“War shocked Fanon. Not only was he horrified by the racial segregation of the French Army, but he was also struck by many French citizens’ disinterest despite the acute threat to freedom that Nazi Germany presented. In a heart-wrenching letter to his family, he wrote: “I was wrong! Nothing here justifies this sudden decision to defend the interests of the French farmer when he himself does not care.””
“In the last years of his life, he turned his attention towards spreading anticolonial revolution in sub-Saharan Africa, acting as the representative of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in Accra. His best-known work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), was a spirited call for decolonization, which he described as “an agenda for total disorder.””
“The book’s acerbic tone was difficult even for the most radical elements of the French Left. Asked by Maspero to review the book after its publication, the French anarchist Daniel Guérin responded that the conclusion, a searing critique of Europe, had laudable literary qualities but was “a bit delusional, and very far from the universalism of the proletariat (the genuine one) to which I remain faithful.””
“Fanon’s well-known skepticism of the French Left was perhaps well deserved.”
“One of the central messages of the book is that a new world order, needed for the survival of humanity at large, would not emerge from the revolutionary traditions of Europe.”
“In The Wretched of the Earth, he writes that colonized Algerians “are in tune with their time,” implying that the revolution had imposed the necessary temporal structure on their actions.”
“He offers the following example: “People are sometimes surprised that, instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio. They shouldn’t be.” If observers expected Algerians to spend their extra money on frivolous items, as they might have in the past, they were sorely mistaken.”
“The radio was powerful precisely because it allowed colonized Algerians to enter a historical time shared by multiple actors across the Third World, offering a perspective wider than the immediate concerns of local (or even national) events.”