Taken from Marvin Perry, et al., Sources of the Western Tradition. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, 385-387 pp.
African and Asian nationalists often denounced imperialism as a crime against humanity and blamed many of their nation's ills on the imperialist past. In this attack, they were joined by some Western intellectuals who saw little benefit in the spread of Western values and techniques to other parts of the globe.
Frantz Fanon , THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, 1961
One of the keenest modern critics of colonialism was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). A black from the French West Indies, Fanon was familiar with racial discrimination, and he was influenced by Marxism. He was trained in France as a psychiatrist and decorated for valor in World War 11. In the 1950s he sided with the Algerian rebels in their fight for independence from France and became an embattled advocate of African decolonization. In his book The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 when colonial rule in Africa had virtually ended, he analyzed the relations between the colonial masters and their subject peoples with the keen eye of a psychoanalyst. Reflecting the tensions built up under colonialism and the fury of the Algerian war, Fanon focused on the oppressive and dehumanizing aspects of imperialism. He did not even spare the Christian churches from criticism, although they had often trained those who eventually led the anticolonial struggles.
Fanon also anticipated the ambitions of the emerging African leaders. As he observed, "The colonised man is an envious man," who wanted what the masters possessed - wealth and power in an independent state. Rejection of colonial domination did not rule out imitation of the colonial masters' way of life an attitude that sometimes brought a new dependence, branded as neocolonialism. Yet the memory of colonial exploitation that Fanon so vividly described persists, kept alive by the poverty and powerlessness of the new African states. In the following passage from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon starkly compares the two realms of the colonial world: ruler and ruled.
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The racks and police stations. In the colonies it is dividing line, the frontiers are shown by bar- the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, and spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression In capitalist societies the educational system, In cap- lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behaviour - all these esthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in the colonial countries on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bring of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.
The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. . . .
. . . No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers' town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. The settler's feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no holes or stones. The settler's town is a well-fed town, an easy-going town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler's town is a town of white people, of foreigners.
The town belonging to the colonised people, or at least the native town, the negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs . . . The look that the native turns on the settler's town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonised man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive "They want to take our place. " It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the settler's place.
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause-is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. . . .
. . . As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. . . . Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. . . .
I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen.
At times this Manicheism [conflict between light and dark] goes to its logical conclusion
and dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style; but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of. 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.