. The section in Black Skin, White Masks on Jacques Marie Émile Lacan demonstrates his impressive (even precocious) learning on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Lacan was not at this stage a famous figure, but Fanon appreciated the connection he made between psychotic delusions and patients’ lived history. In this analysis psychosis was playing out not irrational fantasies but conditions etched into concrete social relations and corresponding psychic tensions. Fanon’s knowledge of this work was impressive. So was his friendship with Paul Balvet, the former director of Saint-Alban, the most progressive psychiatric hospital in France (arguably in Europe), with whom he debated psychiatry and surrealism.66 Through Balvet, Fanon met François Tosquelles, who was now running Saint-Alban. Tosquelles was a veteran militant and antiStalinist who had fought with the Marxist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) in the Spanish Civil War. Until Tosquelles, Fanon had no mentor who could guide him and engage with his ferocious intelligence. Césaire was certainly an inspiration and role model, but Fanon had been young and his contact with the poet brief. In Lyon as well, professors, colleagues and friends had influenced him. In Tosquelles, though, he found someone who could challenge him as a cosmopolitan thinker, a radical psychiatrist with a wealth of extraordinary experiences that could match, inspire and even surpass the intelligence and rich ‘lived experience’ of this young Martiniquan. Born in 1912 in Reus, Catalonia, Tosquelles had read Marx at an early age and supported Catalan nationalism in the 1930s. Catalonia became a centre for exiled Jews fleeing the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany and Austria. Trained in phenomenology and psychiatry at the Institut Pere Mata in Barcelona, Tosquelles came into contact with refugees influenced by Sigmund Freud. However, he was soon frustrated by the limitations of the ‘analytic approach’. Placing patients on the couch, to his mind, separated individuals from the live spaces and communities they inhabited. Tosquelles started to develop his own notions of ‘institutional psychotherapy’. The civil war, which pitted General Francisco Franco’s right-wing military coup against a republican government, brought Tosquelles’s experiments to a quick end. He served on the Aragon front as a

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member of the POUM fighting Franco’s forces.67 Even during the war his work in psychiatry continued: he used his psychological training to help select troops for tank and machine-gun units and in 1938 became the republican army’s head of psychiatry. Tosquelles had revolutionary ideas about transforming psychiatric medicine by incorporating neurology, biology, and phenomenology. But he was also a figure of the anti-Stalinist left. The conflict into which he was now thrust was Europe’s first armed struggle (and revolution) against fascism. As events unfolded, the Soviet-led Communist Party played a ‘counter-revolutionary’ role; its betrayals contributed to the eventual defeat of the republican government. Tosquelles’s life was indelibly marked by these experiences. When the Spanish Revolution crumbled, Tosquelles crossed the Pyrenees and became a ‘refugee psychiatrist’ in France. Like many republican veterans, he was quickly interned at the Septfonds detention centre in Tarn-et-Garonne, which housed refugees with ‘dangerous’ pasts categorised as security risks. (Under the Vichy regime such camps became holding centres for Jews who were eventually deported to Nazi concentration camps.) Tosquelles, apparently unstoppable, established a psychiatric service in the camp. By 1940 he was offered a job at Saint-Alban as a nurse (his qualifications were not recognised in France, but he retrained and qualified in 1948).68 During the war Saint-Alban became a haven for the resistance. Tosquelles insisted on breaking down the rigid medical hierarchy between patients, doctors, and auxiliary staff. Much as the POUM militias had scrapped ranks, Saint-Alban, under Tosquelles’s influence, introduced democracy: elected delegates from the hospital community made decisions on the library, film group and newspaper. The well-known French psychiatrist Jean Oury described the atmosphere and activism of the hospital when Tosquelles first arrived: What we had at Saint-Alban [. . .] was a fervent [. . .] interdisciplinary research: phenomenologists, psychologists, neurologists, surrealist poets, immunologists from the Pasteur Institute, and then all the activities and projects renewed in the wake of the French Liberation. [. . .] It was a magnificent effort which had no dealings with Stalinism.69

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A therapeutic environment was created to include intensive group work, though antipsychotic drugs and ECT were also considered a legitimate and necessary part of the arsenal against psychosis. At Saint-Alban Fanon was plunged into a world of radical politics and psychiatry. The psychiatric hospital dominated the small town of Saint-Alban in the remote Lozère department in southern France. Still hard to reach today, in the 1950s it would have taken many hours to access on poor roads from Lyon. The large hospital was built on a hill with land that the patients farmed. Newer buildings surrounded an old chateau where the patients lived in dormitories and carried out therapeutic activities. Though Fanon would have felt the hospital’s extreme separation from the world, he would have been inspired by its subversive approach to mental health, commitment to intellectual enquiry and political approach almost completely uninfected by the PCF.70 The hospital newspaper, Trait d’Union, was written, printed and circulated by the patients. It carried news about activities and social events as well as techniques and therapeutic practice. Its contents were discussed at weekly editorial meetings that brought patients and staff together. Hospital psychiatrists frequently wrote its lead articles: often Tosquelles, but also more junior doctors. During Fanon’s short stay he contributed several editorials. In one he wrote about lassitude, listlessness and the ‘crisis’ of middle age: One must not confuse weariness and rest. Weariness is the refusal to continue, an unaccountable weight in the legs, an unusual emptiness in the head and especially an anxiety which troubles the chest. [. . .] If at 40 years old, and it must be said that it is especially at 40 that this happens, is born in me a desire to no longer do anything [. . . if] I notice on waking on a beautiful morning that I have the desire for nothing, how are we to understand this? [. . .] In a sense to be 40 is to say to hell with the world, damn others, damn life, damn me [. . .] to hell with those who want to be kind with me, to hell with all those who I don’t like.

A patient responded with some anger in a letter: ‘We have done everything we could to please our doctors and nurses, only for us to be described as layabouts by Doctor Fanon.’71 At least in the pages of the

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newspaper, the doctors were not sacrosanct, with an authority or therapeutic approach that could not be challenged. The paper demonstrated in practice the necessity for group work, discussion and democratic involvement as part of the curative process.72 Fanon was influenced by his mentor’s psychiatric practice and by his commitment to democratic and egalitarian principles, in which there was no whiff of racism or segregation.73 Fanon was active in the clubs and social events and would later attempt to institute similar programmes in the hospitals where he assumed responsibility in Algeria and Tunisia. Tosquelles, in common with many others, was impressed with Fanon’s gift for polemic as well as his impatience, a trait Tosquelles regarded as positive. Their first meeting in the spring of 1952 at SaintAlban is worth citing at length: Relatively well brought up, I shook his hand and invited him to take a seat, asking, ‘What can we do to help you?’ ‘In Lyon’, he replied, ‘we caught wind that in Saint-Alban there was being brought into play a psychiatric practice especially attentive to the complexities of the differences in which each man brings into his meetings with others [. . .]’. The abstract character of these first exchanges did not fool us. The discreet reference to the contrast of colours of our skin was the centre of our meetings [. . .] he straight away offered me his book, Black Skin, White Masks. Then he recounted the terrible suffering he had experienced recently in a street in Lyon while walking with his white fiancée. He was violently arrested and taken to a police station where he was held for hours, accused by the policeman of being involved in the traffic or trade in white women.74

All of his life, Tosquelles maintained a deep affection for the man who briefly worked under him at Saint-Alban. It was a personal and intellectual solidarity of enduring strength. Fanon learned from Tosquelles that patients play a vital role in their own treatment – the self-activity of these weakened brothers and sisters of humanity. For both men the project of ‘de-alienation’ required seeing beyond the walls of the hospital.

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The publication of Black Skin, White Masks did not thrust Fanon into the spotlight. The book was not widely read, and the few reviews that appeared were confused by the book’s style and arguments. Fanon did not waste much time on these disappointments; instead he plunged himself into his passionate affair with psychiatry and more ‘conventional’ research and writing, co-authoring papers with Tosquelles and other colleagues from Saint-Alban and taking further exams that would allow him to take a position of médecin-chef (chief medical officer). The qualification gave Fanon crucial entry into the French medical world: at 28, he was still the ambitious son of an upwardly aspirant middle-class family from Martinique. Psychiatry made sense to Fanon. The profession was still in its creative and experimental infancy. Developing a name in psychiatry required (as it still does) a serious commitment to publishing and presenting papers at conferences in addition to treating patients. Fanon could maintain a literary output pursuing his chosen medical speciality. Black Skin, White Masks was marked by his hybrid reading and interests, but in some senses was not atypical of Saint-Alban’s experimental and cosmopolitan psychiatric community. Fanon was not an exception in writing and thinking across disciplinary borders, and the creative environment at the hospital was perfect for him. 47

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As his career took its first precocious steps, so did Josie’s work. She was immersed in her academic studies in philology at the University of Lyon. They had now been married for one year and established a more than satisfactory modus vivendi. However, Fanon sought a proper opening for a médecin-chef. He needed to chart his own distinct path. Psychiatry was still marginal in the medical hierarchy and there were not a large number of openings for young doctors; other candidates who had scored higher than Fanon in the professional exams would be chosen for posts in France. A post came up in Blida-Joinville, Algeria, a small town a short distance from the Mediterranean capital of Algiers. In autumn 1953 Fanon and Josie moved. Fanon explained to his brother, ‘The French have enough psychiatrists to take care of their madmen. I’d rather go to a country where they need me.’1 Fanon had expressed no previous interest in a move to Algeria; the country had no obvious or special pull on him. If a suitable position had opened up in metropolitan France he would have taken it.2 Moving was a pragmatic career decision, not a political one. He did not yet have a vision of the future publishing success of Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), and the FLN had yet to form. When the couple arrived in November, Algeria was relatively quiet, but it was an illusionary calm. Invaded by France in 1830, Algeria was not fully integrated for another 18 years, as the French struggled to pacify ‘native’ resistance. When ‘integration’ finally took place in 1848, the Arab-Berber population (or indigènes) were not accorded French citizenship but remained subjects with few rights unless they renounced their adherence to Islamic law. Naturally enough, few applied. Algeria was eventually legally constituted as an administrative département within France. Trade, schooling and society were systematically underdeveloped by French colonialism. Mostefa Lacheraf, in an important historical account, explains these developments powerfully: Algeria was no barbarian country inhabited by illiterate people with anarchic or sterile institutions. Its human and economic values attained a high level. [. . .] Patriarchal, agricultural and civic life-styles co-existed. [. . .] Throughout there was a marked sense of energy and industry: in maritime and artisanal techniques, in

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para-industrial methods, in city organisation, in the commerce with Africa and across the Mediterranean, in a system of intellectual values which was strongly impregnated with legal traditions, formal logic, more or less rationalist theology, with Arabic and Maghrebine folk traditions [. . .] a widely diffused culture, generalised through its written and oral expression. [. . .] Algeria in the earlier 19th century displayed far fewer deficiencies, far more chance of progress in relation to the civilisation of the period and the general movement of free peoples than it did by the end of the century, stripped of its millions of hectares of forest, robbed of its mines, of its liberty, of its institutions and thus of the essential prop and motor of any collective progress.3

Schooling, relatively widespread when the French arrived in 1830, was almost completely wiped out. By 1950 UNESCO reported 90 per cent illiteracy among the ‘native’ population.4 Millions of Algerians lost their lives by direct killings, displacement and the collapse of food security as communities were forced off the land and fertile agricultural regions taken over to cultivate grapes for the export of wine to Europe. Algeria’s population fell from 6 million in 1830 to approximately 3.5 million in 1852. But the French did not have an easy time pacifying ‘native’ resistance (and arguably never fully succeeded). From 1830 to 1871, there were only a few years without fighting. The new social forces beginning to emerge from this dramatic mutation of Algerian society were inherently contradictory, involving neither the total liquidation of the past nor a clear project for the future.5 It is worth a making a brief detour to examine the nature of the Algerian class structure. This question was most thoroughly theorised by Jean-François Lyotard in an article in 1963, before he became the philosopher of post-modernism that he did. In Algeria, he argued, direct colonisation had taken from the peasants nearly 7.5 million acres of land in a century. Modern, mechanised rural capitalism employed a few workers but left most farmers landless and workless. Lyotard recorded more than 500,000 agricultural workers, 400,000 of whom emigrated to France, and roughly ‘250,000 Algerian wageearners in industry, commerce and the public services in Algeria. In total more than a million workers, totally dispossessed of the means of production, that is to say, proletarianised or potentially so.’6 For a

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colonial country this was a considerable part of the working population. But the paradox at the centre of Algerian colonialism was that ‘no class has been able to give an answer to the crisis produced by [. . .] [colonial] destruction because no class has been completely constituted’. Only partial social forces had been created. Even so, the Algerian working class was an impressive political presence in the 1950s.

War ends, war begins Though Algeria’s modern war of independence and national liberation is popularly seen as starting in 1954, the 1930s and 1940s were dominated by a number of different ‘constitutional’ nationalist parties. A wave of working-class militancy escalated throughout the war until 1945. In many ways the strikes and demonstrations of this period, infused with a combination of nationalist ideas and breadand-butter demands, were the first phase of a regional explosion of labour activism. The extent of this radicalisation can barely be exaggerated. Roger Murray and Tom Wengraf describe it: By early 1945 a revolutionary situation existed in Algeria [. . .] An acute economic crisis, detonated by the notably bad harvest of the previous year, had developed out of the departure of large numbers of troops at a time when the effects of long-term inflation were making themselves felt. [. . .] Large-scale demonstrations of unemployed and starving men took place in many parts of the country; fights with the police were frequent and anti-French feeling was at a peak [. . .] the progressive elus [conservative nationalists] grew increasingly apprehensive as the social situation became more volatile and inflammatory. In May Algeria was shaken by an uprising whose dimensions and violence were unparalleled since 1871.7

Labour unions held massive demonstrations in Oran, Algiers and other cities across Algeria for two days after the armistice celebrations. The same account explains that ‘the whole area was out of military and administrative control’.

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In May 1945, as Europe exploded in rapturous joy at the end of the war, Algeria suffered the first devastating blows of a new war. In the small city of Sétif, three hours’ drive from Algiers, 5,000 people, organised by Ferhat Abbas of the Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté (Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty, AML), protested against the French, shouting slogans of independence. However, the PCF and its Algerian sister organisation, the Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA, Communist Party of Algeria) took a position that would come to define their relationship to Algeria’s struggle for liberation: that slogans of independence would only divide the European and Algerian working classes. Algerian workers, undeterred, staged a further demonstration on 8 May (VE Day in Europe), again unfurling banners and an Algerian flag and chanting slogans of independence. The police fired on them. Protestors defended themselves and launched attacks on Europeans. The French army arrived and, not waiting for orders, killed indiscriminately. Twenty-two Europeans were killed, along with an unspecified number of Algerians. The communists publicly condemned the protests as ‘Hitlerite’. Algeria’s European settlers armed themselves. But Sétif exploded. After decades of colonial violence, an unorganised contingent of Algerians targeted Europeans, killing 110. The French settlers’ revenge was swift. White inmates were released from Algerian prisons and urged to kill. Civilian militias were organised, and a gunship turned its cannon on coastal communities allegedly in revolt. In a few weeks, between 20,000 and 30,000 Algerians in the east of the country were massacred by the French authorities. The French claimed 1,500 had been killed. Some Algerians escaped, fleeing to Kabylie and organising a guerrilla force. They were joined by veterans newly returned from Europe. For Algerians, the massacre exposed the victory of the democratic world over Hitler, as the pyrrhic triumph it was – and another war was launched for the country’s national liberation. So began Algeria’s long and agonising march to independence. 8 The massacre hardened Algerian nationalists’ anger. France argued that since Algeria was part of France and not a sovereign state, it could not launch or fight a war on its own territory. It used linguistic devices to hide the conflict: ‘events’ and ‘terrorist action’, never ‘war’.9 This denial meant that all military acts were simply ‘crimes’ – exactly the same logic the German occupiers had applied. Only in 1999 did

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France acknowledge that a war had taken place. Like the Vichy period of Nazi collaboration, for the French government even today Algeria remains un passé qui ne passe pas (a past that does not pass).10

Moving to Algeria: Adjusting to the hospital After a brief interregnum as a psychiatrist in a small town in the west of France, Fanon arrived in Algiers at the beginning of November 1953. He would have immediately noticed the Casbah, an undulating mass of small, hilly streets by the sea. A visitor’s first view of the city is striking, severe and beautiful. Seven- and eight-storey nineteenthcentury buildings line the streets, each with ornate balconies and facades, all painted white. The ‘whiteness’ of each building, each government department, post office and shop shone brightly, giving the city the nickname La Blanche. (There is also the fact that, before 1962, it was reserved for Europeans.) Small shops crowded the clean, ordered streets, lined with giant palm trees. Broad boulevards and avenues ran up the mountain on which the city is built. There was more than a whiff of apartheid segregation; if you had dark skin you would be stopped and searched. But for the settlers and French these streets, plunging beautifully into the Mediterranean, would have seemed cleaner, more fulsome and startling than Paris or Marseille. Algiers was a city at the apex of colonial power, worth fighting over. The pieds-noirs see their ‘colony’ as an obscure outpost; being in Algiers was proof of having arrived professionally and socially, the city itself evidence of the project of conquest and settler civilisation. This was an elegant and immense French metropolis to match and even surpass anything across the sea. During the war, the city assumed a very different aspect. One French journalist explained in 1957, To telephone at the Post Office, or to send a telegram, one must show one’s identity documents. Conversations with Paris are bugged. As I dictated my first article I heard a woman’s voice exclaim from one moment to the next, ‘Ah! No way. This one exaggerates, he does.’ A fellow journalist recounted that, not knowing how to spell an Arab word, a mysterious voice came to his rescue.11

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The beautiful architecture of Algiers was now combined, even for foreign visitors, with police surveillance. After 1962 the walls fell and the picturesque French city on the Mediterranean became part of a poor, bustling metropolis. Today the old European city is awash in a chaos of satellite dishes, busy balconies, shops and restaurants. Its decaying grandeur is still impressive, but nothing can disguise what this place was and who fought to keep it white, racist and ‘pure’. Blida was built on an entirely different scale; this small city, close to Algiers, sits in the foothills of the Chréa mountain range. The lushly forested mountains rear up at the back of the city. In the 1950s their beauty would have been menacing to the Europeans in the town, a symbol of the resistance – the terrorists – hiding out in unconquered forests and inaccessible mountain terrain. They are visible from the ornate Place Toute in the centre of Blida, which had an array of cafés around a bandstand where Fanon and his friends would drink and eat. Blida was also a winter skiing destination for Europeans. Divided between a segregated European town and Arab bidonvilles (slums) similar to Algiers, the city was not an escape from the apartheid segregation of the country. The hospital where Fanon became the médecin-chef had opened in 1938. Officially it had 700 beds, but in the late 1930s there were more than 1,500 patients. Blida-Joinville Hospital was impressive, a symbol of modern health care for Europeans and Algerians alike, with large, modern wards, landscaped gardens and good facilities. The hospital has remained remarkably intact since it was first built. An enormous walled compound surrounds an elaborate series of free-standing, identical pavilions housing the different hospital departments, lowrise and painted white, with the blue drains, terracotta tiles and shutters common in Blida and Algiers. Paved, shaded squares and benches lined by olive, gum and palm trees and manicured lawns still give the hospital the appearance of a park. Patients wander unsupervised between the buildings. It is not hard to imagine Fanon using the environment to create a Tosquellian ‘neo-society’ – a therapeutic environment where he could bring his patients outside into the quiet gardens for their activities. Today it is called the Frantz Fanon Hospital, and the administration buildings are festooned with giant photographs of

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Fanon and informational plaques about his life. Josie and Fanon lived on the grounds in a well-equipped house; the salary was generous. The young couple were happy. Fanon was not a complete unknown. His experience working with Tosquelles in Saint-Alban carried a certain cachet, which would have immediately asserted what side of the psychiatric fence the new doctor was on. Black Skin, White Masks and his article on North African Syndrome had also been read by a few in the Algerian medical and political milieu. Fanon was part of a team of four médecins-chefs supported by junior interns and housemen. One junior intern, Jacques Azoulay, arrived in Blida one month after Fanon, having recently qualified as a psychiatrist. Like Fanon he had a profound interest in philosophy; psychiatry was a compromise with a family who wanted him to become a doctor. He shared with his senior colleague a disgust with the psychiatric practices he had already encountered in Algeria. During the course of a year’s collaboration they discovered they shared an interest in questions of racism, anti-Semitism and alienation. Alice Cherki, another of Fanon’s ‘apprentices’, observed that Fanon ‘always maintained for Azoulay more than fondness: rather a tenderness that bordered on fraternal concern’.12 Soon the team had another addition. Charles Géronimi shared Fanon’s radical disposition and was a rare Algerian-born pied-noir who was quick to side with the nationalist cause. Like many of Fanon’s collaborators in Algeria, Azoulay and Géronimi mixed politics and psychiatry. Géronimi shared far more of Fanon’s political instincts, revolted by the so-called Algerian school of psychiatry that viewed the ‘normal African as a lobotomised European’.13 Géronimi was also searching for a political home; he threw himself behind the FLN later than Fanon (and, perhaps, with more doubts). Fanon was quickly made aware that he had joined an oppressive branch of French colonial medicine: The doctor is not socially defined by the exercise of his profession alone. He is likewise the owner of mills, wine cellars, or orange groves, and he coyly speaks of his medicine as simply a supplementary source of income. [. . .] In the colonies, the doctor

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is an integral part of colonisation, of domination, of exploitation. (SDC 134)

Doctors were not the agents of an objective science: they were also, frequently, important members of the property-owning class. They cheated and patronised their Algerian patients, seeing their work as little more than a veterinary service and their patients as livestock. Medicine was the midwife to a violent French colonialism. When it first invaded and occupied Algeria, the French Expeditionary Corps included a large contingent of doctors. There was no clear distinction between medical and military work: they marched together into Algeria’s interior. Africa was conquered, according to the saying, with the Bible and gun, but it could not have proceeded without a doctor’s syringe. Doctors performed experiments and carried out research that provided the intellectual justification for defining Algerians as a peculiar and inferior race. In some respects, the ‘Algerian school’, pioneered by Antoine Porot, prided itself on serious reforms. Porot argued that doctors should speak Arabic and understand the traditions and customs of the natives, to deepen the colonial project and treat mental pathologies. But Algerians were still children: in 1918 Porot decried ‘the Muslim native’s remarkable propensity for the passive life, his habitual insouciance about the future, and his childlike credulity and stubbornness’.14 While there was a defined colonial hierarchy, Algerians and North Africans in general were considered more civilised than the real ‘primitives’ living below the Sahara. Fanon was part of the colonial medical establishment as a well-paid doctor in a large French hospital, but as a black doctor he was also alienated by the establishment. Nor was he automatically regarded as an insider to the Algerian cause. He did not speak Arabic or know Algeria. But Fanon attempted to breathe Tosquelles’s reforming zeal into the hospital in Blida. In contrast to the regimented discipline of the hospital’s old staffers, Fanon began work early, making regular and impromptu visits to the ward. He was always meticulously turned out, in tailored white coats and shirts he sometimes changed twice a day. Fanon’s arrival at Blida has also become confused with legend and myth. Some reports have him releasing patients from chains and straitjackets, like Jack Nicholson’s character (Randle Patrick

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McMurphy) in the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His close friend and fellow doctor Pierre Chaulet recalled that he not only removed the chains from some of the sick, but he abolished the use of straitjackets, and most importantly he organised social and leisure activities (the Moorish café, football games, Algerian music concerts, Muslim religious festivals and a printer for a hospital newspaper).15

The historical record gives us a more ambivalent account; colleagues at Blida have explained that chains were not used at the hospital and Fanon had radical notions of ‘democratisation’ and ‘institutional psychiatry’ but also a pragmatic willingness, even enthusiasm, to employ the full panoply of psychiatric methods: strong antipsychotic drugs, electric shock treatment, narco-therapy. Removing straitjackets was an important part of Fanon’s treatment, but traumatised and alienated patients might also need medical restraints and aggressive drug therapy. Segregated wards reflected colonial society, so Muslim patients were separated from non-Muslim, men from women. Fanon was responsible for 200 patients. Initially most of them were white European women. Many of them had been sectioned. Fanon did not hesitate to introduce some of the techniques and reforms he had learned at Saint-Alban – the first time these techniques had ever been attempted in Algeria. Fanon’s zealous commitment to psychiatric reform created tensions among some of his colleagues. Though his position protected him from some conservative forces at work in the hospital, he could not always avoid their open animosity. There were serious fights. Cherki notes the mixed character of the staff: some unrepentant ‘Algerian school’ racists and other French doctors who did not subscribe to such racism but also did not confront the colonial situation reproduced inside the walls of the hospital. Audacious and horrified, Fanon completely overturned the old practices.16 Meetings were held twice a week and included patients, nurses and other doctors. Other reforms included social events, parties, Christmas celebrations, and decorating the walls of the hospital. These initiatives were not top-down; patients themselves took responsibility for organising entertainment and a newspaper (a practice drawn directly

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from Fanon’s own involvement with Trait d’Union). Committees were formed to organise film evenings and musical events. Occupational therapy groups were established, with patients knitting, embroidering and tailoring their way to mental health. The heady mix of new and old techniques was an abrupt disruption to the old guard. Treating European women was one thing, but could Fanon extend his new methods to Algerian patients? Like most of the senior staff, he did not speak Arabic or any other Algerian language. Though he undertook classes, he only ever acquired rudimentary Arabic; his initiatives, treatments, ‘talking cures’ and group discussions always required interpreters. Fanon and Azoulay tried – and largely failed. Discussions did not work; games were soon abandoned. Their efforts were also scuppered by staff members’ attitudes towards Algerian patients. These failures were held up as proof of the Algerians’ ‘character’ – but they demonstrated Fanon’s own naiveté and lack of experience in Algeria. Fanon realised that the methods of institutional psychiatry had to be adapted. Techniques he had learned at Saint-Alban were culturally bound, and Algerian patients had good reasons to reject them. Fanon started to work with a local Algerian musician to develop a musical therapy as a new way to reach his Algerian patients. But a more fundamental truth emerged. As great, even heroic, as Fanon’s efforts to break down the barriers between doctor and patient were, he only succeeded in reproducing these hierarchies. Built into his position was an inherent contradiction. Introducing an interpreter to facilitate discussions reinforced distance and hardened hostility towards the reforms. He learned that parties and celebrations, outside family or religious occasions, were largely meaningless; what was the point?17 The solution was further adaptation. Fanon tore apart the old practices of institutional psychiatry. He created an Algerian café decorated with local art and invited an imam for Friday prayers and traditional storytellers to entertain the patients. But these practices were risky. When Algerian patients were given tools to plough and cultivate the hospital allotment, European staff were aghast. Peasant tools had been used in Sétif in 1945 to kill pieds-noirs settlers. Macey records the service manager of the hospital complaining that his Martiniquan médecin-chef was ‘madder than the madmen’.18

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When Géronimi expressed astonishment that the author of Black Skin, White Masks could have failed to see the need to adapt the psychiatric techniques he had learned in France, Fanon replied, You can only understand things with your gut, you know. It was not simply a matter of imposing imported methods that had been more or less adapted to the native mentality. [. . .] The burden of suggesting appropriate forms of socialisation and integrating them into the sociotherapy process had to be placed on the Algerian staff.19

In other words, it was through practice, experimentation, and the democratic involvement – endless discussions with staff – that Fanon found the appropriate therapeutic methods. Failing, failing again and failing better, as Samuel Beckett put it. There could be no substitute for practice ‘felt’ intuitively, in our being. Fanon’s understanding of psychiatry and politics was ontological. This was neatly summarised in a letter at the end of 1956, when he was about to leave Algeria: ‘Madness is one of the means man has of losing his freedom [. . .] [and] psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to enable man no longer to be a stranger in his own environment’ (TAR 52–3).

Algeria’s nationalist landscape If we were to scan the skyline of Algeria’s nationalist politics in 1954, sweep over the political parties and groups, what would we see? The first party that comes into focus is the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA, Algerian People’s Party) founded by Messali Hadj in 1937, before the foundation of the FLN. Hadj’s first organisation, the Étoile NordAfricaine (ENA, North African Star), formed to coordinate the revolt against colonial rule in Algeria, was broken up by the French authorities in 1929. But the PPA was probably the most important political organisation in modern Algerian nationalism prior to 1954. As we have seen, Hadj was a radical nationalist, influenced by the communist movement in Europe and committed to a largely urban project of modernisation and independence. As we continue to move over the horizon, we see other groups. In 1938, Ferhat Abbas formed the Union Populaire Algérienne (UPA, Algerian Popular Union),

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a more consolatory party, expressing the desires for gradual change and the needs of the Algerian évolués for assimilation into France. After the interruption of World War II, and the May 1945 massacres, another coalition of nationalist organisations appeared on the horizon. The Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD, Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties) replaced the PPA in 1946 (also outlawed), with Hadj as president advocating for full independence. In the same year Abbas formed a new organisation, Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien, which now sought autonomy within a French federalist structure. Despite their considerable differences, both organisations competed in flawed elections organised by the French. There was no greater symbol of the failure of this process than the 1947 constitution, which promised Algerians full French citizenship and equal representation. However, when the dust cleared on the Algerian National Assembly elections in April 1948, two 60-member ‘colleges’ emerged, one representing 9 million indigenous Algerians, the other 1.5 million Europeans (including Jews and selected members of the évolué ). Racism, segregation and inequality remained the order of the day. As we move even further over the Algerian skyline, we see, in the late 1940s, the emergence of the first paramilitary organisation. In 1947, from the MTLD, the Organisation Spéciale (OS) is established, partly out of frustration at the slow, skewed pace of electoral change. With almost 2,000 members at its height, it constituted a threat, and the French colonial state moved against it in 1951, jailing militants. We also see, emerging from the ruins of the OS, a new organisation, the Comité Révolutionaire d’Unité et d’Action (CRUA, Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action), set up by several former OS members on 23 March 1954. The CRUA promised to lead the revolt against the French. It was this organisation, promising armed struggle, which would start to plan the insurrection. Towards the limit of our panorama of the nationalist scene, we see emerging from the CRUA an entirely new coalition of nationalist forces, now carrying the name Front de Libération Nationale: the FLN. From early in its life, the FLN was a fairly hard-nosed organisation. Violence was a core component from the beginning. New ALN (the armed wing of the FLN) recruits had to prove themselves. ‘An assassination marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate for

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the ALN,’20 according to Krim Belkacem, a leading FLN member; to ensure that they murdered an informer (an Algerian who did not support the FLN or worked with the French), recruits were followed. Such tactics were common against perceived enemies of the FLN. As Allison Drew graphically explains, ‘The FLN showed extreme intolerance towards political parties refusing its authority – patriotic unity necessitated the dissolution of existing parties and the individual adherence of their members to the FLN.’21 Messali Hadj’s party had reconstituted itself as the Mouvement National Algérien (Algerian National Movement, MNA) in December 1954 in France and was exported soon afterwards to Algeria. The party initially asked the FLN to join its ranks but was turned down. Within 18 months the two organisations were attacking each other in their respective presses, and by the summer of 1955 these had become actual battles in Kabylie. The FLN fought a low-intensity war on the streets of France and Algeria against MNA supporters,22 much of it to ensure access to the ‘taxes’ Algerian workers in France paid to nationalist organisations. The FLN depended on this solidarity to fund the war, but the MNA had deeper roots in many Algerian communities. The FLN sought to maintain hegemony over its own forces and pacify potential competitors.23 Similar attacks on PCA members by the FLN would soon occur.

The FLN and the insurrection The bombs that went off on 1 November 1954 were well timed, if amateur. There was barely a mention of the bombs in the international press, but the shock waves of these targeted and largely (for now) symbolic attacks rebounded across Algerian society. For the first time since the 1870s, a fresh era of armed resistance had been launched. The attack signalled to the French authorities that a new resistance movement had broken with the nationalists. There was also a sabotage campaign, with telegraph lines cut and regional police stations attacked. The low casualty figures belied the start of a bloody war that would lead to several hundred thousand martyrs and involve more than a million French soldiers. Even if the oftenquoted figure of 1 million dead Algerians is an exaggeration, the human cost of the war was great.24

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The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) chose the timing of the ‘insurrection’ carefully. Earlier in the year the French had suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam at Diên Biên Phu which signalled the end of its colonial presence there. The FLN and its armed wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), were determined to strike hard on the back of this defeat. The strategy pursued by the old nationalist organisations, like Ahmed Messali Hadj’s Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) – formed in 1937 – had reached an impasse. The insurrection was initially led by a group of nine Algerians, who subsequently became lionised as the forefathers of independence. Though the new FLN broke from the moderate nationalism of the Algerian intelligentsia, it became a broad, cross-class alliance, not strictly a party or coalition. Those who launched the 1 November ‘action’ were a minority; many nationalist figures were afraid of taking violent action. Only in 1955 did a number of different nationalist groups and individuals (like Chaulet and Fanon) ‘regroup’, including a small minority of communists, under the leadership of the radical nationalist Abane Ramdane.25 Ramdane was to become perhaps the leading radical FLN nationalist in the early years of the revolution. His friendship with and influence on Fanon was extremely important. More than five years older than Fanon, Ramdane had also served in World War II. He was born in 1920 in Kabylie. Though not university-educated, Ramdane had graduated from a lycée in Blida with his baccalaureate. At 27 he was already working full-time for the PPA. Profoundly marked by the massacres in May 1945, he radicalised, initially joining Hadj’s PPA. In 1951 he was arrested, tortured and thrown in prison for his activities. Using his years in detention to study, Ramdane became the principal political force in the FLN. Despite being imprisoned until January 1955, he was kept informed about the launch of the war. He was assassinated by his opponents inside the FLN in December 1957 in Morocco. Fanon never entirely recovered from his friend’s murder. The FLN was not immediately orientated to the countryside and the peasantry; it sought to galvanise urban forces. In 1955, the Union Générale des Étudiants Musulmans Algériens (General Union of Algerian Muslim Students, UGEMA) was formed as an FLN affiliate. It recognised that students could be vital for generating support, recruiting fighters and engaging in political education, and

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channelled the most active and politically ‘advanced’ students to the rural maquis. Many prominent student leaders joined the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale), after UGEMA was proscribed by the French in 1958. In this respect university students played a role that would be repeated in decolonisation processes across Africa, as detonators of anti-colonial sentiment and fighters against Western powers.26 Other students fled into exile in Cairo, Tunis and Morocco. The Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (General Union of Algerian Workers, UGTA) was set up in 1956 as a trade union federation supporting the FLN. This body was a vital urban base for support and solidarity – and a conscious effort to bypass existing trade union federation, regarded as hopelessly and paternalistically tied to the French trade union movement.27 The might of the Algerian working class could be wielded impressively for the nationalist cause. However, the FLN’s brutality was never far from the surface. The trade union strategy was also designed to marginalise the MNA, which had a real union base in metropolitan France, and involved murdering some of the most experienced and respected Algerian trade unionists. Although at least some FLN leaders were unhappy with this, there is no indication that Fanon was aware of it. The 1 November general strike in 1956 showed the extent of urban support for the FLN and the strength of the labour movement. The trade union federation was banned in 1958. The UGTA and the UGEMA were beholden to the nationalist project and politics of the hegemonic FLN, constructed as its support bases in cities and towns, even if the FLN never completely ‘won’ such hegemony. They could take their own initiatives, but they were under the constraints of a guerrilla offensive and ‘people’s war’ being fought in rural areas. They were important but essentially marginal elements to a politics that had its centre of gravity in a distinct sphere. The FLN was controlled by shifting alliances of Algeria’s intelligentsia, and worked against the possibility that the movements developing across Algerian society could coalesce around the urban trade unions and students. The nationalist movement was remarkably subdued around Blida at the end of 1954, with the movement more or less paralysed by internal differences. As a consequence, little happened that directly that

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affected Frantz and Josie’s lives in the first months after the insurrection. It was not until almost 18 months later that the French accepted that Blida had followed the rest of the country and was now awash with unrest and ‘terrorist’ activities. The pace of the insurgency was initially slow. News around the world made little mention of the ‘Algerian disturbances’. Little suggested that the war would become the bloodiest the French would fight to keep hold of their colonial possessions. France largely negotiated independence settlements with nationalist movements in sub-Saharan Africa. In 1960, Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Dahomey (now Benin), Niger, Ivory Coast, Chad, Senegal, Mauritania, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Congo, Gabon and the Central African Republic would win independence from France in largely peaceful transitions. Political change in North Africa moved at a different speed. In 1955 Tunisia would be awarded internal autonomy, gaining full independence a year later. Morocco would become a monarchy, free of French control, in 1956 – but these countries had a different relationship to France. They were both protectorates, not settler colonies, with much smaller European populations. By contrast, Algeria, with a million long-standing French settlers in 1950, was regarded as an indispensable part of the mainland.28 The colony also acted as an extraterritorial prison for France’s revolutionaries and insurgents. Revolutionaries from the revolts of 1848, 1851 and 1871 were deported to Algeria; Algeria’s insurgents from the wars against French invasion and occupation were in turn deported to other French colonies in the South Pacific. Though in 1865 natives became defined as French subjects, citizenship and the rights that came with it were reserved for Europeans. French settlers saw their project as civilising an inhospitable territory, but they also began to see themselves as a new race, not simply rootless expatriates or colonists. Though the pieds-noirs identified themselves as French, they were not the Françaoui of metropolitan France, whom they disparagingly defined as cold intellectuals, the men as effeminate. By contrast, the pieds-noirs were rough, big-hearted and virile. (Most left after 1962 – clearly they were not big-hearted enough to accept the new state.) Their association with extreme racism and violent colonialism remains to this day and has formed the backbone of the organised French fascism in the Front National.29

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Metropolitan France was determined not to suffer another humiliation. Hitler’s easy conquest was a fresh memory, but the massive French base at Diên Biên Phu had also fallen to General Võ Nguyen Giáp’s Viet Minh forces, a relatively modest guerrilla army against a global power. France was seriously weakened, its military and political classes smarting from the defeat; they refused to entertain a similar fate in Algeria. The war was Fanon’s second in ten years, but this one had an even more dramatic effect on his life. While his conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks had been a rejection of idealised notions of Africa and abstract ideas of Negritude, the book was not a concrete call to arms. Fanon was acutely aware of the launch of the war on 1 November 1954. He had participated in some activism in Lyon, and gradually the FLN and the war for national liberation provided him with the practice and action that his demand for recognition and humanism required. One early study describes him as arriving in Algeria a rebel and leaving a revolutionary. This is a fair characterisation of his transformation on the anvil of the Algerian struggle, but this relationship had its own dialectic. Most young doctors and professionals arriving from France in the early 1950s did not turn to the FLN. In fact, most moved back to France. The pieds-noirs sided overwhelmingly with France and often joined forces with far-right extremists. For the Algerian war to penetrate and inspire a new arrival it needed an accommodating subject. Fanon’s idea of France had already been shattered on the rocks of World War II. His experience in Lyon with North African communities, the racism he had encountered, had convinced him of the necessity that ‘the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be’ (BSWM 231). Algeria’s new war pulled Fanon further along the path he was really travelling. With his help, the hospital became a base for injured FLN fighters, for whom he provided succour, solidarity and medicine. Fanon first came into contact with the Algerian Revolution not as a theorist but as a doctor. Certainly he held radical ideas about colonialism and liberation, but in his position as a doctor he could practically and materially help FLN/ALN fighters.30 But Fanon also threw questions and doubts back at the revolution. Though he

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supported the struggle unconditionally (fanatically at times), he began to craft an understanding of nationalism, culture and political violence that helped shape a generation’s understanding of the limits to national liberation. There was nothing predetermined about Fanon’s activism. He became a revolutionary in circumstances that he had not chosen, yet became a disciplined militant in a country fighting for its independence. Fanon remained a member of the FLN until his death. After 1956 every significant book and article he wrote was for the Algerian Revolution and against the degeneration of national liberation. The end of 1955 and the first full year of political engagement in his adopted Algeria brought Fanon great personal sadness. News came from Martinique; his sister Gabrielle had died of complications in the last stages of her pregnancy. Fanon was paralysed by grief. The era of easy air travel that would have made a trip to Martinique from Algiers possible for a well-paid doctor was still more than a decade away. Fanon tried and failed to call his family by telephone; instead, he wrote: ‘Gabrielle, dead. What could be more grotesque?’31

The FLN, the communists and class in Algeria As the war escalated, torture became an essential element in the government’s armoury, often by volunteer pieds-noirs organised in the Groupe Mobile de Protection Rurale (GMPR). One technique involved forcing a prisoner to sit on a bottle broken at the neck, with a soldier pushing down on the victim’s shoulders. Other prisoners were shot while trying to escape, a convenient way of avoiding ‘legal’ complications. Those less fortunate were slowly tortured to death before being shot. The normal repertoire of war was used: rape, what we now call ‘waterboarding’ and electric shocks to sexual organs and orifices. The military gégène (a generator used to power field telephones) was particularly useful. As we shall see, Fanon became well versed in treating victims and perpetrators of torture in the war. His views on violence never resembled the clichés of his detractors and were developed in direct confrontation with the daily and vicious violence of the war.32 When Algerians were captured they were treated as criminals, denied even the pathetic cover offered by the Geneva Convention.

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However, to the irritation of the military, they were formally allowed court trials and a lawyer. By the end of 1954, 3,000 people had been herded into custody in Opération Orange Amère (Operation Bitter Orange). But the French authorities, acting on old intelligence, arrested the wrong militants: members of the MTLD, which had not organised the 1 November ‘insurrection’. The attacks had been carried out by a different and entirely new formation of which the French were ignorant, the CRUA. The CRUA issued a ‘Déclaration de November 1’, written by Mohamed Boudiaf and Mourad Didouche, calling for the ‘re-establishment of the sovereign, democratic and social Algerian state within the framework of the Islamic principles’. The Déclaration was not widely circulated, but its message was widely diffused: ‘According to our revolutionary principles and taking into account the external and internal situation, we shall continue to fight until we realise our aims.’33 The fight was against the French state, not its people; any French people who wished to remain in an independent Algeria could, but only by surrendering their French citizenship. Distancing CRUA from the organisations of the past, it declared, ‘Our national movement weakened by years of routine and inactivity, badly directed and deprived of the indispensable support of public opinion and overtaken by events is gradually disintegrating.’34 Although the Déclaration sounded militant, it was almost completely silent on the nature of a post-French state. There was not even a broad nationalist statement on returning the land to the tiller, or a programme of development and redistribution. The aim was to create maximum unity across all layers of Algerian society – landowners and the rising petit-bourgeoisie as well as peasants and workers. An important reason for the failure of an independent labour politics developing was the role played by the PCF, the Communist Party in France, which refused to throw its prestige, dynamism and militants behind the revolution. This had the effect of weakening working-class agency in Algeria and, perhaps significantly, weakening the chances of the working class acting independently of the FLN and imposing itself as a distinct force with its own project of social revolution. Instead, the FLN moved more or less unhindered in another direction. There were very clear reasons for the failure of the PCF to offer an alternative ideology and leadership. The lessons of the 1917 Russian

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Revolution had been lost. In Russia, a working class concentrated in factories and workshops in a few heavily urbanised cities had proved to be the most militant force, so the project of democratic change could not be carried out under the leadership of the bourgeoisie, as with the French Revolution. As the Marxist theorist and activist Tony Cliff, writing in 1963, put it: A bourgeoisie that arrives late on the scene is fundamentally different from its ancestors of a century or two earlier. It is incapable of providing a consistent democratic, revolutionary solution to the problem posed by feudalism and imperialist oppression. It is incapable of carrying out the thoroughgoing destruction of feudalism, the achievement of real national independence, and political democracy. It has ceased to be revolutionary. [. . .] It is an absolutely conservative force.35

Russia’s late-developing bourgeoisie was not the historical agent of the democratic, national revolution – its factory owners were cowardly and conservative, more scared of their own workforce than the ancien régime. This was even more true of Algeria’s évolués, who did not have their own resources and lived in awe of the metropolitan capital. Fanon would label with violent disdain this ‘caste of profiteers’ who were 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.36

The Russian experience could have provided the entire period of decolonisation with another model of transformation: the capacity of linking democratic change and national change under the banner of socialist revolution and transformation. The force that had the ability to unfurl ‘both’ revolutions, the democratic and the socialist, simultaneously was a relatively young and small working class which, in Russia, had refused to be ‘self-limiting’ and halt the revolution after attaining formal democratic reforms. Another lesson of the Russian

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experience was also lost: the peasantry fell under the leadership of the Russian working class, offering no independent leadership. An imposed ‘intelligentsia’ spoke in the name of the peasantry. What became known as the Fanonist revolutionary strategy – ‘peasant-led insurrections’ – after his death in 1961 spoke in large part of the political choices the FLN made in a Stalinised world. Yet in reality such movements were far from peasant-led, instead dominated by sections of the middle-class intelligentsia. It was this intelligentsia, not the peasantry, who after independence became the new nationalist elite that Fanon despised. The Russian Revolution degenerated under the impact of the civil war, which physically destroyed the working class. The isolation of the young state and the failure of the October Revolution to spread internationally killed off the experiment. Instead of a model of permanent and international revolution, another, darker history emerged. Communist parties became wedded to the vicissitudes of the foreign-policy concerns of Moscow. In the West they accommodated the political establishment, frequently supporting reformist programmes and delimiting agitation. The PCF was no exception. After World War II, the command economies of ‘socialist countries’ were seen as the only way for radical Third World states to advance. The Soviet Union was lauded across the world for its rapid growth, achieved at a devastating cost. Its economic success seemed to prove that national industrial development would follow independence.37 In the developing world, this provided a model for rapid industrialisation and development – at the cost of isolation from a wider vision of internationalism and socialism. Newly independent states sought to command national industry, and subordinate all popular movements under a centralised leadership, state capitalism and national projects of ‘socialist’ construction became the Soviet Union’s principal ideological export. In this model, the national and socialist stages of revolution separated. Following this pattern, Algeria’s nationalist struggle did not combine with socialist transformation in a revolutionary decolonisation that sought international expression. As Keynesianism had become the economic orthodoxy in the West, so state capitalism became the doctrine of African states. Early in their independence, even states that were not explicitly ‘Marxist’ expressed an allegiance to socialism and an admiration for the

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Soviet Union. The list includes many of the most famous leaders of independent Africa: Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, as well as Ben Bella in an independent Algeria. Several African leaders were also in the process of adapting the ideas of Marxism in an attempt to make them more applicable to ‘African realities’: Tom Mboya of Kenya maintained that socialism was intrinsic to traditional African culture. ‘African socialism has an entirely different history from European socialism,’ he argued, which arose from the division between a capitalist class and an industrial proletariat. However, ‘there is no such division into classes in Africa. [. . .] So there is no need in Africa to argue over ideology or define your actions in terms of doctrinaire theories’.38 The model of proletarian revolution was in tatters. The field was left open to the évolués to lead Africa’s decolonisation without any serious countervailing ideological forces. Still, working-class movements were widespread across the continent during the period. The problem was not the existence or activity of an African working class but, arguably, as the Nigerian socialist Femi Aborisade claims, the ‘lack of a visionary and strategic labour leadership’.39 Fanon became the most eloquent critic of the leadership of national liberation movements and the national bourgeoisie. In an important recent historical account of the role of the PCA, historian Allison Drew draws attention to the serious, consistent and extensive involvement of communists in the struggle against the French after 1954. Two vital issues emerge from her works that impinge directly on this book. First, why did the FLN consistently write out the role of the PCA, including in the proceedings of the Soummam Conference? Second, why was Fanon unable to see the PCA’s commitment to the Algerian struggle in his accounts of the war and the FLN? In some respects Fanon and Ramdane were completely correct in their mutual condemnation of the PCF. It was slavishly beholden to the about-turns and geopolitical manoeuvres of Moscow’s foreign policy. Its membership in Algeria was almost entirely European and saw revolution in France as the only path to ‘socialist’ change in Algeria. Though this position was contested, many European communists in Algeria in the party’s 1920s infancy saw the question of independence

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and liberation through an entirely colonial, racist lens. The PCF, in a report to the 1922 Second North African Interfederal Communist Conference, asserted that Algeria’s ‘uncultured masses [. . .] fanatical, fatalistic, patient, resigned, submissive, imbued with religious prejudices, cannot at present conceive of their liberation’.40 These servile, hopeless masses must be held in ‘guardianship’ and strongly advised communists to ‘serve them as humane and impartial mentors’ rather than stir them to revolt. Two PCF members, Hadjali Abdelkader and Robert Louzon, later thoroughly rejected these arguments. Louzon wrote in early 1923, ‘The necessary but not sufficient condition for a people to progress is independence. To keep natives in a state of servitude is a certain means of preserving the soul of a slave.’41 By 1939 the general secretary of the PCF, Maurice Thorez, had developed the idea of Algeria as a nation in formation, made up of approximately 20 races. Though this allowed that Algeria was a legitimate nation, it still regarded its struggles, issues and aspirations through a prism of analysis that privileged France and the French Revolution. With the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler, the PCA and PCF were banned. Underground, the PCA briefly called for independence to undermine French imperialism; however, when the Soviet Union finally entered the war in 1941, the PCA dropped its call for independence in order to unite against fascism. The weathervane of French communism spun in the winds blowing from the Kremlin. After the 1945 massacres in Sétif and other towns, the communists reacted appallingly. In Drew’s words: ‘Viewing the events through the lens of anti-fascist struggle, the PCF and PCA were slow to recognise and condemn the massacre.’42 These were more than crimes of omission. The PCF were in government and therefore directly responsible for the repression: for example, PCF member Charles Tillon was air minister and would have been directly involved in any use of the air force. Yet in the late 1940s, with young, militant Algerians attracted by the PCA’s language of social justice, equality and socialism and involvement in trade union struggles, the party began to work with increasing autonomy from the PCF, tugging against the state’s narrative that France included three Algerian ‘departments’. Drew notes that ‘the PCA came to its understanding of the national question through its campaign against state oppression’.43

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So, through the 1950s, a breach can be discerned between the PCF and its sister organisation in Algeria. The PCF, following Moscow, saw America as the leading imperialist nation to be resisted; independence would mean that the new Algerian state could fall into the American sphere of influence.44 Priority had to be given, therefore, to French politics and the increasingly elusive French revolution. In marked contrast, the PCA focused on the global struggle against French imperialism in Vietnam and Africa. The party boasted 10,000 members in the early 1950s.45 When the ‘insurrection’ occurred in November 1954, the PCA was again slow to support the armed struggle. Many of its individual members showed no such reluctance: for example, Louisette Ighilahriz, 18 at the time, regarded the attacks as the ‘end of humiliation, of scorn, of ratonnades’ (violent, racist attacks by Europeans).46 Still, the reticence of the PCA was well-grounded. Resorting to a military campaign against the French would hamper the development of urban organisations and struggle while further deepening the rural– urban divide. The party had already developed a reputation for organising strikes on the docks against the unloading of weapons, as well as encouraging an FLN boycott of tobacco and alcohol in order to target European farmers. In September 1955 the PCA was banned a second time; though its underground leadership might have believed there was still space for urban activism, it was too weak to coordinate and organise such campaigns. Drew summarises these developments: ‘As the war’s second year unfolded – a period characterised by rural guerrilla campaigns – most PCA members came to support the armed struggle.’47 In the meantime the PCF, removed from events in Algeria and preoccupied by the Cold War, saw limiting American power as its chief responsibility: Algeria was still a ‘nation in formation’ and independence was premature. In 1956, when the French National Assembly passed the Special Powers Bill to fund the war with a large majority that included the vital support of the PCF, the PCA were devastated, knowing they would be affected. They began setting up their own armed units, Combattants de la Libération, in the first half of 1955 as an attempt to formalise what was already happening in different areas. As PCA trade unionist and activists were arrested and targeted, cadre moved into the

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mountains with provisions and arms. The PCA Political Bureau adopted the slogan ‘All for the armed struggle’.48 Though there was pressure from a minority in the party to dissolve and join the FLN, the majority saw the need for a ‘proletarian perspective’. Even with active support for the armed struggle – direct encouragement, collections for arms and campaigning for the FLN – the situation of ‘parallel’ organisations could not hold for long. In May 1956 the FLN and the PCA sat down for talks. By this time the FLN was in a strong position. It had more than 8,500 fighters and 21,000 auxiliaries and controlled almost a third of the country. It was asserting its hegemony with a good degree of brutality. ALN guerrillas were prepared to attack ‘the readily designated enemy, the suspect to be threatened or manhandled, the accomplice to be shot, to be hit with a fine, or to be led to jail [. . .] The people in the villages are terrified’.49 Most in the party continued to maintain an internationalist orientation to the national struggle, regarding this as the only sure way to deepen social and economic transformation once independence was achieved. But soon military events taught the PCA and its Combattants that military autonomy left them exposed: on 6 June a PCA unit was wiped out by the French. Initially activists argued for a united front organisation that would give both the PCA and the FLN political autonomy, but the FLN rejected the proposal. On 1 July 1956 the party agreed that groups of Combattants would integrate into the ALN with their weapons, accept FLN authority, and cut all links to the PCA for the duration of the war.50 In this way, approximately 200 communist fighters – mostly Algerians – were incorporated into the ALN. Drew is scathing about the resulting relationship between the PCA and the FLN: Many communists fought and died in the war. Nonetheless, the relationship between communists and nationalists remained characterised by mistrust and violence. During the rapidly evolving wartime conditions, the PCA envisioned an Algerian nation that was democratic and multicultural, yet predominately Arabo-Berber, and called for an opening of political space to be filled by Algerian voices. [. . .] Yet independence saw the PCA banned for a third time, once again confounded by the

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international–national dilemma, its visions of a democratic Algeria swept aside.51

At the time, however, there was collaboration on matters of political education between the PCA and the FLN. As Drew explains, ‘The PCA would provide technical assistance, such as the use of its printing press to make false identity papers. But it refused to dissolve, arguing that this would be against the interests of the working class and the Algerian people, and it continued its independent propaganda.’52

Soummam The FLN was divided. Its original leadership had not been elected; as the war escalated, it became important to develop a clearer leadership that was democratically chosen and respected. Less than two years after the insurrection, in August 1956, a conference was held in the Vallée de la Soummam in Kabylie. The choice of venue was audacious. The French were furious when the news came out that in the middle of the war, in the midst of a massive build-up of French troops, the FLN had been able to organise a wide-ranging conference inside Algeria. The Soummam Conference would be the most extensive exercise in accountability and democracy during Algerian national liberation in the 1950s. The conference resolved the issue of leadership. A Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (CNRA) was formed, with 17 full-time and another 17 part-time or associate members, and a Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution (CCE) to serve executive functions. Both organs were elected. Two further important elements were resolved. First, the conference confirmed that real decision-making lay in the hands of those fighting internally in Algeria. The external and exiled figures of the Algerian Revolution were marginalised. The conduct of the war would be in the hands of those directly involved in fighting the French, not a remote elite who sought conciliation and compromise with the French from exile. The Algerian national movement would not be sold out. Second, it affirmed the leadership of the political wing over the military. Soummam reinstated the FLN’s commitment to an Islamic republic, but this commitment to Islam must not be confused with the

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radical Islamism much derided today. The very distinct concerns of this period made it possible to envisage a progressive project of social reforms and nationalist liberation under the banner of Islam. An independent Algeria would be a broad and multi-ethnic state, shorn of the religious exclusivity that has come to characterise the appellation ‘Islamic’ today. If independent Algeria did not develop as originally envisaged, it was not because of the Islamic pronouncements in the FLN’s Soummam statement, which made clear that ‘the birth of an Algerian state in the form of a democratic and social Republic [. . .] is not a restoration of the monarchy or a dead theocracy’.53 Soummam also placed the ALN on a firm footing. The military would establish a regular army recruited broadly among students, workers and intellectuals. As a People’s Army, inspired if not modelled on General Giáp’s North Vietnamese counterpart, it relied on popular support. Moussebiline and fidayine were essentially soldiers without uniform. The moussebiline were recruited and operated locally and were often involved in acts of sabotage, frequently acting as ‘guides’ to the regular army. The fidayine were local fighters and took part in attacks on police stations and the gendarmerie. Africa had seen mass revolts and armed resistance before Algeria. The struggle of the Mau in Kenya against European settlers was a vital staging post for decolonisation on the continent (and one Fanon admired).54 But the Algerian Revolution was on an entirely grander scale, posing an existential threat not only to French colonialism in North Africa but to the entire French Empire. Soummam had firmly placed the radical wing in control of the nationalist struggle.55 Despite attempts to present itself as a monolithic organisation, the FLN was divided by important political differences. The debates that raged in August 1956 were deeply engaged with the character and problems of the Algerian struggle and the evolving strategy of French imperialism, including, importantly, the failures of moderate organisations like the MTLD and the PCA. Particularly interesting are Soummam’s criticisms of the PCA, which were largely inaccurate. Although the PCA was now a proscribed organisation, the conference noted that the party had failed to support the national struggle, scathingly detailing its ‘bureaucratic leadership’ and condemnation of the FLN’s so-called ‘terrorism’.

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But the problem ran deeper. The Soummam proceedings condemned the absence of a ‘coherent political line’ in the PCA, which was the result of a belief in the ‘impossibility of the national liberation of Algeria, but [support] for the triumph of a proletarian revolution in France’.56 Similarly, the FLN noted, the PCA’s affiliated trade union federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (General Confederation of Labour, CGT), was paralysed. The conference noted that the ‘general passivity’ of the workers’ movement was not the result of the real absence of militancy among those forces, but caused by cadre ‘who accept with folded arms orders from Paris’.57 Soummam conflated the PCA and the PCF. The authors of the proceedings would have known that this was not the case – they had just negotiated with a party that supported the armed struggle and independence from the French. The PCF rightly deserved condemnation. No doubt there was still fresh anger and disgust at the slow and ‘bureaucratic’ response to the massacres in 1945 and the racist insistence that Algerian freedom must follow the political lead of the French proletariat. Yet the PCA fought for its organisational autonomy, arguing in a letter to the FLN in 1956 that tomorrow, in an Algeria free of colonialism, there will be a struggle for the end of the exploitation of man, for the return of the land to the peasants who work it, for the establishment of a socialist society. The existence of such a party is already a guarantee that Algerian workers will advance towards a complete liberation, that is to say, a liberation which will be not only political but also economic, social and cultural.58

In the middle of August the party made a further appeal that the accord between the two organisations be made public to strengthen the movement, especially dans les rangs de la classe ouvrière de France et autres pays capitalistes (‘in the ranks of the working class of France and other capitalist countries’).59 The FLN refused, instead branding the PCA as bureaucratic and politically beholden to the PCF, run by the party in Paris. The hypocrisy of the FLN’s post-Soummam statement was astonishing, its condemnation of the Algerian and French communists total. In some areas ex-PCA members were denounced,

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disarmed and even executed for remaining committed to their communist principles. Though the conference did not spend much time detailing a postliberation vision there was a focus on the administrative structures that were springing up in the revolution. ‘People’s assemblies,’ the Soummam Conference implied, might be figurative of the new state. ‘The slow but inexorable disintegration of French administration has made the birth and development of the system of dual power possible.’60 These assemblies were a real fact of life. They were frequently tied to the conduct of the revolution, necessary bodies that could be used to evade French authorities. This parallel network coordinated supplies of arms, collected taxes to fund the struggle, administered local justice and helped to recruit the mujahideen. The fight, Ramdane argued, would be taken to the cities and towns. The famous Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers is set in 1956 and 1957 and tells this story: the battle of Algiers took place at the height of the urban, Ramdane-influenced FLN. The combination of terrorist attacks against French settlers in the capital and strike action was finally defeated by the French in 1957. Ramdane and other militants were forced into exile. Fanon was a cheerleader to a radical moment in the Algerian struggle, then led by Ramdane. The Soummam Conference represented the radical assertion of the importance of the internal over the exiled leadership and of political supremacy over military decision-makers and established a militant agenda for the Algerian Revolution. In contrast, the external, exiled leadership of the FLN was more conservative, seeking accommodation and negotiations with the French. Decolonisation had to be won, but a pragmatic relationship with the French would be worked out for a new independent Algeria. Ferhat Abbas represented these forces. With a considerable pedigree in different movements Abbas became probably the most prominent moderate nationalist of the war – deepening the revolution (the subject of Fanon’s second book in 1959) was not part of his project for independence.

3

Into the Eye of the Storm

The reality that the possibility of a decisive military victory over the ALN was slight was slowly seeping into the body politic in France. The Soummam Conference rubbed it in. The FLN had humiliated the French ‘in spite of the campaign of [. . .] annihilation led by strong and modern military forces of a colonial regime representing one of the great powers of the world’.1 But with whom would the French be forced to negotiate? What ‘programme’ had come out of Soummam? The FLN seemed overwhelmingly fixed on militarily weakening the French army to force a ceasefire. There was an ‘absence of ideology’, as Fanon noted in 1960: at no point did Algeria’s leading national liberation movement outline, even briefly, a project of economic and social reform, except a few slightly platitudinous references to a ‘democratic and social’ republic. The key questions that could have rooted the revolution deeper in the Algerian soil were not asked: What would happen after independence to the wealth of this French département? Would independence mean that the commanding heights of the Algerian economy, all French-owned, would be seized by the Algerian people? What would happen to French military bases in Algeria? What about the mineral and gas reserves recently discovered in the Sahara? Would French companies be allowed access to the oil fields? If not, how would a new state extract these resources, and with what capital and industrial resources? These were questions 77

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of pressing practical concern. Delegates at Soummam knew that what they discussed would have a direct impact on how the war was organised, whether popular control of the movement would be allowed to develop and the extent of the revolution’s popular reach. Failure to chart a vision of a future Algerian society would have profound ramifications. No one knew that better than Fanon. The French launched a campaign against the new FLN leadership after Soummam. Leading figures including Ahmed Ben Bella, Mohammed Khider, Mostefa Lacheraf, Hocine Aït Ahmed and Mohamed Boudiaf were arrested and imprisoned after France hijacked their Cairo-bound flight on 22 October 1956, two months after Soummam. These arrests decapitated the militant leadership of the FLN. The ALN fought the French on their own terms, engaging the military in ambushes instead of open combat and dissolving back into the hills, tactics modelled on General Giáp’s successful approach in Vietnam. Poorly armed and often irregularly fed, the ALN fighters were extraordinarily versatile. Weapons could be stolen from ambushed soldiers or through raids on police stations. Food could be similarly commandeered from settler farms. The ALN insisted on discipline and forbade smoking and drinking. Punishment was severe. By May 1955 the forces involved in the conflict were 100,000 strong, a serious stretch for the French military. Troops had been transported from Tunisia (a fact that the Soummam Conference celebrated). Military service in France now meant active combat in Algeria; by mid1955 soldiers’ term of ‘service’ had been increased by 12 months from the normal 18. Superior weaponry – tanks, planes, armoured cars, machine guns – gave the enemy the capacity for murder and brutality, but little access to the mountainous areas and ‘rural’ communities. The French used napalm to flush out ALN bases and instituted ‘collective responsibility’, making a village or community pay for the death of a single soldier. The ALN became overwhelmed with volunteers, and the FLN and ALN responded in kind. European non-combatants began to take the brunt. Fanon expressed this reasoning two years later: ‘The status of the foreigner, of the conqueror, of the Frenchman, is that of an oppressor. The Frenchman in Algeria cannot be neutral or innocent. Every Frenchman in Algeria oppresses, despises, dominates.’2 The ‘insurrection’ on 20 August 1955 mimicked French tactics. In the town of Aïn Abid seven Europeans were killed, all from the

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same family. In El Alia 35 people were massacred. In Philippeville cafés were ripped apart by grenade attacks, while Europeans were hacked to death by their Arab neighbours. In total 71 were murdered, including 21 Algerians and 31 soldiers. The riposte was far more severe.3 In Philippeville the notorious 18th Régiment de Chasseurs Parachutistes rounded up young men in a local stadium and mowed them down with machine-gun fire. Many more Algerians were massacred by armed pieds-noirs militias. These incidents signalled a serious escalation in the war. The FLN had now extended the struggle across approximately half the country. Support also came from Tunisia, which had just become partly autonomous ahead of full independence from France the following year. Soon the ALN would establish bases along the Algerian–Tunisian border, while FLN exiles moved to Tunis. In response, Gouverneur Général Jacques Soustelle, who saw himself as an enlightened Gaullist, set up Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) in 1956, charged with implementing ‘reforms’ across the colony, ostensibly to win the hearts and minds of Algerians. The SAS was intended to prove France’s commitment to Algerian development and reform, thereby integrating it into France. Other, unintended consequences were triggered by the escalation of the war. Bringing in civilian conscripts in the form of national service carried great risks. The government also called up reservists, meaning that anyone who had completed military service within three years could be enlisted. However, resistance by conscripts and reservists quickly developed into open rebellion in early spring 1956. Martin Evans has written of the most violent incident, at Grenoble railway station on 18 May: Opponents of the war had called for a large scale demonstration to prevent the troops’ departure. Supported by hundreds of local communists and trade unionists, the prolonged clashes were not broken up until midnight. People lay across the tracks chanting ‘they must not go’, a scenario replicated in Saint-Nazaire, Angers, Port-de-Bouc, Voiron and Brive.4

This was part of a huge anti-war movement involving more than 20,000 soldiers. (The PCF, true to form, supported the call-up, telling

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its members to go to Algeria and, somehow, organise the Algerian population.)5 When the ALN ambushed, killed and mutilated French reservists in May 1956, the fragile mass of French opinion began to give way.

Illusions and the war The year 1956 had started with certain illusions after the French socialists’ (SFIO) victory in the French elections. Guy Mollet’s Front Républicain government came to power at the beginning of February with expectations of negotiating an end to the war, with independence for Algeria and a degree of face-saving for the French. The opposite happened. Shortly after gaining office, on 6 February 1956, Mollet undertook a diplomatic mission to Algeria. He was jeered by angry Europeans and suffered a humiliating ‘tomato-throwing incident’ in Algiers. Eventually the inevitable happened: he backed down, replacing the ‘liberal’ resident minister with the aggressive Robert Lacoste. The pieds-noirs had scored an important victory. Algeria, long the watchdog of French colonial interests in the Maghreb, was becoming rabid and threatening its master. Within a little more than a month the Assemblée Nationale in Paris agreed to extend Special Powers, saving Algérie française from the threat of negotiations and independence. To the disgust of some of its members, the PCF also voted for the Special Powers. The central axis of PCF strategy in 1955 and 1956 was the creation of a new popular front as a governmental alliance between the SFIO and radicals. This was the price that had to be paid for such an alliance. The war continued. Mollet’s capitulation forced ever more French conscripts into the bloodbath. This had important consequences for the left. Those who had resisted the FLN – sometimes due to genuine doubts about its politics and strategy – now felt they had no alternative. The FLN was, more or less, the only show on the road. Fanon’s long-standing colleague and collaborator Charles Géronimi described how political choice closed down after Mollet’s betrayal: There was no longer any choice other than between Lacoste and the Front. A third force could have had meaning only if it had been supported by the French left. Since the French left were playing the

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game of Algerian fascism, any attempt to organise liberal action in Algiers was doomed to failure.6

It is worth focusing on Géronimi’s account of the ‘betrayal’ of 1956, which Fanon included at the end of his 1959 book on the Algerian Revolution, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (SDC), as an appendix. Géronimi became, in the years after 1954, politically committed to the FLN and Algeria’s independence. White, Algerian-born, of European origin and committed to radical anti-colonialism, Géronimi in many ways saw Fanon as a mentor. In 1957 he followed Fanon to Tunis as a way of deepening his involvement in the revolution while pursuing his professional career with Fanon. Géronimi’s text is in the form of a testimonial, or witness statement, and is partly a story of the politicisation of a young activist. Fanon included the testimony after his chapter ‘Algeria’s European Minority’, which looked in particular at the role played by Algeria’s large Jewish population during the revolution as a way of illustrating the involvement of Algeria’s white minorities. Fanon would have found Géronimi’s text a fascinating psychological portrait of a young European/Algerian man’s personal and political journey. The document presents a convincing story of the failures of the French left. Fanon saw two: the rapid disillusionment with the parliamentary SFIO and the inability of any radical, extra-parliamentary left to galvanise resistance to the war and pose a socialist agenda for the unfolding revolution. When it came to a vote, the PCF willingly supported the government. The failure, Géronimi explains, of any ‘third way’ led a generation to see the FLN’s ‘terrorism’ and hegemonic control of national liberation as the only solution. Géronimi started his political life as a student activist in Algiers, where he set up a student committee in defence of civil liberties that included Jews, Muslims and European Algerians. Géronimi describes their common ‘love of country [and] aspiration to transform it, to enrich it’ (SDC, 165). Of the 1954 insurrection, he writes, ‘I considered it understandable, like an excess made possible by the excesses of colonialism, but I refused to accept the validity of violence’ (165). Gradually Géronimi shifted, with the experience of French brutality and ‘a mountain of reading’. The ‘armed struggle’ was slowly

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coming into focus. Soon he cast off his nagging doubts. In his own communities, among his friends and family, he could appeal for negotiations and argue that ‘Algeria is not France’, but ‘I would be listened to with the pity bestowed on one who has lost his mind’ (168). In his political evolution and family arguments we can hear hundreds of young men and women who moved beyond their racist upbringings during the course of the war. It became clear to Géronimi that it was essential to fight, to ‘impose a political solution’ (168). But even with this realisation the path to the FLN was not automatic; it did not yet dominate the nationalist scene. Once he was won to the necessity of political liberation and independence, other obstacles, misgivings and doubts littered the road. Géronimi lists some of the key questions for his politically conscious generation: ‘Who was at the head of the Revolution? Apart from independence, what were the objectives of the revolutionaries? Was it a theocratic, a reformist, a democratic state that they were planning?’ (169) Important though it was to pose these questions, the answers were for Algerians themselves to decide. But who were these Algerians? And if these ‘Algerians themselves’ asked the same questions, what would the answers have been? Géronimi’s testimony also exposes a broader disillusionment with a French left that presented his generation with few alternatives outside the FLN. Muslim students in the UGEMA saw sympathetic Europeans as Algerians and accepted their participation. But then a key event took place that overturned deeply held illusions and a generation’s reservations about the war: Mollet’s disastrous 1956 post-election visit to Algiers. The angry crowds of pieds-noirs not only pelted him with tomatoes but sang ‘La Marseillaise’. The effect was dramatic. Géronimi ‘thought [. . .] that irritated by Algeria’s Europeans, he would have few scruples, a less uneasy conscience about imposing the negotiated solution that we were all looking forward to’ (173). Mollet’s unexpected escalation of the war threw Algerians and radical Europeans into confusion. The city assumed the character of a carnival. Pieds-noirs celebrations broke out in the streets: ‘The city suddenly took on the appearance of a vast fair.’ Opinion hardened. Géronimi observed that ‘as we separated one of us said, “And now we have no one left but the FLN to speak for us”’ (173–4).

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Algerians and Europeans (and to some extent Fanon himself) were thrown into the dead-end of the French left and of any other alternatives. The official Socialist Party had shown its true nature; the radical left, including the PCF, with its ‘absence of ideology’, had shown itself equally incapable of expressing and leading anger at the war. One organisational and political base from which this could have come was the PCF and PCA, which, as David Caute notes, was ‘supported by more than 5 million proletarian and peasant voters and dedicated to the intransigently anti-imperialist heritage of Marx and Lenin’.7 But there, as already shown, no such intransigent dedication to Marx and Lenin existed. The FLN was able to assume its full stature not just by forcing out opponents through violent streetfighting, effective factionalism and murder – especially against Messali Hadj’s MNA – but through the actual activity of the French left and its Algerian counterparts. Géronimi presses the point: ‘What, after all, could we do?’ (SDC, 174). There was nowhere to tread, no path left to take other than the one being ploughed by the FLN. The FLN had its own momentum, its own strategy entirely distinct from the ‘third force’ Géronimi envisaged. In the context of Mollet’s crackdown, the urban student supporters of the FLN were frozen into an honourable but deeply flawed national liberation movement. ‘Our Muslim comrades were soon to join the maquis and the communists [. . .] [They] turned to clandestine action’ (174). The compromised leadership of the PCF, like the militant PCA members, were bit players in a drama staged now largely by an omnipotent FLN.8 If some, had hoped in the absence of any ‘organisational thoroughness’ from the PCF and SFIO, that French intellectuals might provide a counterpoint, they too became disillusioned. When the radical Algerian-born writer Albert Camus spoke in Algiers in January 1956, students rushed to hear him. Hope filled the auditorium, which was guarded against pieds-noirs demonstrators: ‘We expected that Camus would take a clear position on the Algerian problem.’ Instead, he spoke of how the ‘innocent civilian population must be protected’ and his categorical opposition to ‘fundraising in favour of the innocent families of political prisoners’. Géronimi’s anger with Camus leaps off the page: ‘We in the hall were dumbfounded’ (172–3).

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By the end of Géronimi’s testimony we learn that he has left Algiers and his internship in Blida under Fanon for exile in Paris, with which he was disgusted: ‘The Parisians had their minds only on their evenings out, on the plays they wanted to see; on their vacations that had to be planned three months ahead of time.’ Speaking, no doubt, also for Fanon, he writes, ‘I found myself detesting them, despising all those Frenchmen who sent their sons off to torture people in Algeria and cared about nothing but their own little affairs’ (175). Géronimi’s experience forced his hand. ‘I did not hesitate long. I had already decided to join the FLN’ (177). One could offer some well-founded quibbles with his characterisation of late 1950s France; surely only an upper-middle-class minority could have been preoccupied by theatre-going and holidays, and he does not speak of the real and vital solidarity taking place in unions and in the French ‘underground’.9 But the general sense of political chaos, the half-interest in the life-and-death struggles of ordinary Algerians, must have been true. The vacillations and tragedy of the left over the struggle for Algerian independence emerges, in large part, in Géronimi’s account.

Onwards for Fanon and the FLN The events that demoralised members of Géronimi’s generation radicalised the FLN. The pieds-noirs had asserted themselves and compelled Mollet to capitulate and intensify the war. Soummam was in part a response to this situation. As noted earlier, the FLN was under the influence of Abane Ramdane, perhaps the most interesting figure in Algeria’s revolution. Tough and smart, when he was freed from prison in 1955 he was almost instantly pulled into the FLN. Ramdane was the genius behind Soummam.10 The Soummam proceedings stated that the war could not be won solely in the countryside – the FLN must not be allowed to crumble into a peasant fetishism that could not win. Instead alliances were needed with the Algerian trade unions, students, the Jewish population, and so on (even if these were to be on the FLN’s terms) – and, crucially, a central site of battle would be the cities. Independence also must really be that - real economic and political autonomy, not a fudged French alliance with crumbs for the nominally independent state. Ramdane

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was uncompromising. Fanon liked him immediately and was hugely influenced by the de facto political head of the FLN. The ‘urban turn’ following Soummam, known as the Battle of Algiers – largely a campaign of urban terror and limited strike action – lasted until the end of 1957 and will be discussed in more detail below. The defeat of the Battle of Algiers led to the FLN’s withdrawal from cities. Union members and urban FLN sympathisers were encouraged to move to the countryside to work in wilayas (FLN-organised countryside districts). The war shifted to the countryside, the military campaign and the exiled leadership. Ramdane was forced into exile in Tunisia; he was assassinated by the FLN at the end of 1957 (see Chapter 4). Fanon was immersed in these radically changing events. He was, in some ways, a strange convert, as an outsider with no real knowledge about Algeria aside from sympathy for movements of national liberation. He was black in North Africa, still a nègre to French-Algerians.11 For him, November 1954 came to signal Year Zero of Algerian history and his own political commitments. He threw himself into the tumult. Fascinated by the development of the nationalist movement, he made contact with the FLN in 1955, months after its first offensive. Contacting the underground FLN would not have been straightforward for a French civil servant, isolated from the Arab population. However, Fanon knew certain French-Algerian liberals – namely Pierre and Claudine Chaulet. The Chaulets were an unusual couple. Pierre was brought up as a radical Christian; his father had been active in the Catholic trade union movement. His family reached back three generations in Algeria. Pierre was training to be a doctor when Fanon first met him. Claudine was training to be an academic and came from a French family. They were among the few Algerian-French who saw themselves as entirely Algerian, casting their considerable talents and energies into supporting the FLN. Long before the FLN emerged, the couple had been active, helping to found a youth group (Association de la Jeunesse Algérienne pour l’Action Sociale, AJAAS) at the University of Algiers in 1953. Though mostly a discussion group, it sought to break down the barriers between Muslim and European students, a radical idea by Algerian standards. The university in the mid-1950s had fewer

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than 500 non-European students, from a total student body of 5,146. The Chaulets became close friends with Frantz and Josie. They shared exile in Tunisia, took similar risks and had the same aspirations for a new Algeria. When independence came, the Chaulets returned from exile and renounced their French citizenship. Pierre spent the 1960s coordinating a national immunisation campaign that led to the eventual eradication of tuberculosis. Claudine became one of the country’s leading sociologists. They introduced Frantz to members of the FLN. Macey argues that Fanon’s main point of contact was the Algerian businessman and FLN loyalist Mustapha Bencherchali, whose father was a renowned tobacco farmer from Blida. Another member of the AJAAS was André Mandouze, a Frenchborn lecturer in classics and a committed Catholic. He too was disgusted by racism and, like Fanon, was an avant-gardist in his discipline. He favoured pedagogical innovation. He held reading parties, taking groups of students and teachers away to study, punctuated with (servant-free) communal living, sports and collective activities. Mandouze also published journals, Consciences algériennes (1950–1) and Consciences maghrébines (1954–6), both of which were short-lived but left their mark. Fanon contributed an article derived from his work on North African Syndrome, attacking the Algiers school of psychiatry. He had found a circle of French-Algerians, militants and intellectuals with whom he could engage intellectually and politically. Fanon also spoke at public events in Algeria. In late January 1956, on the eve of Guy Mollet’s election, the AJAAS invited him to address a conference of approximately 200 people on ‘Fear in Algeria’. Chaulet describes what happened: The conference was soon transformed into a veritable socio-drama, for all the youth who were present: fear of colonial repression mixed with the hope for young Algerians, for the young Europeans present fear of the future and the end of a world that they knew and for the most part denounced.12

Though only in the country for three years, Fanon was a startling presence both for his growing reputation as a radical psychiatrist and, increasingly, for his political commitments.

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Pierre Chaulet vividly described how their friendship developed during the course of 1956, when there were frequent meetings of the two couples, Fanon and Chaulet in Blida, where we often passed the night at the couple’s home because of the curfew. Over the course of these long evenings we would discuss the evolution of the situation in Algeria and France, Fanon’s attempts to change the psychiatric practice of the hospital [. . .] writing projects based on the experiences he was running in Blida, jazz, the Caribbean.13

Pierre and Claudine Chaulet remained remarkably sanguine about their activism, yet Pierre treated ALN fighters, helped hide FLN members being hunted by the police and transported arms and party propaganda. He was arrested and forced to flee Algeria in 1957. As the war intensified in the early months of 1955, Fanon considered fighting the French directly – abandoning his post at Blida and moving into the maquis. ‘Curing’ fighters was one thing, but taking up the gun would be a visceral and committed action and, as we have seen, Fanon was no novice to armed combat. He could now, he supposed, use some of his training in violence to good effect. After all, his friend François Tosquelles had shown during the Spanish Civil War that it was possible to be both a combatant and a psychiatrist. Perhaps, Fanon thought, he could do the same. The FLN, however, saw Fanon as more useful to the struggle as a doctor. The ALN was not short on volunteers; what good would a non-Arabic speaker have been? In Blida, Fanon could treat fighters and hide others in relative safety. Fanon could help ease the unquiet mind, and basic surgery could patch up broken bodies. But this ‘underground’ work was risky. Pharmacists and doctors had been instructed to inform authorities about suspicious wounds and customers requesting antibiotics. The radical French writer Simone de Beauvoir, who did not meet Fanon until 1961, recorded her own description of his work for the FLN in Algeria: For a year he served the revolution without abandoning his position. He housed in his home and at the hospital senior combatants from the maquis, distributing medicine to them and

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teaching fighters how to treat their injuries. [. . .] Eight out of ten bomb attacks failed because the ‘terrorists’ terrorised were being spotted straight away. [. . .] ‘This cannot continue’, said Fanon. It was necessary to train the fidayines, and with the agreement of their leaders he was put in charge; he taught them to control their reactions at the moment of placing a bomb or launching a grenade, and also what psychological and physical attitudes could help them better resist torture.14

This account suggests that Fanon was involved in serious military ‘training’. As French Algeria began to crack around the walled compound of Blida-Joinville hospital, Josie gave birth to their first child, Olivier, in 1955. Fanon’s psychiatric work and involvement in the struggle left little time for his family. He continued to write about psychiatry, in particular his experiments in institutional psychiatry and medical trials with anti-psychotic drugs. His reputation also meant that he was asked occasionally to meetings in France. Daniel Guérin wrote to Fanon in November 1955, asking him to speak on colonialism in the Caribbean. Guérin was a fascinating activist, a proponent of gay liberation and a fierce defender of the Algerian Revolution. Before 1939 he was a follower of left social-democrat Marceau Pivert; he was very briefly a member of the Fourth International in Norway in 1940, but after 1945 increasingly identified with anarchism. His greatest work, which Fanon had surely read, was La lutte des classes sous la Première République, 1793– 1797 (1946), an important historical analysis of class struggle in France during the First Republic and a challenge to the Communist Party’s notion of the popular front. Its central argument provides us with a useful model for understanding nationalist politics and the Algerian Revolution. The French Revolution was divided by class tensions and cleavages. As soon as the French bourgeoisie raised itself to its full height and overturned the ancien régime, it was faced with ‘subaltern’ challenges to its rule. Guérin identified a ‘working class’ in the sansculottes movement, working principally in small workshops in Paris, which struggled to deepen the Republic’s social content and wrest from the newly triumphant bourgeoisie reforms that challenged its very social and economic raison d’être.

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The popular front emerged around the world in the 1930s as a Communist Party strategy for mobilising and building movements against the far right. The strategy insisted on broad cross-class alliances that pulled together competing interests: bishops, business owners, trade unionists. Again and again it led to the collapse of class politics and the inevitable domination of the bourgeoisie. By the mid1930s the PCF was seeking to form respectable alliances against fascist movements – a testament to the shifting foreign-policy demands of the Soviet Union – and in 1936 it succeeded in bringing a coalition of left-wing parties to power, headed by SFIO leader Léon Blum. Guérin’s history of the First Republic was a warning against these ‘fronts’: the working class needed its own strategy and leaders. Guérin was defending the simultaneous necessity of working-class independence and working-class leadership. The historian Ian Birchall takes the argument further: Guérin challenged the historical roots of the popular front tradition; in his analysis of the 1792 war he showed that foreign policy had its roots in class interests, and that there could be no struggle for national liberation which rose above class interests.15

The popular front was the chosen form of organisation of the nationalist liberation struggle against colonialism, including the FLN. So much of La lutte de classes can be read as a description of the class forces that would fight for independence in Algeria. The French bourgeoisie, even at their most revolutionary, were hesitant, nervously edging forward but aware that their revolution needed a weightier, larger social force to defend it. They mobilised the poor, the bras nus – literally ‘bare arms’ – of the embryonic working class, the sans-culottes and the enragés, to make the revolution for them, only to pull them in when their demands for more thorough transformation seemed to threaten the freedom of property the bourgeoisie wanted. As Guérin writes: The two classes had had to appear united in the struggle for the triumph of the revolution. But after the Thermidor [the defeat, arrest and execution of Robespierre] there could be no longer any illusion. The brutal way the bourgeoisie treated the bras nus after

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seducing them with softly whispered promises of liberty, equality and fraternity, the thanks they gave for the immeasurable service they had just rendered, were too obvious.16

Algerian’s national liberation movement was caught in Guérin’s paradigm. The FLN, though militant and committed, was the quintessential popular front; popular fronts formed as a party, as Trotsky noted in the 1930s, can have a reactionary character in so far as they are directed against the worker, yet a progressive attitude in so far as they are directed against imperialism.17 Written before the great period of decolonisation, the book contained enormous lessons for those who would soon struggle in Algeria. ‘The true face of the bourgeoisie was revealed, the same face we see, even now, every time the mask is lifted [. . .] bourgeois democracy and bourgeois “fraternity” were being shown up as the counterfeits they too really were.’18 National liberation parties were frequently brutal popular fronts incorporating a vast array of contradictory forces; even in the radical African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, as Roger Southall writes, ‘there was a significant class element [. . .] which was distinctly pro-capitalist’.19 Once state power was transferred to an independent government, the failures of national liberation flowed directly from this dominating ‘class element’. Alternatives to these forces were present throughout the continent but were systematically shut down. One reason for this was what Fanon described as the ‘lack of ideology’ – an alternative politics to the ‘curse’ of independence – which he saw, as we have seen, as the greatest danger facing Africa. The movement was led by an elite intelligentsia who sought broad Algerian unity for independence. The smaller Algerian bourgeoisie, tied in most cases to the colonial metropolis, were active in the FLN; moderate and conciliatory figures, symbolised by Ferhat Abbas, dominated its programme. The middle class – Fanon’s ‘caste of profiteers’ – was ‘disproportionately influential’, seeking accommodation with national and international capital. Guérin’s implicit warning to the French left also applied to Algerian nationalists. Fanon’s description of the national bourgeoisie and the conduct of the revolution in The Wretched of the Earth shows the inevitable decay and degeneration of a ‘revolutionary’ movement

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organised as a popular front. His condemnation and warnings were vital, going some way towards an analysis of how ‘decay’ grew out of the organisational forms that Algerian nationalism took. With considerable courtesy and respect, Fanon refused Guérin’s offer to speak in Paris. Fanon was still deeply concerned with swaying French opinion, particularly that of the left. Though he was now a partisan of the FLN, he had to exercise extreme caution. He could not publicly appeal to the international left to support the Algerian struggle while maintaining his job in Blida. Not until his exile in Tunisia could Fanon speak at his full voice. So when he accepted an invitation from Alioune Diop, editor of Présence Africain, to speak in Paris in September 1956, he was not planning to speak on Algeria. The event was grandly labelled the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists. There were almost 70 delegates from 25 countries, mostly French-speaking; the large US delegation included Richard Wright.20 The Congress reflected the cultural dominance of the Paris– Dakar–Caribbean axis. Fanon was part of the Martiniquan delegation, as was Césaire, but he felt more attached to Algeria; he was becoming Algerian. The Congress was an impressive geopolitical celebration of African, Caribbean and black writing and expression. Its aims were twofold: ‘No people without culture; no culture without ancestors’ and ‘No authentic cultural liberation without a prior political liberation’.21 To a decolonising world which denied the cultural diversity and beauty of black and colonised people, this was a forthright riposte. (Yet Wright, correctly, complained about the absence of women.) A telegram from W. E. B. Du Bois was read to enthusiastic applause: he claimed African people must orient to socialism and follow the modern example of the Soviet Union. Though messages were also read out on behalf of Algerian writers, Algeria was the invisible guest at the Congress. Nothing was said. Fanon’s own references were carefully ‘implicit’. Présence Africaine, though an important organ of the black cultural renaissance, was also marked by ‘moderation’, defining itself narrowly as a ‘maison d’édition et revue culturelle du Monde Noir’.22 It was not a forum for the liberation struggle or political mobilisation. The Congress was held at the Sorbonne, a symbol of the Enlightenment and the establishment, in Paris, the City of Light.

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For university-educated black men to occupy a part of it was audacious, but also a genuflection to a venerable and respected institution. For Fanon, though, Paris was no font of enlightenment and wisdom but the headquarters of the massacre of Sétif, murder in the Algerian countryside and colonial war in Indochina. He was struck again by the limitations of Negritude, the Manichaean division of African emotionality and European scientific rationality, but he was not the only one questioning these themes. Wright spoke for many at the Congress when he asked, ‘Where do I, an American Negro conditioned by the [. . .] abstract force of the Western world [. . .] stand?’23 He was questioning, as Fanon had in Black Skin, White Masks, the concept of a unified ‘black person’. Fanon spoke on the second day, delivering his paper with force in short, jabbing sentences. His style expressed his rage. No longer did he write in the mildly autobiographical style of his first book. Though Algerians appeared openly only rarely in the speech, the narrative and its sense of urgency came from his experience in Algeria. He began with biological racism in the early stages of colonial occupation, which ceded ground to cultural racisms as the colonial empire started to fragment and calls came for a defence of ‘Western values’. The phase of ‘primitivism’ and ‘intuition’, the Manichaean moment much celebrated by Negritude, had passed with colonisation. Now a new epoch had opened up the prospect of liberation and demanded a new approach, offering the possibility of an end to racism and real fraternity. But such fraternity could only come with ‘recognition’, which would not be granted but forced out of colonialism by collective struggle. Fanon provided the audience with a definition of racism as ‘the systematic oppression of a people [...] the destruction of its cultural values, of its modalities of existence, its language, its mode of dress [...] inferioris[ing] those people’.24 Liberation involves dismantling ‘inferiorisation’, smashing apart racial oppression and ‘recovering’ humanity. In the era of national liberation the coloniser tries to define the colonised as ‘fanatics’ and ‘primitives’, but the ‘mechanism has broken down and no longer serves his purpose. Those who were once immobile, the congenital cowards, those lazy beings who have always been inferiorised, brace themselves and emerge bristling’.25 He then turned explicitly to culture – ‘the culture of a people that has become truly fraternal’ – and to Wright’s quest for

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universality and humanism. ‘Universality,’ he argued, ‘lies in this decision to take responsibility for the reciprocal relativism of different cultures once colonial states have been ruled out.’26 The speech left the Congress stunned (and enlightened), presenting a total picture and pulling scattered analysis and vague theories about the ‘black problem’ together into a coherent whole. Fanon was elected onto the executive committee of Présence Africaine’s international organisation, Société Africaine de Culture. While Fanon was in France he made the acquaintance of Jean Ayme, a psychiatrist who had also worked with Tosquelles. Ayme was also an active Trotskyist. Meeting in Bordeaux and travelling by road back to Paris, they visited the radical Trotskyist historian Pierre Broué; Alice Cherki writes that ‘they spoke all night’.27 It is not entirely futile to speculate on what was discussed; both Ayme and Broué were supporters of the MNA (and members of Pierre Lambert’s Parti Communiste Internationaliste). They may have been questioning Fanon’s allegiance to the FLN while encouraging a wider political commitment to Trotskyism. But soon Fanon became focused solely on his work as a ‘disciplined militant’ of the Algerian Revolution for the FLN, without the time for foreign speaking engagements.

The revolution takes the city When Fanon returned to Algeria, Ramdane had begun to succeed in bringing the war into European areas, as planned at Soummam. He had only been away for a week, but the change was remarkable. Liberation could only come if the war was brought into cities, into the European quarters – so started the famous and protracted Battle of Algiers in the summer of 1956. The two leading figures of ‘urban’ combat were Ramdane Abane, as the commander of forces operating in the Algiers autonomous zone (Zone autonome d’Alger, ZAA), and Yacef Saadi, a baker from the Casbah. Together they started to direct fidayine to attack civilian targets in the city. Others included Ali la Pointe, who had undergone a prison transformation from streetwise card-sharp to revolutionary nationalist and became one of the most intransigent militants (the French called them terrorists) in the Algerian war.28

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The situation was deteriorating quickly. On 19 June 1956 the French guillotined FLN prisoners at the Barberousse prison at the top of the Casbah (now called the Prisonde Serkadji) in a scene memorably captured in Gillo Pontecorvo’s film. The FLN regarded even the guillotine as a mark of dishonour: rather than standing before a firing squad, prisoners had to kneel, a final humiliation before French power. The French had raised the stakes. François Mitterrand was an important figure in accelerating these repressive measures. Although he is now known for abolishing the death penalty shortly after he was elected president in 1981, when he became minister of justice in Mollet’s government in 1956 Mitterrand enthusiastically defended state executions. In the course of the war there were 222 executions, but the first 45 were carried out under Mollet’s government – the start of a campaign that could be compared to the Terror of the 1790s. Mitterrand backed demands to speed up the execution procedure, ‘shortened the period allowed for clemency [. . .] [and] established himself as a hard-liner on the question of capital punishment. Of the 45 executions carried out during his period in office, he opposed clemency in at least 32 cases’.29 The FLN responded in kind, executing two French soldiers. Yacef Saadi unleashed his fighters on the streets, declaring a virtual end to ‘civilians’. The centre of operations was the Casbah. White European men between 18 and 54 were civilian-combatants, regarded as legitimate targets. Women, children and the elderly were not.30 By the end of June, exactly 11 days after the execution of the FLN fighters, 49 men in this category had been killed or injured. The European population, long used to regarding La Blanche as theirs – a paradise of servile Arabs, large houses and a warm Mediterranean climate – felt daily panic. ‘Arabs’ who had recently known their place were now potential terrorists. The rapid and dramatic implosion of violence shattered any hope of building an alliance with sympathetic European ‘poor’ whites. The lines of history were being brutally drawn. Allies would have to fall into FLN ranks or risk permanent marginalisation or death. The Casbah was impenetrable to the authorities but not immune to their bombs. On 10 August, members of the local police force, operating out of hours, bombed an ‘alleged’ safe house in rue de Thèbes (also portrayed powerfully in Pontecorvo’s film). The choice of ‘safe

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houses’ reflected more the fact that it was the only street in the Casbah wide enough for their car. Seventy people died.31 For those humiliated and abused Algerians, living through French repression during this period is still a painful memory. Miraoui Smain was born in 1935 and has lived and worked in the Casbah all his life. He describes his experience during the war: During the Battle of Algiers the police would try to round us up at the bottom of the Casbah. During one of the many raids when I was forced out of the Casbah, there were the military, even the mouchards [police spies], and they forced us to undress. These were things against nature. I was forced to remove my trousers, but as I stood naked, I saw a member of the army who looked at me and said, ‘You dress.’ He could see that they were in the process of doing terrible things. I was allowed to leave, and thankfully survived the war. But friends were beaten, others taken away, tortured and killed.

Smain was involved in hiding FLN members in a guest house his family ran. When they spent the night, I would ensure that they were ‘unknown.’ We were ordered to let the police know who was staying, but we would hide these revolutionaries. You understand the risk was never calculated in my head, it was a risk that just took place like that. In life you can tolerate many things, but when you are humiliated it is hard to recover.32

The FLN detonated its own bombs in downtown Algiers. On 30 September 1956, the Milk Bar, the Cafétéria – a popular venue for privileged French youth – and the Air France office were selected. It was no simple matter. The Casbah had been turned into a Gaza-like prison, ringed with barbed wire and police checkpoints. Algerian men and Casbah residents could not be used to transport explosives. So Yacef Saadi chose young, attractive Algerian women and gave them careful makeovers – with hair straightening, make-up and the latest European fashion – to appear European. The bombs at the Cafétéria and Milk Bar killed one person and injured 52, but the

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bomb at the Air France office failed to detonate.33 Djamila Bouhired, one of the FLN’s three female FLN bombers, recalled in 1993, We had visited the site and noted several possible targets. We had been told to place two bombs, but we were three, and at the last moment, since it was possible, we decided to plant three bombs. Samia and I carried three bombs from the Casbah to Bab El Oued, where they were primed [. . .] Each of us placed a bomb and at the appointed time there were two explosions; one of the bombs was defective and didn’t go off.34

Djamila was captured after a shoot-out and sentenced to death. A mass campaign halted her execution and she was released as a national hero at independence. Zohra Drif, a fighter for the ALN, was another of these women; she gives a vivid account of the preparations. The morning of September 30, 1956, we introduced ourselves and put on the final touches of makeup. At 11:00 [. . .] we [. . .] prepared our outfits. [. . .] Mine was a pretty, elegant summer dress with straps moulding the bust and marking the waist, [with a hemline] ten inches above the ankles. [. . .] It was lavender-blue with small white stripes and matched perfectly with my shoes [. . .] and small summer bag of the same colour. My gypsy dress and accessories were at the height of fashion in the summer of 1956 . . . with our new haircuts and our makeup, we could perfectly blend into the European ‘golden’ youth and even among the most affluent of them. At noon, we had lunch [. . .] with anxiety twisting our guts at the idea that maybe by the end of the day we would teach them about death or one of us would be arrested. Or both. [. . .] At 1:30 p.m., we got dressed and, aware that we could not go out in the neighbourhood in such attire, we wore long, loose, ordinary blouses over our lovely dresses.35

Historian Belaïd Abane writes of the immediate aftermath of the bomb attacks: The European population, until then living in a relative haven of peace, would in its turn know hell. No neighbourhood saved,

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bombs exploding everywhere. In stations, on city buses, in large department stores, in stadiums [. . .] from now on there would be no public space where security could be efficiently assured.36

Within the movement opinion was divided. Abane Ramdane justified the attacks as far less brutal than the French aerial bombardments of Algerian villages. The Chaulets, dedicated FLN members, were not entirely convinced and raised some legitimate concerns. We spoke to Abane and [Benyoucef] Benkhedda [who commanded the Autonomous Zone, with Ben M’hidi, a leading figure in the FLN and the Battle of Algiers who was captured and murdered by the French in 1957] of our disapproval of certain collective attacks, especially in urban settings. [. . .] Equally, we could not disapprove of attacks that targeted police torturers or the armed military (even if it concerned clueless young men sent to Algeria by the French government [. . .]). Moreover, we found it counter-productive – the attacks could not but justify the discourse held on the future of the colonial minority and the distinction between those who would like to stay French and those who would choose to become Algerian.37

Among the French left there were additional questions. Were these tactics moral? In organising such attacks and violence, was the FLN guilty of excesses that might weaken and transform the struggle? As we have seen, Camus, to whom many looked for political clarity, had said that the ‘innocent civilian population must be protected’.38 Fanon would not tolerate such liberal reticence and morality. In the middle of October 1956, he witnessed the French reprisals. In a small town close to Blida, a local European militia rounded up 20 men and shot them. ‘This is what the French do,’ Fanon stammered to a friend in anger, ‘and to think that some of my intellectual friends, who claim to be humanists, criticise me for being totally involved in the struggle.’39 Fanon was right, but questions can be raised. While the violence of colonialism was far worse than anything the FLN used, was the bombing strategy, even if amply justified in moral terms, the most effective way of developing the struggle? Some writers and activists have argued that such a strategy demobilises political action by broader

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layers of society. Leon Trotsky, writing against individual acts of violence in the early twentieth century, condemned the tendency of such ‘terrorism’ to turn the people’s eyes and hopes ‘towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish’ transformation on their behalf.40 Rather than deepening involvement in revolutionary action, the FLN’s ‘terror’ campaign against the white community was a highly controlled, specialised act oriented in opposition to the self-organisation of Algeria’s poor.

Pressure mounts in Blida The hospital, which had briefly been a sanctuary for those physically and psychologically injured, was sucked into the maelstrom. Members of Fanon’s staff were arrested and beaten, others joined in the FLN strike action or went to fight in the mountains. As Cherki remembers, ‘the hospital was considered to be a veritable nest of fellaghas [armed militants]. Fanon was certainly a target [. . .] a sweep up was being prepared’.41 There was no neutrality. A repressive noose was tightening around Blida’s hospital. Fanon’s working life was also overturned. He was now seeing patients who were suffering from torture and patients who were inflicting it. Despite his post-1961 image as an apostle of violence, Fanon treated French-Algerian torturers with great humanity – some of their stories appear as case notes in the final chapter of his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. He saw both torturer and tortured as victims of the Algerian war. One patient, a policeman, was referred to Fanon complaining that he could not sleep at night. Each time he fell asleep he was woken by the sound of screaming. He explained to Fanon that he recognised the screams of a man beaten up and hung from his wrists for two hours; the final, highest pitch was the scream of a person being electrocuted. Fanon helped to secure the policeman sick leave, after which he returned to France. In the middle of one consultation, Fanon was called out. Josie suggested to the policeman that he wait in their house inside the hospital grounds. Instead, he decided to walk the hospital grounds. A short time later Fanon found him doubled over, dripping with sweat. He had passed one of his victims in the hospital. Fanon gave him a sedative and calmed him down. Fanon then went in search

into the eye of the storm

of the tortured Algerian, whom he eventually discovered cowering in a toilet, terrified that the police had been called and that he would be arrested and tortured again. Finally Fanon convinced him that he was mistaken and that he had not just seen the policeman. Fanon also dealt with two adolescent Algerian boys who had taken a French friend their age to a deserted hill, pinned him down and stabbed him to death. One boy explained that they had done it because they were not old enough to kill an adult. Another young patient, a European self-referral, was torturing suspected FLN members. The problem was that the violence was leaving him ‘disturbed’ and spilling over to his wife and children, including his 20-month-old son. On one occasion he had tied up his wife the way he tied FLN suspects to torture them and had beaten her. He wanted Fanon, a ‘nerve’ specialist, to treat him so he could continue to torture at the commissariat but not at home – to be saved, somehow, from what he was doing, from what was being asked of him. Fanon treated him. For Algerian children and French policemen alike, the war was psychologically cataclysmic. Fanon treated them both as ‘sick’ and ‘damaged’, both needing to be ‘reprieved’. There was no contradiction. Fanon could see violence destroying individuals, breaking apart their psychological fibre, pulling both European and Algerians into a downward vortex. At the level of the colonised, as part of a widening movement of liberation, though, he believed that the violence of the oppressed was not only necessary to end colonialism but – as we will see – also therapeutic. The long-held sense of inferiority would only give way when confronted with assertive and liberatory violence. Only then would the Algerian stand equal to the European and only then could there be hope for ‘universal’ humanism. In the hospital, Fanon was a healer; in the chaotic world of Algeria’s decolonisation, a disciplined and committed revolutionary. These events occurred when Fanon was already active in the FLN, communicating regularly with leading members of the organisation, speaking to Ramdane Abane and providing vital psychiatric treatment (and basic first aid) to FLN fighters. While the contradictions of his work – patching up torturers so they could go on torturing – were great and ultimately unsustainable, they show that Fanon understood the effect of violence with what could almost be described as foolhardy compassion.

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Eventually it became impossible to breach these contradictions. Frantz and Josie were walking an impossible tightrope, using the hospital to assist the FLN but being forced to take in and treat French-Algerians, including police and military personnel deeply disturbed by their own brutality in the war. Local intelligence began to identify ‘suspicious activity’ at Blida’s hospital. Fanon’s colleague Charles Géronimi, who had heard through his contacts, warned him that the hospital was going to be raided; Fanon, Alice Cherki, and Lacaton, another colleague, would be arrested. Their cover was about to be entirely blown. Worse, Fanon started to receive anonymous death threats. He wrote his letter of resignation as a Frenchman, a citizenship he was about to surrender. He might have accepted the post with enthusiasm, he said, but What can a man’s enthusiasm and devolution achieve if everyday reality is a tissue of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man? [. . .] If psychiatry is a medical technique which aspires to allow man to cease being alienated from his environment, I owe it to myself to assert that the Arab, who is permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation. (TAR, 62–3)

Though the situation had become impossible, Cherki ponders whether Fanon resigned in solidarity with the striking nurses, who felt compelled to take action against what was happening in the hospital and in Algerian society.42 The letter, with its open declaration of revulsion at French Algeria – not least his statement of support for the ‘Arab personality’ – was an official scandal. The ministre resident’s office formally expelled Fanon from Algerian territory in December 1957. Josie, Frantz and their small son Oliver left the country quickly, after spending the night with their friends the Chaulets. Fanon’s letter had made them a direct target. A bomb exploded outside their house a few days after they left for France. The raid on the hospital came in January, only days after the Fanons’ departure. Some FLN members were arrested; others escaped and tried to reach Tunis by foot. Blida, with its psychiatric experiments, the hiding place for the FLN and Fanon’s revolutionary training ground in Algeria’s liberation war, was over.

4

A Revolutionary in Tunis

In Algiers, Abane maintained his urban war. On 28 January 1957 there was an eight-day general strike across Algeria. A report gives a powerful sense of the mood: During the night of January 28 to 29, Algerian employees in the communications services stopped work. In the morning, tradesmen and artisans left their shops closed. [. . .] The towns resembled ghost-towns, all activity having come to a standstill. This was particularly noticeable in the working-class districts which are usually so lively. [. . .] Never before in Algeria had a strike been so successful.1

This was an important milestone – an assertion that the FLN could shut down industries, cities and towns. The French were determined to break the strike, which represented a severe challenge to their power in Algeria. Widespread support for it and for the new FLN-affiliated trade union federation showed that the cities were in the FLN’s hands. Miraoui Smain describes his experience of the January strike as a 21-year-old: At the time of the eight-day strike there were many mouchards [police spies or informers], those Algerians who didn’t have any 101

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dignity. Even though some shops and houses were forced to open during the strike, we maintained it until we couldn’t hold on any longer. It was a blind force. Women played a role in the strike. Algerian women are incredibly courageous but during the war they were scared. There was a type of equality: men and women working together as a single machine in the revolution.2

The general strike was central to Abane and Ben M’hidi’s strategy. Military victory over the colonial power was simply out of reach. The French military was more powerful. As Belaïd Abane calls the strike ‘a political operation, pacifist, an ultimate episode in the peaceful resistance of Algerians against French colonialism’ and concludes that the ‘Battle of Algiers’ and the strike, its high point, saw the FLN break the colonial consensus and sow discord in the heart of the French Republic.3 The administration extended the powers of the police. The ministre résident, Robert Lacoste, gave General Jacques Massu of the Tenth Parachute Division carte blanche to do what he wanted in the capital. Massu was the right choice. Though he would seek redemption for his crimes at the end of his life, Massu was in many ways the face of French brutality, especially after 1957. He was given everything he needed. Striking workers and shopkeepers were ordered back to work at the barrel of a gun. Clearly this was not an ideological campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Algerian working class; rather, it was a battering ram aimed at the solar plexus of the trade union movement. Schools had also been closed, so children too were rounded up and ordered back to school. Moutif Mohamed, who grew up in Algiers during the revolution, describes how his father’s life was destroyed by torture in a French concentration camp for ‘terrorists’: He was walking in the Casbah during the strike in 1957 and was stopped by the police, thrown in a police truck and taken to the station. He was then held in a ‘concentration camp’ for three months. When he returned he was a broken man. He kept his political involvement from us; he didn’t want to put us in danger. He died from his injuries in 1970, at 49 years old.4

Within 48 hours of the clampdown, the strike was over. The FLN declared victory, but it was a hollow one. The brutal French methods

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had succeeded. One author describes Algiers as an ‘immense factory of torture’.5 The objective was to gather intelligence and locate the FLN’s command structure by identifying each level of the cell. If the suspect paid membership fees to the FLN, to whom did he give these? What were their names? That person would then be arrested and tortured: another step in unmasking the cell. French historian Sylvie Thénault describes how 91 Algerians were condemned to death in 1957 and 42 of them executed between January and May. Most were either guillotined or shot. Though the intention was to ‘make an example’ of those condemned, the cries, chants and songs of the condemned as they were led to their deaths resonated beyond the wall of the prison – the notorious Barberousse prison was situated at the top of the Casbah – and in this way ‘the execution galvanised [. . .] the popular emotion’.6 Pierre Chaulet, who was held there after his arrest in February 1957, was placed in solitary confinement. His cell was just above the cells that held those condemned to death. He was woken one morning by a din throughout the prison: A man condemned to death had just been taken from his cell and was being led to the guillotine. I heard clearly his cry, ‘Tahya el Djezair’ [‘Long live Algeria’], repeated throughout all the cells and the communal cells. Soon this cry was replaced by ‘Murderers! Murderers!’ with the sound of spoons tapping on metal plates. Then silence and in solidarity a daylong fast.

Though he was told in early July that he had been granted provisional ‘release’ and could leave, Chaulet was suspicious; he was fully aware that at the time the police and paras (the notorious parachutists), frustrated by the ‘liberal’ justice system, would pick up those released by the courts for renewed ‘questioning’. His release had been arranged hastily, so other elements of the security forces could not intervene. He was guarded by two uniformed agents through the night, escorted to the airport in the morning and flown to Marseilles. General Massu, meanwhile, wanted to maximise his advantage and dismantle the FLN’s urban cells. The Casbah was again ringed with barbed wire, metal detectors and police checkpoints. Apartment blocks were labelled and an informer allocated to each building. Yacef

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Saadi – responsible for the bomb attacks – remained elusive, but soon the cell was destroyed and the leadership fled. Only Saadi remained. Arrests escalated. The bomb factory was discovered. By March 1957, Krim Belkacem and Ramdane Abane had to be smuggled out of Algiers in Claudine Chaulet’s car, then to flee by foot to Morocco. From there they made their way slowly to Tunis via Rome.7 Despite this forced exodus, Saadi’s bombing campaign continued – there were approximately 30 further bomb attacks after 30 September 1956. Attacks on European targets were followed by vicious reprisals. Muslim shops were ransacked, Arabs beaten to death with iron bars. Thousands – perhaps as many as 5,000 men and women, like Moutif Mohamed’s father – were arrested and disappeared to unknown destinations set up for ‘special interrogations.’ Many did not return. The army directed their forces at Saadi, eventually arresting him on 24 September 1957. The war in Algiers, with the Casbah at its bloody centre, was finally over. Ali la Pointe, the card-sharp turned FLN nationalist and almost the last man left standing, was killed on 8 October 1957.8 These events were not incidental to the war. Abane’s removal from Algeria and the defeat of his urban strategy had major implications. The FLN’s ‘Soummam moment’ was finished. Abane had suffered a major defeat. The military strategy, including the border armies and their colonels, now assumed a more prominent role. There were also changes for Europeans in Algeria. They regarded the victory over the ‘terrorists’ as a triumph and idolised the paras, who had shown France how to defeat Algerian nationalism. As one historian has written: ‘The “victory” over Algiers gave [. . .] false hope to the European population [. . .] they adhered with a blind confidence to the most extreme theories [. . .] “the natives only understand the language of force”.’9 But popular fervour deepened. An urban struggle led by a small nationalist cadre that had as its set-piece a campaign of terror against the European population – still only a fraction of the horror the French were inflicting on Algerians – had been driven out by superior forces. The active intellectuals, students and Casbah residents who had formed the backbone of the urban front in Algiers now sought ‘exile’ in the countryside as ‘hundreds of students and trained and politicised party cadre left for the maquis, fleeing the suppression

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put in place by Massu in January 1957’.10 The defeat seemed to leave open only one door to the FLN: guerrilla struggle, military conflict and exile. The FLN now directed radicalised workers and students to leave the cities and join the rural wilayas. The outcome was complex. Many of those fleeing to the countryside had been arrested, tortured and used by the French in their battle against the FLN, and French intelligence agents exploited the distrust this created. For example, they planted fake documents that convinced Colonel Amirouche Aït Hamouda, more commonly known as Colonel Amirouche, commander of wilaya III, that he was inundated by spies amongst the newly armed urban volunteers. Like all intelligence some of this information was undoubtedly true, but certainly not all of it. Spies would have been active. Colonel Amirouche believed the planted documents and purged the ranks on a massive scale.11 The French spent a great deal of time – and money – making Algeria, a vast territory bordering four North African countries, almost impenetrable. The French built a 700-kilometre frontier barrier along the Moroccan border in 1956, followed in 1957 by an electric fence, known as the Ligne Morice, to prevent ALN fighters from penetrating the Algerian border from Tunisia and Morocco. A great iron hedgerow of barbed wire stretched into the distant horizon, with intermittent guard-towers and minefields. The effect was devastating; the wilayas inside Algeria could not be supplied with guns, supplies and party cadre and urban areas fell back into the hands of the French.

Life and struggle in exile Fanon was now an enemy of the French state. When the family left Algeria they did not know where they would live or work. The Fanons got out as quickly as they could. In France, with Frantz unemployed, they stayed with pro-Algerian socialists and communists. France was also an important battleground of the Algerian war. Ramdane Abane had appointed Salah Louanchi to fundraise amongst the Algerian community and organise the FLN’s underground Fédération de France. Raising funds for the war effort involved a system of ‘taxes’ on the Algerian community. FLN propaganda came into France through Italy and Switzerland and ‘tax revenue’ left via Switzerland. This also

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required a concerted operation against the influential ‘Messalists,’ followers of Messali Hadj, in the MNA. This period in Paris was short but significant for Fanon. He met Daniel Guérin, who described him as devoted to the Algerian cause ‘heart and soul’ and damning of Messalists (of which Guérin was one). Fanon, in taking this position, was demonstrating his dedication to his adopted Algeria as well as his commitment to the FLN line. Fanon also spent a prolonged period staying with the French Trotskyist Jean Ayme, whom he had met the previous year. Cherki records that Fanon seemed in no particular rush to leave: He continued to sleep three hours per night and to devour books. Amongst the documents that Ayme gave him to read, he was fascinated to discover the transcripts of the first four congresses of the Communist International. [. . .] Fanon spent entire nights in their company.12

Ayme also observed that although Fanon was incredibly smart, with an impressive knowledge of philosophy and psychiatry, he did not have much ‘political training’. He had not been an activist and did not have a thorough knowledge of revolutionary history. Fanon was undergoing a rapid education. The family’s stay in France was hosted by the Fédération de France, towards which Fanon was relatively dismissive. He saw the group as providing important succour to exiles, but essentially marginal to the real fight. Fanon met again with Francis Jeanson, whose impression of him accorded with Guérin’s: all that counted was Algeria. France would be useful only when it became a proper battleground in the war. (Fanon was mistaken: it was already a battleground for the FLN and Messalists. Forty-two murders were committed in the first nine months of 1956, and the violence continued to escalate: in 1958, the average was two murders a day.13 Bodies turned up in Paris’s 18th arrondissement, La Goutte-d’Or, home to large numbers of Algerians. Not all of these murders were the throat-slittings characteristic of the FLN–Messalist feud; the police also used the local ‘war’ as a cover for their own extra-judicial murders.) If Jeanson found Fanon’s attitude ‘unjustifiably hard’ (and ignorant of the activists and activism of the Fédération), it might be

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excused as impatience. It expressed his need for the war to be won and his own urge to return to North Africa. Jeanson was an impressive ally. Defending his activism in support of the FLN in his 1960 book Notre Guerre, he explained, I was not the first, nor the only one, to help Algerian militants; others did it before me, others were doing it elsewhere. [. . .] I have never had a monopoly of such action and, on the other hand, [. . .] this action today – across the whole of France and outside France – involves thousands and thousands of people, of whom the majority are not in contact with the networks to which I refer here.14

Jeanson also writes of the dilemmas of political solidarity and his efforts, as an activist organising and coordinating support for the FLN, to maintain critical distance: We were faced with difficulties: we had to try to be totally with them, while remaining totally ourselves. [. . .] Over three years, we worked for the FLN and received the necessary finances for our action without being ‘under their orders’ or ‘in the pay of’ [. . .] the success of a political action cannot be absolutely guaranteed. But in a period like ours, inaction or simple abstentionism is a guarantee of failure.15

His solidarity and assistance to Algeria and the work of other activists in what became known as the ‘Jeanson network’ made him the most important white FLN supporter in France; though the FLN received vital support and aid from Egypt and Eastern Europe, most of its ‘war funds’ were generated ‘internally’ in Algeria and France. Supporters in France were ‘asked’ to pay 3,000 francs per month. Shop owners paid more. (This amounted to three British pounds a month, or the equivalent of roughly £67 today.) For an unskilled factory worker with a salary of roughly 8,000 francs a week, this was a considerable contribution. Giving was an important political act, but it was not always entirely voluntary. Eventually the Fanon family headed to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, which had become the new home of the exiled leadership of the FLN and had a substantial Algerian population. The city would

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become Fanon’s home until he died. He never returned to Paris. Europe became for him a place of transit to North and West Africa, the new locus of the struggle, out of which a new humanity for a postcapitalist world would emerge. Together with other exiles he helped write and edit El Moudjahid, the central organ of the FLN from 1956 to 1962. Originally and intermittently published in Algiers in 1956, when the Battle of Algiers escalated and repression descended on the city it was necessary to move the paper to Tunis. From 1957 El Moudjahid could come out fortnightly in the space afforded by independent Tunisia.16 The FLN’s internal strife continued. As we have seen, in October 1956 Ahmed Ben Bella sought to broker a negotiation. With others from Morocco and Tunisia, he left his temporary home in Rabat. The plane, with a French pilot, was diverted to Algeria and leading exiled FLN members were arrested upon arrival in Algiers. They all passed the remaining years of the war in jail. This incident taught Algerians of the danger of being in ‘transit’. When Fanon made the journey to Tunisia in early 1957, he went through Switzerland and Italy. Tunis was a city of liberty. Though French intelligence – the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage (SDECE) – was busy in Tunisia, the FLN could move openly. The CNRA was based in Cairo, but the largest part of the FLN’s exiled apparatus was in Tunis. Political discussions could be had in cafes, not behind high walls or in hushed tones. But only 130 kilometres separated the country from areas of repeated confrontation between the ALN and the French army. Pierre and Claudine Chaulet were also forced to move to Tunis in December 1957, soon after Pierre’s release from prison. They vividly describe Fanon in Tunis: A brilliant talker, a charmer, adored using words from the medical and psychiatric lexicon to express a core meaning (such as ‘muscular vigilance’) – he seemed to have read everything – sometimes in a spin of words, taking lyrical flight, attentive to the reactions of his listeners, sometimes pushing reason to the point of paradox to provoke discussion. At the same time a disciplined militant, modest and accepting criticism of certain improper expressions or exaggerations.17

a revolutionary in tunis

His commitment to Algeria also tested Fanon professionally. He continued practising psychiatry in two hospitals while writing books and articles for the Algerian cause, but after 1956 he did not publish in French medical journals, preferring Tunisian and Moroccan ones. While a part of this decision was his increasing political output, it also reflected his political transformation. Life in Tunis was good for the Fanons. They could be themselves and practise their politics with little censorship and with the full force of their passions. Fanon was already an established psychiatrist, a force to be reckoned with in his field. He was published in the right journals and had impressive, though unorthodox, experience in Saint-Alban and Blida. He found work easily at the Hôpital de la Manouba, a public hospital just outside Tunis. The staff was mixed, with Jewish and Tunisian-Arab doctors. One doctor, Lucien Lévy, was a communist with whom Fanon became close. As in Blida, the hospital provided the family with accommodation. The hospital was not the avant-gardist institution where he had learned institutional psychiatry, but it was a therapeutic place; patients moved freely around the large grounds. But it also had elements of traditional incarceration, with patients locked up and effectively condemned to life terms. Fanon’s ideas met with immediate opposition from the unit’s director, a Tunisian Arab and, according to sources, a renowned racist and anti-Semite, with a background in the Tunisian nationalist movement. Now he had a black doctor – with a strong reputation and considerable self-confidence – on his staff. He saw Fanon’s proposed reforms as an insult to what he regarded as a well-organised hospital, not needing reform. Fanon could deal easily enough with this challenge, but would not be regarded as a worthless nègre. The issue illustrated a wider problem with colonial racism across the Maghreb and in Fanon’s work and activism in North Africa: the racial pyramid Fanon had seen during the war had not been dismantled. While Fanon did not face repeated hostility in Tunisia, he would have been aware of the racist gaze.18 When Fanon requested money for his projects, he was told there was none. Undeterred, he bypassed the administration and arranged to meet with the minister of health, an FLN sympathiser and a man of radical credentials. Extra funds were made available for Fanon to conduct occupational therapy. The incident displayed Fanon’s

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impressive tenacity: he could be both the intransigent revolutionary fighting for the FLN and the stubborn doctor securing funding for institutional reform.19 Fanon took up a second position at Hôpital Charles-Nicolle, where he was joined by Charles Géronimi, in addition to his responsibilities at El Moudjahid. The new position was in a small psychiatric unit attached to a large general hospital. Psychiatrists could access pharmacies and laboratories for processing studies and conducting trials, while working with specialists in a range of fields to ascertain any underlying organic conditions. This also meant that ‘madness’ could be incorporated into treatments of ‘normal’ sickness, breaking down the taboos of psychological collapse. For Fanon, who had worked in asylums, such small psychiatric units within general hospitals represented the future. Fanon and Géronimi continued to treat ALN fighters. Though these patients were not hurried through, patched up in secret and then rushed back to the maquis, as in Blida, there was still a degree of secrecy. Fighters were brought in quietly and assured that they were being treated by Algerian staff and sympathisers. However, one element changed completely: here Fanon was not required to treat the enemy. When Fanon spoke in December 1958 to the assembled delegates of the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana and detailed the torture of FLN fighters, he was telling the stories of those he had encountered in Tunis. One man referred to Fanon, a member of an ALN unit, had escaped a massacre by the French that had left 29 of his ‘brothers’ dead. He had to be handcuffed: he threatened to kill everyone present. Fanon treated him with drugs and after three days he was able to speak calmly. Others had been tortured with the notorious gégène and were haunted by recurring nightmares. Even if there exists a degree of myth about Fanon’s activities as a ‘liberator’ freeing patients of straitjackets and chains, he did instigate substantial reforms in Hôpital Charles-Nicolle. The walls separating ‘cells’ were knocked down, the unit was repainted and handles placed on both sides of the doors: doctors and staff could get in, but patients could also get out. Staff were retrained in the new methods. Fanon and Géronimi succeeded in treating a large number of patients; very few needed to be consigned to la Manouba.

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Fanon’s ideas about psychiatry also continued to develop and evolve in Tunisia. He became critical about the ‘institution’ of the hospital and started to work with an idea of an open hospital, a hôpital de jour, which would treat outpatients during ‘opening hours’ but who would return home afterwards. This approached pushed against his earlier enthusiastic embrace of ‘institutional psychotherapy’. These issues have been much discussed by writers and scholars.20 Hussein Bulhan, the principal writer on Fanon’s revolutionary psychiatry, notes that ‘after several years of intensive application of the institutional therapy inspired by Tosquelles, Fanon concluded that therapy is most meaningful and effective within the dialectic of concrete society’.21 In some senses this was a natural extension of Tosquelles’s attempt to make the asylum not a place of exception but a real or neo-society. Fanon now progressed further, as Bulhan argued in 1999, concluding that the ‘patient already rejected by society finds his or her rejection further confirmed in the institutional milieu. [. . .] Disillusioned with the repressive and custodial character of the psychiatric institutions, Fanon sought an alternative in day hospitalisation’.22 Alice Cherki argues that Fanon was trying to envisage psychiatric treatment in non-industrialised, poor and newly independent African countries as well as inside a liberated Algeria. What would mentalhealth facilities look like after independence? Not only did Fanon revisit his own training in ‘institutional psychotherapy’, he became less critical towards psychoanalysis and Freud. He read rare translated texts of Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian associate of Freud, from whom Ferenczi later split to develop a more active psychoanalytic practice. Cherki states that ‘it is evident that [Fanon] was not a psychoanalyst in 1952 [when he published Black Skin, White Masks ]. [Yet] in 1958 his position was more nuanced, and in his practice, he did not challenge the Oedipal complex’.23 Increasingly, Fanon used psychoanalytic methods with his own patients and, according to Cherki, even stated in private a desire to undergo psychoanalytic treatment himself after the war. Even so, there is little to suggest that Fanon would not still have defined psychopathology as he had in 1952: The neurotic structure of an individual is simply the elaboration, the formation, the eruption within the ego, of conflictual clusters arising in part out of the environment and in part out of the purely

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personal way in which that individual reacts to these influences. (BSWM 59)

However, what is clear is that Fanon was constantly changing his approach, responding to new circumstances and continually reviewing and adapting his therapeutic techniques. Perhaps, at the end of his life, Fanon was neither the intransigent anti-Freudian Macey has depicted nor inevitably moving towards psychoanalysis, as Cherki has written. He worked as a psychiatrist, not a psychoanalyst, even if his ideas had begun to change. David Macey writes that he was eager to reorient his patients to the ‘real world [but] not as a psychoanalyst intent upon recovering the unconscious urges of his fears’.24 Fanon did not set up strictures for psychiatric forms, understanding that he needed to use a variety of methods. He was still influenced by Tosquelles. For Fanon mental illness was an alienation from the real, a loss of freedom. To a large extent he still regarded it as deriving from a distorted dialectic between the ego and the world, not simply from subliminal sexual urges or the unconscious. His treatments were concrete and pragmatic, as the world was. His Algerian patients were sick because of the specific – and in most cases recent – traumas of torture, bombings, combat and war. Not only did a range of ‘illnesses’ spin out from unconscious urges, but these conditions emerged in reaction to concrete circumstances. As difficult as Fanon’s psychiatric project was, he sought to help the patient establish a healthier relationship with the world. In his writing for El Moudjahid, Fanon devoted himself to the work of the FLN and war propaganda. The paper was a strange beast, produced fortnightly, made up of reports and appeals with little actual reporting. It was sold widely in France and smuggled into Algeria. Chaulet explains the collective spirit that prevailed on the paper: Freedom of discussion was total within the editorial board. Each person took turns to speak on the proposed themes. [. . .] The reciprocal influence of one on another makes it difficult to discern a single influence: we shared the same analysis and we had the same objectives within the editorial board. Fanon was one of us, no more, and what we wrote was the result of a collective reflection.25

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Fanon was not a natural journalist. He did not type, instead dictating his articles to secretaries. He rarely carried out interviews or original research, but had an extraordinary gift for polemical and passionate prose that expressed the spirit of the revolution. Fanon is so often presented as a maverick, his work untamed and extreme, yet from his involvement with the paper and the FLN more generally a different picture emerges. As Chaulet observes, he was willing to accept criticism, bowed to collective discipline, wrote anonymously and accepted his responsibilities as an FLN member with humility. The paper was produced in Arabic and French under the editorship of Rédha Malek, who answered to Ahmed Boumendjel and M’hamed Yazid. They were senior and experienced activists. Fanon worked closely with them on the paper and then as part of the GPRA team attending the pan-African conference in Ghana. Yazid had worked in the New York office of the FLN, where he could appeal to the UN. Fluent in English, he was a cosmopolitan and able party member. Boumendjel had a long background in the Algerian nationalist movement. He was a Paris-educated lawyer and had previously worked with Messali. Both were hardened, committed FLN members, but also pragmatists. Boumendjel saw negotiations with the French as necessary. As well as being printed in two languages, French and Arabic, the paper had a very interesting distribution system. In Tunisia it was freely available. In Algiers it was naturally an underground paper, smuggled into the country through a network of militants. There were regular print-runs of 10,000, but the paper could only be read by a minority. Despite decades of French ‘civilisation’, by 1954, 95 per cent of women and 86 per cent of men could not read. Little accurate information circulated in the country; the press and radio were under the thumb of the pieds-noirs and the French. Buying a French paper like Le Monde or L’Express could cause problems for the reader. To conquer these problems, in 1956 the FLN began broadcasting The Voice of Fighting Algeria from Morocco. The French repeatedly attempted to sabotage the station’s signal, but never completely succeeded; it continued, intermittently and with notoriously bad signal quality. As we shall see, Fanon quickly recognised the importance of the radio – previously an alien and ‘colonial’ object for Algerians – as a technology that could deepen and strengthen

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commitment to the cause (see Chapter 5). Radio purchases increased by 30 per cent between 1954 and 1958, reflecting the new interest in the medium. The French, desperate to stem the flow of FLN propaganda, ended up banning the sale of radios.26 El Moudjahid was written anonymously and Fanon’s articles are difficult, though not impossible, to identify. Some Josie gathered posthumously and published in Towards the African Revolution. But the provenance of even these articles is the subject of some doubt. Pierre Chaulet explains the complications: Those are his articles in the book, though they were thought through collectively. I discussed events in the Caribbean with Fanon, but he did not want to speak of that region, so it was me who wrote the article [that appears in the posthumous volume].27

There were two central reasons for this anonymity. First, it protected the identities of the journalists, but there was also a wider political point. Since the paper, like the revolution, expressed the will of the people, its editors avoided any individual aggrandisement. Blazoned across the top of each issue, above the title, was La révolution par le peuple et pour le peuple (‘Revolution by the people and for the people’). The individual was subsumed into ‘the people’, and the revolution and newspaper were their natural expression. In Algeria the paper could raise consciousness about individual and national liberation; in New York, Paris and London it could be used to lobby politicians and intellectuals. From these activities, a glimpse of Fanon’s life during this period can be gleaned. His days, from early morning, were taken up with reorganising the unit and visiting the ward. Later in the day he would head to the offices of El Moudjahid and work with the same focus, returning several hours later to the unit to tend to his patients again. One patient recorded that Fanon, upon hearing that his patient was interested in painting, had bought him a book on Van Gogh. Fanon became an enthusiast of the man’s painting, encouraging him and suggesting changes to works in progress. Fanon’s momentary desire, during his time in Algeria, to fight expressed a craving to be directly useful. In 1952 he had written of the need to ‘to educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations

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his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world’.28 This continued to be central to his drive. His professional and political activism achieved a temporary synthesis in Tunis. Fanon was a revolutionary psychiatrist for the FLN, as his mentor Tosquelles had been for the POUM in the Spanish Civil War. The two were not opposed. Fanon’s relentless energy and ability to drive himself constantly onwards allowed him to pursue both.

The making of an Africanist Fanon was to a great extent schooled in this world of FLN politics – Abane’s world. He absorbed the party’s orientation to armed and popular struggle as a method, almost the method, that would rid the world of colonialism. The progress of the war had, in the words of la plate-forme de la Soummam, provoked a ‘psychological shock which has liberated the people from their torpor, their fear and from their scepticism’.29 These ideas (and words) became Fanon’s as he started to write about violence, oppression and revolution. Fanon also inherited from the FLN a deep scepticism towards the PCA – in fact he repeated the prejudices (and dishonesty) of its critique at Soummam almost word for word.30 But his own analysis had a distinct impact. In April 1958, at the First Conference of Independent African States in Accra, armed struggle was suggested as a tactic to defeat colonialism, but the conference refused to give full support to the armed struggle and urged France to negotiate with the ALN/FLN. Obviously Africa was correct to strive towards independence, but Africans had to do this, following Gandhi, by peaceful means. If the Algerian struggle had inspired and influenced his political thinking, Fanon also responded with theoretical and political elaboration of his own brilliance. He was a disciplined militant, but also a creative and critical one. He had a significant influence on the attitude of the All-African Peoples’ Conference, held in independent Ghana in December 1958, towards violence and armed struggle. This was a more militant conference than the one earlier in the year; it brought together activists and leaders of nationalist movements around the continent. Banners and placards decorated the walls of the main conference hall.

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Fanon spoke on 8 December, the opening day of the conference, using the name ‘Dr Omar Fanon’: If Africa is awakening it must not make apologies or entreaties. We must wrest by force what belongs to us. No African must regard himself as demobilised from the struggle so long as any foreign nation dominates any part of Africa. All forms of struggle must be adopted, not excluding violence.31

A violent riposte to colonial brutality across the world was necessary, he argued powerfully, as well as maintaining a commitment to nonviolence where possible. Fanon’s argument was that France’s defeat in some colonies – obviously Vietnam, as well as Morocco and Tunisia – had forced it to allow peaceful decolonisation elsewhere. The continuing war in Algeria meant that France could not launch other wars or fight protracted counter-insurgency campaigns in other African colonies.32 The continent’s forces of national liberation therefore owed Algeria a debt (and solidarity). The Algerian Revolution, then, was the storm-bird of a continental revolution. He proposed setting up an ‘African legion’ that would become a force for furthering the revolution. Fanon was doing two things, both subversive even in those heady days of liberation and decolonisation. First, he was stating that Algeria was intimately part of the continent south of the Sahara. Pre-colonial Algerian history bears this out, but for Fanon fraternity in the struggle against imperialism was what he believed really mattered.33 Second, real liberation could not come about within the confines of the nation state. The December conference took a bold step forward, away from the fudged and hesitant resolutions on violence earlier in the year in Accra. The conference marked a moment of pan-African jubilation. The battle cry was no longer simply ‘non-violence’ but also Fanon’s counter-violence of the oppressed. Colonialism would be defeated by ‘all forms of struggle’, by any means necessary.34 The effect was dramatic. Fanon had, no exaggeration, dominated and won the argument for armed and violent struggle. He was becoming the famously militant exponent of the politics of African unity and liberation. Algeria’s violent war for liberation, he believed, was the

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high point of the continent’s popular struggles for freedom. If the conference had been radicalised by Fanon’s contribution, Fanon had been transformed by his experience in Africa. The year was a high-water mark of continental unity – north and south of the Sahara. Though the Maghreb had a distinct cultural and political history, it was bound by the struggle against colonialism to a common future with sub-Saharan Africa. For Fanon, the conference posed another possibility: unity and meaningful pan-Africanism. Fanon became the greatest Algerian advocate of this unity as a real and concrete practice of support and solidarity to bring the entire continent together. In an effort shaped by his reading of the nebulous, sloganeering Negritude movement, he sought to breathe life into the idea of pan-Africanism. What did the concept really mean, beyond an abstract celebration of unity? How could it be made into a practical tool to defeat the ‘foreign nations’ still dominating parts of the continent and into a project for post-independence transformation, beyond the limitations of the nation state? Though Fanon’s ideas were still being forged by experience, his sense of exasperation and frustration was already present at the conference. Over the next two years this frustration deepened. At a conference in Accra in 1960, British academic Peter Worsely recorded his impressions of Fanon’s speech: ‘I found myself electrified by a contribution that was remarkable not only for its analytic power, but delivered, too, with a passion and brilliance that is all too rare.’35 During the speech, Worsely reported, the presenter appeared to become overwhelmed. Later Fanon explained that he suddenly felt overcome at the thought that he had to stand there, before the assembled representatives of African nationalist movements, to try and persuade them that the Algerian cause was important, at a time when men were dying and being tortured in his country for a cause whose justice ought to command automatic support from rational and progressive human beings.36

This was so typical of Fanon: the extraordinary power of his analysis, wedded to a frustration that he had to even make such an appeal among so-called comrades. Perhaps this anecdote points towards

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his complaint about an ‘absence of ideology’ among Africa’s new political leadership. Fanon returned briefly to Tunisia and then, at the end of March 1959, spoke at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome. The FLN had a secret presence in Rome, in offices provided by the Italian Communist Party. Fanon knew the city and did not like it. He was treated, as he was in most of Europe, first of all as a black man. The Congress was a cultural event, but inevitably infected by the momentous events taking place on the continent. Its themes were familiar to Fanon. Alioune Diop of Présence Africaine spoke of the ‘negro genius’ and the need to ‘de-Westernise’ Africa. When harmony and accord could be sought, Fanon craved discord and argument. Not for the sake of argument like a private school debater, but because he shunned intellectual dishonesty and insisted on clarity for the movement. Despite his appeal to pan-African liberation months earlier in Ghana, in Rome he spoke of national culture and the nation as a cultural unit. Liberation of the nation was a prerequisite for cultural development: a simple and stateless future for Africa was meaningless, dangerous child’s play. Africa must inevitably start as a continent of independent states, but not stop there. Colonisation dictated this course; an appeal to pan-Africanism without this precondition was ‘empty verbalism’.37 Fanon rejected the notion of an amorphous and universal black people and culture, based on an understanding of the important and distinct differences between national cultures – for example, between the art of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and that of Césaire and Senghor. Fanon was aware of the very distinct notions of Negritude in these writers. As David Macey has explained, Senghor’s poetry [. . .] very rapidly becomes a hymn to a mythical Africa, possibly pre-colonial Africa which is almost idyllic and it changes the African soul [. . . this is] appealing in a lot of ways but [. . .] you get a very idyllic, static portrait of Africa in which nothing changes. Whereas the West Indian, in Césaire it is much more to do with revolt and [. . .] the lasting memory of the slave culture.38

For national culture to develop a struggle for national liberation was indispensable. Fanon was a hardened realist as well as a passionate

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revolutionary. He detected a vacuous and empty call for African unity among both nationalist leaders and black writers and artists (in the African context, these were often the same people). Simply calling for unity delivered no practical assistance to the Algerian war; panAfricanism required something much more tangible and real. Fanon spoke of the literature de combat; although he did not speak about what was happening in Algeria, it could not be ignored. Fanon was no cultural philistine; quite the opposite. Though his days were taken up with clinical and political work, he spent evenings and leisure time, when he could, reading novels and plays and discussing art. The FLN had its ‘own’ artists, including a drama troupe based in Tunis, a theatre of action at the service of the FLN. When he was in Tunis Fanon attended every performance he could. Chaulet describes Fanon as giving the impression ‘of having read everything’. He did not want a literature de combat that simply parroted FLN edicts about courageous fighters. He believed that the struggle of culture and nation was a process of rebirth of a pre-existing Algerian state that had been present before the 1830 invasion. Algeria was not a creation of the enterprise and ingenuity of the French; rather, its real trajectory had been negated by French colonialism. Fanon believed deeply that anti-colonial revolutions could be timed, their ‘insurrections’ set following the processes laid out in Algeria. The original title, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, had a dual meaning: both the actual length of the revolution, from its start in 1954 to the publication of the book in 1959, and the start of a new calendar, as the French revolution had reset the clock in 1792, with 1954 as year zero. Fanon was a brilliant (and problematic) proponent of the Algerian model. Nowhere was this clearer than in his relationship to the struggles against Portuguese colonialism.39 In Rome he met representatives of the national liberation movements from Angola, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) and the União das Populações de Angola (UPA). With the MPLA Fanon discussed the possibility of launching an armed struggle, arguing that opening another front on the continent would help the ALN and accelerate liberation in Angola itself. Much of this reasoning is commendable. It was Fanon’s belief that a continentwide anti-imperialist struggle could defeat the Hydra-headed colonial

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beast in an ever-widening process across many countries. Fanon proposed that the FLN could train MPLA militants in its Tunisian and Moroccan camps. The MPLA was in broad agreement. Amílcar Cabral, a co-founder of the MPLA and leader of the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), fighting the Portuguese in Guinea and Cape Verde, would be charged with contacting suitable recruits inside Angola. Fanon was impatient when he heard in early 1960 that little progress had been made and that the Portuguese had tightened repression in the light of the timetable to independence in the neighbouring Congo. For Fanon, the central thing was to get started. The MPLA replied that they needed more time. The MPLA argued for an organised and coordinated movement that would include urban areas, while Fanon demurred and pointed to the peasantry and countryside. Basil Davidson, the great historian of the decolonisation of Portuguese Africa, tells of Cabral’s encounter with Fanon: ‘Fanon urged both the MPLA [. . .] and the PAIGC [. . .] simply “to begin” their armed struggle. If they would only set aside all further delay and begin, the peasants would rally and insurrection would irresistibly widen almost by itself.’40 Fanon did not leave a good impression. Under Fanon’s instructions, the GPRA offered instead to help Holden Roberto’s UPA, who seemed more ready to start the ‘insurrection’. Ferhat Abbas, too, gave the UPA – a murky organisation, to say the least – the status of a provisional government: quite a coup for Roberto. Fanon could see that UPA cadre, and Roberto in particular, were weaker than the MPLA, but the UPA had declared their willingness to ‘get started’. Fanon remained suspicious of the MPLA’s apparent urban bias. The plan went ahead: the FLN trained and armed some of Roberto’s men. On 15 March 1960, Roberto’s UPA crossed from the Congo to northern Angola to launch the insurrection and were plunged into chaos. They were unprepared. No one knew what they wanted or who they were. There were no bases. Though Roberto spoke the language of a national struggle, his forces did not; they were badly trained and regionally biased. The struggle was brutal and disorganised, with little support, and faced vicious repression by the Portuguese and settler militias. Thousands of Angolans in the north were hunted down. Anyone with any education became a target. As many as 20,000 were killed.

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Much of the MPLA cadre was also massacred, only regrouping under Agostinho Neto after 1962. The UPA’s ‘insurrection’ had been a disaster – and Fanon had played a role in its failure. His evangelical faith in the Algerian model had been a catastrophe; nothing could be ‘voluntaristically’ replicated without sufficient knowledge of the real facts and local circumstances. As Davidson wrote, reflecting on these events in 1986: Disaster accordingly followed. Cabral and the PAIGC, for their part, were well advanced with their plans but were still not ready for insurrection; they blankly refused ‘to begin’ and were roundly insulted for thus having minds of their own.41

While there is much to distinguish Fanon from Che Guevara –Fanon’s understanding of revolutionary transformation, his sophisticated grasp of national liberation – in this experience, this naive belief in the armed struggle, if not otherwise, the two men were remarkably and tragically similar. Guevara’s doomed and tragic, though courageous, attempts to export the Cuban model to the Congo in 1965 and Bolivia in 1967 made the same mistakes as Fanon.42 Fanon would not have subscribed to Guevara’s belief that it was the duty of a revolutionary to make revolution, which become a rallying cry of ‘true’ revolutionaries in 1960s and 1970s, but he did slip disastrously into a similar dangerous voluntarism, seeing action and armed revolutionary struggle as a simple act of will. While Guevara celebrated small bands of guerrilla fights, however, Fanon saw mass involvement of ordinary people essential for making the revolution and remaking – recerebralising – the people themselves. Revolution as an act of self-emancipation resides deeply in Fanon’s revolutionary thinking, but is not present in any meaningful sense in Guevara’s writing or practice.43

Fanon and the French left Fanon used the pages of El Moudjahid to attack and challenge the French left. His hostility towards white Europeans deepened. A clue to the reason for this attitude can be found in a 1957 article: ‘Certain French democrats are at times shocked by the sincerity of the [. . .] Algerian fighter. This is because the total character of the war

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that we wage has a repercussion on the no-less-radical manner in which we conduct individual exchanges’ (TAR 97). One white journalist sought him out in Tunis only to be lashed by Fanon’s sharp tongue; only when the reporter had been won over by a political argument would Fanon trust his European interlocutor. This can perhaps be explained by Fanon’s anger at French leftists, whom he believed should have been natural allies of the armed struggle and the Algerian Revolution – but who so often were not. That they were in most cases critical of the FLN frustrated and angered Fanon, who considered himself part of the left. He grew angry because he cared. His stinging polemics were an indication of how much. Fanon’s three-part polemical analysis of the left is worth considering. First, he charts the development of French solidarity. The first rumblings of discontent in the colonies prior to the armed struggle elicit support and solidarity from ‘democrats’ in the colonised countries. The responsibility of the left is clear: ‘One of the first duties of intellectuals and democratic elements in colonialist countries is unreservedly to support the national aspirations of colonised people’ (TAR 76). But the isolation (and sectarianism) of the left prevent a wider campaign to explain the situation, and this ‘pseudo-solidarity is very quickly swept away by events’ (TAR 77). As the struggle for independence in the colony advances and radicalises, solidarity begins to fragment. The people ‘take it for granted that existing, in the biological sense of the word, and existing as a sovereign people are synonymous’ (TAR 78). Confusion replaces liberal condemnation of colonial excesses. The stakes are now raised. Now solidarity and condemnation demand something more: French leftists’ support for the national liberation movement can only proceed in tandem with condemnation of their own colonial state. The left intelligentsia in France, Fanon argued, failed this challenge, caving in to liberal denunciations of ‘terrorism’ and ‘bombing’. With the bombings and attacks on ‘civilians’, ‘the entire French left, in a unanimous outburst, cried out: we can no longer follow you’ (TAR 79). In the deepening crisis and war there was no neutrality, no innocent Frenchman or woman in Algeria, Fanon argued in the second article. ‘Every Frenchman in Algeria at the present time is an enemy soldier. So long as Algeria is not independent, this logical consequence must be accepted’ (TAR 81). The war for liberation, contrary to the wishes of the left and democrats, is not seeking ‘reform’, ‘but the grandiose effort

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of a people which has been mummified to rediscover its own genius’ (TAR 84). One of the reasons why the French left, intellectuals, parties and progressive groups have failed, Fanon writes, is the distinctive nature of colonialism in Algeria. French colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa, is based on a right to property, whereas in Algeria, from the beginning, relations of identity were affirmed. [...] Africa south of the Sahara may have been decreed French territory but never was it decreed that Africa south of the Sahara was France. (TAR 84)

The consequence of these ‘relations of identity’ has meant that French democrats have adapted their attitude to these ideas. Speaking in Paris on 17 March 1957, the PCF’s Laurent Casanova, challenged the party’s lamentable position on Algeria, arguing that the audience must take into account the ‘spontaneous attitude of the French popular masses on the question’ (TAR 85). The third article argues that Casanova’s position is a prison for the left as much as for the country. ‘France finds herself a prisoner of her conquest and incapable of detaching herself from it [. . .] of making a fresh start’ (TAR 90). Fanon was correct but harsh. His generalisations on these questions were frequently wide of the mark. The left offered significant and widespread solidarity and political support and active involvement in ideological debates during the revolution. These important, though fringe, militants often came from the anti-Stalinist left, from small left-wing and Trotskyist groups. Despite their size, their contribution was significant. (An important book, Les Camarades des Frères, explores this ‘hidden’ history, in which marginal left-wing groups outside the SFIO and PCF gave vital and wide-ranging solidarity to the Algerians.) Fanon concluded the third article with an acknowledgment of some of this support: The FLN salutes the French who have had the courage to refuse to take up arms against the Algerian people. [. . .] These examples must be multiplied in order that it may become clear to everyone [. . .] that the French people refuse this war. (TAR 90)

Fanon knew individuals who were members of these groups and would have had an interest and knowledge of their work. He was also

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sympathetic to the anti-Stalinist left. So why was he so hostile in these articles and to European journalists and sympathisers? One reason is his style; his writing was polemical and involved a degree of stick-bending. He wrote in great strokes and broad generalisations about the French left and ‘democratic’ intelligentsia. He sought to expose them – and the large and influential organisations of the left – because he hoped that they would come to their senses: support for the Algerian Revolution was, to him, so clearly a requirement for any self-regarding socialist. His anger was great and his indignation severe when this did not happen. It was towards this left that he targeted his justified fury. The first four years of the war had been conducted by governments of the left. The Fourth Republic was a messy series of coalitions and governments, but Mollet, Mitterrand and Pierre Mendès-France were not right-wingers. (Mendès-France was a prominent left-wing politician of the period, leader of the Parti Radicale and prime minister in 1954. He served Guy Mollet’s government in 1956 as minister of state, but resigned over the war in Algeria.) No opposition came from the democratic left in Parliament; indeed, they had sided with the enemy. Between the official pronouncements of the SFIO and the PCF, there was not much to choose. It was for Fanon to spread the word about the ‘Algerian people’s struggle’, calling on the French left to support the revolution with his 1959 book. The official French left were a wretched bunch who had betrayed their responsibility to Algeria. However, Fanon’s style, his gift for polemics, was also a weakness, one Pierre Chaulet argues flowed from his celebrated strengths. Chaulet posits that Fanon’s force ‘as a psychiatrist, philosopher and poet more than political thinker, gave a particular breath to his dazzling prophetic statements and even his errors’.44 The generality of his statements gave them enormous power, but also a tendency towards broad and problematic interpretation. Fanon cast many allies into the wrong camps. In a settler-colony, he argued, the French military police and civilian populations shared complicity. The choice was between active or tacit involvement in the war on the side of the colony and commitment to the FLN and independence. Neutrality was a sham. Fanon condemned both noncommunist leftists, who worried that a free Algeria would fall into the hands of the Soviets or the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (Americans), and the Communist Party, which feared the influence of the

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Algerians, which would hinder Soviet advances after the country’s independence and damage the possibility of an alliance between France and Algeria. Fanon was not making an argument against the French working class, but appealing for solidarity and strike action: The FLN addresses itself to the French left [. . .] and asks them to encourage every strike undertaken by the French people against the rise in the cost of living, new taxes, the restrictions in democratic freedoms in France, all of which are a direct consequence of the Algerian war. (TAR 100)

He rejected some French leftists’ lazy formulation that there was an immediate and obvious connection between the metropolitan working class and the Algerian Revolution. This position was often used by those who sought compromise and a negotiated solution rather than the revolution and full independence. For Fanon, the connection was more complex. Colonisation was a totalising system of military occupation and oppression by a foreign state, ‘the organisation of the domination of a nation after military conquest’ (TAR 93–4). French workers had to recognise this reality. How could they hope to break their own chains without pulling aside the colonial mask and fighting the repression being carried out against Algerians in their name? The two peoples were linked, but not in a simple symmetry. The Algerians might achieve national liberation without the help of the French working class, but the French could not hope to cast off their own oppression without damning their racist state. Here Fanon is making an argument similar to Marx’s statement that ‘any people that oppresses another forges its own chains’.45 For Marx, any working class that could not cast aside the imperialism of its own ruling class, its own nation, was doomed to share the ‘common’ interests of the bourgeoisie. As we have seen, for Fanon, racism and colonisation – and the ideas of superiority and inferiority underpinning them – trapped the racists, denying and limiting their own humanity as much as that of the colonised and the victims of racism. Fanon’s articles were an attempt at consciousness raising. They were not abstract. There were signs of resistance: the gradual unpopularity of the war, desertions. Such resistance would, Fanon

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believed, start to unravel the system of exploitation in the north, but only once the European working class stopped playing its ‘game of Sleeping Beauty’ (WE 62). This is similar to another argument Marx made – that only in the field of revolutionary action, – in an alliance with European workers and non-European peoples, – can true liberation be sought. He wrote of the working class during the ‘national democratic’ revolution in Germany in 1848: ‘Their battle cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.’46 As we have seen, Fanon was disappointed and angered that what should have been obvious to the leading French left parties – supporting the Algerian cause and fighting colonialism – was fudged and confused, often turning into its opposite. The PCF, a peculiar organisation, had seriously tried to recruit Algerian trade unionists, pulling many into unions and factory activity. For five years the party even produced a monthly paper on Algerian issues, L’Algérien en France. But the party had strayed from its Bolshevik roots, with its emphasis on support for national liberation movements as the sine qua non of communist movements and politics. Now it argued that only the working-class movement achieving socialism in Europe could deliver freedom to Algerians. Algeria might win independence, but political and socialist leadership would come from the unionised, politically mature French working class. As the PCF was subordinated to the dictates and policy changes of Moscow, so the Algerian people must follow the lead of advanced workers in France. There was a crude ‘stagism’ to these arguments that reflected the poisonous role the Soviet Union played in the global communist movement. For the PCF, this position also represented concessions to the entire French republican-nationalist tradition. The idea that a proletarian minority, with peasant support, could lead the struggle for a democratic and socialist revolution in the colonies had become heresy. The ‘popular front’ had been replaced after 1945 with a fear of US imperialism, from which French colonies and interests had to be defended. Algeria could not be left to its own devices. These narrow, nationalist arguments from the largest left-wing, nominally revolutionary party, with deputies in the Assemblée Nationale, was a long way from Fanon’s insistence that the democratic left must renounce ‘its own nation’. The German revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht stated this principle brilliantly in 1915:

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The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.47

The PCF spoke bombastically, even after 1956, of the Algerian nation ‘in formation’ with its mix of Arabs, Berbers and settlers, from which a new Algeria would emerge. Any ‘nationalist’ movement in Algeria, therefore, must respect French-Algerians. This argument painted Algerian revolutionaries as either misguided nationalists or terrorists and agents provocateurs. The party encouraged members to serve, despite the growing movement of those resisting conscription,48 and swiftly expelled anyone identified as part of Jeanson’s network (called porteurs de valise for their suitcases full of FLN money and ammunition). However, the PCF press, particularly L’Humanité, condemned French military terror and individual activists denounced conscription and mobilised against torture and murder.49 When non-PCF leftists denounced the war, they frequently echoed the PCF’s liberal republicanism, calling for ‘peace’ and insisting that violence on both sides must end. The ignorance among prominent left intellectuals, such as Simone de Beauvoir, about conditions in Algeria was shocking. Claude Lanzmann, a French journalist, filmmaker and left activist, writes with disarming honesty of a trip he made with de Beauvoir to Algeria in 1954, months before the November insurrection: ‘Our innocence, our stubbornness, our tourists’ obsession with the beauty of the desert [. . .] Our interests were inexcusably folkloric. [. . .] It took me years to let go of stereotypes, to reconcile myself to the reality, the complexity of the world.’50 There were, however, European porteurs de valise and intellectuals, notably Jeanson and Guérin, who stood fully behind the FLN and criticised the left’s betrayal vehemently. While Trotskyist parties and intellectuals in France were not absent, they were marginal to France’s political left. The war was, to a significant degree, crafted around the failures and absence of a revolutionary left in Algeria and France. There could have been a nationalist liberation movement with a very different character and trajectory – but given the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the

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rise of Stalinism, the support of the popular front and French republicanism these possibilities were largely snuffed out. In early 1956 the newly formed Comité d’Action des Intellectuels Contre la Poursuite de la Guerre en Algérie organised a meeting in Paris.51 Though the meeting’s speakers displayed a degree of ignorance about Algeria, they gathered important and prominent intellectuals, including Aimé Césaire, Jean Amrouche and Jean-Paul Sartre. However, speakers, including Daniel Guérin, were pressured not to speak on the history of the Algerian independence movement. Clearly the organisers feared that mentioning Messali Hadj would upset the FLN. Nine-tenths of those in attendance were MNA sympathisers – as Birchall writes, ‘Algerian workers in their workclothes.’52 Sartre accused Guérin of ‘packing the hall’. True to form, Guérin ignored instructions and spoke extensively on Hadj’s historical role, without mentioning the MNA or the FLN.53 Sartre’s speech demolished any illusions about France’s civilising mission. Colonialism was racist and exploitative to the core, with settlers and the French state claiming monopoly control of Algerian wealth. This system, Sartre maintained, could not be reformed. As he wrote later that year, ‘The only thing that we can and must attempt – it is essential today – is to struggle (at the side of the Algerians) in order to deliver both Algerians and Frenchmen from colonial tyranny.’54 The French too, as individuals and as a society, needed to be decolonised. This was the first public statement Sartre made against the war. He would become France’s most prominent and uncompromising supporter of the revolution and the FLN, a public enemy, hated by politicians, the pieds-noirs and ‘respectable’ republican opinion. Many wanted him dead. It was Sartre’s most courageous moment.55 When Paris-based intellectuals and organisations condemned ‘torture’, Fanon was not always wholehearted in his approval.56 Torture was, of course, an indispensable tool used by the coloniser; it pulled in and corrupted French soldiers – professional military and conscripts alike – but Fanon also identified and attacked certain liberal illusions: that torture was an aberration, an evil distorting the morality of the French and the traditions of republicanism. This thinking, Fanon maintained, still failed to break with illusions of French justice and civilisation, which he rejected wholesale, writing of

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‘the egocentric, sociocentric form of thought that has become the characteristic of the French’.57 What about the Algerian victims? The women being raped? The villages torched and brutalised? These ‘concerned’ denunciations of violence and torture perpetuated colonial images of the faceless Algerians, their subjecthood obliterated by the French. Fanon argued that torture represented the regular functioning of colonialism, not an unusual or exceptional phenomenon. There was also a tendency, he noted, to reduce the collective revolution to narratives of personal heroism and courage. (He returned to these themes in his 1959 book.) Was Fanon too harsh? After all, condemning the war immediately cast these French critics of the war as enemies of the people and put them at considerable risk of physical harm or a lengthy prison sentence for sedition. Were they not bringing important pressure to bear on the French state? Fanon expected more: while in France in 1957, he ‘wished for a large movement of popular solidarity that he did not meet’.58 The left had to break out of the narrow frame of colonial and republican thinking, support the revolution unequivocally and condemn torture as a natural outgrowth of French colonialism and for the devastation it caused Algerians. Fanon knew better than the Paris intelligentsia (and almost anyone else) what torture meant for the torturers, who would be distorted and traumatised for the rest of their lives, as well as for their Algerian victims.59

Fanon and the FLN Meanwhile Fanon became extremely close again to Abane, who had made his way to Tunis by mid-1957. The men were natural allies; they shared a similar determined (intransigent, even) character. They had a similar capacity for hard work and shunned ‘ephemeral’ privileges and distractions. Fundamentally, they both saw Algeria’s independence as the single most pressing goal, which meant no negotiations with the French. With unwavering determination, they fixed their eyes on the prize. They were close not just because of a similar bent of character and symmetrical intensity of focus, but because they shared an ideological perspective. Cherki explains that Fanon felt close to Abane, both ideologically and personally, and Abane’s tragic death touched him deeply. ‘After Fanon’s death, Josie came across an empty

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black binder which had belonged to Abane. Fanon had kept it stashed away with Sartre’s letters.’60 Abane shared an understanding that the Algerian break with colonialism signalled a new human connection between certain Europeans and Jews of Algeria and the Algerian nation. Abane, unlike many of his FLN brothers, took seriously the question of the type of society that would issue from independence, decrying the creation of the ‘power founded on the army’, already visible in exile with the creation of innumerable ALN colonels and ‘potentates’. In 1980 Ferhat Abbas recalled Abane’s condemnation of the military: They imagine that they have the right of life or death over the population they command. They are the negation of freedom and democracy that we want to install in an independent Algeria. I do not work for this future.61

For many exiled leaders, though, independence was all that counted. Abdelhafid Boussouf, born in 1926, had joined the PPA as a young man. From 1954 he became an important member of the FLN, rising to colonel as chief of the ALN’s wilaya V in 1956. He came to represent the predominance of the military wing of the FLN, but only once certain inconvenient figures were removed. Fanon and Abane regarded him as a threat to a meaningful independence. The French historian of the Algerian war Gilbert Meynier describes him as a ‘brutal bureaucrat’.62 Boussouf’s thinking stopped, Fanon explained, at the idea of an independent Algeria and the quarrels over power; as for knowing what this Algeria will be like, they do not seem to have any remedy. Notions of secularism, of socialism or even a conception of man are strange to them.63

Safia Bazi, a young high school student who joined the maquis in 1956, described how radically the motivations of those she fought with differed: ‘Independence without any other political vision for some, the transformation of society for others; and finally for even some the defence of Islam was the primary motivation.’64 As it was in many ways the quintessential popular front, we should not be surprised that the FLN housed such a potpourri of opinions.

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Abane was ferocious and unpopular in many circles. He was unapologetic about the defeat in Algiers, for which some regarded him as responsible. He made his arguments loudly and publicly. He condemned, in colourful terms, ‘betrayal’ and was scathing about compromise. Abane did not get on with Boussouf and Belkacem and argued that Ben Bella was a dictator in the wings, too close to Nasser. The FLN presented a picture of the national cause with itself cast as indivisible national guardian and champion. Not by accident El Moudjahid was produced by anonymous journalists. This equated the people with the FLN, as we have seen. These illusions of unity – clear for all to see in the MNA/FLN violence and the serious divisions in the FLN itself – were a common phenomenon in nationalist movements up and down the continent during the period of decolonisation. If the objective of the war was liberation and independence for the Algerian people – and little else – then there could be no division amongst the people. The revolution was being conducted to secure ‘national freedom’, not as a project of class or social emancipation from capitalism. The FLN, as the self-appointed vector of this liberation, presented the cause as permanently united and ruthlessly smashed divisions and disagreements. This ruthlessness and the FLN’s nationalism were two sides of the same coin; they were not unique to Algerian decolonisation.65 On 29 May 1957, near Mélouza in the far south of Kabylie, the French army announced that it had found 315 dead bodies. Minister Lacoste was quick to send in reporters and photographers. This, he said, was evidence of FLN brutality. Le Monde was reporting evidence of FLN complicity. Fanon, who had just been made an official spokesperson, issued a statement denying the FLN’s responsibility and placing the blame on the French, who, as was increasingly being documented and reported, were guilty of savage attacks on villages. Villagers suspected of ‘terrorism’ were rounded up and killed. Fanon declared that the French were using the massacre to stigmatise the FLN in world opinion; none of its members had been involved. It was not true. Thirty years later, Colonel Mohammed Saïd explained publicly in Algeria that he had instructed his troops to carry out the massacre, with the FLN’s knowledge. An MNA unit had been practically obliterated by the FLN in May 1957, and a small number of survivors had found their way to Mélouza and the surrounding area,

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where they had some support. When Saïd caught up with them, he ordered the murder of the remaining MNA members and any supporters. Male villagers were ordered out of their houses and murdered in the street with knives and small axes, according to Le Monde.66 The revelation caused many to question the FLN’s conduct in the war.67 Did Fanon know of these atrocities? According to Cherki, Mélouza was Fanon’s first ‘lesson’ in the ugly nature of the national liberation war.68 If he knew, it would have been impossible and also inappropriate for him to denounce it, though he wrote The Wretched of the Earth as a cri de cœur and a warning about the limits (famously mésaventures, or pitfalls) of the national revolutionary struggle. Though we can only speculate, Mélouza is likely to have weighed on him. Truth, he notes, cannot exist in the colonial context. Truth is whatever assures the further dislodging of the occupying force and foreigner – but the conduct of the war Fanon supported did impinge on the nature of the post-colonial regime. In the actions of the FLN resided the germ of post-independence degeneration and decay. Fanon knew this. He was an extraordinarily sophisticated thinker, and in his classic and final book he saw the dangers of the parties of national liberation equating themselves with the nation. But there is a vivid tension that sits at the heart of nationalist movements across their different phases, irrespective of their distinct characters. No matter what aspect national liberation took, whatever the level of self-critique or reflection or how liberation was achieved – through negotiation or armed struggle – the subsequent degeneration was the same. In the best cases, the fluid and seemingly radical structures of national liberation movements further hardened after independence in the 1960s and 1970s into Stalinised one-party states, even if the trajectory was as ‘darlings of the non-aligned movements’.69 As we shall see, questions of the nature of the post-independence state and the class of leaders who would divide up the spoils nagged at Fanon in his last book. By May 1958, the FLN was fraught with internal division. El Moudjahid announced on 29 May that ‘Abane Ramdane is dead on the field of honour’,70 reporting that after a difficult and important mission inside Algeria, Abane had sustained grave injuries ‘during

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the course of an engagement between a unit of the ALN [. . .] and a motorised group of the French army’ and had died. After a few lines of biographical information, the eulogy concludes with the words, ‘The FLN has lost one of its best organisers and one of a fighting Algeria’s most valiant children.’71 This was a lie. The truth was much more sordid. Abane had already been dead for several months. He probably was murdered at the end of December 1957 in Tétouan, Morocco, having fallen into a trap set by Boussouf. Abane was taken to a farm, ordered out of the car and then strangled with a piece of rope. Abane’s death was the result of a long-standing political conflict. The outspoken and radical advocate of the urban struggle and the Battle of Algiers was deemed an obstacle to Algerian independence by a group of exiled FLN leaders. These differences reached a decisive point in the CNRA meeting in Egypt in August 1957, in which the external leadership won priority over the internal struggle and resolved to aim at a ‘social Algerian republic’ as long as it did not contradict the principles of Islam – the opposite of what the Abane-dominated Soummam Conference had decided. Abane lost the fight, but refused to shut up. These were old arguments that centred on conflicts between the internal and external leadership of the revolution, the relationship between politics and military and even the notion of the ‘war’ as a revolution. Real power now shifted to the military and the war’s numerous colonels. Soummam, and its Jacobin project of a political and social republic with a radicalising Algerian people at its centre, was broken. Abane was defeated but not yet silenced. He was still a boisterous and vocal critic of the party’s new line, even if his guns had been spiked by the collapse of his urban strategy in March 1957. His murder decapitated ‘the greatest political head of the FLN’; between this and the murder of his collaborator Ben M’hidi by the French in Algiers, the path was now clear.72 Although El Moudjahid lied about Abane’s death, the staff would have known about the murder. Fanon remained silent. This was not cowardice; he had no choice. The new leadership had reportedly drawn up a list of other dissidents who would be assassinated if there was any ‘reaction’ to Abane’s death. Fanon’s name was reportedly on the list.73 This was his second lesson in national liberation. The Wretched of the Earth would become the synthesis of these events.

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The FLN’s internecine war affected Fanon deeply, even as he became more involved in its activities. The learning curve was sharp. But there was also a degree of pragmatism: the war needed to be fought, despite ‘grave’ divisions and errors – according to Chaulet, who expressed these concerns in an interview in 2010: We knew well that the day after independence was going to be difficult, but our problem at the time was the hope that we would even get there alive. Understand that this could not be taken for granted. In the end, we were scared that Algeria would be dismantled, comparable to what was inflicted on the ex-Belgian Congo. The struggle for power did not directly concern us, even though we got a taste of these ambitions and methods with the elimination of Abane. We knew also that this was part of the history of revolutions and human history in general. But this does not prevent the struggle for independence from proceeding and being fundamentally just.74

We can imagine that Fanon’s own thinking at the time would have followed these ‘pragmatic’ lines. Cherki explains similar thinking. While Abane’s murder was a significant milestone in Fanon’s political development, a sort of rite of passage, these ‘political deceptions and worries’ were to be held privately and discussed in private: ‘Publicly Fanon did not disassociate himself from the struggle for Algerian liberation, to which he was profoundly attached.’75 In his articles he privileged the unity of the Algerian people, beyond political manoeuvring. Along with the editorial team at El Moudjahid, he celebrated the role of the FLN and denied the internal divisions. He also denounced theories ‘explaining the Algerian struggle as the manipulation of Egypt or the communist world’.76 Both Chaulet and Cherki saw in Fanon an intransigent and disciplined militant, committed to the cause; though often mistaken, he searched in FLN leaders for revolutionary virtues that he more and more tried to identify and personify in himself. Towards the end of his life, Fanon told Simone de Beauvoir that he had two murders on his conscience: Patrice Lumumba’s and Ramdane Abane’s.77 What could he have done in either case? The statement was clearly meant symbolically. With Abane, whom he knew, he could

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conceivably have helped – he could perhaps have protected or warned his Algerian mentor if he had heard of the plot to kill him. But this would have been difficult. Though Fanon was entirely committed to the Algerian cause and had become a forthright and occasionally sectarian advocate of the FLN’s war against the Messalists, he was still a doctor working in a hospital, conducting clinical trials and introducing innovative reforms. Not until 1959 did he give up his beloved psychiatry to work full time for the GPRA. Until then, Fanon’s direct work with the FLN was his contribution to the paper and his work as a spokesperson. He could argue and speak clearly and with style, could propagandise with his tongue. He was a talented writer (even if he dictated all of his writing while pacing the room). His words came into the world as action, not slow pondering over pen and paper. Fanon’s participation in the All-African Peoples’ Conference thrust him deeper still into the revolution and turned ‘Dr Omar Fanon’ into a tribune of radical pan-Africanism and armed struggle. Fanon became the loud-hailer of the Algerian Revolution.

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Year Five of the Algerian Revolution

Over the next two years, Fanon plunged himself deeper into the work of the FLN, taking a break from his psychiatric work at the end of 1959 to concentrate on his new position as ambassador to Africa for the provisional Algerian government (GPRA) based in Ghana. In 1958 he wrote his second major book, Year Five of the Algerian Revolution (published in English and hereafter referred to as Studies in a Dying Colonialism, SDC), which sought to describe to a larger audience the profound changes taking place in Algeria. The book was also intended as a sustained engagement with the French left – an attempt to shake it from its complacency and lethargy and wake the continental working class from its ‘game of Sleeping Beauty’ so it could join forces with the Algerian people.

Coup and rebellion: The GPRA and the Fifth Republic In January 1958, France bombed a Tunisian base and hit the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, killing 70 civilians. The bombing was widely condemned and caused a crisis in domestic French politics, which led to the government falling on 15 April. In France a new coalition 136

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government was briefly headed by Prime Minister Pierre Pflimlin. But it was events in Algeria that determined politics in Paris. Tension escalated inside Algeria, as pieds-noirs militants feared being sold out. Lacoste fled Algiers. General Jacques Massu seized power in Algiers on 13 May, while General Raoul Salan assumed leadership of a Committee of Public Safety, assuming all power over the civil authorities. The Committee declared French Algeria’s protection as its sole concern. Algeria was in blatant rebellion. Salan declared that General Charles de Gaulle must return to power; to execute this demand, Algeria was prepared to send paratroopers to Paris. Civil war looked like a reality. Finally, prayers were answered. On 27 May, de Gaulle formed a republican government, promising unity and strength and the independence of France. The Assemblée Nationale gave him full powers for six months as premier. The FLN were split. Some thought he could be the answer; others saw him as the arch-defender of the pieds-noirs. Among the pieds-noirs he was heralded as a saviour. He left for Algiers almost immediately and addressed jubilant crowds. He promised a referendum and voting in a ‘single college’, not something that interrupted the celebrations – voting with the Muslim population was certainly not what the pieds-noirs had in mind, but for now their minds were elsewhere. In his tour of Algeria, he used the potent phrase Algérie-Française only once.1 Despite some dissension in the FLN about de Gaulle’s arrival, the war escalated. The FLN now ordered a campaign in Paris: attacks on police stations, assassinations, bombs planted in oil refineries, the police machine-gunned in the streets. In the summer of 1958 there were more than 50 sabotage attacks and 200 gun attacks. There were no civilian attacks as there were in Algeria; neither métros nor cafés were bombed. France was a site of political power, but also a source of revenues for the Front. The police repression was predictable. Thousands of Algerians or North Africans were arrested and held in the Vélodrome d’Hiver (a stadium the occupying Nazis had used as a holding bay for French Jews in 1942 before deporting them to concentration camps). The Algerians were then frequently deported ‘home’ – to camps in the Sahara. In the September 1958 referendum de Gaulle received a ‘yes’ vote for a Fifth Republic and a new constitution giving the president great powers. De Gaulle’s offer to the African colonies of a French

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community with ‘internal governance’ also prevailed and was almost unanimously accepted by France’s West African colonies. El Moudjahid was scathing: Once more French colonialism closes all doors. In place of inviting the authentic representatives of the people that it dominates, to a constructive discussion to lead to the end of the colonial pact and the recognition of national sovereignty [. . .] it perpetuates the cycle of lies, terror, war.2

De Gaulle, buoyed by his victory, returned to Algeria in October, but now his tone was different. He spoke of reforms, land distribution, developing the Sahara’s oil and gas reserves and narrowing the gulf between Algerian communities. He spoke of Algeria and France, not Algérie-Française. De Gaulle also spoke of the GPRA and the ALN, stating that they could meet with military leaders or French embassy officials in Tunis or Cairo. This was not an offer of peace, rather an insistence on surrender, but it was still not the script the pieds-noirs expected. Naturally, the FLN refused. But de Gaulle was acknowledging the ALN and FLN as organisations, not terrorists – which French propaganda had labelled them since the start of the war – but as real adversaries. Without the founding leadership of the FLN – decapitated with the arrests in 1956 – the CCE (Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution) and CNRA were enlarged; together they authorised the establishment of the GPRA on 19 September 1958. El Moudjahid insisted that the GPRA spoke for the entire Algerian nation.3 No newly formed government had ever been recognised so quickly; before the end of the day the new Provisional Government had been recognised by Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen and a host of other countries. By 1960, the year many sub-Saharan African countries became independent, 19 states, mostly Third World countries, had granted de jure recognition to the GPRA, including China, Malaysia, North Vietnam, Lebanon, and all the states of the Arab League.4 This recognition gave the national liberation movement freedom to move beyond Nasser’s embrace. The founding composition of the GPRA was markedly different from that of the FLN. It was a government, complete with nine

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ministers and three secretaries of state, headquartered in Tunis. Ferhat Abbas was president, with Krim Belkacem and Ben Bella as vice-presidents (a ‘position’ held from prison). At this point Fanon had no position. Serious tussles began to infect the national liberation movement. Though the struggle over leadership did represent certain political differences within the FLN on the questions of land reform, control of economic wealth and negotiations with the French, there was little of real significance dividing Abbas from Krim Belkacem and Benyoucef Benkhedda, who became president after 1961. However, old issues re-emerged. Amirouche Aït Hamouda was convinced – quite rightly – that the priority given to the interior had been contravened. In December he organised a meeting of the colonels from the wilayas. The GPRA felt challenged and ordered the same colonels to Tunis. Amirouche died in March 1959, in what some still claim were suspicious circumstances.5 As an indication of his increasingly important role within the FLN, Fanon travelled in the summer of 1959 to Morocco to assist with the Front’s medical services on the Algerian–Moroccan frontier. He was based at the Ben M’Hidi base, the headquarters of the Southern Frontier Army. He treated fighters dealing with exhaustion and fatigue. At the end of June Fanon was involved in a car accident. He was thrown from the car and landed on his back, severely damaging some vertebrae and becoming temporarily paralysed. Given the Front’s record and Fanon’s closeness to Abane, killed the previous year, a certain scepticism towards this ‘accident’ is understandable. But Pierre Chalet was resolute that this was not an attempt on his life: The accident that took place in Morocco, in my opinion, was an accident. [. . .] Fanon was forced to rest for two months, during which time he could finish Year Five of the Algerian Revolution. [. . .] This accident was not an attempt on his life.6

Josie rushed to the hospital in Oudja, Morocco, where Fanon was now a patient. Macey writes that even in hospital, ‘Fanon’s first concern was to his patients and he gave careful instructions on how they should be

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treated.’7 Soon he was transferred to Rome, where he could receive the treatment he required. Rome was not a safe place for the FLN; there had been assassinations. Fanon was given a private room in the hospital, secured by an armed guard. In hospital he heard that the presence of an ‘injured Libyan’ had been mentioned in a newspaper. He insisted that his room be changed; soon afterwards Fanon learned that a gunman had succeeded in finding his by-now-empty room. Fanon was spared a far worse fate than a car accident. The attempt to assassinate the ‘Libyan’ was unlikely to have been a carefully planned plot; more likely a golden opportunity. Macey ponders that if Fanon had really been their target, presumably the assassin could have found his new hospital room – though Cherki and Chaulet have no such doubts. When Fanon arrived back in Tunis in early autumn 1959, important political questions were being hammered out. Fanon was a member of the commission of ‘specialists’ charged with examining the objectives of the war. In some ways the conclusions of this commission were more thorough and specific than those of the Soummam Conference. National liberation and economic and social revolution formed a whole that could not be separated into stages. While the leading agent of the revolution was the peasantry, the working class was a dynamic force that deserved more importance in the struggle. Yet, the commission continued, after the defeat of the 1957 urban struggle, towns and urban areas were less important; trade unionists should work in the wilayas, effectively exiting themselves from the towns. Students were described as a contradictory force who could play an important role in an independent Algeria. We can see Fanon’s ideas in this commission, but also many arguments that were not his. By 1961 Fanon did not argue that the working class was a dynamic force capable of leadership – quite the opposite. By 1961 his swing was complete and he fell behind an increasingly heroic (and romanticised) peasantry. By the end of his life trade unions had a limited role; the peasantry and lumpenproletariat were the motor of the revolution. As to foreign policy, the FLN was still testing the waters, aligning fully with neither Moscow nor Washington. The GPRA made it clear that its hostility was to colonisation, not the West. While Fanon argued for a real pan-Africanism based on alliances between

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independent national states, this was not the tone of the meetings in Tunis in August 1959. Meanwhile, Fanon was writing Studies in a Dying Colonialism. France, however, often had the upper hand. In 1959 it made great use of the harkis – Algerians who worked with the French, either voluntarily or by compulsion. Some were captured ex-ALN fighters. With knowledge of the geography of the wilayas and the tactics of their former brothers and sisters, they were vital to the French strategy. The year 1959 was not a good one for the ALN. In February more than 1,600 ALN combatants were killed around Oran, while almost 4,000 were killed in July in similar operations across Kabylie. Even with its capacity to take heavy losses, it was hard for the organisation to continue to absorb the killings at this rate.

Studies in a Dying Colonialism Alice Cherki gives a wonderfully vivid picture of Fanon’s writing process. In early spring 1959, while still in Tunis, he contacted his secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, asking her, ‘Do you know how to use a typewriter?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but I will learn.’ So Fanon started to dictate Studies in a Dying Colonialism. He would start at seven in the morning, before the start of [his] hospital activities, dictate whole sentences, while walking the entire length and width of his office, to a debutant typist. [. . .] He hardly ever hesitated, almost never returning to a phrase. [. . .] In the evening Marie-Jeanne corrected the text, and brought the pages the next day. Fanon read them and made a few corrections.8

Unable to keep up with Fanon’s rapid dictation, Manuellan decided instead to take written notes and type them up in the evening. The book was rapidly completed, ‘in two or three months. It was almost finished at the time of the car accident in Morocco’.9 Fanon’s writing process, his dictation of all his books, should not be overlooked: his entire oeuvre was an oral text. For a short period Fanon had to abandon his duties at the Hôpital Charles Nicolle to finish the book. He asked Géronomi, who had

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moved from Algiers with him, to assist. Géronomi remembered the conversation: ‘Could you take over the services here?’ Fanon asked. ‘For how long?’ ‘Three weeks or so?’ ‘Sure. But could you tell me why?’ ‘I have to write a book.’10

The conclusion to an overly optimistic introduction to Studies in a Dying Colonialism explained that the work ‘testifies not so much to the death of colonialism as to the life of the masses in this age of revolution. It continues to be today [. . .] a clarion call [. . .] to prepare our place in this revolution’ (SDC 22). The book was a sustained celebration of the revolution’s transformation of Algerian society. Pierre Bourdieu also saw the war and revolution as a destructive, regenerative force: Like an infernal machine, the war makes a clean slate of sociological realities; it crushes, grinds up and scatters the traditional communities of village, clan or family. [. . .] And so the war, by its very existence and by the new consciousness it has aroused, has been enough to bring about a genuine sociological mutation.11

Fanon set himself the task of describing this revolution in consciousness. ‘The men and women of Algeria today resemble neither those of 1930 nor those of 1954 nor yet those of 1957. The old Algeria is dead’ (SDC 27). The revolution had nourished this new humanity, ploughed over the land and watered the crops of a new society. Studies in a Dying Colonialism was a work of propaganda, presenting a forthright and unswerving justification of the Front’s policy in every respect, even if its emphasis on the ‘popular’ elements of the revolution made certain members of the FLN leadership uncomfortable. Written by a party hack, the book would have been a dull work of flag-waving, but Fanon’s prose was brilliant for the purpose. The book starts with a sense of disbelief that ‘five years of struggle have brought no political change’ (23). Fanon speaks, in an autobiographical tone, of those who fought for the French army in

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World War II but felt betrayed and outraged by its role in Algeria: ‘In a war of liberation, the colonised people must win but they must do so cleanly, without “barbarity”’ (SDC 24). When a European nation, he continues, indulges in torture and barbarity, it is a blight on that nation’s civilisation and history. When the colonised respond, this is portrayed as the fulfilment of their ‘underdeveloped’ nature. So ‘an underdeveloped nation is obliged to practice fair play, even while its adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into [. . .] new means of terror’ (24). In this hypocritical framework, the colonised cannot because fighting back means confirming their ‘primitive’ essence; they can only count on European support if they fight and resist as the French left dictate. In contrast, Fanon’s argument for terror is based on a pragmatic assessment of the violence of the oppressed. Because we want a democratic [. . .] Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed. (25)

The French democrats want liberation without the dreadful cries of the oppressed; they are prepared to celebrate the struggle for independence if it is conducted with a minimum of errors. ‘They want the ocean,’ the former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass wrote one hundred years before Fanon, ‘without the awful roar of its many waters.’12 This is a utopia, an abstraction that exists only in the salons and cafés of the French intelligentsia. ‘Democrats’ are neither honest about the role of Europe nor realistic about the struggles of the colonised. Instead, they are caught in a racist trap, blind to the inextricable link between colonisation and violence. Torture is not an aberration of settler colonialism but intrinsic to it a natural outgrowth. Fanon details the ‘peculiarities’ of the Algerian struggle. In other countries independence was often ‘acquired by a party’ that develops national consciousness, but national consciousness and ‘collective suffering’ had driven Algeria to ‘take its destiny into its own hands’ (SDC 28). The strength of the Algerian Revolution is not the number of patriots under arms; rather, it is the ‘hundreds of thousands of [. . .]

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Algerian men and women’ (29) who make up the revolt who have turned the future of the Algerian nation into a reality. ‘There is a new kind of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence’ (30). The book tells a familiar story of the transformation of human potential during revolutionary turmoil. Undiscovered capacities develop; cowed and humiliated people stand up against oppression; old customs of servility fall away. The ‘remodelling’ of Algerians under the dynamics of the revolution transforms ‘the consciousness that man has of himself’ (30). Both oppressed and oppressor are fundamentally altered. The colonisers are dislodged from their perch of invulnerability, their convoys stoned, their forces attacked. Out-gunned by the French army, the revolution has one formidable force: the ‘radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone’ (32). The case studies that detail this ‘mutation’ look to popular mobilisations: the role of the veil, the use of the radio, the Algerian family and medicine. Each chapter describes not mass demonstrations or strikes, but the vital transformation of a piece of the fabric of Algerian culture and society. In the penultimate paragraph of the preface, Fanon moves suddenly into the first person and, having undergone his own mutation, speaks to us as an Algerian: ‘We are now moving forward’ (32). In Black Skin, White Masks, seven years earlier, Fanon had written that the recognition of the black person’s humanity by the white racist world could only be achieved through collective effort and struggle. The exact nature of this ‘struggle’ was ill defined, however; the young Fanon was caught between an ‘individual’ assertion of his own value and an acknowledgement that mutual recognition and a new humanism would require collective struggle. Studies in a Dying Colonialism represents, in part, the resolution of these questions. The racism and inferiority of colonialism were undermined by collective engagement in the revolution, out of which a new Algeria, a new humanism and a ‘recognition’ of colonial subjects as agents in their own lives were beginning to emerge.

The veil The first chapter in the book considers the uses of the veil as a signifier of the role of women in the Algerian struggle, and has come under the

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most sustained criticism of any chapter in the book. Anne McClintock argued in 1995 that Fanon was enacting the phantasm of colonial conquest as an erotic ravishment: ‘The Algerian woman is seen as the living flesh of the national body, unveiled and laid bare for the colonials’ lascivious grip, revealing “piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare”.’13 Others have joined the debate, criticising Fanon’s apparent misogyny.14 However, Fanon was writing about real changes, brilliantly describing the dynamic of the revolution within familiar cultural forms. The uses of the veil explains how women were able to employ a strategy of resistance inside Algerian society. Pierre Bourdieu, who was in Algeria for much of the war and was sympathetic to the revolution, though not the FLN, observed in Algeria 1960 that the use of the veil allowed women to play the role of the ‘cheating gambler’, seeing yet unseen. The ‘attachment to certain clothing’ was part of a will ‘to assert a radical and irreducible difference, to deny the negation of self, to defend a besieged personality’.15 Bourdieu observed, like Fanon, a society in radical mutation, its ‘normal’ social relations transformed and altered by revolution.16 ‘The veil worn by women is at once noticed by the tourist [. . .] but [. . .] appears with such constancy that it generally suffices to characterise Arab society’ (35). Colonial society categorised Algerian traditions as primitive and barbaric; the condemnation was greatest toward Algerian’s subjugation of women. Fanon derides the ‘social workers’ and ‘mutual aid societies’ (38) that descended on Arab communities to denounce the Algerian man’s relationship and oppression of women. Algerian women were encouraged to free themselves, under the aegis of Western values and habits. ‘The method of presenting the Algerian as a prey fought over with equal ferocity by Islam and France with its Western culture reveals the whole approach of the occupier, his philosophy and his policy’ (41). A few ‘test-women’ who were convinced to remove the veil moved around Algeria with ‘bare faces and free bodies’ and were ‘henceforth circulated like sound currency in the European society of Algeria’ (42). These trophy women, won to ‘liberation’, are proof of the civilising mission. The revealed face, unveiled, marked a triumph for the occupier: ‘Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of the colonialists horizons until then forbidden. [. . .] The occupiers’ aggressiveness . . . multiplied ten-fold each time a new face was

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uncovered.’ (42) Fanon goes further, claiming that the unveiled woman was subjecting herself further to the intrusion of the occupier’s gaze and even represented Algeria ‘accepting the rape of the coloniser’ (42). Reading the passage it is clear that Fanon specifically refers to Algeria accepting a metaphorical rape and not the individual unveiled woman ‘accepting’ a rape. This is an important distinction. The removal of the veil, demanded by the state, opens up secret, forbidden and unknown territory for deeper colonial penetration and plunder, making the woman ‘available for adventure’ (43). By contrast, the woman who – refusing these demands – remains unseen and veiled ‘frustrates the coloniser. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself’ (44). The veil is transformed into a ‘combat measure’; in some cases its ‘use’ expresses a ‘desire to exert a symbolic pressure on the occupier, and hence to make a logical choice of one’s own symbols’ (36). These arguments can seem simultaneously absurd and reasonable. Could it not also be argued that Algerian women, using the possibility of removing the veil offered by the occupying French, challenged their position in society? Why could Fanon’s unveiled women not also be opposed to French authority and occupation? But there is little reason to believe that Fanon would have disagreed; he was making a polemical argument that necessitated casting extreme positions to draw out the essence of colonial policy towards women and the veil. For Fanon, the notion of forcing liberation by unveiling women (still popular today in France) was a self-evident oxymoron and an act of violence. Such ‘freedom’ only strengthened the power of the coloniser and the French state, and must be refused and resisted. The French, as part of a campaign of Westernisation, organised public unveilings in May 1958, to show that there was a constituency that did not support the FLN and saw themselves as part of the French civilising mission in Algeria. These cérémonies de dévoilement were staged, frequently using women who did not normally wear the haïk (the Algerian version of the veil) but whose settler employers had obliged them to take part, and ‘Muslims were rounded up from the neighbouring villages and were forcibly brought to “express” their solidarity with banners given to them by the French army’.17 Monique Améziane, who had never worn a veil in the first place,

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was made to put it on in order to perform the act of removing it publicly in Constantine. Her step-brother Mouloud Améziane was detained and tortured: the French Army threatened to execute him if she did not participate in the symbolic act of unveiling.18

As the veils were removed, crowds cried, ‘Vive l’Algérie française!’ The effect was dramatic. These humiliating campaigns breathed ‘new life’ into the haïk. An old, forgotten or – in some families and communities – non-existent tradition came to life, ‘traditionalised’ by the act of colonial unveiling. Many Algerian women saw the veil as a symbol of resistance, ‘reclaimed’ for the revolution. No Algerian women would be ‘liberated’ at the invitation of General de Gaulle.19 Fanon argues that the actions of the occupier at a critical stage in the development of liberation become the fulcrum around which resistance is organised (47).20 The stages of struggle reflect this dichotomous dynamic – so the cult of the veil arises in response to the offensive against the veil: ‘The emotion the conqueror puts into his pedagogical work, his prayers, his threats, weave a whole universe of resistances around this particular element of the culture’ (47). Fanon uses this case study to point to fundamental aspects of liberation movements and revolutionary struggle. The first moments of resistance, he explains, are marked profoundly by this opposition, reflecting and shaped by the power of the coloniser. ‘The doctrinal assertions of colonialism in its attempt to justify the maintenance of its domination almost always push the colonised into the position of making uncompromising, rigid [. . .] counter-proposals’ (63). However, with the outbreak of the struggle for liberation, an entirely new dynamic emerges and again the veil undergoes mutation. Fanon explains that men dominated the combat during the first year of the struggle: ‘The leaders hesitated to involve the women, being perfectly aware of the ferocity of the coloniser’ (49). But as the struggle deepened, the traditional barriers to women’s involvement started to break down and include the slow and gradual participation of women. Soon younger women joined, forcing the political leadership to finally accept their full participation. These changes also arose from a political desire to shift the loci of the combat to the city and the Casbah. Yet the daily movements of Algerian women were almost entirely limited to the Casbah: the European city exposed them and presented them

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with new challenges and fears. Fanon says that women who went into the European city were not only confronted by police but sexually harassed. ‘Each time she ventures into the European city, the Algerian woman must achieve a victory over herself, over her childish fears’ (52). Conquering this fear was an essential stage in overcoming internalised colonisation in the mind and body. But given the real, sexual threat to Algerian women in the European city, his description of these fears as ‘childish’ is shocking. Not until 1956 did women in the revolution assume their full role. The extent of the French state’s terror, its massacres of Algerian civilians, forced the revolution to adopt its own terror, ‘in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression’ (55). The FLN began planting bombs in European areas. The involvement of women was tied up inextricably with the escalation of ‘terror’ and the urban phase of the revolution, as detailed in Chapter 3. In this, the relationship between men and women was refigured. Frequently a man and a woman would work together, – ‘one supporting the other but apparently strangers to each other’ (57) – the man walking confidently ahead of the woman, unarmed, to a prearranged target in a European sector. The woman, ‘radically transformed into a European woman, poised and unconstrained’, would not have been searched. At the given moment the woman would hand over her hidden gun to the man, who could then execute his orders. Though the FLN had to ‘adopt forms of terror’, Fanon insists that this was not terrorism. A terrorist allows ‘death to enter into his soul’, whereas the revolutionary ‘has a rendezvous with the life of the revolution and with his own life’ (57). The Algerian woman, as an unveiled combatant, could move ‘like a fish in Western waters’, no longer hurrying along the European streets shy and timid, hiding from the occupier, invisible from his gaze. Now she could be confident, her body assuming a new pose and striding forward with pride: ‘Her legs are bare, not confined by the veil, given back to themselves, and her hips are free’ (58). Unveiling for the revolution transformed women’s physical and mental vistas. Writing about his own experience as a psychiatrist, Fanon reveals that ‘one must have heard the confessions of Algerian women or have analysed the dream content of certain unveiled women to appreciate the importance of the veil for the body of the woman’ (59).

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The shift was real. Women were not only victims, subjected to torture and abuse, but protagonists in the revolution. Women who had been confined to their homes and neighbourhoods were given responsibilities and admission to new urban areas, even spending nights away with strangers and fellow militants. As Zohra Drif notes, these missions cast women into new relationships, not just with their husbands but between the sexes in general.21 ‘The militant man discovers the militant woman and jointly they create new dimensions for Algerian society’ (SDC 60). Some of this involvement – and its retreat after independence – is captured by US political scientist Meredeth Turshen.22 When the authorities discovered the ‘unveiling’ ruse, the women implicated were arrested, the system of checks hardened and anyone carrying a package – male or female – would be made to reveal it and subjected to a thorough search. The veil, removed for the struggle, now had to be adapted and manipulated again, this time to hide explosives, revolvers and cash. Because the veil was fixed in French minds as a symbol of tradition and female servility, it became a disguise to convince the colonial state that a woman under the haïk was nothing ‘except a poor woman or an insignificant young girl’ (61). Fanon claims that the dynamism of the veil follows the contours of colonialism. At the start, the veil was taken up as form of resistance to any authority or association with colonial rule: ‘Even if these values objectively be worth choosing . . . colonialism wants everything to come from it. But the dominant psychological feature of the colonised is to withdraw before any invitation of the conquerors’ (63). But a second phase is discernible with the revolution: the veil, when necessity demands it, is abandoned. Rigid assumptions about Algerian gender roles melt into air. ‘In forty-eight hours the Algerian woman has knocked down all the pseudo-truths that years of “field studies” were believed to have amply confirmed’ (65). Fanon’s conclusion to the chapter could be the book’s masthead: ‘It is the necessities of combat that give rise in Algerian society to revolutionary attitudes, to new modes of action, to new ways’ (64).

The radio Fanon’s next chapter, which discusses the role of the radio, reflects broader and deeper transformations in social relations. An alien

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technology before 1954, the radio was co-opted for use by urban and rural Algerians alike. Noting the need for ‘the portable battery set’ in rural areas without electricity, ‘an improved form of the standard receiver operating on current’, Fanon observes that ‘the specialist in technical changes in underdeveloped countries might see a sign of radical mutation’ (83). Here particularly, dynamic and innovative technologies may leap classic phases of development. ‘The Algerian, in fact, gives the impression of finding short cuts and of achieving the most modern forms of new communications without passing through the intermediary stages.’23 Fanon’s argument here reveals similarities to Trotsky’s theory of combined and uneven development.24 The ‘mutation’ that Fanon refers to again and again in the book is fundamentally between human beings – in people’s consciousness – and also, as a consequence, in the way colonial society adapted and transformed technological developments. Combined and uneven development was in Fanon’s hand – as it was in Trotsky’s – a tool of combat: ‘The foreign technique, which had been digested in connection with the national struggle had become a fighting instrument for the people’ (81). In 1945, 95 per cent of radios in Algeria belonged to Europeans; only the Algerian ‘bourgeoisie’ owned them. The low adoption rate was widely explained as being caused by programming not culturally adapted to Algerian ‘moral taboos’ (70). Fanon rejects these arguments. The radio is part of the essential paraphernalia of belonging for the Western petit-bourgeoisie – along with a car and refrigerator. Owning those prized objects ‘gives him the feeling that colonial society is a living and palpitating reality, with its festivities, its traditions eager to establish themselves, its progress, its taking root’ (71). The link that the radio facilitates to metropolitan society, to other members of the Western petit-bourgeoisie against a society perceived as primitive and tribal, is, in Fanon’s words, ‘the only way to still feel like a civilised man. [. . .] “without wine and the radio, we should, already have become Arabised”’ (71–2). Algerians therefore perceived the radio as an attempt to deepen and extend the sensorial and intellectual penetration of the French, ‘the spokesman of the colonial world’ (74), and rejected it as an alien technology. But 1954 fundamentally altered the country. Algerians needed to follow the revolution, to monitor the progress of the rebel movements:

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The Algerian at this time had to bring his life up to the level of the revolution. He had to enter the vast network of news; he had to find his way in a world in which things happened, in which forces were active. (76)

The colonised had rejected the ‘truth’ of the oppressor as a total lie, even if it contained elements of ‘truth’, but now came the emergence of a counter-truth. Against obliteration came victory; from partial defeat came a new front. Europeans could no longer count on the passivity of the Algerian after 1954. They used the derogatory expression ‘the Arab telephone’ to describe how information travelled informally and by word of mouth in Algerian society. In the context of war, this system of oral communications gave settlers the impression that Algerians were in permanent contact with the revolutionary high command. At the same time, the hunger for news uncontaminated by the settler state meant that Algerians would buy up the ‘democratic’ newspapers that arrived from France, such as Le Monde. But there was a nasty twist. Newspaper criers would only sell local papers; metropolitan papers had to be bought from kiosks – a risky business, since ordering the paper would quickly label an Algerian ‘suspicious’. Soon only local papers could be safely bought. ‘It was at this point that the political directorate of the revolution gave orders to boycott the Algerian local press’ (81). Among both literate and illiterate Algerians the radio became the sole means for securing news of the revolution. The French-language local press was contaminated. Exiled revolutionaries in Cairo had started broadcasting daily reports on the war. But it was not until 1956 that the radio assumed its full stature in the revolution, with the founding of the programme ‘Voice of Fighting Algeria’ (‘La Voix de l’Algérie Combattante’) (82). Within three weeks, Fanon explains, the country’s entire surplus stock of radios was snapped up. Old radios were recommissioned and sold by enterprising Algerians. Shops opened to service the demand. Now gathering around the radio set created solidarity with the revolution, with fathers, mothers and children ‘elbow to elbow’ scrutinising the ‘radio dial waiting for the Voice of Free Algeria’ (83). Fanon was not exaggerating. Memories of the radio during the revolution are still enthusiastically recalled today by Algerians such as Moutif Mohamed:

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We listened to the radio, ‘La Voix de l’Algérie Combattante’, to understand what was happening, but there was lots of static and my father would say, ‘Be quiet, let me listen to what’s going on.’ Then he would say, ‘You see, my son, we are fighting the French. We have an army.’ At the time we lived right next to the road and he was anxious that we would be heard listening to the radio. He would tell us, ‘Be careful, we don’t know who is behind the door, the military might be passing.’ If the French had found the radio they would have burnt it. They burnt radios.25

Within weeks, the radio had ceased to be a tool of cultural oppression and metamorphosed into an instrument for the propagation and intensification of the revolution. As soon as the French authorities realised this, the sale of radios was prohibited. They could now only be bought with a ‘voucher’ acquired from the military or police. Quickly the French jammed the ‘Voice of Fighting Algeria’. The FLN distributed tracts instructing Algerians to stay tuned for several hours, ‘enrolled in the battle of the waves’ (85), and worked to find new stations, ducking, dodging and circumventing the jammed frequencies. A clandestine traffic in new sets began to flow through Tunisia and Morocco. Acquiring radios through these channels became as ‘important for the people as acquiring weapons or munitions for the National Army’. The process of buying the radio, listening to the broadcasts ‘down on one’s knees with one’s head against the speakers’ (93), was a corporeal commitment. Fanon was describing a new field of action opening up, with tens of thousands of ‘civilian-combatants’ fighting a new war in front of their radios against an enemy attempting to control news and propaganda: the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Algerians. It was rare for a broadcast to be heard in its entirety. Sections of a report would be heard before the signal broke off and then was found again. The result was that listening to the ‘Voice of Fighting Algeria’ would involve creating and reconstructing a battle that had taken place the previous day. ‘Under these conditions, claiming to have heard the Voice of Algeria was, in a certain sense, distorting, but it was above all the occasion to proclaim one’s clandestine participation in the essence of the Revolution’ (87). Fanon explains that this required, in the first months, a choice between the occupiers’ ‘congenital lie’ and the

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‘people’s own lie’. Even in the regions where Arabic – the language of many of the broadcasts – was not spoken, such as Kabylie, the radio assumed a similar presence. Fanon wrote that faces would take a ‘look of gravity and the features harden when the expression Istiqlal [independence] resounds’ (87). The statement that owning a radio and listening to the ‘Voice of Fighting Algeria’ was an act of political commitment seems reasonable. But, Fanon’s claim that doing so was tantamount to going to war is absurd. Even if this claim is made symbolically, the comparison is so forced as to render it meaningless. Perhaps Fanon’s exaggerated claim – an example of what Pierre Chaulet described as ‘pushing reason to the edge of paradox’ – points to the uncomfortable fact that actual popular involvement, beyond the purview of the FLN, was more limited. Fanon compares the FLN’s clandestine broadcasts to the transmissions from London the Polish, Belgian and French people listened to during World War II as a ‘mode of national existence, a form of combat’ (94). But in Algeria, in the struggle against colonialism, the modalities of listening to the radio, and the depth of commitment, were different. The technology had to be stripped of its association with colonial power before it could be ‘requisitioned’ by the revolution. If Fanon’s argument is true that the radio was ‘the means of saying “no” to the occupation’ (97), it remained a fundamentally weak and essentially passive means of saying no. The seam of popular involvement in the revolution ran deeper, but remained fragile. Before 1954 the nationalist parties had used Arabic as a political act of opposition and differentiation. To use French was to support the ‘advocates of integration’, who saw French as the language of civilising the natives, a project of linguistic occupation. If the tools of the civilising mission were the ‘Bible and the gun’, language instruction completed the trinity. As the ‘Voice of Fighting Algeria’ began to broadcast in French, neither the radio nor the settlers’ tongue kept its historical meaning. French could be employed to serve the Algerian nation, but only once the wheels of the revolution began to turn. Conscious of the importance of these changes for his own medical field, Fanon explains that in psychopathology ‘sentences in French lose their automatic character of insult and malediction’ (90). Its use in war by the forces of liberation ‘exorcised’ the language of its

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evil, anxiogenic nature; it was requisitioned by the native. In this passage Fanon pointedly notes that what triggered the takeover of French was the Soummam Conference, which had been conducted in French, subverting the language’s alien associations in an additional snub to the coloniser. In 1959, when the book was written and published, Ramdane Abane had been murdered and the radical project of Soummam defeated. Fanon’s reference to it was both daring and a declaration of support for the politics of the Conference and the assassinated Abane.

The Algerian family The third chapter in the book is the most curious. It has moments of penetrating insight, but occasionally resorts to lazy characterisations of traditional Algerian society (though earlier in the book Fanon criticised sociologists for doing this) prior to 1954. The chapter considers the changes that the war and revolution have brought to the Algerian family structure, painting a picture of the pre-1954 family as ‘homogenous and virtually monolithic’ (99), each family member in their pre-ordained place. The revolution smashes this ‘monolith’ into ‘separate elements’. Fanon admits, for the first time in the book, that 1954 was not the sole midwife to revolutionary consciousness. Indeed, the existence of nationalist politics and parties, ‘the spreading of slogans advocating splitting off from France had already given rise to certain contradictions within the family’ (100). But there was a qualitative change after 1954. If a son adopted a nationalist perspective before 1954, it was not in opposition to his father; not even involvement in ‘parliamentary political action’ challenged the absolute authority of the father. Before Algerian nationalism entered its revolutionary stage, Fanon contends, even a militant would remain loyal and subservient to the patriarch of the family. But as the revolution hardens, constitutional means shut down and national liberation enters into its armed phase, attitudes within the family start to mutate. ‘Everything,’ Fanon writes, ‘unnecessary and detrimental to the revolutionary situation’ is thrown off. Out of the family a new humanity emerges. ‘The person is born, assumes his autonomy, and becomes the creator of his own values’ (101).

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In a more devastating example of how relations between father and son change, Fanon explains how, in war, a son might be forced to condemn a father who has become a police agent or official. A father whose work directly compromises the work of the struggle might have to be executed. Fanon describes these atrocious tragedies in which the son, present at a meeting that had to decide the fate of his father who was a traitor to his fatherland, had no other choice but to support the majority and accept the most irrevocable judgements. (105)

Pierre Bourdieu recognised similar changes in revolutionary Algeria. In 1961 he wrote that the authority of the father, if still very much alive, has often been undermined. The head of the family has ceased to be in every case the basis of all values and the governor of all things. [. . .] Revolutionary values are the values of the young generation.26

The resulting defeat for the authority of the father reverberated across Algerian society. Between daughter and father, similar changes were witnessed. Before the revolution, Fanon tells us, the daughter took ‘her place in the vast network of domestic traditions of Algerian society. The woman’s life in the home, made up of centuries-old customs, allows no innovation’ (SDC 106). Fanon’s description of Algerian society is crude – so categorical, rigidly cast into traditional patterns – because he is working up an argument of propaganda designed to persuade the reader of the profound changes taking place. Women in Algerian society were expected to marry as soon as they reached puberty. A woman’s only status was through a man. The shame of an unmarried girl in the family had to be avoided. These restrictions, Fanon argues, began to be demolished in the national liberation movement as the Algerian woman’s ‘personality discovered the exalting realm of responsibility’ (107). Fanon goes further: the engaged, active and politicised woman – carrying grenades and submachine guns in the avenues of Algiers and Constantine – will not accept or revert to her old roles. Bourdieu also commented on how

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women were steadily more involved in the war and found ‘themselves bearing responsibilities that traditionally fell to men. [. . .] The extremely confined space of life that they had is now widened.’27 But if the momentum of popular struggle is not maintained or rooted deeply enough, the old patterns can come rushing back. Once national independence has been won, a rapid reversion to preliberation patterns of human organisation takes place. How can the new social relations of the revolutionary struggle prefigure the new post-independence Algeria? Fanon leaves this question unresolved in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, but deals explicitly with it in his 1961 masterwork The Wretched of the Earth, arguing that unless the nationalist struggle grows into a social and political consciousness and develops beyond the narrow confines of ‘national’ freedom, the revolutionary transformation in social relations will not be sustained. The point is the continuing popular involvement of broad layers of the oppressed during decolonisation and after any ‘victory’. The new axis of Algeria was militant action. So ‘the young girl is replaced by the militant, the woman by the sister’ (108). The nationalist revolution in Algeria brought with it, to the horror and panic of some, a rapid and unexpected liberation. The new woman ‘would look at the father, she would sit facing the father, would speak to him, not be embarrassed’ (109). But the father too was uprooted from his old ways; he ‘would not turn his face away; he would not feel shame. On the contrary, he would feel a real joy at seeing his daughter [. . .] her new personality radiating through the house’ (109). No longer was the father the purveyor of his daughter’s sexuality. What she did in the maquis was her business, the question of virginity her own. Maybe such sexual questions were still present, but they had taken on a new shape, lost their relevance as other events forced yesterday’s morality into a new mould made by the Algerian militant. The true leaders, Fanon seems to be telling us, are not the exiled political class or the directorate but those forging ‘new values’ in the family and in communities up and down Algeria. At the forefront of these changes was the daughter, the child-woman, who was ‘inviting her father to undergo a kind of mutation, to wrench himself free of himself’ (110). Fanon begins his examination of ‘husband and wife’, as he often does, by telling a story imagined or extrapolated from accounts that he had heard as a militant and psychiatrist. He takes us into the life of

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‘Mustapha’, returning home after an action. He has thrown several grenades into the police station. He is sullen and does not want to talk. He goes to sleep without speaking to his wife. She later hears in the neighbourhood of the attack and the ‘irrefutable proof that our people have dealt the colonists a hard blow’ (111). The event causes her to question her husband’s apparent indolence: the country is at war, the colonialist has been struck and my husband is asleep? She comes into the room and denounces him, calls him a coward. Fanon concludes: ‘The struggle for liberation raised woman to such a level of inner renewal that she is even able to call her husband a coward’ (111). Young women made commitments not to marry any man who was not an active member of the FLN. The new couple is then remade on the battlefield of the revolutionary movement, each sinew of their private life reconfigured into a broader canvas of political upheaval. It is the ‘consciousness of collaborating in the immense work of destroying the world of oppression’ that opens eddying vistas for the couple, never previously envisaged: ‘The couple is no longer shut in upon itself’ (114). Now when the husband returns from the maquis for a few days, exhausted from the war, it is his wife who urges him back to the conflict, forces him to banish any idea that they should not separate again. Instead they share hours completely ‘lived’, with an ‘intensity that can be imagined’ (112). It is hard to escape the sense of Fanon describing both the experience in Algeria and his own relationship with Josie – their mutual loyalty to the Algerian cause bringing them closer together, yet removing the suffocating claustrophobia of a relationship that has to be all things, that like all privatised bourgeois relationships folds in constantly on itself. [Instead] the couple becomes the basic cell of the commonwealth, the fertile nucleus of the nation. The Algerian couple, in becoming a link in the revolutionary organisation, is transformed into a unit of existence. The mingling of fighting experience with conjugal life deepens the relations between husband and wife and cements their union. (114)

Josie was not the ‘simple’ cheerleader of Fanon’s writing and activism but a long-standing militant in her own right. Both of them were

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united by the necessity, indeed desperate urgency, of the cause far larger than their own lives. But, alive constantly to nuances, Fanon notes how the nature of ‘love’ changes. Relationships between man and wife are no longer controlled and ordered by the father. The activism of women means the opportunity to ‘meet’ a partner on their own terms expands massively. In the maquis or missions in the Casbah, women and men could associate freely. Love and sex unfettered by the war, even the ‘cult of love’ as an end in itself, are destroyed. Since FLN officers could officiate weddings, the FLN had to institute a policy of three-month engagements. Love had to be sustained beyond the first vertiginous moments. Divorce, too, was reorganised. A husband, before 1954, could simply divorce his wife by proclaiming his desire for separation. Women lived under the constant threat of repudiation. The revolution turned the tables. Now the husband was compelled to justify his desire for a divorce and, instead of the couple’s in-laws, the ‘final decision rests with the local officer’ (116). What is remarkable about this chapter (and the book) is how Fanon moves between different scales of analysis and understanding. He devotes some detail to the nature of colonial violence and torture, yet never loses sight of the intimate relationships of families and lovers. Fanon tells a story of tragic contradictions. Social relations are transformed by the revolution but individuals are indelibly scarred by the violence. A society emerging from this upheaval is both energised by popular revolutionary consciousness and enslaved by the violence of decolonisation. Fanon describes a ‘husband taken away by the enemy who comes back [. . .] more dead than alive, his mind stunned. Children scattered to the wind, innumerable orphans who roam about haggard and famished’ (119). Using his favoured literary forms, Fanon paints a fictional truth: When a man returns to his wife who has spent two weeks in a French camp and he says hello to her and asks her if she is hungry and he avoids looking at her and bows his head – when such things are a daily occurrence, it is not possible to imagine that the Algerian family can have remained intact and that hatred of colonialism has not swelled immeasurably. (119)

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There is a fraught relationship; new possibilities are also caught in a web of repression and trauma.

Medicine The central theme of the book continues in the chapter ‘Medicine and Colonialism’. Every technical objective advance hangs from a historical period and is imbued and shaped by society’s power relations. Steeped in the politics and brutality of colonialism, even the ‘practical’ discoveries of scientists carry the sign of the devil. A revolutionary society will not require a new antibiotic (or a ‘liberated’ theory of relativity), but the uses of scientific advances will become transformed, as was the case with the radio. ‘The colonial situation is precisely such that it drives the colonised to appraise all the coloniser’s contributions in a pejorative and absolute way’ (121). Fanon stands on the side of these prejudices. ‘Medicine’, he argues, is dripping with the muck of repression and contaminated by its association with colonial occupation. The doctor, like the engineer, the schoolteacher, the policeman, is viewed ‘through the haze of an almost organic confusion’ (121). Even beyond colonialism, a doctor who arrives into such a charged and constrained society is seen to belong to this dominant ‘power structure’ of the army, the occupation and the violence. These relations trickle down into every nominally independent improvement. Progress becomes its reverse; the native sees resisting ‘sanitary’ advice or immunisation as an extension of the general struggle against the occupier’s hold on the stolen land. Fanon does not present an uncomplicated analysis; these statements, he notes, are particularly valid in periods of resistance and confrontation. In moments of ‘calm [. . .] the colonised individual frankly recognises what is positive in the dominator’s action. But this good faith is immediately taken advantage of [. . .] and transformed into a justification for the occupation’ (122). In the face of such obstinate refusal to face the evident truth and reason of science, the doctor or bureaucrat may throw their arms in the air in exasperation, declaring that the native refuses to see what is in their best interests: that they cannot, by consequence, be trusted with independence in the modern epoch, with becoming masters of their own destinies – they have rejected, after all, admission to hospital or refused to allow their

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children’s immunisation. ‘Reduced [. . .] to saying “yes” to certain innovations of the occupier, the colonised perceived that [. . .] the French medical service in Algeria could not be separated from French colonialism in Algeria’ (122–3). Interestingly, to drive his arguments to their fullest conclusion, to convince his readers, Fanon introduces several comparisons with World War II. The war provided him with both an extreme example of ‘occupation’ and a deep well of personal experiences – circumstances determining how people react to scientific advances. The German prisoner of war would ‘beseech’ the French surgeon not to kill him as he succumbed to anaesthetic. In Algeria, he writes, deaths in hospital (a common occurrence in all hospitals) are understood as the ‘murderous and deliberative’ actions of the European doctors (123–4). Why would anyone refuse hospitalisation if there was not doubt about the humanity of the European and the objective role of the institution of the hospital? Fanon stops here, in a footnote, to reflect on the actual role of the French psychiatric services of the army in Algeria; French doctors had, for example, induced experimental epileptic fits on Algerians to establish the ‘specific threshold of the different races’ (124n). These references to ‘torture’ under the guise of medicine belong, perhaps, in the main text of the book. Hesitance, refusal or outright resistance to Western medicine was long painted, Fanon continues, as proof of the native’s attachment to ‘traditional’ practices of medicine, a commitment to sorcery and witchcraft. While such beliefs may be widely held among some communities, medicinal practices in the colonial setting were isomeric to illegal and alien occupation. Sympathy, Fanon tells us, must fall with the colonised. If I abandon what I am in the habit of doing when my wife coughs and I authorise the European doctor to give her injections; [. . .] If I tell this insulter he is right and I admit that I was wrong [. . .] if I do all these things I am acting from a strictly rational point of view, in a positive way. For, as a matter of fact, my son has meningitis and it really had to be treated as meningitis ought to be treated. But the colonial constellation is such that what should be the brotherly and tender insistence of one who wants only to help

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me is interpreted as a manifestation of the conquerors’ arrogance and desire to humiliate. (126)

The doctor working in the colony, the gatekeeper to Western science and progress, is faced with obdurate natives and forms a notion of them as simple, traditional and stubborn. The patients, meanwhile, refuse to trust the doctor. Escaping from the doctor gives the colonised the sense of having won a battle, having limited the takeover by the enemy and occupier. It is, perhaps, too easy to write into these descriptions Fanon’s own experiences. He arrived a ready critic of colonisation, but also a young doctor full of enthusiasm to reform the psychiatric institution. Important though his reforms were, they floundered among his Algerian patients. He was unable to connect with the patients he most wanted to cure. Only from experience could Fanon understand his own failures, ‘We often hear it said that a certain doctor has a good bedside manner [. . .] but [. . .] the colonial situation standardises relations, for it dichotomises the colonial society in a marked way’ (126). The doctor gives up trying to reach the patient emotionally and decides that with those crudely drawn people the only option is to be a ‘veterinarian’ (127), turning to the ‘clinical examination’ in hopes that the body will ‘be more eloquent’ (126). The body, however, is rigid, unyielding, the patient unable to relax. The sociologist classifies ‘all these actions under the heading of fatalism’ (127). Fanon argues that in underdeveloped countries life is not perceived ‘as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death’ – famine, disease and high infant mortality. Life is opposed to hope. ‘All this gnawing at the existence of the colonised tends to make of life something resembling an incomplete death.’ Therefore resistance to Western medicine should not be perceived as ‘fatalism’ but as a ‘greater passivity before that close and contagious death’. The ‘truth’ of Western medicine is corrupted by the deafening lie of colonialism and the colonial situation (128). Training ‘native’ doctors is not a way out of the bind. Such doctors become Europeanised and cease to be members of the occupied society, equivalent to a policeman; the population look with simultaneous pride and horror at one of their own who has reached

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such dizzy heights. Caught between the Algerian population and European society, ‘the native doctor feels himself psychologically compelled to demonstrate firmly his new admission to a rational universe’ (132). But those situations, Fanon writes, are nothing more than the drama of the colonised intellectuals before the fight for liberation. For the European doctor working in the colony, the circumstances are far more grave (and Fanon’s polemic sharper). The European doctor can reach a standard of living far higher, far more luxurious than that of his metropolitan colleague, achieved through both legitimate professional activities and illegal practices. European doctors are known, Fanon explains, to give false X-rays, salt-water injections and counterfeit antibiotics. On Algerian soil the doctor becomes more than his profession; his ambitions are stretched. He (he is almost always male) is usually a landowner, with farms or vineyards. He becomes a settler, with a sideline in the medical profession. The European doctor is an important personification of domination. He sees this, also, as his role; in the fight against national liberation, he takes responsibility for the militia and the counter-terrorist raids. ‘There is something of the cowboy and the pioneer even in the intellectual. In a period of crisis the cowboy pulls out his revolver and his instruments of torture’ (134). Fanon explains that murders of European doctors, internationally condemned, have never been understood. While in normal conflict situations the medical corps is left unhurt, in Algeria certain doctors were targeted. Fanon explains that this is because the European doctor in Algeria has ‘excluded himself from [. . .] the values of the medical profession’ (135). If European doctors were always part of the colonial architecture, during the war they became intimately entwined with the state, writing ‘natural death’ on certificates for Algerians slaughtered by the police, administering ‘truth serums’ to assist police torture and interrogations. The doctor is also a torturer. During the war doctors were given strict instructions to report any war wounds, with severe penalties for failing to do so. Fanon worked in Blida under the same dictates. The mystery that has surrounded Fanon’s deep commitment towards all his patients, treating police torturer and Algerian patriot with the same concern, is explained in these passages. He condemns doctors who inform on their patients, arguing that doctors are duty

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bound to treat all persons with the same conscientiousness, whatever their religion or their race, whether they are friends or enemies (135n). Here Fanon is writing about his own determination to maintain the humanist integrity of his profession. ‘The doctor who fights side by side with his people, as a doctor, must respect the international charter of his profession.’ Regarding doctors who do not honour this code, Fanon is uncompromising: ‘A criminal doctor, in all countries in the world, is sentenced to death’ (137). Fanon also describes the change in medical relationship for doctors who joined the revolution. For doctors no longer separated from the population, living within the rebellion becomes part of the new national consciousness. No more the reticence to visit a doctor: ‘no longer “the” doctor, but “our” doctor, “our” technician’ (142). The attitude towards ‘medical’ techniques recently shunned is similarly reordered. ‘The People wanted to get well, wanted to care for themselves and were anxious to understand the explanations proffered by fellow doctors or nurses’ (143). At the same time, belief in old superstitions such as witchcraft, maraboutism (holy men) and the djinn collapsed. Aspects of life that had been regarded as the very essence of Algeria are revealed as temporary moments, hurriedly pushed aside by the revolution. ‘All the eminent and respected studies that describe a “native psychology” and the “Algerian personality” can be discarded’ (145). Fanon concludes the chapter with familiar declarations. ‘The people who take their destiny into their own hands assimilate the most modern forms of technology at an extraordinary rate’ (145). The revolution has not ‘depoliticised’ science and European medicine, but has seen it seized and commandeered by the Algerian population.28

Jews and settlers Fanon’s final chapter, ‘Algeria’s European Minority’, is a eulogy to ‘European’ (white) support by settlers and the then large population of Algerian Jews in the revolution. The very fact that Fanon celebrated European engagement on the side of the revolution overturns certain assumptions about his character and politics. Even his greatest biographer, David Macey, tends to repeat the popular idea of Fanon’s anti-white and anti-European attitude. Yet the reality was

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considerably more complex, as Cherki has written.29 Instead, this chapter gives us a nuanced understanding of the variety of European involvement, from joining terrorist right-wing militias to supplying, arming and hiding FLN supporters. Fanon remains throughout the stalwart of the FLN, arguing that commitment to Algeria’s national sovereignty can only be expressed through the Front as the sole legitimate organ of the liberation struggle.30 The chapter starts with a general statement on the support that ‘hundreds and hundreds of European men and women have brought to our units and to our political cells’ (SDC 149). But Algerian Europeans, despite these realities, have faced the fact that ‘for a long time history is made without them’ (152). As we have seen, Fanon’s greatest reprimands are reserved for the French left, but here he pulls his punches: ‘The left has done nothing for a long time in France. Yet by its action, its denunciations, and its analysis, it has prevented a certain number of things’ (152). Fanon is conflicted: on the one hand the European Algerian left have by and large done nothing; on the other, the work they have done has been indispensable to the FLN. The war drew ordinary European settlers into the torture and brutality of a dying colonialism, but there were notable European friends, ‘brothers and sisters’ who fought with the same courage and commitment as Fanon. Fanon poses the dilemma for the European population: ‘In tomorrow’s independent Algeria it will be up to every Algerian to assume Algerian citizenship or to reject it in favour of another’ (152). Fanon examines the development of European settlers, describing how decolonisation poses them an enormous challenge. In Tunisia, Kenya and Rhodesia, only an infinitesimal minority became embroiled in the actual defence of the colony. Neutrality did not exist. Pierre and Claudine Chaulet were two remarkable examples: before the war came to an end, they had made their decision. With those Europeans who came over to the Front’s cause after 1954, care had to be taken. The FLN needed people who were ‘responsible and not people who at the slightest hitch would break down and claim that they had been deceived’ (151). These volunteers were carefully vetted; the result was that when one was picked up and tortured they behaved like ‘an authentic militant in the national fight for independence’ (151). European Algerians did not fight in the war, even if some wanted to; their role was different. ‘The FLN did not

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want to make of them “show” Europeans in the ranks of the Revolution’ as colonial society had displayed ‘show’ évolués (152). The FLN wanted to ensure that these Europeans played an important and – in the language of our day – ‘embedded’ role, informing on settler society and providing cover and funds for the Front in the heart of white Algerian society. These settlers sheltered fighters and arms. In cities, certain European doctors ensured that essential supplies of now proscribed penicillin made their way to the maquis. Others took greater risks and left to treat wounded ALN fighters in the mountains. Some doctors undertook training programmes for the medical corps of the ALN. It is, Fanon concludes, thanks to an increasingly large number of Algeria’s Europeans that the revolution has been saved ‘from the colonialist hounds’ (162). Fanon then makes a curious argument; it is interesting to follow its contours. The ‘war criminals’ who defend their privileges and the colony’s bastions ‘are bent on shedding the greatest possible amount of blood’ (152). Their violence is a reflection of the ‘last spasms’ of the French colonial empire, whether in Saigon, Tunis or Meknes, a last desperate lashing of the tail of the imperial beast. What should be done with these men whose hands are dripping with blood and dirt, who have formed death squads and settler militias, whose militias have massacred and terrorised thousands of Algerians? ‘Jackals do not take to feeding on milk overnight’, Fanon argues, since they have become so entirely de-socialised; the ‘taste of blood and of crime is deeply embedded in the very being of these creatures’ (152). So what does Fanon recommend for these jackals, whose crimes were among the cruellest of all colonial wars of decolonisation? Torture by the FLN? Slow death? Popular tribunals, followed by public executions? Or simply what he suggests 15 pages previously – the death sentence? Fanon’s answer is disarming and beautiful: ‘These creatures,’ he writes ‘must be retrieved by psychiatry’ (152). Not death, but redemption – through simple and vital psychiatry. The statement is a remarkable confirmation of Fanon’s own humanism, his deep optimism in the redemptive possibilities of psychiatry and the potential of retrieving the most wretched (and European) elements from savagery. Fanon was no ‘apostle of violence’; quite the contrary. Fanon then turns his attention to the Algerian Jews. The Jewish population, he claims, represents ‘one fifth of the non-Muslim

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population of Algeria’ (153). A small but significant layer of them are shopkeepers, some civil servants, others in liberal professions. This group tend to look on the ‘prospect of the birth of an Algerian state with fear and trembling’ (154), worrying that an Algerian nation will see their position supplanted by Muslim traders and civil servants, their privileged trading position and contacts with France overthrown. But at all layers Jews were victims of anti-Semitism, so knee-jerk affiliation with the European authorities was rare. While they were loyal – maybe – to colonial power, an explicit, ‘broad daylight’ show of support to ‘Algeria’s extremist groups’ was unusual. The Jewish intellectuals, he noted, have ‘demonstrated their support of the Algerian cause’ (156). More interesting to Fanon is the far larger layer of Arabised Jews, with little knowledge of French and lifestyles similar to their Muslim brothers and sisters. This mass, Fanon asserts, represents three-fifths of Algeria’s Jewish population. These Jews ‘are Algerians’ (155). He quotes a group of Jews from Constantine who wrote in 1956, ‘The Jews have been in Algeria for more than two thousand years; they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people’ (157).

Dialectical transformation against static sociology Fanon could have written a more conventional account of the revolution, with a narrative focused on the principal events since the insurrection in 1954. Such a book, written by an adopted Algerian from Martinique, would have been important. Alternatively, he could have written a book about the military campaign. Instead he wrote a book about the revolutionary process, describing in forensic – if occasionally vague and creative – detail how the patterns of Algerian society and culture had been uprooted by the latest and most profound phase of armed nationalist struggle since 1954. He describes his method in a footnote: ‘What is involved here is not the emergence of an ambivalence, but rather a mutation, a radical change of valence, not a back-and-forth movement but a dialectical approach’ (90n). Fanon’s dialectical approach sees Algerian society lurching forward under the great impact of the national rebellion. If initially resistance takes the form of automatic rejection, it soon assumes a more

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complicated form, developing around the needs of the revolution. Fanon’s approach captured a society in movement and the challenges of the armed struggle. His Algeria is fluid and full of potentialities and possibilities – his approach explicitly hostile to an empirical, static, non-dialectical sociology. But Fanon’s emphasis on 1954 as the meta-signpost in Algerian society is problematic. The year did signal an escalation and intensification of the armed struggle; before this date Algeria’s nationalist leadership had been more moderate, wedded to nonviolent constitutional change. Popular engagement was limited. But real and serious changes had taken place in Algerian society in the 1930s and 1940s, before the FLN was formed, which were not always limited to the ‘uncompromising, rigid, static counter-proposals’ (63) Fanon describes. Nationalist consciousness was spreading and developing across society, accelerating particularly after the Sétif massacres in May 1945. The argument that history began in 1954 became a state discourse that the post-independence FLN could use to challenge dissent to its authority as midwife and protector par excellence of Algeria’s revolution. (Fanon would write two years later about how nationalist leaders subverted the emancipatory and popular movements in the name of the nation.) The second problem in the book runs deeper. As great as the involvement and transformation of cultural and social relationships were, popular involvement in the revolution remained limited. The text is peppered with references to the ‘political directorate of the revolution’ (81) giving orders. Though initiative was seized and developed by a dialectical progression between the leadership and movement, control – and repression – were firmly exercised from above. Abane’s murder in 1958 signified what had already happened: the shift to the military campaign and an exiled leadership. Indeed, Fanon’s emphasis on moments such as popular involvement through the radio succeeds to some extent in doing the opposite of what he intended: highlighting the limitations of popular involvement. Brilliant though the various and complex uses of the veil were in the Algerian Revolution, they came out of a particular, organised rebellion that did not rest decisively in the hands of urban or rural Algerians during its first years. Though Algerian independence could not have been won without the widespread involvement of ordinary Algerians,

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the political and military campaign was directed by relatively privileged évolués whose concerns were sometimes in sharp contrast to the dynamics of Algerian popular movements. Fanon was brilliantly alive to the tensions, contradictions and ‘dialectic’ between the nationalist leadership and the growing active membership in the Casbah and across Algeria. The revolution, in Fanon’s hands, is a deeper and more profound process than what the leadership wanted – and undoubtedly this is partly what happened. When Fanon approached Ferhat Abbas to write the preface to the book, he refused. Abbas was the representative of the new FLN and would have been alarmed by the book’s celebration of Algeria’s popular change, let alone its praise of the Soummam Conference. By the time of the publication of the book, the war was intense, the fighting vicious, but the locus of political action had swung to military confrontation with the French – with Fanon an enthusiastic advocate, eager to open up a southern front to fight the French through the Sahara. Even at the height of the urban war in 1956–7 the emphasis was on ‘targeted attacks’ in European areas and occasional political strikes, with the FLN turning mass participation on and off. Only in late 1960 did these forces explode onto the political scene without the FLN’s directives and succeed in forcing the French to finally concede defeat. The popular revolution blossomed into an Algerian spring, but still, when the movement settled, it fell under the leadership directives of the FLN. Though with popular engagement in the revolution could not develop fully into an independent movement without a ‘third’ force (in Géronimi’s words), so the initiative frequently returned to the Front. The country was allowed to flower and blossom but pollination was restricted, popular upheaval curtailed. Yet Fanon’s book shone a light on the beauty of a society and people beginning to cast off the muck of ages, even if it also expressed the limited depth of the popular engagement it had set out to celebrate. Nigel Gibson is undoubtedly correct when he explains that Studies in a Dying Colonialism really speaks of this experience of revolution. It is interesting that many criticised Fanon as a ‘romantic’ or ‘utopian’ but [. . .] the revolution, as revolutions do, turned things upside down, upset the old social relations. That these changes did not remain, that they were turned back

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(re-revolved?) does not mean that they didn’t happen. I think Fanon also understood the fragility of new social relations, not only from outside but also from inside the revolution, and that is a reason why he remains relevant today.31

Nor was Fanon alone in charting the revolutionary mutations in Algerian society. Pierre Bourdieu, as we have seen, saw similar processes taking place: ‘The war, by its very existence as well as by its form and duration, has transformed the situation out of which it was born. The social field in which everyday behaviour takes place has been radically modified.’ Then he asks the question that preoccupied Fanon: ‘How should we describe and understand this rapid and total change, this revolution in the revolution?’32 The book did not receive many reviews, but those that did come out stressed the book’s originality and criticised its excessive optimism and revolutionary idealisation. Macey writes that the account seems ‘idealistic in the extreme and even dangerously confused’.33 Apparently Fanon mistook ‘temporary changes born of extraordinary circumstances for a permanent revolution’.34 As we have seen, Fanon’s analysis is deeply nuanced and explicitly anti-sociological in that he poses a dialectical dynamic in place of a ‘back-and-forth movement’ at the heart of the process of revolutionary mutation.35 Though Fanon was not explicitly concerned with the ‘permanency’ of these changes, his method was. Maintaining popular momentum after national liberation was a specific concern for him in The Wretched of the Earth, as we shall see. To criticise Fanon for not seeing the ‘impermanence’ of revolutionary action in Studies in a Dying Colonialism is to blame him for not writing a different book. The FLN never came even close to a military defeat of the French. What it could do was take far more casualties. Its victory was largely due to the fact that the French ruling class realised late that the political and economic cost of the war was too great. If de Gaulle can be credited with anything it is this: the survival of French imperialism did not necessitate a French colonial presence in Algeria. A smarter and more confident French political class would have got out earlier, but they were entrenched by both the pressures coming from inside French Algeria, the pieds-noirs, and the inefficiency of the political system of the Fourth Republic.36 None of

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this means that the FLN’s victory was not its own, achieved by great sacrifice and courage, but these acts took place within certain circumstances that made victory achievable. In February 1960 Fanon became the GPRA’s permanent representative in Accra for Africa. He was now a sort of diplomat – and a strange and unruly one at that. Kwame Nkrumah funded the diplomatic mission. The GPRA needed an African presence to win solidarity in the Afro-Asian grouping at the UN. For the GPRA, Fanon’s posting was important, but not hugely so. He lobbied hard to get the post, according to one friend.37 There were other, more important regions – not least in the Middle East and Eastern Europe – but Fanon could not have wished for a better base: the hub of a radicalising, if contradictory, continent. Ghana welcomed him as an ambassador. Fanon’s confidence in the ultimate, if not immediate, victory of the Algerian Revolution came from the struggle inside Algeria but also from his sense of the global balance of forces. Across the world support for the French was ebbing. France, like the UK, had been utterly humiliated at Suez in 1956, routed by a Third World country as the United States watched, smug and seemingly indifferent. France was on the defensive; the pathetic and brutal rule of Guy Mollet had been confused and disoriented. The decolonising world, in contrast, was proud – and that came in large part from the defeat of the old powers. Newly independent countries supported Algeria’s GPRA as the only legitimate government. Fanon sniffed the air and, for a moment, it was sweet. The world was being won to new political forces.

6

‘The Whole of Existence’ – Liberation and Leukaemia

Ghana in the late 1950s was a place of exciting meetings and possibilities. Accra was host to pan-African conferences and a headquarters for nationalist leaders and parties. Fanon loved it. He met others as driven and possessed as him. Fanon did not like people who held themselves back, went to bed early instead of talking and arguing through the night. Before and after being diagnosed with leukaemia, he repeatedly stated that he did like people who conserved and limited their activity and engagement. Fanon knew and understood this side of himself, describing such exuberance, his total commitment to life and expression, as ‘doing a Fanon’. Fanon was not interested in fireside chats and family conversations; he was searching always for the characteristics of a true revolutionary. He met the Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba. Though Lumumba’s background was distinct, the men were the same age and shared a remarkable intelligence and a similar experience of racism. They both read and argued and stuck doggedly to their opinions and principles. Both also had a capacity to work tirelessly, sleeping only three or four hours a night – both exuded life. The two died within months of each other. Fanon also befriended Félix-Roland Moumié, leader of the Cameroonian nationalist movement, Union 171

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des Populations Camerounaises (UPC), soon to be assassinated by the French secret service in 1960, as well as Tom Mboya from Kenya and Holden Roberto from Angola. Moumié was a complicated figure. He had launched an armed insurrection in 1955. After Cameroon’s independence in 1960, he established an exiled government in Conakry. Fanon could not separate Algeria’s freedom from the continent’s; his mission was cultivating and nurturing that struggle beyond anything else. Fanon was in some ways a clumsy diplomat. He pushed arguments and made rash judgments. He hated small talk and hobnobbing. He spoke little English – and communicating his ideas, in particular, needed a sophisticated grasp of the language. Increasingly, Fanon balked at the vague and confused notions of African unity he encountered. For the concept to have meaning it needed to be tied to practice, action and practical support. Nkrumah criticised The Wretched of the Earth for being without a practical revolutionary philosophy, yet this was exactly Fanon’s rejection of Nkrumist ideas of ‘unity’ and African socialism. Much of Fanon’s practical work as a diplomat centred on the idea of an African Legion, which he had first raised in December 1958, that would provide Africa with fighters in the war against imperialism, especially the fight against the French in Algeria. In March 1960 he travelled to Cairo to get approval for the African Legion from the leadership of the GPRA. Though Fanon was not alone in making the case for pan-African unity north and south of the Sahara, these appeals were marginal to the FLN’s principal orientation and interests. The idea was not popular or considered seriously. The leadership of the GPRA, involved in complicated machinations in Tunis and Cairo, had begun to regard a military victory highly unlikely. Negotiations of some sort would be necessary. In mid-April 1960, Fanon spoke in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, at the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference. The ALN would fight, he said, until victory; compromise and accommodation must be shunned. The picture was clear. Guinea and Algeria were pursuing a real independence; Senegal and the Ivory Coast a compromised and limited independence. In April 1960 the Conference on Positive Action for Peace and Security in Africa, formed in reaction to French nuclear testing in the Sahara, set up a Committee on Algeria, with the remit of establishing

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an all-African force to fight with the ALN, organised with troops from Africa’s newly independent states. A Ghanaian official stated that they had started to recruit a force of 500 for the enterprise. Fanon’s speech at the conference astonished a sociology professor from the UK who was in Ghana at the time: ‘I found myself electrified by a contribution that was remarkable not only for its analytic power, but delivered too with a [. . .] brilliance that is all too rare.’1 Fanon’s schedule was hectic. In mid-June, he travelled to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a Conference of Independent African States. In August, with Omar Oussedik and M’hammedYazid, he travelled to the Pan Africanist Congress, held in Lumumba’s Congo. This was a crucial period in the young nation, which had been independent for less than two months. Within days of independence the mineral-rich province of Katanga had seceded; weeks later, diamond-strewn Kasai followed suit. Belgium, the former colonial power, supported and armed these ‘independent’ states within the Congo to fight the Lumumba government in Léopoldville. Lumumba tried to mobilise his forces against the secession. He spoke at the start of the conference: As militants for African unity, all these leaders have said ‘no’ to the attempt to strangle Africa. [. . .] All of them immediately realised that the colonialists, in their efforts to regain their former hold, have endangered not only the genuine independence of the Congo, but also the very existence of all the independent countries of Africa. They have all realised that if the Congo dies, all Africa will be plunged into the darkness of defeat and slavery.2

Lumumba was right to see the ‘death’ of the independent Congo as a fork in the road: for much of the continent, defeat would indeed mean slavery and darkness. The Pan Africanist Congress was an effort to make real the calls for African unity and defence against a blatant and ruthless attempt for full independence to be crushed by the old colonial power (and their ‘Congolese puppets’, as Lumumba described them). The conference voted to support Congolese unity. But by the end of September, four Western governments wanted Lumumba dead and were preparing to carry out their desires. The Belgians beat the pack. Lumumba was arrested and sent to rebel-held Katanga, where he was

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brutally murdered with his two comrades, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, on 17 January 1961. The imperial powers had shown with horrifying clarity their policy towards the newly independent states: toe the line or die. Today we can say Lumumba’s murder set the course for Africa’s independence but, for Fanon, it was a challenge to avoid.3 The continent still had a chance. Fanon’s ‘remarkable analytical powers’ were present in his El Moudjahid article on his friend’s murder. In a forthright analysis, he argued that Lumumba had been mistaken to call in the UN. ‘In reality,’ Fanon wrote, the UN is the legal card used by the imperialist interests when the card of brute force has failed. [. . .] Africa must remember this lesson. If we need outside aid, let us call our friends. They alone can really and totally help us achieve our objectives because, precisely, the friendship that links us is a friendship of combat. (TAR 195–6).

Fanon drew conclusions about the weaknesses of the Congo’s independence. In Ghana and across the continent he found kindred spirits who did not hold back, whose lives were sewn so tightly into the fight for liberation that it was impossible to find the seam, the point of joining and separation. There was no space in life for anything else. Even before Lumumba’s murder, Fanon realised that the Congo reinforced the central importance of the African Legion. On 30 September he flew with Moumié from Accra to Tripoli, Libya. From here Moumié flew to Geneva, arranging to see Fanon in Rome in mid-October, but in Geneva he was poisoned and died on 4 November. He was not short of enemies, personal and political. The circumstances of his murder are still confused, as is his real legacy. But Fanon had no doubts. He saw himself in Moumié; they were brothers in temperament and strategy. Finally Fanon received authorisation to carry out a reconnaissance for a possible West African supply route into southern Algeria, but also an entry point for an African Legion to attack the French from the south. ALN troops needed to be supplied with extra forces and armaments. The French had cut off supply lines, but ALN troops in the south could hypothetically be reached from sub-Saharan Africa. In October 1960 Fanon set out to prove this could be done. He began this trip still mourning Moumié’s death. The mission revealed a basic

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historical and geographical fact about the continent: at no point was the desert an impenetrable divider of the continent, separating the ‘civilised’ north from the ‘barbaric’ south. The view that sub-Saharan Africa was populated by savages dominated European thought throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. In reality there had existed for many millennia a continual flow of goods and people between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. Gold travelled north as certain handicrafts, salt and meats travelled south in a vibrant trade that criss-crossed the expanse of desert. Fanon kept a field journal that he intended to use when he returned to write a report for the FLN leadership on the prospects for a Southern Front. What is remarkable about the report (found in TAR, 177–90) is that although these were rough notes written in the difficult circumstances of an uncomfortable and clandestine trip across 2,000 miles, the language was powerful, certain passages beautiful. It seems Fanon was incapable of writing plain prose. Almost despite himself, he could not write an ordinary sentence. The journal starts with a series of bullet points: ‘To put Africa in motion, to cooperate in its organisation, in its regroupment, behind revolutionary principles. To participate in the ordered movement of a continent – this was really the work I had chosen.’ He then gives a continental survey: Mali was ‘ready for anything’, offering a ‘bridgehead’ to ‘precious perspectives’. The Congo, ‘which constituted the second landing beach for revolutionary ideas’, was now caught up in an ‘inextricable network of sterile contradictions’. He then stresses the need, though now delayed, to ‘besiege the colonialist’s citadels known as Angola, Mozambique, Kenya and the Union of South Africa’. The field journal expresses Fanon’s commitment to African unity, distinct from the hollow sloganising of much of the nationalist movement on the continent. Fanon’s Africa was not the continent ‘of the poets, the Africa that is sleeping, but the Africa that stops you sleeping because the people are impatient to be doing something, to speak and to play’. Fanon states the objectives of his mission – a declaration of determined will: We must immediately take the war to the enemy, leave him no rest, harass him, cut off his breath. Let’s go. Our mission: to open up the Southern Front. To bring in arms and munitions from Bamako.

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Stir up the population of the Sahara; infiltrate our way into the high plains of Algeria. Having taken Algeria to the four corners of Africa, we have to go back with the whole of Africa to African Algeria, towards the north; towards the continental city of Algiers. That is what I want; great lives [. . .] cross the desert. To wear out the desert, to deny it, to bring together Africa and to create the continent [. . .] take the absurd, [. . .] the impossible, rub it up the wrong way and hurl a continent into the assault (180).

As we can see, Fanon was modest in his objectives – though if these hopes and ambitions seem strange to us, perhaps this only expresses the weariness and pessimism of our own contemporary hopes. There were eight men: two soldiers, two signals experts, two political advisors and two medics. He describes Commandant Chawki, who had studied in Tunis. For two years he had also lived in Paris, where he devoured hundreds of library books. Returning to Algeria, he took up arms when the war started. 1954. He took down his hunting rifle from its hook and joined the brothers. He knows the Sahara like the palm of his hand. When he speaks of the inhuman desert immensity it assumes an infinity of details. Hospitable corners, dangerous roads, mortal regions, points of penetration, the Sahara is a world in which Chawki moves with the boldness and the perspicacity of a great strategist. The French do not suspect the tricks this man is ready to play on them. [. . .] For the time being Chawki and I share the same bed. Our discussions last rather late into the night and I constantly marvel at the intelligence and clarity of his ideas. (181–2)

In his admiration for this real fighter who had seen everything – ‘repression, torture, shelling, pursuits, liquidations’ – Fanon saw what he had always wanted to be – a fighter, a man whose life never jostled with the contradictions of a bourgeois life. Chawki was an unadulterated revolutionary who had no concerns but the Algerian struggle. He was indispensable to the mission. The Mali government knew of the mission and supported it. But there were serious dangers. At the start of the mission the small group decided not to fly from Accra to Conakry, instead travelling overland

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to Bamako through the night. They later learned that their scheduled flight had been diverted to the Ivory Coast and searched by French forces. Fanon regarded this as a plot, undertaken with the knowledge of Ivory Coast president Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Once in Bamako they met the country’s first president, Modibo Keïta. There was something of the Accra air in Mali’s capital; the French presence was still visible (like the British presence in Accra). The president was a friend to the French commander and the whiff of compromise and continuity hung in the streets and corridors of the new regime. The FLN group proceeded to carve a slow, torturous route north towards the Algerian border. More or less without incident, they passed Aguelhok and Tessalit in north-east Mali. Once across the border into Algeria, Fanon felt a huge sense of achievement. The fighting might have been a long way from them but they had proved it was possible that a supply route to the Southern Front could be opened up. At one of their stops on the return journey, Fanon found volumes of history on the area and enthusiastically read about the great civilisations of Mali, Ghana and Guinea. These trans-Saharan paths the militants were tracing were, for Fanon, the living veins of African unity. His dream was a modern African anti-imperialist force that would cross the Sahara to ‘wear out, deny’ the desert and break the isolation of the war by bringing in African reinforcements and solidarity – literally bringing the continent together. The victory of Algeria would be the continent’s, and Algeria’s ‘real struggle’ would infect and inspire those besieging the colonialist citadels in subSaharan Africa. The mission was not only a military strategy but a way of spreading Fanon’s revolutionary principles. Fanon argued that small groups of troops should move east and join up with fighters in the wilayas in Algeria. Ultimately the mission did not lead to an African Legion heading north from Bamako with Fanon’s wish-list of weaponry. President Keïta did, however, establish something approximating a Southern Front later in 1961: small groups of combatants operated from an area Fanon had marked out, though these small sorties were unlike his great plans. Fanon was left shattered and drained by the mission, but as the days passed he realised it was more than exhaustion. He was sick. A medical examination in Accra revealed a high level of white corpuscles. Returning to Tunis at the end of December 1960, Fanon had further

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tests. The diagnosis was a death sentence. Leukaemia is a cancer of the blood; it is an abnormal build-up of white cells in the bone marrow that prevents the body from producing healthy red blood cells and platelets. Fanon’s symptoms were typical: tiredness, breathlessness, loss of appetite and dramatic weight loss. Even today, treatment for acute leukaemia has a very mixed success rate. It follows normal cancer drug therapy: chemotherapy, followed by radiotherapy and (more recently) stem cell transplants. Chemotherapy was in its infancy when Fanon was diagnosed. The best available treatment, though still largely experimental, was in the United States. Fanon was not an expert on leukaemia but he would have immediately known the conclusions – a few years of life at the best, probably less. Josie and Frantz’s lives were upended, both of them faced with their own imminent and permanent separation just as Algeria’s independence, the cause that had come to define their relationship, shimmered within reach on the horizon. Fanon refused to entertain a trip to the States. If good treatment could be sought in Moscow, then that was where he would go – his friends and the FLN believed that the level of treatment in Moscow could not be beaten. The GPRA arranged for his visit and hospitalisation in the Soviet Union in mid-January. This was a sign of Fanon’s importance to them, a realisation that his irrepressible analytic power and energy could not be ignored or replaced. He returned to Tunis in early spring. He had gained weight, his white blood cell count was down and the Soviet doctors had promised him a five-year reprieve. He was disappointed with what he had seen of the Soviet Union; though his movements had been restricted, he had seen the state of psychiatric medicine there and was deeply critical.4 Cherki recalls that Fanon was in a hurry when he returned, with projects he was determined to complete. He repeated a demand to be allowed to fight, to join ALN forces fighting the French in Algeria. He did not want to die in his bed, but risking his life in combat. No one in the FLN took these requests seriously. They wanted him alive.5 During the last months of his life, despite massive haemorrhages, Fanon continued to write and carry out political activities. It was a moment when, in Cherki’s words, he was most ‘demanding’ of himself, the hardest and most taxing on his own thought, struggling for clarity and analysis for ‘this “Algerian Revolution”, this

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African movement, he wanted to do everything he could so it would not collapse’.6

The greatest book of our time Fanon knew that his time was limited and that his final book would be his most important legacy. He did not have time to find ‘proof’, make a ‘proper’ study, conduct fieldwork or spend time referencing other work. He had to hit quickly and hard. Pierre Chaulet describes the fevered period in which the book was written: The Wretched of the Earth should be read like an urgent message, delivered in a raw state and uncorrected. He was sick, and aware that he was condemned. But he desired with all his force to say what he had to say.7

Fanon read draft chapters to a circle of his Tunis friends, who were only too aware of his terrible physical suffering. The entire book was dictated, as was his custom, to his secretary Marie-Jeanne Manuellan. Hardly rereading the typed pages, Fanon compiled them into hasty chapters and sent them directly to Claude Lanzmann, who in turn passed them on to the publisher, François Maspero, who had published Fanon’s previous book from his recently formed Maspero publishing house in Paris. Lanzmann, a radical journalist, writer and anti-colonial activist, was to be an important contact and intermediary for Fanon in his last year. Fanon promised the completed manuscript by June and completed the book at the end of July, insisting that the book appear at the end of September. There could be no excuse for bringing the book out later than this, he said; after all it was ‘long awaited with feverish impatience in the political milieus of the Third World’.8 By any standard Fanon’s book was an incredible feat. The main chapters, each of them original, penetrating and devastating in their analysis, were written in little more than four months. Yet there was little sense of satisfaction once the manuscript was submitted. The project had allowed him to avoid the reality of the sickness that was coursing through his body, destroying his life-force. After the book was finished he pressed on, with political involvement, seminars to ALN soldiers on the frontier with Algeria and finally meeting

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Jean-Paul Sartre, whose philosophical work and political practice had inspired him. The Wretched of the Earth is a hard book to describe. Its scope is massive, including the degeneration of national liberation movements, military coups, national culture and case notes from patients undergoing psychiatric treatment. The terms Fanon uses stretch across disciplines. Alliterations, metaphors and generalisations abound. Fanon generalises, but manages not to be essentialist. Great insights give the contemporary reader the slightly hallucinogenic sense that Fanon is describing even 50 years in the future – baffled readers may find themselves returning to the first page of the book to check the publication date. His characterisation of power and the class of nationalist leaders and parties is prophetic. The book can also be frustrating; in its impressive and dizzying general statements, vital groups and approaches are cast aside. Certain subjects and theories, he tells us, are unable to explain decolonisation and African realities; the working class and Marxism are ditched in favour of the peasantry and the lumpenproletariat. Still, the book is tantalising and brilliant, better, more perceptive and urgent than any single volume that has been written in the field of African Studies since Fanon’s death. Gone are references to academic texts. If Black Skin, White Masks was a radical treatise on racism (and a reading list) by a 26-year-old, now Fanon was writing entirely on his own feet, using studies and texts from his mountainous reading, implied in the text, present, yet in most cases not cited. The book was Fanon’s attempt to develop new ideas – not without the help of others, but not needing to prove his erudition. David Caute captures this uneven brilliance: Fanon’s passion for aphorisms is often indulged at the expense of precision. [. . .] sweeping generalisations are offered, usually without concrete evidence. [. . .] The narrative drives forward in the present, but here his sense of historical sequence loses itself in an elliptical oscillation between past and present, present and future, future and past [. . .] The Algerian Revolution is implicitly treated as a model for all of Africa’s.9

Caute’s 1970 verdict is still correct: ‘And yet The Wretched of the Earth is one of the great political documents of our time.’10 Rushing a book

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in the white heat of passion does not mean a weaker, poorer study, just as a long pondered book is not necessarily a better one. Fanon wrote, like he always did, in a hurry, distracted by political events and anxious to assist and strengthen the struggle.

For Europe and the Third World: Sartre’s preface Many readers of The Wretched of the Earth do not get beyond the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is a pity. Not because Sartre got Fanon wrong – there is a debate about Sartre’s preface – but because the book is much better than the preface.11 Fanon approved of Sartre’s preface. His very inclusion tells us much about Fanon. Contrary to Sartre’s assertion that the book is not addressing Europe, the book was drenched in the Enlightenment and in a desire to engage with the European left. Sartre’s startling preface speaks with a lyrical power that almost matches Fanon’s. Controversially, he addresses Europeans; the ‘we’ he speaks of throughout is the white audience of the mother country, the coloniser. Repeatedly Sartre explains, ‘Fanon has nothing for you at all; his work – red-hot for some – in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you’ (WE, 9). Rather, Fanon writes for his brothers, the poor, the colonised ‘half-men’ in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The solution to the problems of a world divided into colonies, into competing nation states, is to ‘achieve revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our former masters’ (10). Rather than thinking of ‘ourselves’ at the centre of the project of a new humanism, Europeans actually find themselves pushed out. Around the fires burning in the Third World, another emergent humanity is making plans. ‘Turn and turn about,’ Sartre writes; ‘in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies’ (12). As with Fanon, so Sartre’s preface is heavy with the dialectic. Europeans need Fanon to see themselves: ‘It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realise what we have made of ourselves’ (15). Though we may quibble with Sartre’s dogged insistence that Fanon’s book addresses only the Third World – an exaggeration at best – he is employing his European ‘we’ as a polemical device to

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highlight certain, crucial aspects of Fanon’s work. In denying and cheating the colonised ‘native’ of life, culture and self-respect, the European has created a beast of burden. Colonialism, its brutal social relations standing naked, is the essence of violence. No sooner have colonised ‘natives’ ‘opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged’ (15). The unbearable circumstances, the destruction of their communities, the shame and fear created by colonialism generates a ‘volcanic fury’ – yet: You said they understand nothing but violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror. (20)

Sartre is clear that this violence can be transformative, the path to selfdignity and respect. Humanity is regained, but, in the Third World, it requires the ultimate sacrifice of life. Like Fanon’s appropriation of Hegel, recovering social life requires physical death, violent resistance against the settler and the colonial empire. In contrast with European notions of human salvation, Sartre writes, We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind . . . We were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher quality. (20)

At the end of the preface Sartre seems to contradict himself. ‘When we have closed the book, the argument continues within us, in spite of its author; for we feel the strength of the peoples in revolt’ (20–1). The decolonisation of the ‘native’, the hominisation of man and woman in the furnaces of struggle and violence, involves also ‘our’ deliverance. Sartre delivers his verdict: We in Europe too are being decolonised: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not a

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pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggressions. (20–1)

After reading the book and seeing the world afresh, unadorned, we also face a moment of reckoning; the recognition of what we were, our passive acquiescence in the crimes of colonialism. In such recognition, Sartre tells us, we have the possibility of remaking our own humanity. Only once we declare ourselves for the Algerian fighter and condemn the war can we too hope to find salvation. We need to recognise our culpability, reject the colonial tyranny undertaken in our name and declare our support for the violent self-assertion of colonised humanity.

Concerning violence Fanon’s first chapter tells the story of the construction of the colony, the dehumanising and alienating reality of the colonial world from which the ‘settler’ and ‘native’ emerge and decolonisation springs. Decolonisation is a ‘historical’ process that sees the meeting of the two opposing forces with contradictory natures. It is a cleansing process that institutes a new humanity and through which the oppressed become ‘grandiose’ actors in the glare of ‘history’s floodlights’ (28). But for the oppressed to rise up and assume their full task and responsibilities, ‘all means’ including ‘that of violence’ must be used. Without violence no real decolonisation can take place. ‘You do not . . . overcome all the obstacles that you will come across’ if you are not ‘ready for violence at all times’ (29). This is not violence for the sake of violence, but necessary violence to overcome and conquer the ‘complete calling into question of the colonial situation’ (28). Colonial society is divided in two. In ‘capitalist societies’ there is a ‘multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and “bewilderers”’ who separate the ‘exploited from those in power’; in colonial situations it is the frontier guards who separate the native from the settler by means of ‘rifle butts and napalm’ (30). The ‘intermediary’, those ‘bewilderers’ who befuddle the exploited in ‘democracies’, do not disguise their domination in the colony. The separation between settler and native is absolute. No reconciliation is possible. Where the settler’s town is well built and made with asphalt and steel, populated by white people and

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foreigners, the colonised live in the medina or the reservations, starved of ‘bread, of meat, of shoes, of coals, of light’ (30). The absolute determining factor of this line is the ‘fact of belonging or not belonging to a given race’ (31). Here Fanon questions Marx; in the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. It is neither the act of owning factories, nor estates, nor a bank balance which distinguishes the governing classes. The governing race is first and foremost those who come from elsewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ‘the others’ (27).

Marxism, Fanon maintains, cannot explain the dominating racial aspect of the colonial world: that ‘you are rich because you are white; you are white because you are rich’ (27). The zoned colonial world can only be maintained and policed by violence. If the native is to ‘embody history in his own person’, he must surge forward and break up the ‘violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial situation’. Decolonisation is a spatial and geographical reordering; the destruction of colonial society is, therefore, the ‘abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country’. These processes are not the neat ‘democratic’ unfolding of a rational confrontation (the dialectic), nor a ‘treatise on the universal’ (27). ‘The colonial world is a Manichean world’ in which the native is regarded as devoid of values, in fact as the negation of values. In this world the settler, white and pure, becomes the symbol of humanity, the native dehumanised, the repository of a negative physical presence. The native becomes a beast. Fanon could be writing about the global media image of the Global South today: Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life – all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (33)

In contrast, the settler sees the world as his, created by his efforts. He is literally the bringer of life; without him the country will lapse back into

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barbarism. But – and this is Fanon’s central point – the native can cast off the ‘immobility’ that has been violently thrust on him and make a decision to ‘put an end to the history of colonisation’ (40). As with a great deal of Fanon’s writing, he is not actually describing what happened in most cases. A total and utter extinguishing of the colonial flame, free of negotiations and compromise, the absolute and unequivocal seizure of history by the native, the end of dehumanisation and the negation of the colonised were polemical objectives. This process was uneven across the colonial world. Rather, these sections point to how Fanon constructs an argument, forcing it to its most extreme end to indicate not the actual course of events but the necessary or preferred course. Fanon is making an argument for revolutionary change. Efforts at controlling and directing decolonisation in a way acceptable to Western culture and values lead the colonial system to begin a ‘dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonialist country’ (34), whom it sees as a useful tool for maintaining colonialist values. By contrast, the morality of the native is concrete. It requires breaking the colonialist’s violence – snuffing out the settler. If all men are equal, Fanon argues, then only when the native proves that ‘he is the equal of the settler’ will the entire edifice of the colonial state be broken. The violent confrontation that is necessary (but not automatic) has a profound impact on the psychology of the native. Through it he realises that the white skin no longer has more value than a native’s skin. This is an old theme for Fanon, the search for mutual recognition and the necessity of actively seeking out this recognition, but here it becomes a clarion call for violent struggle. The colonial world of ‘race’ recalls Shylock’s famous appeal for recognition and revenge: ‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affection, passions [. . .] if you prick us, do we not bleed?’12 The world has been shaped by the colonial conquest and the settler, as the Jew has been defined by the Christian. Fanon’s apparent ‘extremes’ reflect the dichotomy imposed on society by the colonial situation. ‘The villainy you teach me I will execute – and it shall go hard, but I will better the instruction’ (36). The ‘instruction’ Fanon orders is a complete and unifying national liberation movement. Fanon makes an important distinction: he is arguing for a ‘real struggle’ for freedom and recognition, which takes place only where

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the ‘blood of the people has flowed and where the period of armed warfare has favoured the backward surge of intellectuals towards bases grounded in the people’ (WE 36). Only in these places – privileged by violence – is there genuine destruction of the bourgeois colonialist ‘superstructure’. In 1959, as we have seen, Fanon’s described the eradication of the superstructure by popular involvement in the revolution. Algerian society was transformed from the bottom. Only from below, among the poor and oppressed, could society be properly changed; violence was the sign that decolonisation and revolution had reached the necessary heights to rid society of colonial racism and hierarchy. Always conscious of the psychological burden of colonialism, Fanon writes of the compartmentalised, Manichaean world of statues, of the general who ‘civilised the “colony”, the engineer who built the bridge’ (40). The colony – free of movement, fixed fast by these statues of conquest – teaches the natives to stay in their place. The condition of colonialism leads to dreams of muscular prowess, ‘of action [. . .] of aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing. I dream that I burst out laughing, that I spanned a river in one stride’ (40). This tension makes the ‘mass relationship’ of settler and native inherently unstable and explosive. Fanon argues that the ‘violence’ of the native is deflected into feuds, tribal warfare and vendettas – efforts to forget that colonialism exists. For Fanon, ‘destruction in a very concrete form is one of the ways in which the native’s muscular tension is set free’ (42). The ‘supernatural’ plays the same role: myths and magic convince the native that there is no need to fight against the settler since ‘what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths’ (43). When the ‘choice’ of armed struggle is finally made – after centuries of believing in phantoms – the native reaches for the gun and stands at last with real force as the arbiter of life. If the work of the psychiatrist was to ‘enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment’ (TAR 60), as Fanon wrote in 1956, then the violent struggle against colonialism serves the same function. The confrontation reveals the true nature of the world. Next Fanon proceeds to unpick the situation that leads to national liberation. The first moment sees nationalist parties participating in electoral action, where they issue ‘philosophical dissertations’ on the right of self-determination, not the necessity of overthrow and

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violence against colonialism. They may speak of radicalism, but they remain steadfast to ‘reforms’. Their membership is among teachers, workers and small shopkeepers and they seek to increase their own lot. The nationalist party is careful to maintain close dialogue with the colonial state, hardly disguising their desire for acceptance and assimilation. Their conception of political liberation is inherently proscribed. This self-serving class of ‘enfranchised slaves’ seeks only the extension of rights to a class of emancipated citizens. By contrast, the ‘people’ do not want colonial assimilation or privileges but rather the settlers’ place (WE 47). Fanon’s argument here is problematic, replete with extraordinary generalisations that throw sand in the eyes of the reader. First, the trajectory of nationalist politics did not, across the continent, follow these lines. Second, were all parties of national liberation compromised by their urban supporters? Where Fanon mixes ‘workers and the petty bourgeoisie’ into a seamless support base, there were fundamental differences. The major contours of the intellectual life and attitudes of the évolué are well described, but Fanon conflates their desire for assimilation and compromise with the desires of urban society as a whole. Nationalist politics was frequently energised and radicalised by organised urban working classes and trade unions in strikes and demonstrations, often leading to the foundation of the first independence struggles (such as in the 1947–8 Senegalese/Malian railway strike and the 1948 general strike in Southern Rhodesia). Though these movements were finally undermined and co-opted by Fanon’s ‘enfranchised slaves’ into moderate nationalist parties, this does not mean that the working class were selfishly profiting from colonialism. Fanon set up these ‘conflations’ to make his next fundamental point: ‘The peasantry is systematically disregarded for the most part by the propaganda put out by the nationalist parties’ (48). For the first time in the book, Fanon’s true ‘wretched of the earth’ make an uncategorical appearance: In the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms (48).

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The real heroes of Fanon’s narrative are the peasantry – who nowhere on the continent played an ‘independent’ role or led the struggle for national liberation. When they were active they were under the control of a radical intelligentsia, but this is not what Fanon wanted. His writing is an aria for agency and self-activity, yet he identifies the peasantry, who were incapable of independent action, as his revolutionaries par excellence. Bourdieu, in a scathing response, wrote that the peasants, ‘unable to define their own goals other than in an emotional and negative manner, [. . .] wait for their destiny to be revealed to them’.13 The Vietnamese struggle Fanon celebrates was ostensibly a peasant movement, but actually controlled by a selfappointed revolutionary intelligentsia who usurped popular decisionmaking and controlled the processes of national liberation with an iron grip (not unlike the FLN). The peasantry were never the force he envisaged. Fanon, like many thinkers of his time, was influenced by Maoist interpretations of socialism, which emphasised the central role of the peasantry in revolutionary struggle while holding a deep suspicion towards the proletariat. Fanon accepted the widespread argument that the organised working class had been effectively ‘bought off’ with the profits of imperialist exploitation. There is a real sense in The Wretched of the Earth that the role Marx gave to the working class could be taken over by the peasantry. This displays a failure to understand what Marx meant by the pivotal role of the working class and its relationship to the oppressed. The ‘colonial machine’, Fanon argues, is ‘violence in its natural state’ (48) and only yields when confronted with violence. The machine creates the violent counter-reaction. At a stage in the struggle the colonial bourgeoisie intervene with an idea that is, Fanon says, a creation of the colonial system: non-violence. Non-violence is, therefore, an attempt to maintain colonial relations and continuity by negotiating a ‘peaceful’ transition, ‘before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made’ (53). Enlightened members of the colonial apparatus see that national liberation may become entirely destructive – infrastructure smashed, towns ransacked and an economy destroyed. Compromise offers a way out. The national bourgeoisie use ‘mass’ movements at decisive moments in the negotiations and compromise and ‘brandish the danger of a mass mobilisation as the crucial weapon’ (53) in a sort of ‘tap-politics’, where the ‘tap’ of

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political mobilisation is turned on and off by the ruling national party.14 (There is another sleight of hand here: if the peasantry is the revolutionary class, then it is necessary to lampoon the urban struggle. This Fanon does with his characteristic force. Admittedly, the struggle, Fanon is describing is led by a conciliatory, reformist leadership, but the point remains.) ‘Stoppages of work [. . .] mass demonstrations to cheer the leaders and the boycotting of buses or of imported commodities’ are used to bring pressure to bear, nothing more, while allowing the ‘people to work off their energy’ (WE 53). The Cold War had a huge influence on the national liberation movement. The native’s guerrilla warfare now had an ally in the completely ‘new international situation’ (51). The colony and the nationalist movement are forced to face the outside world. On the side of the oppressed is the experience of colonial defeat: one victory in one colony is quickly linked with ‘the whole question of colonised people’ (59). The presence on the international scene of progressive anti-imperialists, Fanon argues, changes the ‘atmosphere’ of the violent struggle. ‘When Mr Khrushchev brandishes his shoe at the United Nations [. . .] there’s not a single ex-native [. . .] who laughs. [. . .] Castro sitting in military uniform [. . .] demonstrates [. . .] the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence’ (61). The situation ceases to be ‘hopeless if we compare [the violence of the native] in the abstract to the military machine of the oppressor’ (62). Fanon, though critical of the role of socialism and the Soviet Union, was expressing a widely held belief that the refigured geopolitics of the Cold War was beneficial to the struggle of colonial peoples. These arguments were problematic. But, as we have seen, the essence of classical Marxism – the self-emancipation of the working class and the oppressed – was rejected in the Stalinised ‘Marxism - Leninism’ of the Soviet Union. Internationalism, the lifeblood of Bolshevism, became merely a slogan used in diplomacy. Socialism, the world was assured, would follow the national struggle. National liberation and socialism, it was claimed, were too much for one movement.15 Fanon’s description is a brilliant analysis of the inherently dialectical tension and contradictions between nationalist parties and the people: the leadership responding cautiously to pressure from

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below, the masses maintaining a revolutionary zeal. The tug-of-war transforms both sides – the leader and the militant. The nationalist parties plead for calm while surveying the horizon for the ‘liberal intentions of colonialism’ (54). The effect of the escalating violence of the nascent nation can spark a violent ‘insurrectionary’ movement by the people or itself act as a brake on the colonial regime. While colonised masses know ‘that their liberation must and can only be achieved by force’ (57), sometimes it does not happen. Independence is granted after limited periods of popular struggle; the depths of revolutionary fervour are not plumbed. ‘Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic and the nation is demobilised through a rapid movement of decolonisation, the people have the time to see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special merit’ (74). So violence is essential, both as a cleansing force to rid the native of inferiority and pragmatically to confront the inherently violent colonial regime, but it also operates at a symbolic level, as an ‘atmosphere’ that chokes and confuses Western powers across the multiplicity of colonies in the Third World. How, then, can Fanon criticise ‘rapid decolonisation’ as insipid and weak, not having been forged on the anvil of the ‘real struggle’? The new nation born of negotiation and reconciliation, Fanon argues, will be crippled and hopelessly compromised. Popular liberation can only take root in the context of a violent engagement in the processes of national independence. Can the symbolic presence of violence across the Third World substitute itself for a ‘real struggle’? Fanon is unclear: at different points he answers with both yes and (an uncategorical) no. His comments on Cuba (whose revolution was limited to a relatively small band of fighters that was neither a mass peasant force nor an urban struggle of the working class) suggest that he saw an ‘atmosphere’ and the correct leadership as a possible substitute for active involvement in the actual revolution. Castro’s revolution might have been won from above, but when he ‘took over power in Cuba [. . .] he gave it to the people’ (76). Power can be won, Fanon seems to be saying, in a variety of ways, but needs to be surrendered and returned to the people. The tension and contradictions in the text are illustrative of Fanon’s questioning of rapidly changing circumstances and search for real solutions. He worked as a representative of the GPRA and knew the

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necessity and danger of compromise and negotiations. But this also created conflict between political pragmatism and his despair of compromise and his commitment to unflinching and ever-deepening revolutionary struggles from below. He fights in the chapter with a variety of nationalist ‘demons’ and is never content to accept easy answers. Independence, when won, gives ‘more compensation’ to the colonised, but has not yet given time for them to ‘elaborate a society, or build up and affirm values’. The new nation is set ‘in a kind of irresolution’ (64). To break the potential ‘curse of independence’, Fanon talks about the need to bring the world’s extraordinary ‘productive forces’ to bear on the poverty of the underdeveloped world. The waste of the nuclear arms race could be used ‘in the space of fifteen years to raise the standards of living of underdeveloped countries by 60 percent’ (68). Fanon’s arguments on violence are a series of hammer blows pounding over and over again on the same point: Force is the raison d’être of colonialism; therefore anti-colonial violence is the necessary line of action. Once it has been committed there can be no retreat. The Mau Mau, Fanon tells us, required each member to aim a blow at the victim – immediately implicating each in the death of the settler. Violence fixes the native to the struggle. The native’s violence in turn is proportionate to the violence of the settler regime. But there is no real equivalence, because ‘machine gunning from aeroplanes and bombardment from the fleet’ (69) – both common in the Algerian war – go further than anything the native is capable of exacting. After national liberation, Fanon admits, further struggle is necessary – requiring a rejection of regionalism and tribalism. Hence the nationalist party shows ‘no pity’ towards ‘customary chiefs’ created or kept alive by colonialism. Attention must be given here to Fanon’s highly – and intentionally – idealised nationalist party. He discusses what such a party should do. He also sees national parties failing independence, curtailing and co-opting national liberation. So when he writes that when people have ‘taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as “liberators”’, we would be mistaken to call out ‘Rubbish!’ We know that the violence of liberation did not mean that people refused to allow their ‘freedom’ to be usurped by so-called liberators. But Fanon’s technique is polemical, an argument in the conditional tense.

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A nationalist party should liquidate all regionalism and tribalism; liberation should ensure that people hold their freedom, won with their own hands, close to their chests, refusing to allow a ‘living god’ or ‘liberator’ to wrest it from them. Fanon, here, is the prophet of an idealised liberation. His final statement on violence should be read in this vein. ‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction: it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’ (74). But we have seen that his notion of violence is contradictory. It celebrates ‘violent’ liberation and the armed struggle as a prerequisite for ‘real’ liberation but also posits that countries that have not experienced such liberation may benefit from an ‘atmosphere of violence’ that transports them, somehow, into the realm of ‘real’ national liberation. Violence is both therapeutic and indispensable, but also symbolic. Fanon’s own contradictions and hopes came from rapidly changing situations. He also spoke, no doubt because of his role in the GPRA, of necessary compromises as well as arguing for the absolute necessity of revolutionary change. He did not manage an entirely coherent analysis – but how could he, in the life-rush to complete the book as he battled leukaemia? In the final section Fanon speaks with the voice of realpolitik and the provisional government, envisioning the first years of independence not abstractly but as an actual observer. The young nation feels overwhelmed by the gap between it and developed countries. European development, he tells us, was gradual and involved the ‘middle class’ becoming the most ‘dynamic and prosperous of all classes’, (75) with national unity allowing it to concentrate wealth. But European ‘opulence is literally scandalous’, for this wealth has come from the ‘blood of slaves. When the natives call for independence, the colonial country says ‘take it and starve’. Soon the economically backward new nation feels the ‘curse of independence and the colonial power through its immense resources of coercion condemns the young nation to regression’ (77). The regime must impose austerity ‘on these starving men’, who are asked to make another ‘gigantic effort’. ‘An autarkic regime is set up and each state with the miserable resources it has in hand tries to find an answer to the nation’s great hunger and poverty’ (79). But, Fanon tells us, another option is available, that of

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‘accepting the conditions of the former guardian power’ (79). The effect is another curse: economic dependence. What counts is the redistribution of wealth. The competition between capitalism and socialism does not solve the problem either. Denuded of any tools except those economic channels left by the colonial regime, the new nation, capitalist or socialist, is obliged to ‘export to other countries and other currency areas, but the basis of its exports is not fundamentally modified’ (79). If it does not, catastrophe threatens. These problems of development occupied the minds of many world economists and scholars.16 The developing country should refuse these conditions, Fanon argued: the wealth of Europe is the Third World’s; Europe is indeed the ‘creation of the Third World’ (WE, 81). If European nations demanded restitution from Germany for war crimes, then the deportations, massacres and forced labour suffered by the colonial world must also be accounted for. The colonised must realise that ‘it is their due, and [. . .] the capitalist powers [. . .] must pay’. In a statement of bold pragmatism, Fanon says that the new nation is not blinded by the ‘moral reparation of national independence, nor are we fed by it’ (83). Independence triggers the flight of private capital from the old colony, Fanon states. The parting colonial power must establish stability and protect investments; they would ‘make a great mistake and commit an unspeakable injustice if they contented themselves with withdrawing from our soil those forces that were implanted to discover the wealth of the country’ (83). If this does not happen, capital becomes locked up in Europe without an outlet for profits and investment. The newly independent nation is condemned to regression and poverty while Europe is deprived of overseas markets. The ensuring crisis throws thousands onto the dole in Europe and the working class is forced to ‘engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime’ (83). The conclusion of this situation leads Fanon to develop a ‘negotiation position’, arguing that the young nations of the Third World are wrong in trying to make up to the capitalist countries. We are strong in our own right. [. . .] We ought [. . .] to emphasise and explain to the capitalist countries that the fundamental problem of our times is not the struggle between the socialist regimes and them. The Cold War must be

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ended [. . .] and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions (84).

We can hear in this argument echoes of the discussions Fanon must have had with prominent FLN members as independence beckoned. He seems to be appealing to the same capitalist villains and monsters he condemned just pages before: they must come to their senses and see that capitalism needs to invest in and help the Third World. But just as the reader is astonished by this naivety and contradiction, Fanon catches himself: ‘It is clear that we are not so naive as to think that this will come about with the cooperation and goodwill of the European governments’ (84). No such goodwill exists. Instead, the task requires the indispensable help of the European peoples, who themselves must realise that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned. [. . .] the European peoples must first decide to wake up and shake themselves, use their brains, and stop playing the stupid game of the Sleeping Beauty. (84)

The contradiction here is self-evident. In places Fanon is trying ideas out, experimenting with arguments with which he must have been uncomfortable. The revolutionary in him wished for a process of popular engagement and the development of a new consciousness from below across the Third World, up and down the continent he had made his home. Studies in a Dying Colonialism represented the high-water mark for revolutionary struggle – celebrating the Algerian people but also saying implicitly to the rest of decolonising Africa: Here is how it’s done. You too can feel the liberating breath and freedom of revolution – but only if you, like us, seize control of liberation yourselves. The Wretched of the Earth is a final clarion call for human unity: Fanon’s leitmotif, his signature tune. This may appear strange for a man pilloried so often for being the prophet of violent Third Worldism as a struggle in which Europe plays no part. Fanon states the opposite: If the West is a creation of the Third World, so the Third World has been violently created by the West. At the level of international relations there must be co-existence, an uneven co-dependence. In Fanon there is no real or

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desirable possibility of ‘delinking’ from the rest of the world.17 But there is a deeper, richer level to his commitment to Europe. Fanon was describing the major contours of an interlinked and uneven world system. Politics and philosophy had to deal with this political economy. While Fanon’s answer seems to contain an appeal to European governments to grant financial aid and support (reparations), he also sees the solution to the insoluble predicament of the Third World in an alliance with European people. He reasonably stipulates, however, that such an alliance will require Europe to throw off its racism. No people can be free while holding another down. European workers must wake up. Fanon is right to see the development of capitalism as resulting from pillage, slavery and colonisation. But the pattern is complicated. Capitalism, as Marx wrote, came into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’.18 One of the principal ways it sweated this dirt and blood was from its relationship with people in the North. The processes of primitive accumulation, of building up capital in sufficient quantities to generate transformation in agriculture and infrastructure, took place in large measure through enclosures: the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society.19

This saw public ‘commons’ across Europe closed off to a class who had used them to feed themselves, graze their animals, grow crops. Thousands were forced into towns, or what we could more accurately be called slums or bidonvilles. A minority were absorbed into the growing industry but huge numbers were destitute, without food security through access to land and their own means for cultivating it. There was a natural kinship for a time between the slow and horrific growth of wage labour, as millions were forced to leave the land for town and city slums, and the period when slaves who had been bought, stolen, bartered for in Africa, were worked and killed on plantations in the New World. The role of slavery was prefigured of the changes that

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now had gripped Europe and the ‘North’. As the African political scientist and theorist Biko Agozino has written, Marx ‘gave the central explanatory power for capitalism and the inevitability of a revolution to the enslavement of Africans and the struggle for emancipation’.20 Each step in the development of both capitalist industry in northern Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States and slavery throughout the Americas was met with resistance. In Haiti the revolution of slaves led by Toussaint Louverture sounded the death knell of slavery; in Europe the early trade union movements and the revolutionary struggle of Chartism in the UK in the 1830s and 1840s signalled the birth of an alternative to capitalism. The ‘gains’ so often credited to benevolent liberal governments and politicians were the result of a sustained struggle by a class recently and violently freed of its means of reproduction. The eight-hour day and the right to vote, to form unions and to demonstrate were all won. It was to the struggles against slavery and colonialism that Marx and Engels looked for inspiration and guidance, as Agozino has written: Whereas Marx focused Volume 1 primarily on the analysis of contemporary slavery and the African experience [. . .] Engels added an appendix to Volume 3 of Capital in which he recounted a heroic battle where the Zulu defeated the British with mere sticks and spears.21

While Fanon was right to identify a crippling strand of xenophobic and racist thinking among European people, he was wrong to imply that the working class – like the urban worker in the colonial world – was a parasite on the Third World, implicated in colonial theft and benefitting from the rich dividends of the bourgeoisie. These arguments were repeated with such frequency after Fanon (and in no small part because of him) that they became commonplaces. There are, in fact, many cases that illustrate not the inherent racism of the European working class but the opposite. Fanon knew this better than us. He had fought alongside PCF members in anti-colonial protests in France. His wife’s family were militants in trade unions, and Josie was a political force in her own right. Racism was present, but there was also a thick strand of militant solidarity with the oppressed in French

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colonies. Fanon did not give up on Europe, engaging constantly with its best intellectuals and political traditions to recognise the essential battle going on across the Mediterranean. France had inspired him with its great, frustrated and incomplete Enlightenment and revolution. Perhaps the best critique of Fanon’s rejection of the working class as a revolutionary subject was written by Communist Party USA member Jack Woddis in 1972. His account systematically dismantles two of Fanon’s principal myths: first, that the working class was, in any respect, a privileged stratum of African society in the 1950s and 1960s. In a thorough trawl of the data and scholarly literature, Woddis shows that in each region of the continent the working class was ‘in no sense’ privileged – even if a group of trade union officials were (as they are everywhere).22 Second, he demonstrates that the actual history of working-class struggle through the period of decolonisation stands in utter contrast to Fanon’s prognosis. ‘If Fanon,’ he writes, ‘was irresponsible in creating his myth about the bourgeoisified African worker, he was no less irresponsible in attempting to invent the legend of the consequent innate conservativism [. . .] of the African workers in the struggle for national liberation.’23 The simple empirical observation that Fanon was wrong about the existence of a pampered continental working class cannot be dismissed as ‘proletarian messianism’, as John Saul and Giovanni Arrighi wrote in 1969.24 Despite his precise and astute assessment of the role of the petit-bourgeoisie on the continent, his comments on revolutionary agency were confusing and ill-informed, to say the least. Unfortunately, Woddis’s own Stalinised version of Marxism meant that he was unable to diagnose the reasons for Fanon’s weakness or see the power of his analysis. It was Fanon’s disgust with Stalinism and the PCF that caused him to pull away from a fuller, deeper engagement with Marxism. The same story applies to the Algerian Revolution. Frequently the Algerian working class was, as Bourdieu indicated, the most politically progressive class, able to quickly grasp the notion of solidarity and internationalism: from the beginning of the struggle in Vietnam, long before 1954, Algerian dockers refused to load war materials or even goods for trade going to or from Vietnam.25 In 1953, for example, dockers and building workers in Oran led mass demonstrations

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against the attempt to cancel local elections. There were over 220 strikes that year, involving more than 270,000 workers. As we have seen, Fanon saw the role of the Communist Party in Algeria and France as hopelessly compromised, and while he might have been a sophisticated critic of the ‘nationalist party’, he was a loyalist (occasionally a fanatical one) of the FLN, whose turn to the cities and Algeria’s small but significant working class was broken after the battle of Algiers. But even this urban fight had been top-down, directed by FLN cells; independent initiatives, though frequent, were constrained and occasionally viciously repressed. There was never a serious analysis – even at the Soummam Conference – of the role of the working class. Workers would at best be regarded as bit players to be told what to do (and at worst disregarded altogether). While revolutionary change from below did occur, as Fanon documented, it was not the unbridled flowering of creativity that he wanted. In April 1959 Patrice Lumumba described the relationship between the leadership of the party that he led, the MNC, and its membership: The masses are a lot more revolutionary than us [. . .] They do not always dare to express themselves in front of a police officer or make their demands in front of an administrator, but when we are with them it is the masses who push us, and who want to move more rapidly than us.26

Such was the dialectical relationship between the people and the FLN. When the momentum of struggle was lost as the country edged into independence, political power fell back into the increasingly conservative hands of the leadership. Another factor that had a profound impact on Fanon’s thinking was events that seemed to have dislodged the Third World working class. The Algerian war, fought by ‘armed forces’ and guerrilla sorties, seemed to present the world with the magic key to liberation. On top of the peasants’ role in China’s 1949 revolution came Vietnam’s defeat of the French in 1954, then Cuba in 1959. An island that had long been the brothel and playground of the American elite was shaken by a revolution. With little apparent ambiguity, the ‘rural guerrilla’ had walked onto the stage of history. Relatively small forces could liberate an entire country and pose a

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model to both the still-colonised world and the nations to which independence had already become a curse. But the ‘socialist models’ celebrated in the 1950s and 1960s, though they spoke in the increasingly vacuous language of ‘proletariat internationalism’ and Marxism, had displaced Marx’s agent of political change. There is already in Fanon’s work an implicit criticism of parties that substitute themselves for the masses, speak for them and supplant the ‘real struggle’ of the oppressed with the heroic activities of the leadership. These criticisms, targeting nationalist parties in particular, could also be made against those ‘guerrilla intelligentsia’ who promised liberation on behalf of the peasantry and proletariat. But none of these models represented either an independent revolutionary peasantry or a viable alternative to Africa’s predicament. During the final stages of China’s revolution Mao was explicit that the sizable urban population had to remain passive and inactive.27 As for the role of the revolutionary peasantry, China revealed another illusion. As the socialist writer John Molyneux wrote in 1983, Once achieved, national liberation (if it is not transcended in international revolution) must be consolidated and maintained in the arena of fiercely competitive world capitalism. The petty bourgeois guerrilla elite propelled to power by peasant war thus finds [. . .] it has no choice but the Stalinist option, the struggle for economic growth through the accumulation of capital, based on the exploitation of the workers and peasants, which in turn means it must consolidate itself as a new ruling class.28

In Vietnam and Cuba the trajectory was the same. Neither saw mass peasant armies, rather an ‘intelligentsia’ leading groups that included rural agricultural workers. Nowhere in these countries did the working class play a role that could be mistaken as pro-imperialist or as a stooge to colonial powers. In sub-Saharan Africa the working class could not, before or after independence, be described as a ‘labour aristocracy’ – indeed, I do not believe the term to be a valid category in any of the cases where it has been used.29 The passivity of the working class in some cases, certainly in the 1950s and 1960s, can be significantly attributed to political decisionmaking, organisational folly and ideological confusion, and the class’s

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own ‘immaturity’.30 Stalinism bears considerable blame. None of this explains the ‘failures’ of working-class movements but it does go some way in illustrating the complications and Fanon’s limited field of vision – so obscured was Marxism by the ‘Marxist - Leninist’ fog billowing out of Moscow. Fanon, more than many of his contemporaries, saw the importance of organisational forms in creating counter-hegemonic forces and providing ideological tools for the oppressed to contest and confront the world. He also saw how these organisations could work as a conservative pressure on the ‘rank and file’. Fanon had a keen sense of the importance of organisations and rejected simple notions of ‘spontaneity’. But still he did not extend these beyond romantic notions of the peasantry or consider the potential of a Third World proletariat as an important and necessary element in the unfolding liberation struggles during and after the period of decolonisation.

Spontaneity In ‘Spontaneity: Its Strengths and Weakness’, Fanon looks directly at questions of organisation – specifically the ‘time-lag, or difference of rhythm’ between the nationalist party’s leadership and the masses. He protests in the first page that the ‘party’ is a modern, Western instrument that is picked up in the Third World without the ‘slightest modification’ for local peculiarities (WE 85). One essential defect, he tells us, is that the Third World proletariat may be ‘politically conscious’, but it is a tiny minority and ‘the nucleus of the colonised population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime’. It is here that Fanon makes his classic statement about the working class in the colonial world: In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everything to lose; in reality it represents that fraction of the colonised nation which is necessary and irreplaceable if the colonial machine is to run smoothly. (86)

Those drivers, nurses, interpreters and dockers are the mainstay of the nationalist parties, Fanon argues, and constitute ‘a . . . ‘“bourgeois”

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fraction of the colonised people’ (66). In this way Fanon can be credited with helping to launch a long and disastrous intellectual and political hostility towards the African working class (not to mention the love affair with a largely mythical peasantry). By contrast, the nationalist party is deeply suspicious of rural areas, having inherited this distrust from the colonial state, and uses local chieftains as mediators when accessing ‘rural’ communities. Fanon sees a crude replication of European revolutions by ‘westernised elements’ in the colonial context. In working-class revolutions in industrialised countries, the ‘peasantry are [. . .] the worst organised and at the same time most anarchistic element’ (66). They show no political independence; their motivations are individualistic, their perspectives limited. By contrast, the native peasantry in the colony are a different formation: ‘The landless peasants, who make up the lumpenproletariat, leave the country districts [. . .] rush towards towns, crowd in tin-shack settlements and try to make their way into the [. . .] cities founded by colonial domination’ (66). Here Fanon describes what was to become a more or less permanent feature of Africa’s urban landscape: the slums (or mega-slums) much written about today.31 Fanon sees this lumpen class as revolutionary. Bourdieu was dismissive: ‘Enclosed in a condition marked by insecurity and incoherence, their vision is generally itself uncertain and incoherent.’32 Fanon argues, however, that peasants who stay in the countryside, in ‘this unchanging way of life which hangs on like a grim death to rigid social structures, may occasionally give birth to movements . . . based on religious fanaticism or tribal wars’ (WE 89). But then, without explanation, Fanon declares that in their ‘spontaneous movements’ the country people are disciplined and altruistic: the collective dominates the individual. How we have arrived at this conclusion from the preceding statements is not clear. Fanon, however, is surely correct when he argues that nationalist parties neglect and disregard the country districts: ‘They do not go out to find the mass of the people. They do not put their theoretical knowledge to the service of the people’ (91). Despite this, diverse processes are happening at the same time, so, as the nationalist party is working with the working class in towns there may be an explosion in the countryside. Fanon cites the example of Madagascar in 1947 when, following repression of the national movement, the rural masses

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opposed ‘colonialist forces savagely’ (91). The echo of repression in the city reaches the countryside, ‘the old warrior-like tradition springs up again [. . .] the peasantry spontaneously gives concrete form to the general security’ (92). This leaves the official, urban nationalist movement in a quandary. They make no effort to send in their party organisers or develop the political consciousness of the ‘peasantry’. Instead the old colonial mistrust of the ‘rural’ is maintained. He points out that in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion ‘not a single well-known nationalist declared his affiliation with the movement’ (93).33 Fanon’s analysis, though sweeping and general, is largely accurate. Fanon’s criticism points to a general theme in the book: the dreadful, stultifying lack of ideological development in nationalist parties. He is completely consistent: nationalist parties suffer from a lack of political content within and as a consequence are unable to carry out coherent political education without – in urban and rural areas alike. This plays out most horrifically in the rural question and extends into independence: when the nationalist flag is raised, the ‘interior of the country’ is regarded as ‘non-pacified’ and visited by ministers only ‘when the national army is carrying out manoeuvres there’ (94). Did Fanon overhear conversations when such rural prejudices were expressed – in Ghana, for example? ‘“We don’t quite know how the mass of these people will react” is the cry [. . .] “they need the thick end of the stick if this country is to get out of the Middle Ages”.’ (94) The rural remains alien and dangerous. When considering the working class Fanon makes another interesting conflation: of the craven, cowardly nationalist leadership and the colonial working class. These separate forces almost became conjoined. The social character of the urban évolué melts into Fanon’s understanding of the Third World proletariat. But, as we have seen, their lifestyle, experiences and perspectives were utterly distinct. (The évolué are variously labelled in The Wretched of the Earth as an intelligentsia, a pseudo-bourgeoisie or a new middle class.34 For the purposes of this book, ‘student-intelligentsia’ seems the most accurate appellation.) The nationalist movement was quickly dominated by a ‘student’ class, often educated in European or North American universities or colleges and often formed politically in student organisations such as the West African Student Union in London or

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the Fédération des Étudiants d’Afrique Noire en France in Paris, both crucial training grounds for African nationalist leaders. The nation was their project and they saw themselves as custodians of the new independent state. They were also caught between feelings of revulsion towards the illiterate masses and feelings of obligation and romanticism. This group is Fanon’s ‘urban bourgeoisie’ and was also, in most cases, deserving of his vitriol. In ‘progressive’ socialist regimes – Guinea, Ghana, Tanzania – they sought nation state development, instituted from above with authoritarian force. In other states – the Congo, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya – they saw themselves as simply the passive heirs to the levers of state control and were happy to accept ‘metropolitan’ dividends in the form of share ownership and kickbacks from export contracts. As Fanon rightly suggests, they were not a neutral group who could be compelled to work in the interest of the nation or, as later radicals hoped, commit ‘class suicide’ and become an ‘ideal proletariat’. But Fanon’s characterisation of the student-intelligentsia seems to include a ‘pampered working class’; at best these lines were blurred. The early independence (or late colonial) working class, apart from sharing an ‘urban’, had little in common with the évolué. Maybe they had access to greater political representation, newspapers, ‘debates’, consumer goods, but these were not sufficient to merit class affinity. On the contrary, the weakness of working-class organisation gave the student-intelligentsia a heightened and exaggerated power and their nationalist organisations political hegemony. The considerable évolué leadership of trade unions in the colonies points to these weaknesses. More often the colonial working class, small as it was, lived in considerable poverty and was not characteristic of Fanon’s description. David Seddon describes a distinctive African working class, initially strongly rooted in the countryside and reproduced there, but increasingly developing a different identity from those classes still based in the rural areas. This ‘new’ or emerging working class was usually highly heterogeneous, both ‘vertically’ (for example, ethnic and tribal origins) and ‘horizontally’ (such as working conditions and pay). [. . .] This failed to prevent its involvement in widespread and protracted class struggle throughout the colonial period and thereafter.35

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In detailing simple geography and access to ‘goods’ as a definition of class, Fanon was in danger of replicating crude, impressionistic sociological insights. Class dynamics in late colonialism varied greatly; class struggle involved a relationship between metropolitan capital, a middle class or petit-bourgeoisie, the ‘rural masses’ and the working class, as distinct groups with their own interests. In the case of Algeria it also involved the dynamic of a large and developed Algerian working class in France. It is still unusual to state that the Algerian and French working classes were allies in the anti-colonial struggle. Fanon rejected this possibility, as we have seen, mirroring the politics of the FLN. In reality the most developed section of the Algerian working class was in France. The actual history of solidarity between the Algerian working class – wilayasVII, as it was known by the FLN – and French worker was impressive. Henri Benoîtswas a trade unionist in the CGT union and a Trotskyist during the war, working in the giant Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt. He describes a ‘normal’ act of solidarity towards an FLN member and worker in the factory, Towards 1958, a CGT delegate from the Foundries, and FLN member Ben Nacef was asked by two security guards to go to the factory gate where he was told he was being urgently asked for by a member of his family. The FLN was already aware that this procedure had become common since arrests at home had sometimes become more unpredictable. He refused and the whole of the workshop (his job was stripping engine-blocks) stopped work and got the neighbouring workshop in the forges to join them. The security guards were thrown out.36

Nacef was later transferred, in his worker’s overalls, to safety by Benoîts, who with other French workers worked with the FLN and with Algerian and French workers throughout the bloodiest and most dangerous periods of the war. Unfortunately the FLN leadership frequently saw Algerian workers in France as a source of finance or as ‘martyrs’ and killed many of its best leaders.37 However, Fanon presents us with a picture of the late colonial class system that is simultaneously illuminating and inconsistent. Fanon was critical of the imposition of metropolitan trade union structures on the colony and of the officials of those unions who might have

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impressive experience organising in Europe but no idea how to ‘organise the mass of country people’ (WE 96). Fanon admits that the nationalist trade union organisation ‘constitutes impressive striking power’. The trade union actually can bring the colonialist economy to a standstill. There is also, he observes, a heightened strength to this action since most of the colonial machine is located in towns and cities, ‘Goods rot on the quays’ (97). Trade union action has an ‘exaggerated’ impact and the colonial structures ‘staggers under their blows’. But, and this ‘but’ is key to Fanon’s argument, country dwellers will know nothing of this conflict. The trade union is isolated, incapable of influence beyond the suburbs. Trade union work becomes ‘political’ and unions become ‘candidates for governmental power’. After independence the plot thickens. The trade unions, Fanon argues, realise that if their social demands were expressed ‘they would scandalise the rest of the nation’ (98). Why? Because, simply, the working class are already the most favoured section of the population and represent the most comfortably off faction of the people. Hence any movement seeking to improve the lot of the docker and workman would be unpopular. Fanon argues, therefore, that this insists on a ‘social programme’ for the entire nation. The trade union movement, it is clear, cannot formulate such a programme, as its social base is limited and would raise sectional and divisive demands. In the new independent dispensation, trade unions unable to formulate national and progressive demands become anachronistic. The peasantry ‘constitutes the only spontaneously revolutionary force of the country’ (98). The trade union leaders – anachronistically embedded in working-class action – ‘go from them to the preparation of a “coup d’état”’ (99). The middle class ‘makes a show of its military and police forces’. Meanwhile the peasantry, confronted with this national middle class and these workers, shrug their shoulders. Again they are regarded as ‘brutal’ mass fodder. The nationalist organisation is divided between competing forces, one to break colonialism and the other to make a deal with it. In the first phase the latter force comes to dominate and revolutionaries are denounced as ‘adventurers and anarchists’ (99). The revolutionary minority finds itself alone, isolated and terrified at being swept away. But then intrudes a second phase and involves the ‘seconds in command’.

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Men, Fanon writes, who have come to the ‘head of the party by their untiring work, their spirit of sacrifice and a most extemporary patriotism [. . .] For them the fact of . . . a nationalist party is not simply taking part in politics, it is choosing the only means whereby they can pass from the status of an animal to that of a human being’ (100). These men, Fanon says, become political animals in the ‘violent brotherhood’ of prison. But outside the prison the situation changes, colonialists have started to approach the national parties. The gulf widens between the ‘illegal arm’ hatching plans of resistance and the legal majority who crave reform of colonialism from ‘within’. These ‘illegals’ seeking refuge in the suburbs and are forced to flee again after further repression to the countryside. The peasantry protects them. ‘These men . . . who are cut off from the urban backyard against which they had defined their ideas of the nation and of the political fight . . . become maquisards [guerrilla fighters]’ (100). Their entire political education changes; no longer attuned to the next election they rather hear the ‘true voice of the country’. They soon come, Fanon argues, to the realisation that change will not come as a ‘reform’. The conclusion is clear; colonialism will not be overturned in urban areas. The picture is still one of ‘leadership’ from urban areas, now displaced (and protected) into new rural arenas. Fanon was formally correct when he identified the absolute (indeed absurd) statistical minority of ‘urban’ workers. But this fact in itself tells us nothing, nor does even their apparent (though overstated) privilege. This working-class minority had a political weight greater than their numbers, given their power to paralyse the economy. But there is a distinctly African element: The ‘class’ of wage earners was not only numerically small but also, from its inception, faced with chronic under-employment; workers had unsevered rural ties, as Seddon indicates above. This limited their capacity for independent action. Leon Trotsky’s general point about the urban struggle (and, in a formal and empirical sense, the undemocratic preponderance of cities and towns) in the modern epoch holds much of its original and transnational accuracy. In the ‘explosive’ meeting of the ‘people’ and the men from the ‘town’, a new consciousness of action is born and the armed struggle begins. The orientation now shifts and it is the party’s turn to be isolated. It is not a simple rural or guerrilla struggle: it radicalises

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through the processes he describes in the countryside among the people, but it also bounces dialectically back to urban areas. The colonial system, after all, has to be attacked in its urban citadels. The vector of the radicalised national liberation movement in the new period, is another group Fanon sees as almost entirely distinct from the urban proletariat – the mass of the semi-urbanised poor in the slums that circle cities. For Fanon these groups are revolutionary in their entirety: It is within this mass of humanity, the people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people. (103)

Extensive measures to control this class, deemed to be ‘debauched’ and ‘troublesome’, were developed across many colonies in the 1940s and 1950s. In the Congo, admission to urban areas was controlled by the colonial state, which divided the native population between ‘professional unemployed’, ‘parasites’, people living ‘without funds’ and ‘boys deemed unsatisfactory’ (domestic servants).38 The very existence, Fanon argued, of the ‘shanty town’ sanctions the ‘natives’ biological decision to invade [. . .] the enemy fortress’ (WE 103). The lumpenproletariat – its criminals, drunks and hooligans – become the ‘idealised’ working class in Fanon’s account, his ‘stout working men’. The city, in this politicised moment, can only be penetrated by the loitering and jobless multitude by means of political and violent action, ‘by hand-grenades and revolvers’. The lumpenproletariat will constantly gather forces, pulling in the ‘dregs of humanity, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness will recover their balance [. . .] and march proudly’ (106). The movement, for Fanon, has a therapeutic centre: these wretched ‘dregs’ will become dealienated from their reality in the process of violent political action. It is the bottom-up nature of this revolt, fanning out from the countryside to the towns formerly dominated by the nationalist parties, that gives the resistance its ‘spontaneous’ nature. Fanon does not use ‘spontaneous’ to mean an unorganised and unexpected rising up, but rather one that

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is not arranged or controlled by the nationalist parties. ‘Spontaneous’ means that control is localised in villages and forests. Old rivalries and feuds are rubbed out in favour of unity in the fight. The nation is forged in such transformation. The sovereignty falls to the people. ‘The circle of the nation widens and fresh ambushes to entrap the enemy hail the entry of new tribes upon the scene’ (106). In the chapter Fanon describes the life cycle of rebellion impressively. His powerful language is used not to show off his authorial prowess but to touch the reader with the ‘lived experience’ of the rebel. The swift and violent reaction of the colonial armies leads to a change in ‘fighting technique’, machine-gun massacres a cruel midwife to the next phase of the war, guerrilla warfare, powered now by organisations and ideas. This is absolutely key. If the revolutionary war is to succeed, the struggle presupposes clear objectives, a definitive methodology and above all the need for the mass of the people to realise that their unorganised efforts can only be a temporary dynamic. The ‘standard of consciousness’ must be raised, stubborn, determined action will not be enough. (108)

But the parties of national liberation need to be mindful that colonialism will try to corrupt the social forces involved in the struggle. ‘The oppressor [. . .] never loses a chance of setting the niggers against each other. [. . .] The lumpenproletariat has to be mobilised and politicised or they will fall into the hands of the colonial state’ (109). Political education – ideology – is a historical necessity for the successful and continued fight against the state. The colonialist attempts to disarm the rural masses by bribes and concessions – a foil that continues colonial oppression. Freedom will not be gained by such ‘granting’. In all of this, the lies and dangers of co-optation by a defensive colonialism, comes the realisation that spontaneity itself, flashes of violence and hatred, will not in themselves sweep away repression. There is the possibility of the noble and heroic, but the vulnerable masses may be fooled by concessions. Fanon therefore calls for organisation – the enlightenment of consciousness is only possible ‘within the framework of an organisation and inside the structure of a people’ (114). The political agitator must explain ‘that

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certain factions of the population have particular interests’ and this in turn allows people to pass ‘from total, undiscriminating nationalism to social and economic awareness’ (115). As the war progresses people will see that you get ‘Blacks who are whiter than the whites [. . .] having a national flag [. . .] does not always tempt certain strata of the population to give up their interests or privileges’. The dangers are great and the militant may realise that ‘while he is breaking down colonial oppression he is building up automatically yet another system of exploitation’. Exploitation can wear a black or Arab face, Fanon argues: ‘The treason is not national, it is social. The people must be taught to cry “Stop thief!”’ (116). Likewise, not all settlers can easily be categorised and condemned. Some may show themselves loyal to the national struggle, closer to the cause than ‘certain sons of the nation’. ‘The task of bringing the people to maturity will be made easier by the thoroughness of the organisation and by the high intellectual level of its leaders’ (117). But it is in the process that the ‘force of intellect’ increases, ‘criticising mistakes, using every appraisal of past conduct to bring the lessons home and thus ensure fresh conditions for progress’. Here Fanon issues a barely veiled challenge to some in his own organisation: In defiance of those inside the movement who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute dangers and drive wedges into the solid block of popular opinion, the leaders stand firm upon those principles that have been sold out in the national struggle and in the worldwide struggle of mankind for his freedom (118).

His points are clear: learn from practice, synthesise the lessons of historical struggles, ceaselessly review and criticise mistakes, involve and educate the broadest layers of the population in the nuanced and complex realities of the struggle. Fanon argues that this is particularly important because in revolutions there is a ‘brutality of thought’ that mistrusts subtlety. Fanon’s notion is not top-down but sees the movement nourished and radicalised from below – yet the revolution will still require ‘leaders and organisers living inside history’ to take the lead ‘with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom’ (118). The national struggle must also be social – pulling away, as it does, the crude

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dichotomy of black and white, good and evil. It is only struggle, what Fanon calls the ‘knowledge of the practice of action’, that can do this; without it, all we have after independence is a ‘fancy dress parade and the blare of trumpets’, a few ‘reforms at the top’ and at the bottom an ‘undivided mass, still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time’ (118).

Pitfalls The next chapter deals explicitly with the weaknesses of national independence and the necessity to raise consciousness. Much of the ‘empirical’ data that fuelled its passionate anger and descriptive power was accrued in Fanon’s travels on behalf of the GPRA, as well as his direct contact with the national bourgeoisie in the FLN. Fanon may have been celebrating the Algerian Revolution, but he was certainly not writing a party book, full of FLN propaganda and nationalist illusions. Here he reaches his full height as analyst of decolonisation and brilliant critic of its tragic limitations. Suddenly he turns nationhood into a curse, ‘an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been’ (119). The reason newly independent nations quickly regress to the tribe over the nation lies with the middle class. There may be other reasons – including the ‘mutilation of the colonised people by the colonial regime’ – but Fanon’s focus is on the utter intellectual and spiritual destitution of the national middle class, which is underdeveloped and has none of the attributes of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Its mentality is that of the ‘businessman’, not the ‘captain of industry’. Their role is intermediary: to ‘keep in the running and to be part of the racket’ (120). While this puny, impoverished national bourgeoisie should put the skills it has acquired in colonial universities to the service of the new nation, instead it sets its soul to its own interests and avarice. The nationalist parties have mobilised in large part simply on the slogans of independence. On questions of economic transformation they are ignorant. Their knowledge is pitiful, Fanon writes, with only ‘an approximate bookish acquaintance with the actual and potential resources of their country’ (121). Upon national independence the ‘underdeveloped middle class’, shorn of capital and refusing a popular or revolutionary alternative, falls into ‘deplorable stagnation’. In the

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place of large industry and development, it makes a cult of the ‘artisanal class’ and so-called ‘local’ products. In an eerie prophecy, Fanon writes how this class becomes fixated on the ‘old crops’: coca, groundnuts, olive harvests. No new industries are set up; colonial cash crops are simply exported as they always were, unprocessed. Fanon was completely correct – in 1961, almost before the pattern was set, when most of the continent was still freshly and hopefully new to independence. What efforts were made to build up national industry faced major hurdles. The centrepiece of independent Ghana’s attempt to industrialise was the Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, intended to provide energy for turning local supplies of bauxite into aluminium. Instead, the American company Kaiser, which ran the aluminium works, imported semi-processed bauxite from Jamaica, claiming that it did not make economic sense to use local sources of bauxite (why ship it 100 miles when they could import it from an island 2,500 miles away?). As the writer Robert Biel has put it, ‘The four big companies which dominated the world aluminium industry were brought together through the personal intervention of US leaders Nixon and Kennedy, to ensure that Ghana did not establish a basis for independence.’39 Fanon, keenly observing the activities of the middle class, sees how even the policies of nationalisation disguise an ugly and greedy desire for personal accumulation. The mission of this class is to act as the new brokers and agents to big foreign companies, nothing more; hard-wired into its role as intermediary, it cannot fulfil the ‘historic role of bourgeoisie’ (WE 122). Fanon here refers to the development of national capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The bourgeoisie, Fanon writes, were once ‘inventors’ or ‘discoverers’ of new worlds – but these characteristics are absent from the national middle class: ‘It follows the Western bourgeoisie along its path of decadence without ever having emulated it in its first stages of exploration and invention’ (123). It leaps directly into the decay and corruption of the late bourgeoisie. ‘It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth’ (124). The petit-bourgeoisie set up the country as a tourist attraction for the Western bourgeoisie – providing exotic game-hunting and sex. For the American businessman Latin America is a ‘subtropical paradise where for a space of a week or ten

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days they can luxuriate in the delicious depravities which their reserves hold for them’ (124). Africa, following Latin America, will become Europe’s whorehouse. Fanon’s conceptual framework is resolutely the nation; for him, this class is failing to work to develop the nation. But the new owners of agricultural land will still double the rate of exploitation in the name of ‘national’ development. The new landed bourgeoisie refuse to sink their profits into inventive agricultural techniques, instead adopting the paraphernalia of their Western colleagues: country estates, cars and the performance of wealth. The national middle class ‘waves aloft the notion of the nationalisation and Africanisation of ruling classes’ (128) in the interests of the nation. Soon, he argues, these politics trickle down to the working class, the unemployed and the small artisans. Before long, nationalism passes ‘to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism and finally to racism’ (128). Non-Africans are told to leave. For Fanon this is connected to the empty calls for ‘African unity’ that crash on the rocks of the national middle class. This situation springs from the inability of the national bourgeoisie to extend a vision of the world, ‘falling back’ instead on old tribal attitudes and racial prejudices. This national chauvinism can morph easily into regionalism. The colonial economy developed sectors and areas that were rich in copper, diamonds or other resources. In the context of independence, ‘federalism’ can become another expression of anti-foreigner resentment. The secession of Kasai and Katanga from the Congo in August 1960 is a prime example.40 The mask is off, Fanon states, and African unity ‘crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationality itself’ (128). Colonialism, once challenged by the mobilising force of African unity, ‘recovers its balance and tries now to break that will to unity’ (131). Religious rivalries are exacerbated: in areas where Christianity predominates, Muslim minorities fling ‘themselves with unaccustomed ardour into their devotions’ (131). A continent united for a second in the struggle for decolonisation becomes ‘Africa South of the Sahara’, divided with undisguised racism between the ‘Mediterranean’ (read European) north and ‘Black Africa [. . .] looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilised – in a word savage’ (130). In a hideous reversal, the jibes about so-called Arab misogyny, the veil and polygamy once uttered by settlers now find new lips. This is no

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accident, but speaks to the assimilation by the national middle class of the most corrupt forms of colonialist thought: ‘By its laziness and will to imitation, it promotes the [. . .] stiffening of racism which was characteristic of the colonial era’ (131). There could be no greater insult from Fanon – but these attitudes, common now in independent Africa, gave a person the impression of being in Paris, London or Brussels. Fanon notes how the artificial racist divisions of the continent cast ‘Black Africa’ into a corner, ‘hemmed in by a kind of semi-slavery which renders legitimate that species of wariness [. . .] which the countries of Black Africa feel with regard to the countries of White Africa’. The dangers, Fanon tells us, are not only economic. The native bourgeoisie have come to power with a banner of ‘narrow nationalism’ (131); they are incapable of putting in place even a ‘minimum humanist’ programme. Fanon is not celebrating the Western bourgeoisie, which he sees as thoroughly racist, but he claims it affirms an ‘essential equality’, invites the sub-categories of men to become human ‘and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie’. By contrast, the racism of the new bourgeoisie is a ‘racism of difference’ based on vulgar tribalism and rivalries. No wonder African unity is a lamentable shame. It will only conquer through the ‘upward thrust’ of the people, under their leadership against the national bourgeoisie, who have ‘decided to bar the way to unity’ (132). The impotence of the national bourgeoisie calls forth more grandiose statements and prestige projects. Able only to grant a few crumbs to the nation, the national bourgeoisie fills its own pockets, hiding stagnation in monuments by ‘laying out money’ (133). The newly independent state needs a ‘popular leader who will [play] the dual role of stabilising the regime and of perpetuating the domination of the bourgeoisie’ (139). Fanon could easily have been describing Nkrumah, whose degeneration he saw at close proximity. Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared [. . .] the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes this national bourgeoisie (139).

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The economy of the newly independent nation runs on neo-colonial rails. Quickly, Fanon claims, the people will see the ‘unfathomable’ degeneration of the national leadership and the bourgeois caste. But the leader now plays a central role – with his experiences of political action and record of patriotism, he plays the role of ‘screen’ between the people and the rapacious bourgeoisie, ‘a braking power on the awakening consciousness of the people’ (139). But for the mass of people nothing has changed. The national flag is no substitute for real processes of development. If independence is a shell, so is the national party. The spoils of the nation and the demands of a hungry population are great, so increasingly the party transforms itself into an instrument of repression and patronage, blinding the people with a fog of nostalgia and ringing them with barbed wire. The police and army become key levers, their strength and power increasing in direct proportion to the stagnation of the nation. Corruption infects every layer of the state apparatus. Fanon compares the new national bourgeoisie to a gang member ‘who after every hold-up hides their share of the swag from the other accomplices’ (139). The levels of deceit and exploitation lead to discontent and deepening hardship, and the regime in turn becomes more repressive. With the Parliament either absent or irrelevant, the army becomes the chief arbiter. For this analysis, Fanon drew both from his own observations of African independence and his study of Latin America. He condemns the national bourgeoisie, not for the first time, for learning ‘nothing from books. If they had looked closer at the Latin American countries they doubtless would have recognised the dangers which threaten them’ (140). The national bourgeoisie will accomplish nothing. The caste of profiteers will be forced to give way to the army – which is also in hock to the former mother country and led by its experts. Fanon’s verdict is rooted in political action. The bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries ‘should not be allowed to find the conditions necessary for [their] existence and [. . .] growth’ (139). He then embarks on another question of revolutionary theory. Can the bourgeois stage be skipped in underdeveloped societies? It seems that we already have the answer to this question in his preceding analysis. The bourgeoisie in ex-colonies is feeble and cowardly – not only will it be unable to carry through national bourgeois development, it

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must be stopped and prevented from developing and reaching into the new state. This task – essentially one of class struggle, though Fanon does not label it as such - is vital for all revolutionary forces; in some countries, when there is a genuine bourgeoisie that can lay the foundations, a modern proletariat and large-scale agriculture can develop. But in underdeveloped countries ‘no true bourgeoisie exists; there is only a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious’ (141). They are not a carbon copy of the Western class ‘but its caricature’. Fanon finally answers his own question: there is no ‘bourgeois’ phase for underdeveloped countries. ‘When this caste has vanished, devoured by its own contradictions, it will be seen that nothing new has happened since independence was proclaimed’ (142). Even if the national bourgeoisie could ‘blossom’ into an authentic capitalist class, it would be centuries before an industrial revolution could take off, since each step of the way would be barred by the relentless opposition of the ex-colony. Since the national bourgeoisie operates in trading, Fanon advocates nationalising the middleman’s trading sector to prevent the growth of the profiting caste. But he remains cautious of a ‘rigidly state-controlled’ nationalisation, where trade formerly in the hands of settlers is controlled by civil servants incapable of thinking in terms of the nation as a whole. ‘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 people interested in the ordering of public affairs’ (145). Fanon proceeds with a discussions of the evolution of the nationalist party after independence. We have already seen what happens – structures once mobilised decay, the leadership mobilise the masses for annual events and the police corral and beat up any opposition. The party insists on obedience and acquiescence. But it is a fake calm. Militants despair and ‘unceasing anger makes itself heard’ (147). Soon the nationalist party ceases to represent the nation even nominally, becoming regional and ethnic, no longer a bourgeois dictatorship but a tribal one. Members of the party are chosen ‘from the same ethnological group as the leader’s, sometimes directly from his own family’ (148). This provokes and encourages regionalism and separatism. Another battle must be waged, Fanon argues, this time against a leader who behaves like a gang leader:

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‘a battle to prevent the party [. . .] becoming a willing tool in the hands of a leader’ (148). Out of this battle a political organisation must be forged that seeks to develop not just each town but ‘also the brains of its inhabitants’. To create a party that like a tool can be wielded by the people, militants ought to live ‘in country districts’: one member of the political bureau in each area but without administrative powers. Membership of the political bureau should be separated from administrative functions to prevent corruption. Fanon, thinking on these questions, is focused and determined. Fanon’s policy recommendations are specific: extreme decentralisation of party authority and structures, popular and democratic engagement of the working classes in party branches and over all levels of production. Without continued ‘mass involvement’ from the bottom nourishing and correcting the national leadership, nothing will be achieved and the seemingly radical and progressive measures of nationalisation (or replacing white faces with black ones, in the name of indigenisation) will give the state a deeper authoritative bent. ‘State capitalism’ emerges under the banner of African socialism. The necessity of political education is not sloganising occasionally about the situation in the country. It involves awakening the mind: ‘as Césaire said, it is to “invent souls”’ (159). This does not mean making political speeches but giving power to the masses and insisting that they learn to govern. Responsibility for the nation depends on the efforts of an engaged and active population. This engagement will be secured in those underdeveloped countries that have seen a revolutionary elite that has emerged for the people and allowed the ‘masses upon the scene of history’ (161). These processes, Fanon repeats, are dialectical and involve complicated, fraught stages. The awakening of the people is slow and contradictory; the political involvement of a ‘people at war’ a hesitant struggle against the deep inferiority taught by colonialism. With the continued active involvement of the people in the phase of post-independence construction, ‘everything is possible’ (162). Nigel Gibson is correct to locate in The Wretched of the Earth various layers of nationalism; he was not alone in doing this. L. Adele Jinadu also identifies ‘stages’ of decolonisation in Fanon’s notion of liberation.41 The first stage is a nationalism that is not fought for or contested but negotiated and compromised; rather, as Gibson

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writes, ‘the colonialist embraced the nationalist elite and negotiated withdrawal’.42 Gibson identifies the second stage (‘nationalism 2’) as a deeper and more critical nationalism that challenges the exigencies of the colonial state; the nationalist liberation movement insists on ‘popular’ involvement and organisation of the people. Decolonisation is a revolution that will lead to a new state based on full economic and political autonomy. Gibson locates a third ‘nationalism’ in Fanon’s work, which is not the complete withdrawal of the coloniser but a shift in consciousness: It is the complex transformation of the colonised, not the simple departure of the coloniser, that will produce the new humanity. In short, to venture beyond Manicheanism is to transform the native into an active thinking historical subject.43

The army has a special place in these developments. The soldier is not simply an armed killer but a citizen who defends the nation. We can hear Fanon, if we listen carefully, as he lectures the ALN soldiers at Ghardimaou on the Algerian border in 1961, riddled with leukaemia, dying. The soldier should know that he is in the service of his country and not in the service of his commanding officer, however great that officer’s prestige may be. We must take advantage of the national military [. . .] to raise the level of the national consciousness and to detribalise and unite the nation. (162)

As the chapter draws towards an end Fanon uses the pronoun ‘we’ to drive home the weaknesses of nationalism. He is still addressing his crowd of Algerian army recruits, imploring them not to waver once independence has been won: The magnificent organisation that made people rise against their oppression stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed. Nationalism is not a political doctrine, nor a programme. If you really wish your country to avoid regression [. . .] a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness. (163)

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Nationalism must fold out into social and political consciousness and develop quickly into humanism. Only when men and women are included on a massive scale is ‘form and body’ given to consciousness. The nation ceases to be the flag, and instead flees the cities and towns for the country and the self-activity of the people. The only true government of independence is ‘for the outcasts and by the outcasts’ (165). ‘Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ is an extraordinary chapter, written with the clarity of anger and urgency. It is hard to exaggerate its analytical and descriptive power. It is more specific than the other parts of the book, which are often a patchwork of previously published papers and edited articles. Fanon’s account of the national bourgeoisie is damning and brilliant. As a picture of postcolonial development in the five decades since the book was completed, it seems agonisingly timeless. How did he arrive at his seemingly prophetic analysis? Fanon is explicit: again and again he turns to Latin America. Here, he says, we can see the dangers that face us: a class that usurps independence and in the name of the nation pursues its own agenda of ‘avid, greedy and voracious’ profiteering and pleasure. Fanon is an intellectual of giddying insight and brilliance who extrapolated from a part of the world that he knew and read about. While Martinique was certainly not an example for his study on national consciousness, the region was. Fanon appears as a revolutionary of the black Atlantic.44 He also travelled across West Africa. These visits were inspiring and heartbreaking. The continent was beginning to stand on its own feet, yet already falling under the sway of the student-intelligentsia. Fanon warns the reader about the role of the ‘company of profiteers’ and provides very specific instructions to fight at all costs against the further growth of this caste. If they are allowed to develop and grow, independence will arrive at nothing; instead the nation will stagnate and decay. Fanon here is the doctor, identifying a disease that has, so far, been unable to triumph over the body of the nation – but its symptoms, kept in check by popular control and mobilisation, will break out at independence and infect each body part unless the disease (the ‘profiteering caste’) is cut out and broken up. Fanon brings us, in startling and beautiful prose, the spectre of class struggle. The first task of the new state, he tells us, is the struggle

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against the new enemies within. National unity is a cover that conceals new and threatening realities. The post-independent nation must move rapidly to undermine the national bourgeois, cutting it off mid-stream. Fanon is adamant that the national stage cannot be skipped. To overcome ‘nationalism’ and ‘avoid regression’ Fanon insists a ‘rapid step must be taken for national consciousness to political and social consciousness’ (163). A true nation only exists in the programme thrashed out by the revolutionary movement. Fanon’s project was not limited to the nation, but he saw it as an indispensable stage in raising consciousness. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. [. . .] The building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to lay its part in the stage of history. (199)

There are several things here that need to be pulled out. Fanon is saying that since the world is divided into nations, some colonised, there is a degree of inevitability to the role that a ‘national liberation’ movement will play: a rise in national consciousness (‘which is not nationalism’) follows as the ‘native’ discovers his own power through revolutionary struggle. While there is a serious, indeed grave, danger that the ‘nation’ will fold into itself, fracture, become a curse or a prison, for Fanon national consciousness and national liberation are part of a broader international revolutionary transition to a ‘new humanity’. After all, only with the disappearance of ‘colonialism’ and the ‘colonised man’ can we reach for a global project of liberation (198). Revolutions for national liberation had to embed socialist and anti-capitalist politics (as Fanon advocated) into their programmes for transformation. The revolution could not be made after ‘national liberation’ was already won. Fanon’s work can be read as an attempt to give further life and autonomy to the popular revolt in Algeria, build it up so it would be ready for independence, warn and strategise before it was too late. Brilliant though these contributions were, they could not be substituted for the similar commitment and work of the FLN. Both the parties of

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national liberation and decolonisation itself were inherently limited, as the South African revolutionary Ruth First observed in 1970.45

Culture Fanon’s chapter ‘On National Culture’ is a tour de force. It draws on his contribution to the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers in 1959. Fanon is writing about the ‘arts’ and all those activities that comprise a culture: painting, poetry, novels, sculpture and pottery. The development of a national culture and the work of the artist are inextricably tied up with the struggle for national liberation – no meaningful separation is possible. National consciousness is ‘the most elaborate form of culture’ (199). There is an elaborate and dialectical development to ‘native’ artists’ engagement with their world. To start with, the ‘native intellectual’ produces work to be admired by the oppressor. This phase ‘gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power’ (178). The inspiration is Europe and Western artistic movements. In the second phase, however, ‘we find the native is disturbed’. He immerses himself in his country and traditions, but his work concentrates on ‘the bygone days of his childhood’ (179). The final phase is the ‘fighting phase’: having immersed himself in the people, he creates in order to awaken them. For the novelist this phase heralds a ‘literature of combat’, of propaganda. In other art forms similar developments take place. The artist has a responsibility to the struggle. In as much as the past is summoned up, it is ‘as an invitation to action and a basis for hope’. The artist cannot be a bystander but must throw himself into the national struggle. What is important is practice, ‘collaboration on the physical plane’. These are not narrow nationalist objectives but the first stage of a fight ‘for the liberation of the nation’ as a keystone to the construction of a new humanity (180).

Case notes Fanon’s final chapter is made up of case notes from patients, part of the book’s patchwork of ideas. He ponders, almost to himself, ‘Perhaps these notes on psychiatry will be found ill-timed and singularly out of place in such a book, but we can do nothing about

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that’ (200). But Fanon is not apologetic; his work as a psychiatrist and on ‘psychiatric phenomena’ was tied up with his political engagement and his understanding of colonialism and the armed struggle. The notes are well placed. They detail, with exactly the same tone and professional concern, the suffering and ‘entailing disorders’ of all sections of Algerian society: partisans of the settler state, including the notorious police torturers who want to go on torturing; the ‘patriot’ whose wife has been raped by the police following his disappearance; the non-committed Algerian man who survives a massacre. There is no romance about the armed struggle, even if the violence is necessary and just. Each of his patients is ‘pursued’ by the war – actively engaged in it or pulled along by its slipstream. Commenting on the insomnia and suicide obsessions of a patriot who lives with doubt and regret after having placed a bomb that killed ten settlers, Fanon writes, We are forever pursued by our actions. Their ordering, their circumstances and their motivation may perfectly well come to be profoundly modified a posteriori. This is merely one of the snares that history and its various influences sets for us. But can we escape becoming dizzy? And who can affirm that vertigo does not haunt the whole of existence? (185)

This is an extraordinary and moving description of a tragic human paradox. The war and the violence it entails are necessary and even ‘positive’ historically in order to secure liberation, but we are caught up and disturbed by the aftermath of the violence, snared by our own agency. Fanon’s psychiatry was an attempt to ease this paradox for Algerian freedom fighters and heal the psychiatric disorders of those disfigured by the war and violence. In this simple respect the chapter is a magnificent and moving celebration of Fanon’s humanity and compassion. Another important observation is often overlooked. Fanon, in what he knew would be his final statement, was making a vital argument. The book dealt with large themes; national liberation, violence and culture. But here Fanon finishes on the individual, the core professional preoccupation of his entire life. Human life, he is telling us, needs to be revolutionised, because only then will we be able to

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escape the alienation that afflicts our relationships and personalities. Revolutionary action ties together the levels of our existence – macro and micro – in a liberatory embrace. Fanon synthesises his work as a political militant with his psychiatry more harmoniously here than anywhere else: colonialism as a system of profound depersonalisation, at the level of the individual and at the ‘collective sphere on the level of the social structure’. Armed struggle is the privileged form that liberation should take – we must expose or rip apart the truths that have been implanted in people’s consciousness by the colonial system and by ‘military occupation and by economic exploitation’. He sees armed struggle as a requirement to exorcise ‘falsehoods’ in consciousness that instil ‘inferiority’ and ‘literally mutilate us’ (237). Yet even the necessary violence of the oppressed creates its own ‘paralysing disorders’. Fanon was passionate and sober in his assessment of a new society: even the new humanity would be ravaged by this vertigo. Independence is not sufficient to cure alienation; it is no exorcism. Total liberation is required. Independence is an ‘indispensable condition’, which men and women can become ‘truly liberated’; independence, therefore, makes ‘possible the radical transformation of society’ (250). It must grow into social and political transformation. Revolutionary theory liberates and decolonises the mind and makes explicit the goals of the struggle, demystifying the past and present. Revolutionary theory (and practice) are, in therapeutic terms, a requirement necessary to enable us to cease to be strangers in our own environment. The revolution – which must be helped by the correct theory – is an attempt to end a state of depersonalisation. A revolutionary theory is an attempt to ‘recerebralise a people’ – and the process is, as Fanon reminds us again and again, dialectical. Theory and practice interact and transform each other. Revolutionary theory without revolutionary practice is sterile, but revolutionary practice with little theory opens up the possibility of a hollow ‘liberation’ that will decay and stagnate.

7

Legacies

The intellectual and activist who influenced Fanon most profoundly was Jean-Paul Sartre. From the start Sartre was a towering, brilliant figure in Fanon’s life, his philosophical mentor and the reason Fanon could not give up on the French left. Even if the two did not meet until 1961, they were about to join together in one of the most important intellectual collaborations of the twentieth century. Fanon was not a simple student of Sartre. He amended and upbraided his teacher in Black Skin, White Masks on his understanding of Hegel’s dialectic in relation to the black experience and read critically every word that the philosopher had written.1 Fanon admired Sartre’s political practice. He had done what the French left collectively had failed to do: he had always, unconditionally, supported Algerian independence. In 1960 he publicly supported draft resisters. Sartre made the link that Fanon had indicated in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, arguing that ‘the French left must act in solidarity with the FLN. Besides, their fates are linked; the victory of the FLN will be the victory of the left’.2 These were dangerous words, tantamount to an appeal for desertion and treason. Sartre knew he was taking a considerable personal risk. In autumn 1960 the ‘Manifesto des 121’ was signed by 121 people who stood behind those refusing to fight in France. It described the Algerian people as the ‘cause of all free men’.3 Many of those who signed were suspended from their jobs or 223

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threatened. Others supported the war more directly as porteurs de valises; several faced trial for this support in September 1960. The trial was held in the Cherche-Midi prison, where Alfred Dreyfus had notoriously been unjustly tried and convicted and where resistance fighters had been tortured to death by the Gestapo in the war. The defence was warned not to use the term war; operations was the preferred term, since war on French soil would mean a civil war. (The French state fought to maintain this fiction until 1999.) Six Algerians and 18 French citizens were sent to prison. Fanon acknowledged their resistance in The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre was a giant in Fanon’s eyes, and rightly so. He had recently published Critique de la Raison Dialectique, an engagement with the Russian Revolution and its consequences for Marxist theory. The book had an enormous impact on Fanon, who travelled to the ALN border base at Ghardimaou specifically to talk to them about it. One academic commentator muses, ‘One would love to know what precisely Fanon told these fighters about Sartre’s book,’ which the author goes on to describe as a ‘monstrous and unfinished volume’.4 There are some obvious answers. Sartre’s book is mostly taken up with a description of group genesis, or the problem of maintaining unity after the initial flurry of activity. How you can sustain the dynamism of revolution beyond a specific point? How can you prevent it from collapsing back into an inert structure? Both Sartre and Fanon were dealing with questions of revolutionary agency and energy. Sartre explains how, with time, group cohesion crumbles. His classic example is the storming of the Bastille. The single goal fuses a group. The embryonic party sustains itself towards that goal on its own dynamism and energy, but not always beyond it. The group is bound together by what Sartre called ‘fraternity-terror’: the fear that, while the group is united by fraternity, a traitor could divide it. As Macey explains: For example, the embryonic party can sustain itself on its own energy to a point and probably not beyond. [. . .] The party is bound together by fraternity and at the same time [there is] fear that someone in it is a traitor, and it’s the fear of treachery that’s very dangerous.5

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In Wretched of the Earth there is a similar obsession. In his discussion on national liberation Fanon sees parties forced into the unifying goal of nationhood, but with independence they become instruments of demobilisation. Only under pressure from below can the party remain a tool at the service of the people and can African unity become a realisable goal. Such pressure can only be maintained by a conscious and politicised people, yet in Algeria their political and social awareness was uneven. This is what Sartre helped show him. Fanon spoke to the ALN troops, almost his last political act, because he wanted to warn them that commitment to their specific struggle – the single goal – was not enough. They had to maintain the pressure and remain mobilised beyond independence, and that would require political intervention and positive leadership.6

Lanzmann, Sartre and de Beauvoir Fanon had again fallen under Sartre’s spell. He believed that he was the only reader who fully understood him, so it was for him to ‘translate’ Sartre’s lessons. Fanon met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the end of July 1961. Sartre was a target: as they were preparing to leave for Rome, a bomb had exploded outside his apartment in Paris on 19 July. The Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), a right-wing pieds-noirs militia, was escalating action against those who had signed the Manifesto des 121 (now considerably more than 121 people). The couple travelled to Rome with Claude Lanzmann, who had already met Fanon. Their lifestyle, despite their high-level political engagement, could not have contrasted more dramatically with Fanon’s: they woke late, read the papers, took their time over their meals. Sartre was on a break from his gruelling self-imposed work regime, though he still wrote every day. Fanon’s main reason for travelling was to meet Sartre, but it was only through Lanzmann that the visit was possible. Lanzmann’s story is interesting. He was a journalist and writer on the left in France, close to de Beauvoir and Sartre. He met Fanon for the first time in 1961, before his treatment in Moscow, and was astonished. Lanzmann’s description of their meeting is the most striking account of Fanon’s last year.

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The encounter that really shook me, unsettled me, captivated me and that was to have a profound effect on my own life was my meeting with Frantz Fanon. [. . .] My abiding memory of the first afternoon I spent with Fanon in El Menzah, a suburb of Tunis, in the apartment where he lived with his wife and son, is the absolute emptiness of the place – nothing on the walls, not a stick of furniture, no bed, nothing. Fanon was lying on a sort of pallet, a mattress on the floor. I was immediately struck by his fiery dark eyes, black with fever. [. . .] He had just come back from Accra in Ghana.7

Fanon intrigued his guest, speaking with intensity about the Algerian Revolution. I sat on the floor next to the mattress where Fanon lay and listened to him talk [. . .] for hours, stopping several times when the pain became unbearable. I put my hand on his forehead, which was bathed in sweat, and awkwardly tried to dry it, or I held his shoulder gently as though by mere touch I might ease his pain. But all the while Fanon spoke with a lyricism I had never before encountered, he was already so suffused with death that it gave his every word the power both of prophecy and of the last words of a dying man.8

Fanon questioned his guest intently ‘about Sartre, about Sartre’s health, and I could sense the affection, the admiration he felt for the man’.9 Critique de la Raison Dialectique had been published in April 1960 and Fanon had managed to get a copy sent to Ghana, where he had started to study it. He had finished the book by the time of Lanzmann’s trip, ‘something that had required considerable effort and concentration for a man suffering from leukaemia, though his philosophical acuity was still amazing’.10 Fanon spoke powerfully about the ALN combatants he had visited on the border, describing their commitment. He claimed that these men of the interior were purer, truer than those outside the country. In Fanon’s clammy, fraught descriptions they became, in Lanzmann’s words, ‘polymaths who not only fought the French by force of arms with utter purity and self-denial, but also studied

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philosophy’.11 Exaggerating the men by turning them into peasantwarrior-philosophers spoke loudly of Fanon’s desperate hope that they could defend the Algerian Revolution against the dangers he knew they confronted. Lanzmann writes that Fanon propped himself up on his elbow and announced like a visionary that Africa, the Africa of his dreams, would not experience the Middle Ages as Europe had, one could not but be carried along by his words, could only subscribe to his glorious utopian ideal.12

When Lanzmann returned to Paris he was under Fanon’s spell, caught up by the intensity of those hours together. He believed that this man was the ‘keeper of the truth, and the truth as a secret’. In this belief he spoke to Sartre, who – unusually – decided that he too must meet this ‘visionary’. Lanzmann met Fanon several times during his momentary remission from the leukaemia. On further visits Lanzmann discovered how difficult and fraught Fanon’s relationship with the combatants of the interior, the Algerian people he exalted and praised, was. He was one of them and yet was not, because he was Martiniquais and black. His loyalty was unconditional, but he constantly had to reaffirm it, prove it. He knew about the rivalries, the often fierce power struggles within the FLN, but when he talked to me about them, he constantly used the word ‘secret’ [. . .] I realised that Fanon himself was afraid.13

Lanzmann may be right, though it is unlikely that the dying Fanon was feeling afraid for himself as much as the gripping, terrifying fear that the Algerian struggle itself would unravel on independence. It was this fear that drove Fanon to write The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon insisted that if Lanzmann was to really understand the Algerian Revolution then he must visit the ‘warrior-philosophers’. ‘You’re never going to learn anything about the Algerian Revolution here in Tunis,’ Fanon said. ‘Everything here is corrupt; you need to go there.’14 However, Lanzmann did not find the pure and unsullied fighters Fanon had described. Instead, these were fighters who had crossed over from the interior, to Morocco and then Tunisia, and created an alternative organisation that wielded power and would

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continue to do so well into independence. This army was becoming a political force. Contrary to Fanon’s noble imaginings, the French had managed to starve and break the ‘interior’, and they now could not make any serious incursions or attacks. Though independence was a year away, the French army had the clear upper hand.15 When Lanzmann arrived at the frontier he explained to the soldiers who questioned him, ‘Dr Fanon told me that until I met you, I would never understand the Algerian Revolution.’ For a week he ‘toured’ the front line, ‘holding out under the brutal and very precise French bombing raids’. When he returned to the barracks, where he stayed for another week, he spent hours in discussions with soldiers. ‘We talked about what the Algerian political regime would be like, about Marxism, and so on, and I soon realised that their knowledge of Critique de la Raison Dialectique was limited to a seminar that Fanon had just given.’16 When Lanzmann returned to Paris he spoke about his experiences in public lectures, but not about his time on the frontières. Lanzmann organised a meeting between Sartre and Fanon in Rome for the end of July. De Beauvoir and Lanzmann went to the airport to collect Fanon, then took him back to the hotel where they were staying. At this point something unthinkable, something unheard of happened: Sartre, who spent every morning, every afternoon writing, whatever the circumstances or the weather [. . .] who never compromised about his work schedule [. . .] now Sartre stopped work for three days to listen to Fanon.17

De Beauvoir remembers a ‘feverishness’ from the moment Fanon arrived, during the car journey, through lunch with Sartre and until two o’clock in the morning. Finally de Beauvoir put an end to the conversation, explaining that Sartre needed his sleep, to which Fanon characteristically replied, ‘I do not like people who limit themselves.’ Fanon was a whirlwind of words and analysis. He was furious at the recent French invasion of Tunisia after the blockade of the naval base in Bizerte and spoke of the dangers that confronted the Algerian Revolution. But Fanon was also delighted to finally meet Sartre. He told Lanzmann, ‘I would pay 20 million francs each day to speak with Sartre from the morning to the evening for 15 days.’18

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For almost three days, all day until the early hours of every morning, this strange foursome were together. Fanon did most of the speaking. ‘He was persuasive, convincing, it was impossible to raise objections; in the face of his words every objection seemed trivial. It is impossible to object to a prophet’s trance.’19 Sartre was captivated and agreed to write the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. According to de Beauvoir, Fanon challenged Sartre, urging him to renounce writing until the end of the war, or to go even further by declaring himself Algerian. Sartre declared that while he supported the Algerian struggle completely, he was French. De Beauvoir describes their days with Fanon: Our conversations were always of an extreme intensity, thanks to the richness of his knowledge, his power of evocation, the speed and audacity of his thinking [. . .] he was someone exceptional. When I shook his feverish hand, I believed I was touching the passion which burned in him. He communicated this fire; close to him life seemed a tragic adventure, often horrible, but with an infinite prize.20

Lanzmann claims his own life was profoundly affected by the meeting. Even if the projects and hopes Fanon expressed eventually failed to materialise, he wrote, ‘we now know that the real Africa is not the Africa of Fanon’s dreams’.21 Fanon worked in the last year of his life not for a romantic dream of African unity, but to warn the continent against such false dreams. He argued for action against imperialism and the degeneration of independence at the hands of the ‘profiteering caste’ of national heroes; he saw the need to maintain popular mobilisation and develop ideological clarity. For Lanzmann to then list Africa’s post-independence failures in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Darfur and the Congo is both incongruous and lazy: it was exactly Fanon’s insight into these possibilities on the continent, as so many countries were already hurtling towards the ‘curse of independence’, that made him so ‘feverish’ and his visions so apocalyptic in the last year of his life. If Lanzmann finds modern Africa ‘hobbled and lame’, many of the reasons can be found in the pages of The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon saw Sartre two more times before he died, though for brief periods. But the friendship was already sealed. Sartre and de Beauvoir kept in close contact with Fanon, often through Lanzmann but also

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with letters and telephone calls. They followed his slow, inexorable decline over the following months. On Fanon’s valedictory voyage for treatment in Washington he stopped in Rome, where Sartre saw him in his hotel room ‘so exhausted that during the whole meeting he did not open his mouth’. Fanon was ‘reduced to a passivity against which his entire body was in revolt’.22 Sartre had recently completed his preface and sent it to the publisher. Fanon was delighted with it. Sartre’s preface was a courageous and brilliant appeal for the fight in Algeria and the Third World, where history was being made. Events turned, however; seven years after Fanon died, Josie wrote to the publisher demanding that Sartre be extirpated from her late husband’s book. She was furious that Sartre was defending Israel’s actions during the Six-Day War in June 1967. If Sartre had been on the side of those making history, she argued, he was no more.

To Washington As Fanon’s cancer progressed, he needed to accept the most advanced treatment, which was only available in the United States. He arrived in Washington on 3 October. Though everyone believed that Fanon, as a member of the GPRA, would be treated well when he arrived, he was not. He was left alone for ten days in a hotel room before being admitted to hospital. Biographer Peter Geismar has argued that Fanon was in touch with the CIA, who facilitated his hospitalisation in Washington and wanted a chance to ‘grill the sick man’ in the hotel without the interference of a hospital bureaucracy.23 It is not hard to imagine the isolation and horror he must have felt, conscious now more than ever of his imminent death. During these days he wrote letters to his close friends and family. In a letter to his wife he evoked their first meeting, on the steps of a theatre in Lyon. To his friend Roger Taïeb, he wrote, Roger, what I want to say to you is that death is always with us, and the important thing is not to know if we can avoid it, but if we have done everything we can for our ideas. What shocks me lying here in bed, at a time when life is leaving me, is not to die, but to die in Washington of acute leukaemia, when I could have died three months ago, facing the enemy, when I knew I had this sickness.

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[. . .] We are nothing on earth if we are not first of all slaves to a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of justice and freedom. I want you to know that even at the moment when the doctors had despaired I thought again [. . .] of the Algerian people, of the people of the Third World, and if I held on, it is because of them.24

Despite this awareness, when he faced visitors in his ‘official’ capacity, Fanon spoke as though he was going to vanquish the sickness, talking about the book projects that he was determined to complete. Soon after his arrival his wife and son joined him in Washington. The hospital replaced his blood in the hope that it would provoke the growth of bone marrow, an extremely painful process. The procedure gave him only momentary remission. A friend travelling from Paris brought a copy of the newly published Wretched of the Earth and in early December Josie read aloud the first reviews. Neither gave Fanon any succour. ‘This will not replenish my marrow,’ he said. What good was a book that he had slaved to write and finish when he wanted to live? Even if it might well be the most important political tract of the twentieth century, what importance did it really have against life itself? ‘Minute by minute Fanon had lived his death and had savagely refused it’, de Beauvoir writes.25 Before the final, absolute end of his existence there was no balm or recompense; hanging on, clawing to stay alive, was Fanon’s last struggle. He succumbed to double pneumonia on 6 December. As furious an opponent as he was, there could only be one victor. Fanon was dead. ‘We felt despair,’ de Beauvoir wrote in 1963 of Fanon’s death.26 Lanzmann, who had been writing regularly to Fanon, was about to leave for the States when Josie phoned in the middle of the night: ‘There is no point in your coming, he has just died.’ Lanzmann travelled anyway. ‘I arrived in Washington to a memorably cold winter and spent two days talking to Josie, two days walking along the banks of the frozen Potomac.’27 Fanon’s body was flown back to Tunisia. There was a large crowd to receive him at the airport on 11 December. One of his last wishes was to be buried in liberated Algeria. His remains were transported to the frontier with a large contingent of ALN soldiers, friends and FLN leaders. His coffin was painstakingly carried across the border, through woods, rivers and rocky terrain, to where he was finally buried; speeches were made in French and

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Arabic. He received a full FLN burial, with Krim Belkacem, the senior GPRA member who would lead the negotiations that led to independence seven months later, delivering the principal eulogy. Fanon, he said, belonged to the Algerian people. For several years Josie kept the news of Fanon’s death from their son, Olivier, who was six years old when his father died. His daughter, Mireille, was also not told by her mother; instead she learned of her father’s death from the cover of the magazine Paris Match at a news-stand. Mireille went on to help form and run the Frantz Fanon Foundation, where she speaks and writes about her father’s ideas and their relevance to democratic struggles today.28 Olivier works for the Algerian government in Paris. Josie, Fanon’s companion and wife, continued to live in Algeria for many years, writing in the 1960s for the Algerian publication Révolution Africaine. In 1989 she committed suicide. Boussad Ouadi, a friend and neighbour, recalls, Josie worked opposite me so I saw her most days. We were good friends. She had spent some years in France and then had come back to Algeria. My wife worked in Lycée Frantz Fanon, which was the first establishment after 1962 to call itself after Fanon. Josie was very active in the school and would attend their events, speak to the children. She was unhappy. In her time she had been ravishing, elegant, seductive. But she became depressed, she had started to drink and put on weight. She became angry with the government and had certain run-ins and became demoralised, disillusioned. She couldn’t believe that this is what had come of independent Algeria and she couldn’t see a way out. Her suicide was a horrible shock to us.29

The first years of Fanon’s legacy Algeria won independence on 5 July 1962, after a gruelling eightyear war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Algerians, following negotiations known as the Évian Accords between the FLN leadership and the French government led by General Charles de Gaulle. The Algerian Revolution had defeated the French in the most violent war of decolonisation in Africa. No other national

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liberation movement had come to power, with international hope so high. Yet Algeria’s post-colonial history after 1962 provides a tragic confirmation of Fanon’s study. Fanon has received an uneasy recognition there – his work translated, his old hospital in Blida named after him – but his warnings about the failures of national liberation have been grimly fulfilled. Algeria seemed to represent the real struggle, with huge potential to become a model for radical projects of national liberation around the world. The new independent government aligned itself with the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, riding a radical wave of national liberation that brought new governments to power across North Africa and the Middle East; the ‘revolutionary’ regime led by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in Libya seemed to seal the fate of the region’s petrol states.30 In the months leading to independence, the OAS went on killing sprees across Algeria. Initially they targeted only Algerians – 230 were killed in the first two weeks of May 1962 – but by June groups of young pieds-noirs started to kill ‘liberal’ settlers and even those leaving for France. One recent study describes how ‘OAS hit squads, many of them just teenagers, went on indiscriminate killing sprees, usually in the early evening after a day relaxing on the beach’.31 Once it was clear that their resistance to independence was futile, they started on a campaign of sabotage and destruction that culminated in burning down the University of Algiers library. No sooner was independence reached than deep problems began to undermine the new state. On 1 November Ben Bella explained that of the 9 million Algerians, half were under 20 and 2 million were unemployed. Most of the skilled white community had left at an astonishing speed: within an incredibly short period, four in five piedsnoirs had left.32 At independence there were only 33 Algerian engineers. This great flight included most of Algeria’s Jewish population, some of whose Algerian roots went back thousands of years. The FLN was divided. Ben Bella emerged in the course of 1962 as a radical voice who condemned the GPRA for having given away too much with the Évian Accords. Against these ‘neo-colonial’ compromises he argued for a popular revolution led by the peasantry to renew the FLN and combine Islam and socialism. Yet behind the apparent differences in ideology was a frenetic rush to grab the spoils

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of independence. Thousands were killed in clashes between Ben Bella’s power base and other wilayas. The killings spread to the Casbah, which triggered a demonstration of 20,000 with the slogan ‘Seven years is enough’. It was Houari Boumédiène’s army of the frontier – which Lanzmann had visited two years before – that finally settled the fighting; his disciplined force brought the dissident wilayas to heel. Boumédiène was a high-ranking colonel in the war and, from 1960, in charge of the ALN. After the National Assembly elections, Ben Bella became head of the government and the Algerian republic was officially proclaimed. Although historians Martin Evans and John Phillips argue that ‘Fanon’s vision was one amongst many’ in the struggles for hegemony from July 1962, in many ways the first months of independence served as grim confirmation of Fanon’s analysis of the role a post-colonial class of nationalist leaders would play.33 In place of the pieds-noirs settlers, European, mostly French, coopérants arrived to assist independent Algeria. This group soon acquired the name pieds-rouges. They were modest in number; an April 1963 census estimated the number of French volunteers working as civil servants, teachers, technicians, journalists and more at 13,800.34 Many were self-defined revolutionaries; some had unconditionally supported the struggle for Algerian independence, worked as porteurs de valises, or were militants in Trotskyist or communist parties that had supported the FLN. One of these porteurs de valises, Jean-Jacques Porchez, explained his motivation for moving to Algeria in the summer of 1962: ‘We believed that the struggle for national liberation was the prelude to the socialist revolution. It was the epoch of China [. . .] we wanted to rebuild what France had destroyed.’35 For a brief period these coopérants participated with thousands of Algerians in a variety of projects, believing that they were involved in constructing a socially just or even a socialist Algeria. Ben Bella gave these projects a momentary space, which to some extent expressed his own ambitions for Algeria. In public statements he called national liberation a revolutionary process, with the Algerian peasantry as its protagonists. He looked to China and Cuba as models. These ambitions reached their summit in the Algiers Charter in April 1964, which called for worker and peasant self-management

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(autogestion), the socialisation of the economy and agricultural reforms. Even though the PCA had been officially banned on 29 November 1962, its 6,000 members continued to operate and enthusiastically supported Ben Bella’s reforms. These experiments with autogestion were often inspired from the bottom up. Immediately after independence, it was often workers who took the initiative in their workplaces and set up management committees in factories. In the countryside it was the poor who took over abandoned estates. Quickly the movement spread until there was a network of workers’ management committees across many areas of the country. Ben Bella’s government responded to these initiatives, rather than organising them, seeing in them a way of defending the economy. The government issued three important decrees in March 1963 which attempted to institutionalise and give legal protection to the principle of autogestion. Yet the danger to these initiatives was real. Many of Fanon’s caste of get-rich-quick profiteers, including ALN leaders and their friends, had already taken over abandoned estates.36 Ben Bella’s reforms were built on a fragile edifice. Economically the country was still dependent on France; the president had to deal with increasing intolerance and violence from his opponents, who accused him of nurturing a personality cult.37 Internationally, however, Ben Bella became a figurehead for radical pan-Africanism. He also nurtured relations with Cuba. The impoverished island extended military and medical cooperation to Algeria, ‘Cuba’s first love in Africa’.38 On 19 June 1965, Defence Minister Houari Boumédiène led a military coup that ousted President Ben Bella and brought a swift and brutal end to many of his more radical initiatives. By September, writer and historian Catherine Simon writes, 2,000 of Ben Bella’s supporters had been arrested. Many were tortured. The coup signalled the end of a radical moment for Algeria. Some of the pieds-rouges escaped the country; many others, including Trotskyists, socialists and trade unionists – French and Algerian – were arrested and tortured. The new regime used tactics of the old, despised colonial administration. The love boat of Third World revolution had crashed on the rocks of national liberation. Boumédiène’s government committed itself to a programme of industrialisation and nationalisation, culminating in February 1971 with the nationalisation of the oil industry. However, for ordinary

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Algerians, these initiatives did not flow from their own endeavours, the popular participation and involvement in society that Fanon had envisaged; instead, the dividends of independence trickled down unevenly. Popular ownership was largely absent in a statist project that was led from above. The nationalist leadership of the new state assumed dictatorial character, concentrating powers in a few hands around the political leadership. Boumédiène ruled ruthlessly. As we have seen, political expression, organisations and basic freedoms were severely curtailed – what the FLN had been to its opponents in the war against the French, it was now in government.39 Mohammed Harbi, a former left-wing FLN militant and historian, was arrested in September 1965 and imprisoned without trial, only released into house arrest in 1971. For Harbi the crisis of independence, as this book has argued, stemmed from deep inside the national liberation movement itself and from the violent protagonist of that liberation, the FLN. During the war against the French, he said, some perceived a malaise, but they said to themselves that this will be resolved with liberation. They did not see that it was an aspect of the liberation and that if we did not resolve it in the process of the struggle, we would return to the same point.40

Since the 1980s the regime, led since 1999 by Abdelaziz Bouteflika – who worked as Fanon’s secretary in 1961 – has followed pro-market economic reforms, pursuing aggressive privatisation and liberalisation that has impoverished Algeria. The UK-based Algerian writer Hamza Hamouchene has described a ‘bazaar economy based on importimport [. . .] the economy relies essentially on oil revenues and [. . .] the Algeria of today imports even the food it eats’.41

National self-sufficiency and the middle class Even if Fanon was a man of his time, developing and radicalising in a period of extraordinary decolonisation and struggle, he also collided with his historical moment and the contradictions of decolonisation. Few people after Fanon wrote with such sheer clarity and force as the activist and scholar Ruth First, who wrote less than ten years after Fanon’s death that

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the independence ‘revolution’ in Africa was brief, makeshift and leaky. It came precipitated as much if not more by thrusts from beyond the continent as by sustained and articulated social revolution from within. This does not mean that independence was unwanted in Africa. [. . .] It means that in the circumstances of its coming, it could accomplish and change only so much and no more.42

The limits of national liberation were tightly drawn, even if there was much to celebrate after independence. The extent of popular mobilisation outside Algeria was real, but limited, and the class of nationalist leaders was an elite determined to make a deal on the ‘terms and fixed indemnities for the departing power’, as First wrote.43 The departing colonisers could transfer power to a new black elite while securing their economic profits. Fanon directed his great revolutionary strength at this towering and formidable obstacle. He was – in the power of his analysis – almost a lone force, charging with ever-greater blows at the limits of decolonisation. Each time he fell, he picked himself up – resting for a moment, dusting down his impeccable suit, handkerchief, cravat – and then with his small, solid frame quickly resumed his battle charge against the fortress of inherited circumstances. Again and again Fanon hammered at the constraints of what decolonisation could yield, pushing at the limits of the possible. Even the forces of the popular social revolution – his ‘real struggle’ – were too weak, the revolution built on too faulty and fragile an edifice of armed struggle to be sustained after independence. It was while Fanon had time to reflect, during his last great desert mission at the end of 1960, that he posed the problem in his own language. The problem was largely political, he argued: the lack of a clear and guiding ideology. Arming those fighting for independence with pan-Africanism, the closest thing the continent’s nationalist leaders had to a unified philosophy, was inadequate. It is worth quoting Fanon at length: Colonialism and its derivatives do not, as a matter of fact, constitute the present enemies of Africa. In a short time this continent will be liberated. For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the

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political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology. [. . .] In Africa [. . .] the countries that come to independence are as unstable as their new middle classes or their renovated princes. After a few hesitant steps in the international arena the national middle classes, no longer feeling the threat of the traditional colonial power, suddenly develop their own appetites. [. . .] In these imperialist pseudo-states [. . .] an extreme militarist policy leads to a reduction of public investments in countries which in certain respects are still medieval. The discontented workers undergo a repression as pitiless as that of the colonial period. (TAR 186–7)

In Fanon’s notes, which he did not intend to publish, we have his Grundrisse, where he began to sketch the character and appetites of the national bourgeoisie after national liberation. He saw his project on the continent as one of clearing up ideological mess, confusion and nonsense: For nearly three years I have been trying to bring the misty idea of African unity out of the subjectivist bogs of the majority of its supporters. [. . .] We must once again come back to the Marxist formula. The triumphant middle classes are the most impetuous, the most enterprising, the most annexationist in the world (not for nothing did the French bourgeoisie of 1789 put Europe to fire and sword). (TAR 186–7)

Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth to fill this ideological vacuum. The work cannot, however, be separated from the desperate rush in which he wrote it. He was a dying man. He was also racing against another clock: Algeria would be independent but this, as he was now acutely aware, would not solve the problem of underdevelopment and continental liberation. Independence, he could see, had become a curse. The FLN was split between politicians ready to do business with France and rein in the revolution and the veterans of the struggle, who demanded agrarian reforms and some version of socialist change. Though the ‘nationalist’ aims of the revolution curtailed the ‘social’ revolution, the two were caught in a fraught embrace – political advances (and pronouncements) infected and deepened the social revolt.

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The triumphant middle class, the working class and national liberation Writer and activist Tony Cliff wrote, in 1963, an account of national liberation and Third World revolution that provides a powerful model for the understanding of the Algerian Revolution described in this book. In many ways Cliff’s work is an important elaboration of processes that Fanon had attempted to work out, but Cliff worked explicitly within the framework of the radical left. Cliff is also trying to answer Stora’s question: why, in the classic Trotskyist account, an embryonic working class in a colony failed to lead the struggle of national and socialist transformation. His starting point is to identify the spinelessness of the emerging bourgeoisie, which Fanon refers to above: ‘The bourgeoisie which arrives late on the scene is fundamentally different from its ancestors of a century or two earlier, it is incapable of providing a consistent, democratic, revolutionary solution to the problem posed by feudalism and imperialist oppression.’44 But, Cliff argues, it was no longer correct to state that therefore the ‘decisive revolutionary role falls to the proletariat, even though it may be very young and small in number’, since it was only the working class (in developing capitalist countries) that could move beyond private property, forcing the ‘democratic revolution’ to grow ‘immediately into the socialist, and thereby [. . .] a permanent revolution’.45 Cliff summarises the theory in the light of the emerging processes of decolonisation. ‘While the conservative, cowardly nature of a latedeveloping bourgeoisie . . . is an absolute law, the revolutionary character of the young working class is neither absolute nor inevitable.’ He goes on to describe some of the serious weaknesses of a young working class in colonial settings: ‘In many cases the existence of a floating amorphous majority of new workers with one foot in the countryside creates difficulties for autonomous proletarian organisations; lack of experience and illiteracy add to their weakness.’ These factors, Cliff argues, tend to result in dependence on a non-workingclass leadership. ‘The last, but by no means least, factor determining whether the working class in the backward countries is actually revolutionary or not is a subjective one, namely, the activities of the parties, particularly the Communist Parties that influence it.’ This reality was never more clear than in Algeria and France. Without a

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party to make up for the political lacuna of the ‘absence of ideology’, national liberation was quickly hollowed out. On these questions, this book has made a clear distinction between Stalinist ‘Marxism– Leninism’ and a richer, emancipatory Marxism, represented by a rich array of thinkers and activists.46 The counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism after 1945 had a profound influence on many colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, as well as attempts to build revolutionary working-class organisations. Without the ‘piston box’ of a revolutionary organisation, workingclass action tended to be dispersed and disorganised. Anti-colonial struggles faced a double jeopardy: a working class that was poorly organised, young and small in number in addition to Stalinised communist organisations that divided up the ‘democratic’ and socialist tasks into distinct stages. This meant that while alternatives to the ‘curse of national consciousness’ were present in the period of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, as Fanon noted, and again in the 1970s and 1980s in southern Africa, they were systematically shut down. Algeria’s national liberation war took place in a world that had helped to shape the meanings of national liberation and communism. Quite early in the development of post-revolutionary Russia, a shift – one that had an important effect on many liberation movements across the continent – took place among an important band of communist activists from Egypt and Algeria in the Maghreb to southern Africa. During the so-called ‘third period’ announced by the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in 1928, some useful work was undertaken in the colonial world. Yet these advances were liquidated with the advent of the popular front in 1935, with disastrous effect.47 Increasingly, national liberation movements became brutal popular fronts incorporating a vast array of contradictory forces, often encouraged by Moscow; among these, according to historian Roger Southall, ‘there was a significant class element [. . .] which was distinctly pro-capitalist’. The black middle class, though weak and small in number, were ‘disproportionately influential within these national liberation popular fronts’, which, Southall notes, ‘predisposed them to becoming state managers, for only preferential access to the state could enable them to become a “proper” bourgeoisie’.48 The influence of these forces within such movements meant that this class

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of petit-bourgeois nationalists – Fanon’s ‘caste of profiteers’ – sought accommodation with national and international capital. Cliff elaborates on the emergence of this ‘caste’, following Fanon (though never explicitly): ‘It is one of the tricks of history that when an historical task faces society, and the class that traditionally carries it out is absent, some other group of people . . . implements it.’49 For Cliff this group was the intelligentsia, which played a central part ‘as the leader and unifier of the nation, and above all as manipulator of the masses’ in the colonial world. The desire of this group is always to rise above society. These tendencies can be checked when the intelligentsia are involved in mass politics, but when they are free of the constraints and discipline of a wider movement, ‘they show clearer and much more extreme tendencies towards elitism [and] arbitrariness, as towards vacillation and splits’. In a period of nationalist struggle a revolutionary intelligentsia is a ‘cohesive factor’ and an ‘obvious source of a professional elite’. Members of this group have various advantages over other social groups in society. They are able to pose as the neutral arbiters of the nation against sectional interests, with a clear concept of what the nation means, when ‘the peasants and workers [have] neither the leisure nor education for it’.But this group also has an organisational coherence lacking in other classes, with its clubs, associations and student unions. The intelligentsia also see themselves as the exalted agents of political transformation. Cliff wrote, They are great believers in efficiency [. . .] they hope for reform from above and would dearly love to hand the new world over to a grateful people, rather than see the liberating struggle of a selfconscious and freely associated people result in a new world for themselves.50

Their relationship to those below them is inherently contradictory, a simultaneous debt and guilt towards the ‘masses’ and a sense of distance from and superiority to them. The intelligentsia’s exaggerated power derives directly from the ‘feebleness of other social classes, and their political nullity’; they filled a political vacuum. As Jean-François Lyotard concluded, in an extraordinarily prescient and astute analysis, ‘No class has been able to give an answer to the crisis produced by this

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destruction because no class has been completely constituted.’ Lyotard’s final words are revealing: ‘Algeria still does not belong to those who live there and they still have the task of conquering it.’51 So liberation became its opposite, bureaucratic state capitalism, in the 1960s and 1970s. Fanon’s extraordinary work was a highly original attempt, within the struggle for national liberation, to rejoin the severed whole, to marry national liberation with continental and eventually global liberation. However, there is a problem. It can be simply and painfully stated. Whether national liberation came in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, from France or Britain’s ‘negotiated’ settlements in Ghana, Nigeria or Tunisia or from armed resistance in Algeria and North Vietnam (Fanon’s ‘real struggle’), the end result was the same. When a second, more ‘critical’ decolonisation occurred in Portugal’s colonies in Africa, the pattern was that the independent state remained in the hands of a narrow elite; though there were important reforms, the model of state management was the same and the popular forces that had engaged in the revolution were demobilised. When the guns were withdrawn and the streets filled again with traffic, few fundamental social aspects of society had been overturned.52 Land reforms, though significant for the recipients of redistributed land, were limited. When control of factories, previously in foreign-owned industries, passed into nationalist hands, workers were extolled to work harder ‘in the national interest’. Following the model of the Soviet Union, productivity drives were implemented to assist the new state to catch up with the West. Fanon was the preeminent theorist of the limitation and degeneration and conservatism of national petit-bourgeoisies, but despite his appeals for ‘ideology’, he was also trapped in the constraining and self-limiting framework of national liberation. Certain Marxists have long distinguished between types of ‘revolution’. Political revolutions may have ‘social’ aspects but operate essentially as a struggle over the existing state. Such revolutions expressed, on the eve of decolonisation, the évolués’ desire for modernisation and national freedom and to lay their hands on the levers of power. Their project was not to refigure the world and transform social relationships and patterns of ownership. These political revolutionary movements frequently carry the vocabulary of real mass mobilisations and occur relatively frequently in history.

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There are famous examples in the twentieth century: China in 1949, Cuba a decade later, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989–91. For this book, the entire history of Algeria’s national liberation can be placed in a similar category. At the end of the ‘revolution’ most Algerians faced the same conditions they had at the beginning; the exploited remained without land, workers without control of their factories. Yet the desire for social revolution, expressed brilliantly in Fanon’s writings, seeks ‘the transformation of one type of society into another’, in Neil Davidson’s words.53 These revolutions, demanded by popular movements for generations, are harder to make. ‘We only know of two and one of these has not yet succeeded: bourgeoisie revolutions and the socialist revolution.’54 In the period of decolonisation many sought social revolution, but their hopes collapsed, constrained and limited by the ideology and politics of national liberation. In none of the successful anti-colonial struggles was there a shift from one mode of production to another. Independence from colonial oppression was a huge achievement, but with constrained popular participation it was more and more seen as hollow. Fanon, despite the paradox in which he was trapped, wrote more powerfully than anyone of the likely outcome of independence. His influence on a huge audience, over many generations, is extraordinary.

A confusing combination The influence of Fanon’s work on a confusing combination of movements and activists from Marxism, Maoism and guerrilla wars does point to an uncomfortable reality. Fanon was the brilliant and angry champion of national liberation and revolution, but his refusal to see how a movement could be centred on the power of the organised working class and independent working-class politics limited the positive reach of his ideas. Instead, though Fanon’s orientation to the countryside and the lumpenproletariat won him many supporters in the 1960s and 1970s, it also helped to tie his alternatives into a delimiting prison.55 The real history of working-class action in the Third World has often been concealed. Fanon’s role in helping to conceal this reality makes his legacy decidedly ambiguous for those of us who seek to develop (and recover) such a politics today.56

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The actual history of decolonisation in Africa reveals a boisterous working class, often leading the struggle for national liberation, able to paralyse the colonial machine their position at the heart of profit, in factories, mines and docks.57 This is true in many parts of late colonial sub-Saharan Africa and even more so in North Africa and the Middle East. For example, there was a widening and radicalising wave of working-class militancy after 1945 in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Arguably, it was the extraordinary working-class demonstrations in the cities and towns across Algeria in December 1960 that forced the French to accept that they would have to leave – this was a movement that was not controlled or organised by the FLN and has been labelled the ‘Diên Biên Phu moment’ in the revolution.58 Of these protests Fanon wrote nothing.59 But there were also important weaknesses, which Fanon’s analysis of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia points to. Stronger workingclass leadership within these strikes and protests could have made an argument for an urban and worker-led movement of national and socialist revolution in a single ongoing process of revolutionary change linked to the countryside. There were, of course, many reasons why these politics could not emerge, not least the role of Stalinised communist parties, which sought to limit these revolts to nationhood or argued, as in the case of Algeria, for the need to follow the lead of the European working class. Leadership therefore fell into the hands of the nationalist intelligentsia, as we have seen: in Egypt in 1952, for example, it was a class of nationalist ‘free officers’ who deposed King Farouk’s regime. Fanon knew prominent members of this class, both personally and from afar, including Senghor, Lumumba, Césaire and Nkrumah. In addition, many labour movements on the continent were able to resist total incorporation into the nationalist project and maintain their own autonomy from hegemonic nationalist parties, but their biggest problem was their inability to generate intellectual or ideological alternatives to the focus on national economic development dominant among both Stalinists and nationalists. As a consequence, trade unions sometimes adopted syndicalist or economistic approaches, rejecting nationalist or new state ideologies in arguing that their role was ‘nonpolitical’. This unfortunately dovetailed and seemed to confirm the accusation, present in The Wretched of the Earth, that organised workers represented, in an African context, a labour aristocracy who selfishly

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defended their privileges at the expense of other – particularly rural – sections of society.60 However, the removal of the working class from Fanon’s paradigm can be contextualised, given the war’s shift back to the countryside after the Battle of Algiers. What became known as Fanonist revolutionary strategy after 1961 spoke, in large part, of the failures and divisions of the Algerian war and the political choices made by the FLN.61 Fanon also tended to fetishise the armed struggle as the real struggle.62 He was right to confront the hypocrisy of the European left, but his championing of the Algerian method of ‘insurrection’ was deeply problematic. At times Fanon presented this model to countries that were ill-suited to such a tactic, as we have seen, such as in the case of Angola.63 Yet Fanon’s writing and life offer us so much to celebrate and study. Fanon was perhaps the most important figure in the ideological struggle against colonialism in the twentieth century. Studies in a Dying Colonialism and especially The Wretched of the Earth – with its capacity to capture the anger of the world – had an important impact on national liberation movements across the continent and the world. But this book has argued that, through Fanon’s critical engagement with Marxism, he has helped to extend the reach of that political project. Five years after his death in 1961, Fanon’s work leapt across the Atlantic from Algeria and inspired one of the most militant and antiracist movements to emerge in the United States in the twentieth century, the Black Power movement. The Wretched of the Earth was regarded as essential reading for the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense, a radical black party formed in 1966. A founding member of the Panthers, Bobby Seale, wrote in his passionate autobiography, Seize the Time (1970), of giving his copy of The Wretched of the Earth to Huey P. Newton, the party’s leading member, who later interpreted the book and stressed the importance of Fanon’s work to their struggle. National liberation and independence and the struggle against colonialism were not the immediate conditions of black America, but the Panthers argued that Fanon’s descriptions of settler colonialism spoke directly to their experiences. The Black Panthers developed a political understanding of the world, of racism and oppression, from the struggle against European colonialism in Africa and adopted the same formulations of liberation. Black Americans had been living for hundreds of years under a form of colonial occupation, an ‘occupation’ by the state,

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the ‘pigs’ (police), who were an alien and unwelcome force in black neighbourhoods. The profound discrimination against, arrests and murders of black Americans meant that this oppressed community constituted a nation, as Seale writes: ‘We were made into a nation within a nation – having been brought here from Africa and after exportation and segregation, becoming Afro-Americans.’64 The language and practice of national liberation spoke directly to these politics; Fanon’s work was a manual that explicitly influenced the development of the Black Panthers. However, the Black Panthers offered much more than ‘black nationalism’. The foundation of the Panthers was an ideological reaction to the ‘cultural nationalism’ of black nationalists in California, who mouthed platitudes about liberation and white racism but did little. Fanon’s ideas of national liberation became their manifesto: the complexity and failure of national liberation, the ways national consciousness was riven by class interests. Fanon’s analysis of the role of the petit-bourgeoisie in breaking revolutionary movements was also a strong element in the Black Panthers’ humanism and seemed to address their realities. Fanon also spoke to the Black Panthers in another way. The Wretched of the Earth’s emphasis on the peasantry, unemployed and poor (the lumpenproletariat) and rejection of the urban working class as a revolutionary force expressed another reality for black communities – here the Black Panthers went even further than Fanon. The black lumpenproletariat was a revolutionary force that could, given the right political education, become the vanguard of the struggle in the United States. Seale wrote that Newton wanted brothers off the block – brothers who had been out there robbing banks, brothers who had been pimping, brothers who had been peddling dope, brothers who aren’t going to take shit, brothers who had been fighting pigs – because he knew that once they got themselves together in the area of political education [. . .] you get niggers, you get black men, you get revolutionaries, who are too much.65

The Black Panthers were successful in doing just this: inspiring a generation to challenge the ‘power structures’, even if its strategy of

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organising almost exclusively among the unemployed led to serious problems.66 Fanon was the political godfather to the Black Panthers; they were his astute and thoughtful students.67

Becoming human Fanon wanted much more for Algeria and for the world. He was an internationalist who understood that transforming the world, creating a new and socialist humanity, would ultimately necessitate unity between the North and South, but only if Europeans ‘carried out in practice the mission which fell to them’ (WE 253). Now, he believed, it was the time for the South to lead the project of human emancipation. Fanon’s immense humanism is astonishing, as is his ability to move between scales of analysis – from the Algerian Revolution, continental liberation and class to broken and tortured combatants and French torturers. Human life, he argues, must be revolutionised, and when it is our relationships with each other will also be transformed. Though our crimes and deeds will forever pursue us, we can all be redeemed. The revolution will radically mutate and humanise us. One case study in The Wretched of the Earth involves an FLN combatant whose life was destroyed by the war. His wife had left him after being raped by a French soldier; she felt the shame was too terrible to stay with her husband while he struggled to maintain his sanity. He came to see Fanon for treatment. After several weeks he managed to find his way back. His appetite had recovered; he was able to sleep again and could engage in political discussions. ‘After two weeks,’ Fanon relates, ‘he went back to his unit. Before he left he told me: “When independence comes, I’ll take my wife back. If it doesn’t work out between us, I’ll come and see you in Algiers”’ (208). This was Fanon’s wish: for broken and scarred humanity to be healed, to return, to become human again. There can be no greater, no more important project for any of us.

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Notes

Introduction 1. ‘Nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l’esclavage.’ See T. Kasse, ‘Ahmed Sékou Touré’, Pambazuka News, 10 May 2008, http:// www.pambazuka.org/fr/category/features/51013 (accessed 10 October 2013). 2. C. Hoskyns, ‘Pan-Africanism at Accra’, in Africa South 3/3 (1959), pp. 74–5. 3. E. Mphahlele, ‘Accra Conference Diary’, in L. Hughes (ed.), An African Treasury (New York: Crown, 1960), p. 38. 4. The current president of Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, worked as Fanon’s secretary in 1962. Interview, P. Chaulet, 4 October 2010. All interviews cited were conducted by the author unless otherwise indicated. 5. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 165. Subsequent references to this book will be cited in the text with WE and a page number corresponding to this edition. 6. B. Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Black Classic Press, 1970), p. 24. 7. Interview, N. Gibson, 3 November 2010. 8. For an excellent feminist critique of these positions, see T. SharpleyWhiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 9. M-A. Helie-Lucas, ‘Women, Nationalism and Religion in the Algerian Liberation Struggle’, in N. Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon (New York: Humanity Books, 1999). 10. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press: 1986), p. 222. Subsequent references to this book will be cited in the text with BSWM and a page number corresponding to this edition. 11. G. Pirelli’s Fanon, originally published in 1971, was later republished in Italian, with another study by A. Aruffo as Frantz Fanon: o l’everione anticoloniale (Rome: Redazione, 1994). 12. H. Gates, ‘Critical Fanonism’, Critical Inquiry 17/3 (1991), p. 470. 13. Indeed, there is a proliferation of articles and books on Fanon and his period. Many of these considerably expand our understanding of his work and life. See, for example, J. Go, ‘Decolonising Bourdieu: Colonial and Postcolonial Theory in Pierre Bourdieu’s Early Work’, Sociological Theory 31/49 (2013), pp. 49–74, and A. Haddour, ‘Torture Unveiled: Rereading Fanon and Bourdieu in the Context of May 1958’, Theory Culture Society 27/7–8 (2010), pp. 66–90. Apart from the early biographies, see P. Bouvier, Fanon (Paris:

248

notes pp. 5–10

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Éditions Universitaires, 1971); P. Geismar, Fanon (New York: Grove Press, 1971); I. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (London: Wildwood House, 1973). See, for an example of the principal works of the booming 30year Fanon Studies industry, E. Hansen, Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977); L. A. Jinadu, Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution (London: KPI, 1986); H. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985); A. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); L. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995); T. Serequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994); L. Gordon, T. Sharpley-Whiting and R. White, Fanon: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); R. Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010); Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See D. Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York, Picador: 2000), and N. Gibson, Fanon: The Post-Colonial Imagination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). Neil Belton, ‘David Macey Obituary’, Guardian, 2 November 2011, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/02/david-macey-obituary (accessed 12 December 2011). Bulhan, Fanon, p. 14. Amine Kadi, ‘Décès de Pierre Chaulet, chrétien militant algérien’, La Croix, 10 October 2012, http://www.la-croix.com/Actualite/Monde/Deces-dePierre-Chaulet-chretien-militant-algerien-_EP_-2012-10-10-862938. Fortunately, he had time to finish a joint autobiography with his wife: Pierre and Claudine Chaulet, Le choix de l’Algérie, deux voix, une mémoire (Algiers: Barzakh, 2012). Before I left, Pierre explained that his son Luc was a publisher but, to separate himself from his famous parents, had taken a nom de plume. Pierre then said, with a broad smile, ‘He is now called Omar Zelig. He is your cousin in Algeria.’ See C. Onyeani, Capitalist Nigger (New York: Timbuktu, 2000). See Hall’s interview in the short documentary Frantz Fanon: An Introduction, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWyPwsh079Y (accessed 12 April 2014). Rabaka, Forms of Fanonism, p. 27. See B. Agozino, ‘The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’, Review of African Political Economy 41/140 (2014), pp. 172–84. See, in particular, I. Birchall, ‘Sartre, Trotsky et le Trotskysme’, in E. Barot (ed.), Sartre et le Marxisme (Paris: La Dispute, 2011). B. Stora, Le nationalisme algérien (Paris: CNRS editions, 2010), pp. 43–78. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 1848), https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01. htm#007 (accessed 14 November 2013).

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notes pp. 10–17 25. See L. Zeilig and P. Dwyer, African Struggles Today: Social Movements since Independence (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012). 26. N. Gibson, email communication, 3 November 2010. 27. E. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 154. 28. See B. Hirson, ‘Communalism and Socialism in Africa: The Misdirection of C.L.R. James’, Revolutionary History (1989), https://www.marxists.org/ archive/hirson/1989/clr-james.htm (accessed 15 January 2014). 29. Interview with J. Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (New York: International Publishers, 1919). Available at www.marxists.org/archive/reed/ 1919/10days/10days (accessed 13 August 2013). 30. B. Stora, La dernière génération d’octobre (Paris: Hachette, 2003), p. 213. 31. See Joby Fanon’s interview in the short documentary Frantz Fanon: An Introduction. 32. Panaf Editors, Frantz Fanon (London: Panaf Books, 1978). 33. P. Chaulet, email communication, 9 July 2010. 34. It is important to note that Fanon was trapped in certain gender conventions, as were most writers of his day, so he uses the male pronoun extensively in his writing, a convention that is preserved in translations of his work. As this book is a detailed discussion of his work, I constantly weave in and out of his writing; it would have been impractical and jarring to replace Fanon’s male pronouns. In my own writing I opt for the use of ‘they’, which is increasingly accepted as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. See, for example, Ben Zimmer, ‘“They”, the Singular Pronoun, Gets Popular’, Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/ can-they-be-accepted-as-a-singular-pronoun-1428686651 (accessed 24 April 2015). 35. G. Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, Gangrel (summer 1946), http://web.calstatela. edu/faculty/jgarret/308/readings-4.pdf (accessed 17 February 2013).

1

Martinique, France and Beyond

1. Macey, Fanon, p. 38. 2. B. Davidson, The African Slave Trade (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 95–8. 3. See, for a useful overview of slavery, R. Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (New York: Verso, 1997). 4. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938). 5. Cited in J. Popkin, You Are All Free (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 363. 6. Historian Ian Birchall has noted the difference between the anti-slavery movements in Britain and France: while in Britain the leading figure, Wilberforce, was a reactionary, misogynist Christian, in France, Schoelcher was a socialist (personal communication, 10 August 2014). 7. Macey, Fanon, p. 43.

notes pp. 17–28 8. Ibid., p. 46. 9. K. Stromberg-Childers, ‘Citizenship and Assimilation in Post-War Martinique: The Abolition of Slavery and the Politics of Commemoration’, Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 34 (2006), http://hdl. handle.net/2027/spo.0642292.0034.018 (accessed 17 May 2013). 10. Ibid. 11. A. Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). 12. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 57. 13. Ibid., p. 61. 14. Birchall suggests that the metropolitan experience was not so benign, ‘a good many Provençals, Bretons etc. would have seen themselves as victims, if not exactly of racism, of some sort of colonialism’ (personal communication, 10 August 2014). 15. Macey, Fanon, p. 64. 16. There is some truth in this assertion of blackness, which stems from Guadeloupe’s involvement in the revolution in 1794. Hundreds of white collaborators with the British were guillotined and the population became blacker. 17. Fanon became uneasy about how Cesaire, in his later incarnation as politician, accepted the French community and compromised in an alliance with France. 18. Macey, Fanon, p. 81. 19. For a good general history of the region see E. Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969 (New York: Random House, 1984). 20. Macey, Fanon, p. 88. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., p. 91. 23. Probably the best account of Fanon’s period fighting in the war is Geismar, Ibid., pp. 29–40. 24. See K. Barry, Female Sexual Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1984). 25. See S. Berthon, Allies at War (New York: Carroll & Graff, 2001). 26. Macey, Fanon, p. 97. 27. Cited in D. Killingrey’s contentious history of colonial soldiers fighting in the war, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (London: James Currey, 2010), p. 206. See also B. Davidson, Africa in Modern History (London: Penguin, 1979). 28. Killingrey, Fighting for Britain. 29. Macey, Fanon, p. 99. 30. Macey, interview, October 2010. 31. Macey, Fanon, p. 103. 32. Ibid., pp. 103–4. 33. P. Lumumba, speech at the ceremony of the proclamation of Congo’s independence, Kinshasa, 30 June 1960, https://www.marxists.org/subject/ africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm (accessed 7 October 2013).

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notes pp. 29–37 34. Cited in F. Grenard, ‘The French after 1945: Difficulties and Disappointments of an Immediate Post-War Period’, in L. Kettenacker and T. Riotte (eds), The Legacies of Two World Wars (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 218–19. 35. I am grateful to Ian Birchall for elaborating on the role of the PCF in the post-occupation tripartite government. 36. C. Izambert, ‘The Example of a Communist Paper Aimed at Algerian Immigrants’, in W. Pojmann (ed.), Migration and Activism in Europe Since 1945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 99–100. 37. Macey, Fanon, p. 46. 38. Irene Gendzier states in her 1972 study of Fanon (Frantz Fanon, pp. 16–17) that he wanted the child brought up by his own mother in Martinique. Mireille Fanon was accepted and incorporated into the Fanon family after her father’s death. She has written about her father and played a prominent role in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his death. She runs the Fondation Frantz Fanon. 39. Cited in Geismar, Fanon, p. 11. 40. Fanon was, at this point, something of a political novice: he had not read major works of Marxism or studied revolutionary history and theory. See A. Cherki, Frantz Fanon: Portrait (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2010). 41. I. Birchall, 1998, ‘Socialism or Identity Politics: A Reply to Linda A. Bell’, Sartre Studies International 4/2, pp. 69–78, in particular p. 70. 42. Cited in Cherki, Frantz Fanon, p. 135. Gendzier and Bouvier argue that Fanon mixed in Trotskyist circles in Lyon. Gendzier writes that he was reading Lenin, Marx and Trotsky ‘at the same time that he was reading Freud’. Fanon’s friend Marcel Manville ‘recalls that Fanon developed a great interest in Trotsky and asked Manville to bring him the proceedings of the Fourth International’ (Gendzier, Fanon, p. 20). 43. J. Woddis, New Theories of Revolution: A Commentary on the Views of Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray and Herbert Marcuse (New York: International Publishers, 1972). 44. B. Hirson, Revolutions in My Life (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1995), p. 346. 45. Macey, Fanon, p. 479. 46. See D. Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War (London: Bookmarks, 2012). 47. While it would be nice to side with Fanon against a stuffy and autocratic university department (and medicine in Lyon in the early 1950s certainly was this), in this case it does seem reasonable that a long, brilliant analysis of racism, colonial revolt, Negritude, black writers and Hegel was beyond an acceptable submission for a medical degree. 48. See D. Macey’s excellent article ‘“I Am My Own Foundation”: Frantz Fanon as a Source of Continued Political Embarrassment’, Theory Culture Society 27(7/8) (2011), p. 41. 49. J.-P. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), p. 56. 50. Ibid., pp. 68–9. 51. Ibid., pp. 97–8.

notes pp. 37–46 52. Ibid., p. 110. 53. See, for an excellent discussion of Sartre’s influence on Fanon, R. Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 28–33. 54. F. Fanon, Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), pp. 116–17. 55. H. Bulhan, Frantz Fanon, p. 121. 56. We need to ask ourselves whether, in the quest to ‘uncover’ resistance, Fanon is contradicting his own argument in the final chapter that the desire to uncover African/black history is essentially irrelevant to the project of change and transformation in the present. 57. L. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, p. 12. 58. F. Fanon, ‘The North African Syndrome’, in Towards the African Revolution (London: Pelican Books, 1970), p. 26, hereafter TAR. 59. I am grateful to Kim Wale for these insights. 60. Fanon, Peau Noire, p. 220. 61. Ibid., pp. 116, 117. 62. Izambert, ‘Example of a Communist Paper’, p. 100. 63. P. Chaulet, interview, Algeria, September 2011. 64. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 159. 65. One important later influence was Jean Oury, but perhaps the most important was Tosquelles, who had at one time been ‘hunted’ by Spanish Stalinists. 66. See D. Reggio and M. Novello, ‘An Interview with Dr. Jean Oury’, Radical Philosophy 143 (2007), pp. 32–46. 67. He was also involved in bitter, pitched battles with Communist Party units also fighting Franco. Influenced by Stalin’s shifting foreign policy, the party played a destructive and debilitating role in the civil war. See G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986). 68. For an interesting discussion of Fanon’s ‘clinical psychology’, see J. McCulloch’s Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 69. Reggio and Novello, ‘Interview with Dr Jean Oury’. 70. Today the hospital is called Centre Hospitalier François-Tosquelles. Once the cradle of institutional psychiatry, it is a shell of its former self; patients are locked up for hours, heavily drugged, and the early experiments are only a faint memory to the staff. 71. Fanon, ‘Lassitude’, Trait d’Union, n. 128 (1952); letter, Amayen Roger, n. 129 (1953). Saint-Alban library, accessed August 2012. 72. Interestingly, from 1957, Fanon worked in Tunisia on El Moudjahid, Algeria’s main paper of national liberation, produced using a similar collective editorial approach. 73. Fanon co-authored three articles with Tosquelles that dealt with aspects of mental illness, and the social milieu and the atmosphere created in the hospital. 74. F. Tosquelles, ‘Frantz Fanon et la Psychothérapie Institutionnelle’, unpublished paper, accessed at the closed library at Saint-Alban, 16 August 2012.

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2

Towards Revolution

1. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 203. 2. Alice Cherki has indicated that Fanon was interested in a position in Senegal and, with this in mind, wrote to the future president, Léopold Senghor. 3. Cited in R. Murray and T. Wengraf, ‘The Algerian Revolution – 1’, New Left Review 1/22 (1963), pp. 22–3. 4. F. Jeanson, La révolution algérienne (Paris: Feltrinelli, 1962), p. 29. 5. Murray and Wengraf, ‘Algerian Revolution’, pp. 15–30. 6. J-F. Lyotard, ‘Algeria’, International Socialism 13 (Summer 1963), http:// www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1963/no013/lyotard.htm (accessed 12 June 2012). 7. Murray and Wengraf, ‘Algerian Revolution’, pp. 53–4. 8. J. L. Planche, Sétif 1945: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin, 2006). 9. The war lasted until 1962 and cost an estimated 1 million Algerian lives. 10. Macey, ‘I Am My Own Foundation’, p. 37. 11. P. Kessel and G. Pirelli, Le peuple algérien et la guerre: Lettres et témoignages, 1954–1962 (Paris: Harmattan, 2003), p. 247. 12. Cherki, Fanon, pp. 99–100. 13. Ibid., p. 98. 14. Cited in N. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 171. 15. P. and C. Chaulet, interview, Paris, 14 November 2010. 16. Cherki, Fanon, pp. 92–3. 17. Macey, Fanon, p. 232. 18. Ibid., p. 233. 19. A. Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (New York: Cornell University, 2006), p. 71. 20. Cited in A. Drew, We Are No Longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2014), p. 187. 21. Ibid., pp. 188–9. 22. The ‘war within in a war’ is brilliantly captured in Rachid Bouchareb’s film Hors-la-loi (Outside the Law) (Tessalit Productions, 2010). 23. Stora, Le nationalisme algérien. 24. These statistics are also a battleground; officially, the French state claimed 141,000 were killed in war, the Algerian state referred to a million martyrs, though the actual figures are likely considerably lower than the Algerian estimate. See G. Pervillé, ‘La guerre d’Algérie: combien de morts?’ in M. Harbi and B. Stora, La guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004). 25. Interview, Pierre Chaulet, Algiers, 29 September 2011. 26. L. Zeilig, Revolt and Protest: Student Politics and Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011). 27. The Union Générale des Syndicats Algériens (UGSA) was founded in 1954 and was, in effect, the CGT of Algeria. 28. It is interesting to ponder why France could unload the rest of its colonial empire with relative ease, but fought so long to hold onto Algeria. Much

notes pp. 63–72

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

of the reason is political rather than economic. An important electoral constituency had far-reaching ties with Algeria and identified with the settlers. While the French political and economic elite would have been prepared to scrap Algeria, before the collapse of the Fourth Republic the political system did not allow them to do so. See M. Evans, ‘A History of Algeria in Six Objects’, Open Democracy, 7 December 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/martin-evans/history-ofalgeria-in-six-objects (accessed 4 February 2013). Cherki, Fanon, p. 116. Macey, Fanon, p. 240. One of the best accounts of Fanon’s period in Algeria, the devastating consequences of torture and Fanon’s work as a doctor and militant is Caryl Churchill’s remarkable play The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution (in Caryl Churchill, Caryl Churchill Shorts, London: Nick Hern Books, 2008). Cited in Panaf Editors, Frantz Fanon (London: Panaf Books, 1978), pp. 65 – 6. Cited in Panaf Editors, Fanon, pp. 65–6. T. Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’, International Socialism 12 (Spring 1963), https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/permrev.htm (accessed 11 March 2012). F. Fanon, Les Damnes de la Terre (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1961), p. 131. E. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–91 (London: Abacus, 1995), p. 385. Mboya, Freedom and After (London: André Deutsch, 1963), p. 167. Cited in L. Zeilig and D. Seddon, ‘Marxism, Class and Resistance in Africa’, in L. Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009), p. 31. Cited in I. Birchall (ed.), ‘European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence, 1954–1962’, Revolutionary History 10/4 (2012), pp. 206–18. Ibid. Drew, We Are No Longer in France, p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. It is true that US imperialism was sympathetic to Algerian independence, seeing the end of European colonial rule as an opening to its influence. Though the PCA claimed around 10,000 members in the early 1950s, we should be sceptical of the membership figures given by political parties. So, for example, by the time of the integration of fighters into the ALN in 1956, Emmanuel Sivan estimates only 200 PCA combatants had been integrated. See E. Sivan, Communisme et nationalisme en Algérie, 1920–62 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1976). Cited in Drew, We Are No Longer in France, p. 181. Ibid., p. 183. Cited in ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 196. However, no demands were made for PCA members to renounce their communist convictions.

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notes pp. 73–88 51. 52. 53. 54.

60.

Ibid., pp. 8–9. Ibid., p. 205. Panaf Editors, Fanon, pp. 178–95. Fanon refers to the Mau Mau six times in The Wretched of the Earth; their revolt was of vital continental importance. The comparison with Kenya is worth exploring. Why did Kenya cause only minor ripples in British political life, whereas Algeria was able to tear the Fourth Republic apart? Panaf Editors, Fanon, pp. 178–95. Ibid. Ibid. See PCA Central Committee, ‘Lettre du comité central du PCA au FLN le 12 juillet 1956 et le 16 août 1956’, reprinted in Socialgerie, 1 July 2009, http:// www.socialgerie.net/spip.php?article32 (accessed 14 March 2011). Panaf Editors, Fanon, pp. 178–95.

3

Into the Eye of the Storm

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

1. Ibid., p. 178. 2. Cited in ibid., p. 119. 3. To be more precise, in Aïn Abid seven people were killed, all from the same family. In El Alia there were 35 victims. 4. M. Evans, ‘Mutiny by French Troops during the Algerian War’, in Socialist Worker, 23 May (2006), see p. 256. 5. M. Evans, ‘Mutiny by French Troops during the Algerian War’, Socialist Worker, 23 May 2006, http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/8687/Mutiny+by +French+troops+during+the+Algerian+war (accessed 13 May 2012). 6. C. Géronimi, ‘Appendix 1’, in F. Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism (London: Earthscan, 1989), p. 174. 7. Caute, Fanon, p. 48. 8. It is interesting to consider why Fanon, a staunch, even fanatical supporter of the FLN, decided to include in Géronimi’s testimony in his book. 9. See I. Birchall’s edited collection, ‘European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence 1954–62’, Revolutionary History 10/4 (2012). 10. See B. Abane, Résistances Algériennes: Abane Ramdane et les fusils de la rébellion (Algiers: Casbah Editions, 2011). 11. The white population existed in its own bubble to such a degree that no local or linguistic knowledge was required to serve or live in Algeria short of an ability to bark orders at ‘Arab’ servants. 12. P. Chaulet, ‘Notre rencontre avec Frantz Fanon au cours de la révolution algérienne: 1955–1961’, Second Colloque National Frantz Fanon, El Tarf, 30–31 Mai 2005, unpublished paper. 13. Ibid. 14. S. de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses II (Paris: Folio, 2012), p. 422.

notes pp. 89–102 15. I. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn, 2004), p. 179. 16. D. Guérin, Class Struggle in the First French Republic (London: Pluto Press, 1977), pp. 270–1. 17. L. Trotsky, ‘The Progressive Character of Catalan Nationalism’, in The Spanish Revolution, 1931–39 (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), p. 110. 18. Ibid. 19. R. Southall, Liberation Movements in Power: Party and State in Southern Africa (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013), p. 92. 20. Wright made an important ‘appearance’ in Fanon’s first book. Wright was a French resident at the time of the First World Congress. 21. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 280. 22. See the website for Présence Africaine, http://www.presenceafricaine.com/ (accessed 19 April 2014). 23. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 286. 24. Ibid., p. 289. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 290. 27. Cherki, Fanon, p. 127. 28. Abane, Résistances Algériennes, pp. 559–79. 29. I. Birchall, ‘Mitterrand’s War’, Revolutionary History 10/4 (2012), p. 168; see also F. Malye and B. Stora, François Mitterrand et la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Clamann-Lévy, 2010). 30. Cited in Abane, Résistances Algériennes, p. 569. 31. Ibid., pp. 574–6. 32. M. Smain, interview, Algiers, 2 October 2011. 33. Abane, Résistances Algériennes, p. 578. 34. L. Zeilig, ‘Recalling the Victory of the Algerian Revolution’, Socialist Worker, 3 July 2012, http://socialistworker.co.uk/art/28462/Recalling+the+victory+of +the+Algerian+revolution (accessed 5 August 2013). 35. Z. Drif, Mémoires d’une combattante de l’ALN, zone autonome d’Alger (Algers: Editions Chihab, 2013), p. 182. 36. Abane, Résistances Algériennes, pp. 578–9. 37. P. Chaulet, interview, Algiers, 11 December 2010. 38. Fanon, Studies, pp. 172– 3. 39. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 292. 40. L. Trotsky, ‘Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism’, 1911, http://www. marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm (accessed 4 September 2014). 41. Cherki, Fanon, p. 131. 42. Ibid., p. 91.

4

A Revolutionary in Tunis

1. Cited in Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, p. 140. 2. Interview, Algiers, 2 October 2011.

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notes pp. 102–115 3. Abane, Résistances Algériennes, pp. 657–8. 4. Interview, Algiers, 4 October 2011. 5. S. Thénault, ‘La justice dans la guerre d’Algérie’, in Harbi and Stora (eds), La guerre d’Algérie, pp. 117–8. 6. Ibid. 7. The two men did not arrive in Morocco until 21 May (Abane, Résistances Algériennes, p. 658). 8. Ibid., pp. 597–624. 9. Ibid., p. 674. 10. Ibid., p. 660. Abane attempts to put an overly positive spin on the ‘defeat’, claiming that these groups’ ‘exile’ from the cities helped ‘rebalance’ the sociological composition of the maquis. This was fairly frequent in colonial settings. Urban repression in Rhodesia in the early 1970s and in GuineaBissau after 1959 convinced the nationalist intelligentsia that the urban and popular working-class route to decolonisation had been shut down definitively. This lent itself to notions of a Maoist-like guerrilla or peasant army as the true harbinger of liberation. 11. M. Bouaziz and A. Mahé, ‘La Grande Kabylie durant la guerre d’Indépendence algérienne’, in Harbi and Stora (eds), La guerre d’Algérie, pp. 362–3. 12. Cherki, Fanon, p. 135. 13. Macey, Fanon, p. 303. 14. F. Jeanson, Notre Guerre (Paris: Berg International Éditeur, 2001), p. 43–51. 15. Ibid. 16. The entire output of El Moudjahid during the war was compiled and published in three volumes in Yugoslavia in 1962. It is still possible to find the occasional volume in old bookshops in Algiers. 17. P. and C. Chaulet, interview, Algiers, December 2010–January 2011. 18. See Cherki, Fanon, pp. 163–4. 19. See, for an excellent discussion of Fanon’s medical practice in Tunisia, Macey, Fanon, pp. 315–26. Perhaps the incident confirms the adage that the best fighters for reforms are revolutionaries. 20. See Gendzier, Fanon; H. Bulhan, ‘Frantz Fanon: The Revolutionary Psychiatrist’, Race and Class 21 (1980), p. 251. 21. Bulhan, ‘The Revolutionary Psychiatry of Fanon’, in Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon, p. 162. 22. Ibid., p. 165. 23. Cherki, Fanon, pp. 174–5. 24. Macey, Fanon, p. 322. 25. P. and C. Chaulet, interview, Algiers, December 2010–January 2011. 26. Macey, Fanon, pp. 326–34. 27. Interview, Algiers, 29 September 2011. 28. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 173. 29. Cited in Panaf Editors, Fanon, p. 179. 30. See Abane, Résistances Algériennes, pp. 464–79, for an analysis of the FLN’s relationship with the PCA.

notes pp. 116–128 31. ‘Accra Conference Acclaims Kenyatta and Mau Mau’, East Africa and Rhodesia, 18 December 1958. 32. A similar argument has been used to explain the United States’ inability to intervene against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela because its forces were locked into the war in Iraq. See, for example, M. Gonzalez, Hugo Chávez: Socialist for the 21st Century (London: Pluto Press, 2014). 33. The idea that North Africa belongs culturally and politically to a distinct and Middle Eastern milieu finds defence in academia; see A. Alexander and D. Renton, ‘Globalization, Imperialism and Popular Resistance in Egypt, 1880–2000’, in Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, pp. 87–115. 34. Malcolm X was influenced by Fanon’s writing and took up his declaration of liberation: ‘by any means necessary’. 35. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 432. 36. Ibid. 37. See B. Davidson, ‘On Revolutionary Nationalism: The Legacy of Cabral’, Race and Class 27/21 (1986), p. 42. 38. D. Macey, interview, Leeds, 14 October 2010. 39. As Chaulet referred to the title of Fanon’s second book, ‘Le titre en forme de clin d’œil à la révolution française de 1789, les “« soldats de l’an II »” etc., soldats de l’an II’ (‘The title of the book was a sort of wink to the French Revolution of 1789. . .’), interview, December 2010. 40. Davidson, ‘On Revolutionary Nationalism’, p. 31. 41. Ibid. 42. See C. Guevara, The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo (London: Harvill Press, 2000). 43. See P. Hallward, ‘Fanon et la volonté politique’, Contretemps 2/10 (2011). 44. Interview, Algiers, 15 December 2010. 45. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 21 (London and Moscow, 1975–2001), p. 120. 46. K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’ (London: March 1850), http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/index.htm (accessed 18 April 2014). 47. K. Liebknecht, ‘The Main Enemy Is at Home’, leaflet, 1915, http://www.m arxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm (accessed 12 October 2012). Emphasis in original. 48. However, there is a very long tradition that argues that socialists should go where the working class is, and in wartime that means the army. Needless to say, the PCF used this principle rather mechanically against those on the left trying to organise desertion. 49. See J. Chatain’s positive account, ‘Guerre d’Algérie 1954–1962, huit ans de saisies, de censures, de procès’, l’Humanité, 19 March 2012, http://www.hum anite.fr/monde/guerre-d%E2%80%99algerie-1954-1962-huit-ans-de-saisi es-de-censures-de-proces-492482 (accessed 4 November 2013). 50. C. Lanzmann, The Patagonian Hare (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), pp. 331–2. 51. Macey, Fanon, pp. 344–5.

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notes pp. 128–138 52. I. Birchall, ‘Sartre’s Encounter with Daniel Guérin’, Sartre Studies International 2/1 (1996), pp. 41–56. 53. Ibid, pp. 41 – 56. 54. Cited in Gendzier, Fanon, p. 158. 55. See Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism. 56. Of course Les Temps Modernes was an important exception and condemned the French without qualification. Fanon knew this and cooperated with the publication. 57. F. Fanon, ‘L’Algérie face aux tortionnaires français’, El Moudjahid, 10 September 1957. 58. Cherki, Fanon, p. 138. 59. There is still little sense that France has dealt with the Algeria war, despite the explosion of literature on the 1954–62 war. The literature is still replete with nostalgic memoirs of the pieds-noirs and military. French cinema regularly provides a diet of ‘war’ films from the point of view of French Algeria. 60. Cherki, Fanon, p. 105. 61. Cited in G. Meynier, ‘Le PPA-MTLD et le FLN-ALN, étude comparée’, in Harbi and Stora (eds), La guerre d’Algérie, p. 642. 62. Ibid. 63. Cited in Cherki, Fanon, pp. 146–52. 64. Ibid. 65. See Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa. 66. D. Junqua, ‘29 Mai 1957: Le FLN organise le massacre de Mélouza’, in Harbi and Stora (eds), La guerre d’Algérie, pp. 54–5. 67. Ibid. 68. Cherki, Fanon, pp. 149–50. 69. See M. Evans and J. Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 70. ‘Abane Ramdane est mort au champ d’honneur’, El Moudjahid, 29 May 1958. 71. Ibid. 72. Meynier, ‘Le PPA-MTLD et le FLN-ALN’, p. 648. 73. See M. Harbi, ‘Avec ceux de la Wilaya IV’, Sans Frontiére, February 1982. 74. Interview, Algiers, December 2010. 75. Cherki, Fanon, pp. 152–3. 76. Ibid. 77. Cited in Macey, Fanon, pp. 356–7.

5

Year Five of the Algerian Revolution

1. Macey, Fanon, p. 364. 2. El Moudjahid, ‘Appel Aux Africains’, 17 September 1958. 3. The GPRA received the fraternal support of the Free Algeria Campaign in the UK, organised with Tony Benn’s backing. 4. Harbi and Stora (eds), La guerre d’Algérie, pp. 989–96.

notes pp. 139–150 5. Still disputed in the Algerian press and by FLN supporters. See M. Benachenhou, ‘Amirouche porte seul la responsabilité de l’opération sanguinaire d’épuration de la Wilaya III’, La Matin, 3 May 2010, http:// www.lematindz.net/news/3080-amirouche-porte-seul-la-responsabilite-deloperation-sanguinaire-depuratio.html (accessed 16 December 2012). 6. P. Chaulet, interview, Algiers, December 2010. 7. Macey, Fanon, p. 393. 8. Cherki, Fanon, p. 186. 9. Ibid. 10. Cited in P. Geismar, Fanon, p. 113. 11. P. Bourdieu, ‘Revolution in the Revolution’, in Algerian Sketches (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 109–10. 12. Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings (New York: Dover, 2014), p. 42. 13. A. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 364. 14. See Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience; also N. Gibson (ed.), Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Legacy (New York: Humanity Books, 1999). 15. Bourdieu, ‘Revolution in the Revolution’, p. 96. 16. See also P. Bourdieu, Algeria 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 17. Haddour, ‘Torture Unveiled’, p. 82. 18. A. Haddour, ‘Torture Unveiled: Rereading Fanon and Bourdieu in the context of May 1958’ in Theory, Culture, and Society, 2010, 27:66, p. 82. 19. The phenomenon of the veil being taken up with renewed verve and enthusiasm is a process that can be described as the ‘reinvention of tradition’. See E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 20. These concerns are old ones for Fanon; as he argued in Black Skin, he states again, ‘It is the white man who creates the Negro, but it is the Negro who creates Negritude’ (SDC 47). 21. Z. Drif, Mémoires d’une combattante. 22. M. Turshen, ‘Algerian Women in the Liberation Struggle and the Civil War: From Active Participants to Passive Victims?’ Social Research 69 (2002), p. 3. 23. It was not only in civilian battery-operated radios that Algerian society was leaping ‘intermediary stages’: the ALN had, in less than two years from 1954, developed telecommunications systems equal to the most advanced in the world. 24. In a simple form this is an indication of the influence of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky on Fanon. Trotsky wrote on combined and uneven development and saw how underdeveloped, non-European and colonial societies adopted advanced technologies and machinery associated with higher levels of capitalist development. As in the case of prerevolutionary Russia, there was a process of ‘transplanting’ these technologies to the Third World, which creates ‘advanced’ forms of social relations and propels the creation of large concentrations of wage labour amid existing pre-

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

capitalist formations. The rhythm of combined and uneven development throws up new and exciting political possibilities. In the capitalist era, Trotsky argued, combining modern technological advances with an uneven pace of development across the regions of the world creates an inherently unstable and dynamic political and economic global system. See L. Trotsky, ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development,’ in The History of the Russian Revolution, translated by Max Eastman (New York: 1932), https://www.marxists.org/archive/ trotsky/1930/hrr/ch01.htm (accessed 11 October 2012). M. Mohamed, interview, Algiers, 4 October 2011. Bourdieu, ‘Revolution in the Revolution’, p. 101. Ibid. There is a pressing need to apply Fanon’s analysis to contemporary hostility towards ‘Western’ medicine in Africa. Failure to do so can create confusing and ‘exotic’ narratives. See J. Steinberg, Three Letter Plague (London: Vintage, 2008). See Cherki, Fanon, p. 181. Yet his friendship with Daniel Guérin belies this point: Guérin was a committed MNA supporter. P. Bourdieu, ‘Revolution in the Revolution’, p. 96. P. Bourdieu, ‘Revolution in the Revolution’ in Algerian Sketches (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 96. Macey, Fanon, p. 410. Ibid., p. 406 – a comment that strikes this biographer as a misunderstanding of Fanon’s entire quest. Nevertheless, the second edition of the book in 1966 was titled Sociologie de la révolution algérienne. I am grateful to Ian Birchall for these insights. M. Martini, Chroniques des années algériennes (Saint-Denis: Bouchene, 2002).

6 ‘The Whole of Existence’ – Liberation and Leukaemia 1. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 432. 2. P. Lumumba, Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958–1961, ed. J. van Lierde (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 347. 3. L. Zeilig, Patrice Lumumba: Africa’s Lost Leader (London: Haus Books, 2008). 4. Despite an attempt to interrogate Fanon’s ‘disappointment’ with Russia, there seems to be little in the record. For example, his mentor Césaire broke with the PCF in reaction to Soviet tanks crushing the Hungarian revolution. 5. Cherki, Fanon, p. 225. 6. Ibid. 7. P. and C. Chaulet, interview, Algiers, 14 November 2010. 8. Ibid., p. 232. 9. Caute, Frantz Fanon (New York: Viking, 1970) p. 73 – 4. 10. Ibid.

notes pp. 181–203 11. See V. Schaepelynck, ‘Sartre avec Fanon: Notes et réflexions sur une alliance’, in E. Barot (ed.), Sartre et le Marxisme (Paris: La Dispute, 2011). I. Birchall has also written powerfully in defence of Sartre’s preface: ‘Sartre and Terror’, South Asia Citizens Web, 17 December 2011, http://www.sacw. net/article2457.html (accessed 24 April 2012). 12. William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3, Scene 1, http://shakespeare.mit.edu/m erchant/full.html (accessed 4 January 2012). 13. Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches, pp. 87–8. 14. This term – ‘tap’ – has been used to describe the mobilisation during the negotiations in South Africa in the early 1990s. See P. Dwyer, ‘South Africa under the ANC: Still Bound to the Chains of Exploitation’, in Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, pp. 187–211. 15. See, for an extended discussion of these arguments, Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa. 16. See S. Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). 17. See S. Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed Books, 1990). 18. K. Marx, ‘Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist’, in Capital, Vol. 1 (London: 1867), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm (accessed 14 February 2011). 19. Ibid. 20. A detailed explanation of the connection is beyond the scope of this book, but see Agozino, ‘Africana Paradigm in Capital’, p. 176; also Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery; James, Black Jacobins; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 21. Ibid., p. 177. 22. Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, p. 108. For another critique, see N. Nghe, ‘Fanon et les problèmes de l’Independence’, La Pensée 107 (1963). 23. Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, p. 114. 24. G. Arrighi and J. Saul, ‘Nationalism and Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Socialist Register (1969), p. 137. 25. Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, p. 139. 26. Van Lierde, La pensée politique de Patrice Lumumba, p. 45. 27. Cited in Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’. 28. J. Molyneux, What Is the Real Marxist Tradition? (London: Bookmarks, 1985), http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/molyneux/1983/07/ tradition.htm (accessed 23 February 2011). 29. D. Seddon, ‘Popular Protest and Class Struggle in Africa: An Historical Overview’, in Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, pp. 57–86. 30. Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’. 31. See M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 32. Bourdieu, Algerian Sketches, p. 88. 33. See also J. Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (London: Bookmarks, 2006). 34. See L. Zeilig, Revolt and Protest. 35. Seddon, ‘Popular Protest’, pp. 59–60.

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notes pp. 204–228 36. H. Benoîts,‘Interview with Henri Benoîts’, in Revolutionary History, October 2004, http://revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/homepage/articles/articlesof-rh1004/2lo.htm (accessed 13 February 2011). 37. J. Omasombo and B. Verhaegem, ‘Patrice Lumumba: Jeunesse et apprentissage politique 1925–56’, Cahiers Africains 33/34 (1998), pp. 111–2. 38. R. Biel, The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North–South Relations (London: Zed Books, 2000), p. 91. 39. D. Seddon, D. Renton, and L. Zeilig, Congo: Plunder and Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2007). 40. See L. Adele Jinadu, Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution, pp. 65–71. 41. Gibson, Fanon, p. 179. 42. Ibid., p. 180. 43. Ibid., p. 280. 44. See P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 45. R. First, The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’État (London: Allen Lane, 1970), pp. 57–8.

7

Legacies

1. See N. Gibson, Fanonian Practices, p. 223. 2. Cited in Macey, Fanon, p. 448. 3. ‘Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria (Manifesto of the 121)’, 1960, trans. Mitch Abidor, https://www.marxists. org/history/france/algerian-war/1960/manifesto-121.htm (accessed 20 April 2013). 4. R. Bernasconi, ‘Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as the Fulfillment of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason’, Sartre Studies International 16/2 (2010), pp. 36, 38. 5. Interview, Leeds, 14 October 2010. 6. Many of the most important chapters of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason can be found online: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre (accessed 25 March 2014). 7. C. Lanzmann, Patagonian Hare, pp. 336–8. 8. Ibid., p. 338. 9. Ibid., p. 339. 10. Ibid., p. 341. 11. Ibid., pp. 343–5. 12. Ibid., p. 339. 13. Ibid., p. 340. 14. Ibid., p. 341. 15. Ibid., p. 341. 16. Ibid., p. 343–5. 17. De Beauvoir, Force des Choses II, (Paris: Folio, 2011), p. 421.

notes pp. 228–241 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

Ibid., p. 421. Lanzmann, Patagonian Hare, p. 347. De Beauvoir, Force des Choses II, p. 427. Lanzmann, Patagonian Hare, p. 347. De Beauvoir, Force des Choses II, p. 439. Geismar, Fanon, pp. 182–4. Cited in Cherki, Fanon, p. 237. De Beauvoir, Force des Choses II, p. 440. Ibid. Lanzmann, Patagonian Hare, p. 348. See M. Fanon and L. Zeilig, Voices of Liberation: Frantz Fanon (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2015). Interview, Algiers, 2 October 2011. R. First, Libya: The Elusive Revolution (London: Penguin, 1974). Evans and Phillips, Algeria, p. 69. C. Simon, Algérie, les années pieds-rouges (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), pp. 34–5. Evans and Phillips, Algeria, p. 71. Simon, Algérie, p. 12. Ibid., p. 24. Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, p. 158. Simon, Algérie, p. 183. See P. Gleijeses, ‘Cuba’s First Venture in Africa: Algeria, 1961–5’, Journal of Latin American Studies 28/1 (1996). See Evans and Phillips, Algeria. In many ways this is an important and accessible history of modern Algeria, though it provides a far too generous account of Boumédiène’s rule. Cited in Simon, Algérie, p. 183. See Hamza Hamouchene, ‘Algeria: 50 Years of Independence: Hopes and Lost Illusions’, Algeria Solidarity Campaign, 2013, http://www.algeria solidaritycampaign.com/algerias-independence50-years-on-failures-andachievements (accessed 14 November 2013). First, Barrel of a Gun, p. 58. Ibid., pp. 49–50. T. Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’ in International socialism (12) (first series) Spring 1963. http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/ xx/permrev.htm. Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’. Nigel Gibson sees Steve Biko’s ‘Fanonian practice’ (the title of a chapter in his 2011 book) as an answer to Fanon’s quest for such ideological clarity. For Gibson, Biko was Fanon’s most thoughtful and brilliant student. See H. Adi’s sympathetic account of the Sixth Congress in Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist International and the Diaspora, 1919–30 (Ewing Township, NJ: African World Press, 2013), pp. 47–85. Southall, Liberation Movements in Power, pp. 92, 332. Cliff, ‘Deflected Permanent Revolution’.

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notes pp. 241–247 50. Ibid. 51. See Lyotard, ‘Algeria’. 52. This is not an assertion of the ‘uselessness’ of decolonisation; on the contrary, these were movements that left the world completely transformed. The point is that they maintained a political and economic structure that did not fundamentally overturn the ancien régime. 53. N. Davidson, ‘From Deflected Permanent Revolution to the Laws of Uneven and Combined Development’, International Socialism 2/128 (2010), http:// www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=686&issue=128 (accessed 12 March 2012). 54. Ibid. 55. Chaulet points out that Fanon’s general and unspecific statements give them an enormous power but also a tendency towards broad and problematic interpretation. Interview, Algiers, 28 November 2010. 56. However, this point is controversial. Hamouchene has argued that ‘this claim is based on a unilinear and exclusively based conception of Marxism. In Algeria and other parts of the colonial world at the time, the working class was not developed. Even 50 years later, the working class is still the minority, with informal work dominating the scene’ (personal communication, 10 June 2014). 57. See Zeilig (ed.), Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa. 58. H. Elsenhans, ‘Les manifestations de décembre 1960 et la reconnaissance de la révolution algérienne’, in 11 Décembre 1960: Le Diên Biên Phu politique de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Petite collection – Histoire, 2010), pp. 29–62. 59. Ibid. 60. However, it is hard to escape the sense that Fanon’s approach reflected Abane’s failure to turn the Algerian Revolution to the cities and urban areas, rather than a serious consideration of the role of the working class in the developing world. 61. It should be clear that Fanon was not trying to develop such a ‘strategy’, whatever subsequent writers and activists have said. His last book was a work in progress. It is also important not to present a Manichaean version of the Algerian Revolution, divided neatly between ‘city’ and ‘countryside’ phases. 62. See, for a discussion on Fanon as a ‘voluntarist’, Hallward, ‘Fanon et la volonté politique’. 63. B. Davidson, ‘On Revolutionary Nationalism’. 64. Seale, Seize the Time, p. 392. 65. Ibid., p. 84. 66. The Panthers inherited from Fanon a suspicion towards workers and their political organisations; the party’s educational programmes were not orientated towards the power of black and white labour. 67. Interestingly, when certain leading Panthers were forced into exile, it was Algeria they chose – largely because of the regime’s stated ‘socialism’ – but the country’s association with Fanon must have been attractive to leading militants schooled on The Wretched of the Earth. See Gendzier, Fanon, pp. 264–6, and, for a much more critical discussion of the Black Panthers’ relationship with the post-independence Algerian regime, Simon, Algérie.

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abolition, 17, 143 Africa, independent, 213 African countries, independent, 111 African emotionality and European scientific rationality, 92 African nationalist movements, 117 African working class, 69, 201 Ahmed, Hocine Aït, 78 AJAAS. See Association de la Jeunesse Algérienne pour l’Action Sociale (AJAAS) Algeria decolonisation, 99 impoverished, 236 independent, 6, 66, 69, 74, 76, 130, 140, 164 invaded, 25 Jewish population, 166, 233 liberation war, 100 modern war, 50 nationalist politics, 58 nationalist struggle, 68 new post-independence, 156 revolutionary, 155 socialist, 234 violent war for liberation, 116 voice of fighting, 152, 153 war in, 116, 124 Algerian cause, 106, 109, 117, 126, 135 Algerian decolonisation, 131 Algerian employees, 101 Algerian fighter, 121 Algerian independence, 84, 128, 133, 167, 233, 234

Algerian independence, 84, 234 Algerian independence movement, 128 Algerian Jews, 163, 165 Algerian liberation, 134 Algerian Muslim Students, 61 Algerian National Assembly, 59 Algerian National Movement, 60, 113 Algerian People’s Party, 58 Algerian Revolution, 4, 6, 12, 14, 35, 64, 65, 73, 74, 76, 81, 88, 93, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 135, 178, 180, 197, 210, 226– 228, 232, 239, 247 Algerian society, 34, 49, 60, 62, 66, 78, 100, 142, 145, 149, 151, 155, 166, 167, 169 Algerian struggle, 64, 69, 74, 76, 91, 115, 134, 143, 144, 176, 227, 229 Algerian War, 14, 64, 93, 98, 105, 119, 125, 130, 191, 198, 245 Algerian women, 95, 102, 145 – 149, 155 Algerians and radical Europeans, 82 Algiers autonomous zone, 93 All-African Peoples’ Conference, 1, 2, 110, 115, 135 Allied troops, 25 ALN. See Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN); Armmée de Libération Nationale (ALN) Amis du Manifeste et de la Liberté, 51 Anti-colonial demonstrations, 33 Anti-colonial sentiment, 62

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frantz fanon anti-colonialism, 9 radical, 81 anti-Semite, 36, 37, 109 anti-Semitism, 36, 37, 43 anti-Stalinist, 123, 124 Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), 3, 59, 61, 62, 72, 74, 77 – 80, 138, 172, 173 Association de la Jeunesse Algérienne pour l’Action Sociale (AJAAS), 85, 86 Bella, Ahmed Ben, 78, 235 Black Martiniquans, 18 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, 245 Black person, 27, 36 –39 Black Power movement, 3 Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), 4, 7, 8, 15, 17, 20 – 23, 26, 28, 29, 34 – 36, 38, 40 – 42, 47 Blida, 3, 48, 53 – 6, 61– 3, 84, 86 – 8, 91, 97– 8, 100, 109– 10, 162, 233 Boudiaf, Mohamed, 78 Bouhired, Djamila, 96 BSWM. See Black Skin, White Masks Cairo-bound flight hijack, 78 Cameroonian nationalist movement, 171 Campaign mass, 96 national immunisation, 86 terror, 98 capitalism, 10 Casbah, the, 147, 158, 168, 234 Chaulet, Claudine, 6, 85– 7, 104, 108, 164 Chaulet, Pierre, 13, 56 Cherki, Alice, 6, 11, 54, 56, 93, 98, 100, 106, 111– 12, 134, 140– 41, 164, 178 Civil war, 137 Class black middle, 240

element, 90, 240 interests, 89, 246 post-colonial, 234 social, 241 Cliff, Tony, 9, 67, 239, 241 Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (CNRA), 73 Cold War, 71 colonial hierarchy, defined, 55 colonial oppression, 208, 209, 243 colonial powers, 1, 3, 8, 34, 52, 102, 153, 166, 173, 192, 199 colonial situation, 37, 56, 159, 161, 183–185 colonial society, 56, 145, 150, 161, 165, 183, 184 colonial state, 93, 122, 185, 187, 201, 207, 208, 217 colonial system, 16, 18, 185, 188, 207, 222 colonial world, 150, 183 – 185, 193, 196, 200 colonialism, 1, 34, 35, 142, 144, 147, 149, 153, 158, 159, 161, 164, 182, 183, 186, 187, 190, 191, 196, 206, 208, 212, 216, 219, 221, 222 Colonisation, 18, 26, 118, 125 Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution (CCE), 138 Communist parties, 51, 66, 234, 239 confident racism, 23 Consciousness people’s, 222 social, 217, 219 Conseil National de la Révolution Algérienne (CNRA), 73 Convention Nationale Révolutionnaire, 17 counter-revolutionary role, 44, 240 crisis, economic, 10 cultural diversity, 91 cultural dominance, 91 cultural racisms, 92 cultural values, 92

index de Beauvoir, Simone, 42, 87, 127, 134, 225, 228– 29, 231 de Gaulle, 1, 23 – 6, 137– 38, 147, 169, 232 de Gaulle, Charles, 23 decolonisation, 1 – 2, 11, 18, 26, 164, 165, 182– 186, 216, 217, 236, 237, 239 critical, 242 extraordinary, 236 processes, 62 Defeat Algerian nationalism, 104 Democratic change, 67 democratic involvement, 58 democratic liberties, 59 democratic revolution, 239 democratic world, 51 Drif, Zohra, 149 Du Bois, W.E.B., 91 Dying colonialism, 14, 223, 245 El Moudjahid, 108, 110, 112, 114, 121, 131– 34, 138, 174 European Algerians, 81 European racism, 22 Fanon: A Critical Reader (Gordon, Lewis), 4, 5 Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Gordon, Lewis), 5 Fanon, Frantz analysis, 39, 169, 202, 234, 246 answer, 165, 195 approach, 167 argument, 116, 150, 153, 187, 205 arguments on violence, 191 articles, 114, 125 collaborators in Algeria, 54 counter-violence, 116 death, 6 description, 90, 155, 189, 203, 245 early life, 18 – 21 examination, 40

family, 15, 23 gift for polemic, 46 inspire, 35 knowledge, 43 legacy, 4 life, 22, 32 politics, 5 prose, 34, 142 psychiatric enquiries, 30 rejection, 172, 197 relationship, 34 revolutionary principles, 177 psychiatry, 111 thinking, 121 training ground, 100 secretary, 236 speech, 117, 173 studies, 30, 233 transformation, 14, 26 understanding, 121, 202 unit, 25, 26 Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution ( Jinadu, L. Adele), 5 Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Sekyi-Otu), 5 Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (Gibson, Nigel), 5 Fanonism, 5 Fascism, 24, 44 FLN. See Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) Forms of Fanonism (Rabaka, Reiland), 5 France colonies, 16, 22 liberate, 25, 27 post-revolutionary, 18 revolutionaries, 63 France’s West African colonies, 138 Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (Gendzier, Irene), 5 Frantz Fanon, Portrait (Alice Cherki), 6 Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (Bulhan, Hussein), 5

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frantz fanon Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Hansen, Emmanuel), 5 French colonial medicine, 54 – 55 French elections of the French socialists (SFIO), 80 French infantry troops, 20 French Liberation, 44 French politics, 29, 71 French Republic, 18 French Revolution, 67, 88 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), 58 – 62, 64 – 66, 68, 69, 72 – 76, 83 – 85, 97, 99, 107, 108, 131, 138, 164– 165, 204 General Union of Algerian Muslim Students, 61 Géronimi, Charles, 54, 100 Ghana, independent, 1 – 2 Gibson, Nigel, 4, 5 GMPR. See Groupe Mobile de Protection Rurale (GMPR) Gordon, Lewis, 5 Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA), 2, 120, 135, 136, 138–140, 170, 172, 178, 190, 192, 210, 230, 233 GPRA. See Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) Groupe Mobile de Protection Rurale (GMPR), 65 Guérin, Daniel, 9, 88–91, 106, 127–28 Guerrilla wars, 243 Guevara, Che, 5, 121 Hadj, Ahmed Messali, 27 The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy (Serequeberhan, Tsenay), 5 Humanist liberation, 12 Humanity, 37, 39, 40, 46, 182 – 184, 207, 217, 220– 222 Jeanson, Francis, 41, 106 – 07, 127 Khider, Mohammed, 78

Lacheraf, Mostefa, 78 Lanzmann, Claude, 127, 179, 225– 9, 234 Leukaemia, 171, 178 Lumumba, Patrice, 28, 134, 171, 173–74, 198, 244 Macey, David, 17, 25 Mao/Maoism, 188, 199, 243 Martinique Black Skin, White Masks (BSWM), 35 – 40 Lyon, 40– 42 peacetime and medicine, 29 – 35 racism in, 16–18 revolutionary ideas, 42 – 45 Marxism, 243 Marxist politics, 11 Mau Mau, 191, 202 Mazrui, Ali, 25 Medicine, 13, 30, 44, 54 – 5, 64, 87, 144, 159– 61, 163, 178 Meynier, Gilbert, 130 Middle class national liberation, 239– 243 and national self-sufficiency, 236– 238 Mouvement National Algérien (MNA), 60 Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), 1 Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (MTLD), 59 Mphahlele, Ezekiel, 2 Murray, Roger, 50 National liberation movement, 12 National self-sufficiency and middle class, 236– 238 Newton, Huey P., 245– 46 Nicolle, Hôpital Charles, 141 October Revolution, 12, 68 The Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS), 225

index Oury, Jean, 44 Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA), 51 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), 43, 44 Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), 58 Parti Communiste Algérien (PCA) Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) Qaddafi, Colonel Muammar, 233 Rabaka, Reiland, 5, 9 racism, 17 radio, role of, 149 – 154 revolution Algerian Revolution, 4 Marxists, 242 national democratic, 126 real social, 11 urban phase of, 148 revolutionary action, 4, 98, 126 agency, 197, 224 change, 9, 35, 185, 192 forces, 215 movement, 3, 11, 12, 90, 157, 219, 242 for national liberation, 219 organisation, 215, 240 principles, 66, 175 psychiatry, 111 situation, 154 solution, 67, 239 transformation, 3, 12, 121 Russian Revolution, 11, 12, 68, 127, 224 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 9, 11, 13, 32– 4, 36 – 7, 42, 128, 130, 180– 83, 223– 30 Seale, Bobby, 245– 46 Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS), 79 Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-espionnage (SDECE), 108

Serequeberhan, Tsenay, 5 Soummam, 73 – 76 Soummam Conference, 69, 73, 76– 78, 133, 198 Spanish Civil War, 12, 43 Spanish Revolution, 44 Student politics, 33 Studies in a Dying Colonialism (SDC), 81, 136, 141– 144, 156, 168, 169, 194, 223, 245 The Third World, 14, 68, 138, 170, 179, 181– 82, 190, 193– 96, 198, 200, 202, 230– 31, 235, 239, 243 Trotsky, Leon, 9 Union Générale des Étudiants Musulmans Algériens (UGEMA), 61, 62 Union Générale des Travailleurs Algériens (UGTA), 62 Union Populaire Algérienne (UPA), 58 Union des Populations Camerounaises (UPC), 171 – 172 urban war, 101, 168 The Voice of Fighting Algeria, 113, 151, 152, 153 Washington, 229– 231 Wengraf, Tom, 50 Working class colonial, 13 dynamic force, 140 European, 126 Fanon’s rejection of, 197 French, 125 independence, 89 leadership, 89 self-emancipation of, 10 World War I, 23, 28 World War II, 64, 68, 143 The Wretched of the Earth (WE), 2, 181, 224, 228, 229, 244, 245

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