The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

Poor colonist: his contradiction has been unmasked. He ought to kill those he plunders, like they say the djinns do. But that is now out of the question. Doesn't he have to exploit them as well? Failing to carry the massacre to the point of genocide, and servitude to a state of mindlessness, he cracks up, the situation is reversed, and an implacable logic leads to decolonization. Not right away. First of all the European reigns: he has already lost but doesn't realize it; he does not yet know that the "natives" are false "natives." He has to make them suffer, he claims, in order to destroy or repress the evil they have inside them; after three generations, their treacherous instincts will be stamped out. What instincts? Those that drive the slaves to massacre their masters? How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose power of authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficulty remembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whip or a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferior races" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards the human memory, the indelible reminders; and then, above all, there is this that perhaps he never knew: we only become what we are by radically negating ...