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Western colonialism and imperialism from Algeria to the Arab Spring
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon died in 1961, but his analysis of European and Western colonialism, its brutality and the dehumanising impact on its victims, forging psychological chains of oppression and self-hatred that can only be broken via a “murderous and decisive struggle” against the coloniser, remains apposite over five decades after it first appeared in his classic work The Wretched of the Earth.[i]
Fanon wrote the book in the midst of the epic struggle for national liberation that was being waged by the Algerian people against their French colonial masters, pitting the might of a first world European power against a poorly armed but popularly supported anti-colonialist insurgency. It was a fierce and bitter conflict lasting eight long years between 1954 and 1962. Ultimately, the Algerian people’s desire for national liberation proved stronger than France’s ability to retain a North African colony it had possessed since the 1830s. By the time the war ended, marked by French President Charles De Gaulle’s pronouncement that the Algerian people had the right to determine their own future, 1.5 million people had perished, the vast majority of…
