David Caute's review of Frantz Fanon appeared in the TLS of May 28 1964

A militant activist of the F.L.N., a psychiatrist, a writer of real originality and special insights, and latterly the Algerian Revolution’s “ambassador” in Accra, Frantz Fanon died prematurely in 1961. He left behind him three works which constitute important testimonies on the exact nature of the fast-developing revolution in the “Third World”: Peau noire, masques blancs; L’an V de la Révolution algerienne; and Les damnés de la terre.

The present volume is largely composed of the shorter, journalistic pieces written by Fanon in the heat of the Algerian war and published in the paper El Moudjahid and elsewhere. It could be argued that, with the wounds of that bitter conflict now healing, the resurrection of such violently partisan polemics can serve only to revive dormant animosities. Yet the Algerian war was part of a wider struggle which has by no means been finally resolved, and Fanon’s voice carries a lesson, a message, which the white race as a whole has still to absorb and digest thoroughly.

According to Fanon, racism is a product of certain cultures, and not of others. These cultures are in essence colonialist; a colonialist nation is by definition a racist nation, if only because racism constitutes a vital element in the process of inferiorization which is visited upon the enslaved-people. Fanon regarded (rightly) the whole colonialist nation, the entire people, as being implicated in and responsible for the crimes committed in its name, and he ridiculed the ancient myth, or hope, that the European proletariat stands in natural solidarity with the colonial masses. On the contrary, the white proletariat had absorbed the racist poison.

Fanon knew all about torture; he examined medically many of its victims and many of those Algerians who had been at the wrong end of the French Army’s renowned ratissages. He dismissed as fallacious the notion that the worst acts were the work of Germans and Italians in the Foreign Legion, and contended that, on the contrary, the majority of deserters from the Legion consisted of Germans, Italians and other foreigners who had been revolted by the cruel methods employed by the French. He knew this because the F.L.N. had interrogated these deserters in their thousands. Without wishing to absolve the French from full responsibility for all that occurred in Algeria, one is bound to regard Fanon’s argument here as either disingenuous or naive. The Legionnaire is not the most squeamish or humane of mortals; but if he should fall into the hands of the F.L.N., and if he should happen to be a foreigner, what better story to tell these dreaded Arab maquisards?

Among the most interesting passages in this book are those in which the author discusses, often scathingly, the activities of the French left-wing intellectuals on the colonial question. He did not spare the Communist Party for dragging its heels about Algerian independence and for bowing before the rising tide of racism and chauvinism sweeping over the French working class. The communists, he wrote, promise us their support if we pledge ourselves to keep out the Americans and if we acknowledge that we will never be able to carry on without French assistance; the non-communist Left promise their support if we pledge ourselves to remain in the western camp. Thus neither faction could understand that the Negroes, Arabs and yellow peoples must and would create their own particular values and relationships with the outside world.

Fanon mocked the reaction of the left-wing intellectuals to the murder at Sakamody of ten French civilians. They had cried out in horror, demanding as the price of their continued support a flat denunciation of the deed by the F.L.N., forgetting, he claimed, that every Frenchman in Algeria had become objectively a soldier in the service of colonialism. If this point is granted (and the logic of the suffering attains an almost irresistible rigour), was it equally just to complain, as Fanon did, that the French intellectuals were more concerned with the effect of torture on the torturers than on the tortured, more worried about the sadistic perversion of young Frenchmen, than about the agonies of their victims? In practice the problem does not allow such a simplistic division; in any case, the writers in question had good cause to stress that aspect of the situation most likely to influence a French audience, and so to hasten the end of the war.

Fanon’s own death was preceded by a few months by that of his idol, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba was, evidently, the African leader whose vision and ethic came closest to his own, and it is for this reason that his few criticisms of the Congolese Premier carry so much weight. He points out, for example, that Lumumba forgot, ultimately, that he could not be everywhere at once, and that the miracle of conviction which he worked whenever he spoke in public was due less to the truth of what he said than to the truth of his personality. But elsewhere passion – and it is a passion which excites sympathy – warped Fanon’s judgments on the Congolese situation, particularly about the subjective intentions of the United Nations.

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