Look Black in Anger

The Wretched of the Earth,
by Frantz Fanon, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre,
France, 1961.

PAUL JOHNSON described it as "the most influential of all terrorist handbooks".  Noam Chomsky reveres it.  Algerian dictator Ahmed Ben Bella hailed it as a guarantor of his country's revolution.  Eldridge Cleaver approvingly reported that it was "now known among the militants of the black liberation movement in America as 'the Bible' ". Syria's Baath organisation used it for years in the training of recruits.  Such is The Wretched of the Earth, whose author enjoyed positively mythic status during the late 1%0s and early 1970s within literate or semi-literate New Left circles.  There Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was spoken of as reverently as Marcuse and Gramsci.  Nevertheless, even at the height of his book's fame, Fanon's own circumstances and ideological standpoint remained much less celebrated in the Anglophone world than in French-speaking and Middle Eastern lands.  If the maxim "Know your enemy" has any merit whatever, this ignorance is regrettable.

Born in Martinique, educated in France and long resident in Algeria, Fanon was as thoroughly déclassé as any intellectual of our age and more so than most.  Most of his short life he spent employed as, of all otiose occupations, a psychiatrist in North African mental hospitals.  This marginalised existence must indeed have galled anyone who -- like Fanon -- hobnobbed with the Sartre-Camus existentialist set, had briefly served with the Free French armed forces, and no doubt harboured hopes of career preferment accordingly.

From his surrounding he derived his eccentric theory of psychopolitics, which holds that psychiatric illness is an inevitable adjunct of colonialism and thus can be cured only when colonialism ends.  In attributing mental disorder to political oppression, Fanon somewhat resembled Wilhelm Reich.  But he possessed a huge advantage when it came to being taken seriously:  he suffered -- or so one learns from his biographers -- from no visible character weaknesses, let alone vices, of any sort.  He was (to adapt Carlyle's acclaimed tag about Robespierre) the pitch-black incorruptible.

Of course, even by the aqueous standards of psychiatric "care", Fanon was shockingly self-deluded.  He devotes an entire chapter in The Wretched of the Earth to case-histories of assorted unfortunates referred to him for treatment.  Obsessed with sniffing out colonial exploitation, Fanon naturally found what he wanted to find, and closed his eyes to every other factor that might have explained his patients' distress.

Ultimately, however, Fanon's psychopolitical lucubrations are subordinate to his craving for revolutionary violence.  Here lies a dramatic difference between Fanon and his predecessors.  Earlier ideologues spoke of violence with a certain show, however spurious, of distaste.  They would fling around phrases like "deplorable necessity";  or (like the Bolsheviks) they endeavoured to exculpate themselves by rejecting all free will, putting the entire blame for their evil upon History's unalterable laws.  Fanon wants none of this.  To him, violence is not a lamentable byproduct of justice;  it is justice.  "Violence is a cleansing force.  It frees the native from ... despair and inaction;  it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect".  For the Mau-Mau's creed, which made the killing of at least one British settler a sine qzta non of Mau-Mau membership, he has only praise:  "each member of the group ... was personally responsible for the death of [his] victim.

He reserves special plaudits for Khrushchev, who by clowning around at the UN "treats these miserable capitalists in the way that they deserve".  Moreover, "The choice of a socialist regime ... will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is in the hands of a few".

There we have the Fanon mind in all its simple glory:  African governments are either socialistic or oligarchic, never both.  That oligarchy is of socialism's very essence never entered Fanon's skull even as a concept to be rejected, though the disgust which Congolese socialism aroused in such moderate black leaders as Moise Tshombe was already apparent in 1961 to any sane observer.

The less connection African rulers had with reality, the better Fanon like them.  He denounced Senegal's Léopold Senghor and the Ivory Coast's Houphouët-Boigny as French imperialist lackeys;  but he showered compliments on Nkrumah, Lumumba, and Guinea's truly demented Sékou Touré.  He quotes with approval Tourt's singular pronouncement that "there is no place outside that fight [the fight against colonialism] for the artist or for the intellectual who is not ... completely at one with the people in the great battle for Africa".

It is true that Fanon sometimes gave the impression of forswearing bloodshed.  Writing in Toward the African Revolution, he smarmily apostrophised "the people that says:  I want to build, to love, to respect, to create ... that sings:  Algeria, brother country, country that calls, country that hopes".  Yet this merely confirms the incurable muddle of revolutionary thought:  which simultaneously proclaims the brotherhood of man, and inflicts the most frightful retribution on all members of that brotherhood whom this week's dictator has decided to wipe out.

The influence of Fanon's writing cannot be measured solely in terms of the Eldridge Cleavers whose thuggee it extenuates in advance.  As Ronald Knox observed, "a prophet ... exercises a kind of hydraulic pressure on the thought of his age".  For every Cleaver who put Fanonism into practice, there were a thousand members of the West's ruling class whom Fanonism -- whether at first or at second hand -- cowed for life.  The ever more raucous calls for "foreign aid" to sub-Saharan kakistocracies;  the assumption that policing Somalia is incomparably nobler a use of taxpayers' bounty than policing Los Angeles;  the almost ubiquitous modern insistence that Western culture, by a process mystifying to the logician, is at once a Dead White Eurocentric Construct and the property of Ancient Egypt:  all who exemplify these manifestations of the liberal death-wish are Fanon's heirs.  What could better typify politically correct thought, such as it is, than Fanon's concluding nativist peroration?

"We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe ... Let us decide not to imitate Europe;  let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction ... Comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her".