The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

Every colonized intellectual won over, every colonized intellectual who confesses, once he decides to revert to his old ways, not only represents a setback for the colonial enterprise, but also symbolizes the pointlessness and superficiality of the work accomplished. Every colonized intellectual who crosses back over the line is a radical condemnation of the method and the regime, and the uproar it causes justifies his abdication and encourages him to persevere.

the colonized writer, after having tried to lose himself among the people, with the people, will rouse the people. Instead of letting the people’s lethargy prevail, he turns into a galvanizer of the people. Combat literature, revolutionary literature, national literature emerges. During this phase a great many men and women who previously would never have thought of writing, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances, in prison, in the resistance or on the eve of their execution, feel the need to proclaim their nation, to portray their people and become the spokesperson of a new reality in action.

In the field of visual arts, for example, the colonized creator who at all costs wants to create a work of art of national significance confines himself to stereotyping details.

these creators forget that modes of thought, diet, modern techniques of communication, language, and dress have dialectically reorganized the mind of the people and that the abiding features that acted as safeguards during the colonial period are in the process of undergoing enormous radical transformations. This creator, who decides to portray national truth, turns, paradoxically enough, to the past, and so looks at what is irrelevant to the present.

To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow. One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation. For example, all the men and women fighting French colonialism in Algeria with their bare hands are no strangers to the national culture of Algeria. The Algerian national culture takes form and shape during the fight, in prison, facing the guillotine, and in the capture and destruction of the French military positions.

National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these countries are waging.

One cannot expect African culture to advance unless one contributes realistically to the creation of the conditions necessary for this culture, i.e., the liberation of the continent.

The liberation struggle does not restore to national culture its former values and configurations. This struggle, which aims at a fundamental redistribution of relations between men, cannot leave intact either the form or substance of the people’s culture. After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized.

This is the case of an academic who was interned and subjected to months of brainwashing. One day the camp officials congratulated him on his progress and announced he would soon be set free. Familiar with the enemy’s tactics, he was wary of taking the news too seriously. The stratagem, in fact, was to announce to the prisoners they were going to be freed and a few days before the set date organize a group session of self-criticism. At the end of the session it was often decided to postpone release since the prisoner showed no signs of being definitely cured.

One of the characteristics of the Algerian people established by colonialism is their appalling criminality. Prior to 1954 magistrates, police, lawyers, journalists, and medical examiners were unanimous that the Algerian’s criminality posed a problem. The Algerian, it was claimed, was a born criminal. A theory was elaborated and scientific proof was furnished. This theory was taught at universities for more than twenty years. Algerian medical students received this education, and slowly and imperceptibly the elite, after having consented to colonialism, consented to the natural defects of the Algerian people: born idlers, born liars, born thieves, and born criminals.

“This primitivism is not only a condition resulting from a specific upbringing, its foundations go far deeper, and we believe its substratum must lie in a specific configuration of the architectonics, or at least of the dynamic hierarchical organization of the nervous system. We have observed that the impulsiveness of the Algerian, the frequency and nature of his murders, his permanent criminal tendencies and his primitivism are no coincidences. We are in the presence of a coherent pattern of behavior and a coherent lifestyle which can be explained scientifically. The Algerian has no cortex, or to be more exact, like the inferior vertebrates he is governed by his diencephalon. The cortical functions, if they exist, are extremely weak, virtually excluded from the brain’s dynamics. There is therefore neither mystery nor paradox. The colonizer’s reluctance to entrust the native with any kind of responsibility does not stem from racism or paternalism but quite simply from a scientific assessment of the colonized’s limited biological possibilities.”

The proposed explanation, which is now taught as part of the curriculum, seems in the last analysis to be as follows: the configuration of the North African’s brain structure accounts for the indolence of “the native,” his mental and social inaptitude as well as his virtual animal impulsiveness. The criminal impulsiveness of the North African is the transcription of a certain configuration of the nervous system into his pattern of behavior. It is a neurologically comprehensible reaction, written into the nature of things, of the thing which is biologically organized. The idleness of the frontal lobes explains his indolence, his crimes, his thefts, his rapes, and his lies. And the conclusion was given to me by a sous-préfet now préfet: “These instinctive beings,” he told me, “who blindly obey the laws of their nature must be strictly and pitilessly regimented. Nature must be tamed, not talked into reason.” Discipline, tame, subdue, and now pacify are the common terms used by the colonialists in the territories occupied.

Could it be said that the war, the privileged terrain for expressing finally a collective aggressiveness, directs congenitally murderous acts at the occupier? It is common knowledge that significant social upheavals lessen

In the countries of the Maghreb already liberated, however, this was true during the liberation struggles and remains so to an even greater degree during independence. It is therefore apparent that the colonial context is sufficiently original to afford a reinterpretation of criminality.

Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian’s congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists.

Exposed to daily incitement to murder resulting from famine, eviction from his room for unpaid rent, a mother’s withered breast, children who are nothing but skin and bone, the closure of a worksite and the jobless who hang around the foreman like crows, the colonized subject comes to see his fellow man as a relentless enemy.

In the concentration camps men killed each other for a morsel of bread. I can recall one horrible scene. It was in Oran in 1944. From the military camp where we were waiting to embark, the soldiers threw bits of bread to some Algerian children who fought for them in a frenzy of rage and hatred.

In Algeria, everything has changed since the war of national liberation.