1961 Preface to Fanon's 'Wretched of the Earth', by Jean Paul Sartre

 

It
came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black
voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our
inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements
of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to
talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not
doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of
not being faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her
mission; she had hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed,
the Graeco-Latin Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men
of the world: ‘After all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves
their feelings; dogs that bark don’t bite.’

 

A
new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With
unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us
that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang
together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet
assimilate them. By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are
making us into monstrosities; your humanism claim we are at one with
the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.’ Very much
at our ease, we listened to them all; colonial administrators are not
paid to read Hegel, and for that matter they do not read much of him,
but they do not need a philosopher to tell them that uneasy consciences
are caught up in their own contradictions. They will not get anywhere;
so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing will come of it but
talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for anything at all
precise in their wailing, it would be integration. Of course, there is
no question of granting that; the system, which depends on
over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But it’s enough to
hold the carrot in front of their noses, they’ll gallop all right. As
to a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would
go off to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as
they are? In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and
thought it not a bad idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a
Negro. That was before ’39.

 

1961.
Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating
mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man,
yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of
their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they
have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called
spiritual experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is
an African, a man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds:
‘Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she is running
headlong into the abyss; we would do well to keep away from it.’ In
other words, she’s done for. A truth which is not pleasant to state but
of which we are all convinced, are we not, fellow-Europeans, in the
marrow of our bones?

 

We
must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says
to other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for’ — which has happened, I
should think, almost every day since 1930 — it is emotional talk;
burning with love and fury, the speaker includes himself with his
fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless …’ His meaning
is clear; no more mistakes must be made; if his instructions are not
carried out to the letter, then and only then will the country go to
pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a piece of advice and
these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they spring from a
national intersubjectivity. But on the contrary when Fanon says of
Europe that she is rushing to her doom, far from sounding the alarm he
is merely setting out a diagnosis. This doctor neither claims that she
is a hopeless case — miracles have been known to exist — nor does he
give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that she is dying, on
external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe. As to
curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a
damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is
scandalous. And if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for
us!’ the true nature of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing
in for you at all; his work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you
is as cold as ice; he speaks of you often, never to you. The black
Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of colonized
laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that language to
new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized only:
‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For
the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even
consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their
speeches. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes:
Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar: but he does not waste his time in condemning
them; he uses them. If he demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the
complex play of relations which unite and oppose the colonists to the
people of the mother country, it is for his brothers; his aim is to
teach them to beat us at our own game.

 

In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through
his voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that
enslaved peoples are still to be found there, together with some who
have achieved a simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still
fighting to attain sovereignty and others again who have obtained
complete freedom but who live under the constant menace of imperialist
aggression. These differences are born of colonial history, in other
words of oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some
feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a
native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has
played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited
at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing
groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and
has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the
stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to
fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or,
rather, the two struggles form part of a whole. In the heat of battle,
all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen
and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged
position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns — all
fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable
reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries
where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry,
when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it
knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers
in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less
than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to
triumph, the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is
cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State,
in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the
imperialists. The example of Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus
the unity of the Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in
progress, which begins by the union, in each country, after
independence as before, of the whole of the colonized under the command
of the peasant class. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in
Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve revolutionary socialism
all together everywhere, or else one by one we will be defeated by our
former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses, nor discords, nor
mystification. Here, the movement gets off to a bad start; then, after
a striking initial success it loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to
a standstill, and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw
their bourgeoisie overboard. The reader is sternly put on his guard
against the most dangerous will o’ the wisps: the cult of the leader
and of personalities, Western culture, and what is equally to be
feared, the withdrawal into the twilight of past African culture. For
the only true culture is that of the Revolution; that is to say, it is
constantly in the making. Fanon speaks out loud; we Europeans can hear
him, as the fact that you hold this book in your hand proves; is he not
then afraid that the colonial powers may take advantage of his
sincerity?

 

No;
he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date; they can sometimes delay
emancipation, but not stop it. And do not think that we can change our
ways; neo-colonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of
hot air; the ‘Third Forces’ don’t exist, or if they do they are only
the tin-pot bourgeoisies that colonialism has already placed in the
saddle. Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake
world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The
settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force, when he can
command it; the native has only one choice, between servitude or
supremacy. What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is
to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we
have no more up our sleeves. It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid
her hands on our continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she
lets go. It’s a good moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at
Elizabethville or in the Algerian bled that the whole world
does not hear about. The rival blocks take opposite sides, and hold
each other in check; let us take advantage of this paralysis, let us
burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into universality for
the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we've no other arms, the
waiting knife’s enough.’

 

Europeans,
you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in the
darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and
listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your
trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will
see you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without
even lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their
fathers, shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it
was who allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare
speak, and you did not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons
ignore you; a fire warms them and sheds light around them, and you have
not lit it. Now, at a respectful distance, it is you who will feel
furtive, nightbound and perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in
these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the
zombies.

 

In
this case, you will say, let’s throw away this book. Why read it if it
is not written for us? For two reasons; the first is that Fanon
explains you to his brothers and shows them the mechanism by which we
are estranged from ourselves; take advantage of this, and get to know
yourselves seen in the light of truth, objectively. Our victims know us
by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their
evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made
of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves. But is it any
use? Yes, for Europe is at death’s door. But, you will say, we live in
the mother country, and we disapprove of her excesses. It is true, you
are not settlers, but you are no better. For the pioneers belonged to
you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they enriched. You warned
them that if they shed too much blood you would disown them, or say you
did, in something of the same way as any state maintains abroad a mob
of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns when they
are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an
exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you
pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are
massacred in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some
of them who are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people
of the mother country and of their representatives in the colonies.
Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make
you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. You
see, I, too, am incapable of ridding myself of subjective illusions; I,
too, say to you: ‘All is lost, unless …’ As a European, I steal the
enemy’s book, and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. Make the
most of it.

 

And
here is the second reason: if you set aside Sorel’s fascist utterances,
you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the
processes of history into the clear light of day. Moreover, you need
not think that hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him
some uncommon taste for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the
situation, that’s all. But this is enough to enable him to constitute,
step by step, the dialectic which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and
which is as much responsible for our existence as for his.

 

During
the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as covetous
creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care to
include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they
considered that they were free men — that is to say, free to sell their
labour. In France, as in England, humanism claimed to be universal.

 

In
the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no
contract; moreover, there must be intimidation and thus oppression
grows. Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother
country, apply the ‘numerus clausus’ to the human race: since none may
enslave, rob or kill his fellowman without committing a crime, they lay
down the principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men. Our
striking-power has been given the mission of changing this abstract
certainty into reality: the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of
the annexed country to the level of superior monkeys in order to
justify the settler’s treatment of them as beasts of burden. Violence
in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these
enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything
will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language
for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer
physical fatigue win stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any
spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the
peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of
flogging to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers
fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is
no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and
make his inmost self fall to pieces. The business is conducted with
flying colours and by experts: the ‘psychological services’ weren’t
established yesterday; nor was brain-washing. And yet, in spite of an
these efforts, their ends are nowhere achieved: neither in the Congo,
where Negroes’ hands were cut off, nor in Angola, where until very
recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to shut them with
padlocks. I do not say that it is impossible to change a Man into an
animal I simply say that you won’t get there without weakening him
considerably. Blows will never suffice; you have to push the starvation
further, and that’s the trouble with slavery.

 

For
when you domesticate a member of our own species, you reduce his
output, and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes by
costing more than he brings in. For this reason the settlers are
obliged to stop the breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor
animal, is the native. Beaten, under-nourished, ill, terrified — but
only up to a certain point — he has, whether he’s black, yellow or
white, always the same traits of character: he’s a sly-boots, a
lazybones and a thief, who lives on nothing, and who understands only
violence.

 

Poor
settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He
ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is
not possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can’t
carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation,
he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic
leads him on to decolonization.

 

But
it does not happen immediately. At first the European’s reign
continues. He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he
does not yet know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him
talk, it would seem that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to
repress the evil that they have rooted in them; and after three
generations their pernicious instincts will reappear no more. What
instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge slaves on to massacre
their master? Can he not here recognize his own cruelty turned against
himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants, does he not find
his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed through every pore
and for which there is no cure? The reason is simple; this imperious
being, crazed by his absolute power and by the fear of losing it, no
longer remembers clearly that he was once a man; he takes himself for a
horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that the domestication of
the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the conditioning of their
reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the human memory and the
ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all there is something
which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we are by the
radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened
their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged.
In psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life. But these
constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission,
thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will
pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken
in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that
is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that
of the pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but
violence? Of course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon
they will make it their own; that is to say, the same violence is
thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us
when we go towards a mirror.

 

Make
no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen,
by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of
powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men
because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them —
because of him, and against him. Hatred, blind hatred which is as yet
an abstraction, is their only wealth; the Master calls it forth because
he seeks to reduce them to animals, but he fails to break it down
because his interests stop him half-way. Thus the ‘half-natives’ are
still humans, through the power and the weakness of the oppressor which
is transformed within them into a stubborn refusal of the animal
condition. We realize what follows; they’re lazy: of course — it’s a
form of sabotage. they’re sly and thieving; just imagine! But their
petty thefts mark the beginning of a resistance which is still
unorganized. That is not enough; there are those among them who assert
themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these
are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans,
and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the
terrified masses.

 

Yes,
terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a
current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the
fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of
repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They
are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying
compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of
their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it
is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends
them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep
down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which
is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will
learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to
murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.

 

If
this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and
devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free
themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight
between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can
count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises
his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for
all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these
expiatory victims don’t quench their thirst for blood. They can only
stop themselves from marching against the machine-guns by doing our
work for us; of their own accord they will speed up the dehumanisation
that they reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they will take
the greatest precautions against their own kind by setting up
supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and terrible myths, at
others binding themselves by scrupulous rites. It is in this way that
an obsessed person flees from his deepest needs — by binding himself to
certain observances which require his attention at every turn. They
dance; that keeps them busy; it relaxes their painfully contracted
muscles; and then the dance mimes secretly, often without their
knowing, the refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not
commit. In certain districts they make use of that last resort —
possession by spirits. Formerly this was a religious experience in all
its simplicity, a certain communion of the faithful with sacred things;
now they make of it a weapon against humiliation and despair;
Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe come down among them, rule
over their violence and waste it in trances until it in exhausted. At
the same time these high-placed, personages protect them; in other
words the colonized people protect themselves against colonial
estrangement by going one better in religious estrangement, with the
unique result that finally they add the two estrangements together and
each reinforces the other. Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated
person, tired of always being insulted by his demon, one fine day
starts hearing the voice of an angel who pays him compliments; but the
jeers don’t stop for all that; only from then on, they alternate with
congratulations. This is a defence, but it is also the end of the
story; the self is disassociated, and the patient heads for madness.
Let us add, for certain other carefully selected unfortunates, that
other witchery of which I have already spoken: Western culture. If I
were them, you may say, I'd prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis.
Very good: you’ve grasped the situation. But not altogether, because
you aren’t them — or not yet. Otherwise you would know that
they can’t choose; they must have both. Two worlds: that makes two
bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn they crowd into the
churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our enemy betrays his
brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the same thing.
The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained
by the settler among colonized people with their consent.

 

Laying
claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the
contradiction is explosive. For that matter it does explode, you know
as well as I do; and we are living at the moment when the match is put
to the fuse. When the rising birthrate brings wider famine in its wake,
when these newcomers have life to fear rather more than death, the
torrent of violence sweeps away all barriers. In Algeria and Angola,
Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it
is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and
we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we
that have launched it. The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we
were not polite enough to the natives, that it would have been wiser
and fairer to allow them certain rights in so far as this was possible;
they ask nothing better than to admit them in batches and without
sponsors to that very exclusive club, our species; and now this
barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any more than the bad
settlers. The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the true situation
of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted to; they do
not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done
everything to provoke it. But, all the same, they think to themselves,
there are limits; these guerrillas should be bent on showing that they
are chivalrous; that would be the best way of showing they are men.
Sometimes the Left scolds them … ‘you’re going too far; we won’t
support you any more.’ The natives don’t give a damn about their
support; for all the good it does them they might as well stuff it up
their backsides. Once their war began, they saw this hard truth: that
every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out of them;
they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured
treatment to no one.

 

There
is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism
by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in
the last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot
help seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that
these less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of
humanity. Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by
peaceful undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial
prejudice.

 

They
would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this
irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection
of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man
re-creating himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but
we have forgotten it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of
violence; only violence itself can destroy them. The native cures
himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force
of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost innocence
and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his self. Far
removed from his war, we consider it as a triumph of barbarism; but of
its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of
the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the
colonial gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may
fear or be feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the
disassociations of a sham existence or conquer your birthright of
unity. When the peasant takes a gun in his hands, the old myths grow
dim and the prohibitions are one by one forgotten. The rebel’s weapon
is the proof of his humanity. For in the first days of the revolt you
must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one
stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same
time: there remain a dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the
first time, feels a national soil under his foot. At this moment the
Nation does not shrink from him; wherever he goes, wherever he may be,
she is; she follows, and is never lost to view, for she is one with his
liberty. But, after the first surprise, the colonial army strikes; and
then all must unite or be slaughtered. Tribal dissensions weaken and
tend to disappear; in the first place because they endanger the
Revolution, but for the more profound reason that they served no other
purpose before than to divert violence against false foes. When they
remain — as in the Congo — it’s because they are kept up by the agents
of colonialism. The Nation marches forward; for each of her children
she is to be found wherever his brothers are fighting. Their feeling
for each other is the reverse of the hatred they feel for you; they are
brothers inasmuch as each of them has killed and may at any moment have
to kill again. Fanon shows his readers the limits of ‘spontaneity’ and
the need for and dangers of ‘organization’. But however great may be
the task at each turning of the way the revolutionary consciousness
deepens. The last complexes flee away; no one need come to us talking
of the ‘dependency’ complex of an A.L.N. soldier.

 

With
his blinkers off, the peasant takes account of his real needs; before
they were enough to kill him, but he tried to ignore them; now he sees
them as infinitely great requirements. In this violence which springs
from the people, which enables them to hold out for five years — for
eight years as the Algerians have done — the military, political and
social necessities cannot be separated. The war, by merely setting the
question of command and responsibility, institutes new structures which
will become the first institutions of peace. Here, then, is man even
now established in new traditions, the future children of a horrible
present; here then we see him legitimized by a law which will be born
or is born each day under fire: once the last settler a killed, shipped
home or assimilated, the minority breed disappears, to be replaced by
socialism. And that’s not enough; the rebel does not stop there; for
you can be quite sure that he is not risking his skin to find himself
at the level of a former inhabitant of the old mother country. Look how
patient he is! Perhaps he dreams of another Dien Bien Phu, but don’t
think he’s really counting on it; he’s a beggar fighting, in his
poverty, against rich men powerfully armed. While he is waiting for
decisive victories, or even without expecting them at all, he tires out
his adversaries until they are sick of him.

 

It
will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes
ferocious; the country is marked out, there are mopping-up operations,
transfers of population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women
and children. He knows this; this new man begins his life as a man at
the end of it; he considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be
killed; not only does he accept this risk, he’s sure of it. This
potential dead man has lost his wife and his children; he has seen so
many dying men that he prefers victory to survival; others, not he,
will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary of it all. But this
weariness of the heart is the root of an unbelievable courage. We find
our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it beyond
torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind. The
child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We
were men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man;
of higher quality.

 

Here
Fanon stops. He has shown the way forward: he is the spokesman of those
who are fighting and he has called for union, that is to say the unity
of the African continent against all dissensions and all
particularisms. He has gained his end. If he had wished to describe in
all its details the historical phenomenon of decolonization he would
have to have spoken of us; this is not at all his intention. But, when
we have closed the book, the argument continues within us, in spite of
its author; for we feel the strength of the peoples in revolt and we
answer by force. Thus there is a fresh moment of violence; and this
time we ourselves are involved, for by its nature this violence is
changing us, accordingly as the ‘half-native’ is changed. Everyone of
us must think for himself — always provided that he thinks at all; for
in Europe today, stunned as she is by the blows received by France,
Belgium or England, even to allow your mind to be diverted, however
slightly, is as good as being the accomplice in crime of colonialism.
This book has not the slightest need of a preface, all the less because
it is not addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring
the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being
decolonized: that is to say that the settler which is in every one of
us is being savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can
bear to, and see what is becoming of us. First, we must face that
unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism. There you can
see it, quite naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an
ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed
words, its affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our
aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the believers in non-violence,
saying that they are neither executioners nor victims. Very well then;
if you’re not victims when the government which you’ve voted for, when
the army in which your younger brothers are serving without hesitation
or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without a shadow of
doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk being
put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your
irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out;
they’ll have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any
rate: if violence began this _very evening and if exploitation and
oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of
non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your
non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression,
your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors.

 

You
know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid
hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new
continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries.
This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our
cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the
threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow
or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure
to its inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of
colonialism, since all of us without exception have profited by
colonial exploitation. This fat, pale continent ends by falling into
what Fanon rightly calls narcissism. Cocteau became irritated with
Paris — ‘that city which talks about itself the whole time’. Is Europe
any different? And that super-European monstrosity, North America?
Chatter, chatter: liberty, equality, fraternity, love, honour,
patriotism and what have you. All this did not prevent us from making
anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers, dirty Jews and dirty Arabs.
High-minded people, liberal or just soft-hearted, protest that they
were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or
dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist
humanism since the European has only been able to become a man through
creating slaves and monsters. While there was a native population
somewhere this imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the human
race we found an abstract assumption of universality which served as
cover for the most realistic practices. On the other side of the ocean
there was a race of less-than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our
status a thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the elite
for the genus. Today, the native populations reveal their true nature,
and at the same time our exclusive ‘club’ reveals its weakness — that
it’s neither more nor less than a minority. Worse than that: since the
others become men in name against us, it seems that we are the enemies
of mankind; the élite shows itself in its true colours — it
is nothing more than a gang. Our precious sets of values begin to
moult; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that isn’t stained with
blood. If you are looking for an example, remember these fine words:
‘How generous France is!’ Us, generous? What about Sétif, then? And
those eight years of ferocious war which have cost the lives of over a
million Algerians? And the tortures?

 

But
let it be understood that nobody reproaches us with having been false
to such-and-such a mission — for the very good reason that we had no
mission at all. It is generosity itself that’s in question; this fine
melodious word has only one meaning: the granting of a statutory
charter. For the folk across the water, new men, freed men, no one has
the power nor the right to give anything to anybody; for each of them
has every right, and the right to everything. And when one day our
human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum
total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of
their mutual needs. Here I stop; you will have no trouble in finishing
the job; all you have to do is to look our aristocratic virtues
straight in the face, for the first and last time. They are cracking
up; how could they survive the aristocracy of underlings who brought
them into being? A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator
found only this to say in defence of the West: ‘We aren’t angels. But
we, at least, feel some remorse.’ What a confession! Formerly our
continent was buoyed up by other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the
Rights of Man or the swastika. Now we know what these are worth; and
the only chance of our being saved from, shipwreck is the very
Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it’s the end; Europe is
springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that
in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio
of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our
hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion.

 

The
old ‘mother countries’ have still to go the whole hog, still have to
engage their entire forces in a battle which is lost before it has
begun. At the end of the adventure we again find that colonial
brutality which was Bugeaud’s doubtful but though it has been
multiplied ten-fold, it’s still not enough. The national service units
are sent to Algeria, and they remain there seven years with no result.
Violence has changed its direction. When we were victorious we
practised it without its seeming to alter us; it broke down the others,
but for us men our humanism remained intact. United by their profits,
the peoples of the mother countries baptized their commonwealth of
crimes, calling them fraternity and love; today violence, blocked
everywhere, comes back on us through our soldiers, comes inside and
takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native re-creates
himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals we break
up. Rage and fear are already blatant; they show themselves openly in
the nigger-hunts in Algeria. Now, which side are the savages on? Where
is barbarism? Nothing is missing, not even the tom-toms; the
motor-horns beat out ‘Al-gér-ie fran-çaise’ while the
Europeans burn Moslems alive. Fanon reminds us that not so very long
ago, a congress of psychiatrists was distressed by the criminal
propensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each other,’
they said, ‘that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex must be
under-developed.’ In central Africa, others have established that ‘the
African makes very little use of his frontal lobes’. These learned men
would do well today to follow up their investigations in Europe, and
particularly with regard to the French. For we, too, during the last
few years, must be victims of ‘frontal sluggishness’ since our patriots
do quite a bit of assassinating of their fellow-countrymen and if
they’re not at home, they blow up their house and their concierge. This
is only a beginning; civil war is forecast for the autumn, or for the
spring of next year. Yet our lobes seem to be in perfect condition; is
it not rather the case that, since we cannot crush the natives,
violence comes back on its tracks, accumulates in the very depths of
our nature and seeks a way out? The union of the Algerian people causes
the disunion of the French people; throughout the whole territory of
the ex-mother-country, the tribes are dancing their war-dances. The
terror has left Africa, and is settling here; for quite obviously there
are certain furious beings who want to make us Pay with our own blood
for the shame of having been beaten by the native. Then too, there are
the others, all the others who are equally guilty (for after Bizerta,
after the lynchings of September, who among them came out into the
streets to shout ‘We've had enough'?) but less spectacular — the
liberals, and the toughs of the tender Left.

 

The
fever is mounting amongst them too, and resentment at the same time.
And they certainly have the wind up! They hide their rage in myths and
complicated rites; in order to stave off the day of reckoning and the
need for decision they have put at the head of our affairs a Grand
Magician whose business it is to keep us all in the dark at all costs.
Nothing is being done; violence, proclaimed by some, disowned by
others, turns in a vacuum; one day it bursts out at Metz, the next at
Bordeaux; it’s here, there and everywhere, like in a game of hunt the
slipper. It’s our turn to tread the path, step by step, which leads
down to native level. But to become natives altogether, our soil must
be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of
hunger. This won’t happen; for it’s a discredited colonialism which is
taking hold on us; this is the senile, arrogant master who will
straddle us; here he comes, our mumbo-jumbo.

 

And
when you have read Fanon’s last chapter, you will be convinced that it
would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his
misery than to be a former settler. It is not right for a police
official to be obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that rate,
his nerves will fall to bits, unless the torturers are forbidden in
their own interests to work overtime. When it is desirable that the
morality of the Nation and the Army should be protected by the rigours
of the law, it is not right that the former should systematically
demoralize the latter, nor that a country with a Republican tradition
should confide hundreds and thousands of its young folk to the care of
putschist officers. It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know
very well all the crimes committed in our name, it’s not at all right
that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your
own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgement on yourself. I am
willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was
happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but
now you know, and still you hold your tongues. Eight years of silence;
what degradation! And your silence is all of no avail; today, the
blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights up the whole
country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that does not
ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger, not a
single action that does hot betray our disgust, and our complicity. It
is enough today for two French people to meet together for there to be
a dead man between them. One dead man did I say? In other days France
was the name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not
become the name of a nervous disease.

 

Will
we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the
wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we are bound hand and foot,
humiliated and sick with fear; we cannot fall lower. Happily this is
not yet enough for the colonialist aristocracy; it cannot complete its
delaying mission in Algeria until it has first finished colonizing the
French. Every day we retreat in front of the battle, but you may be
sure that we will not avoid it; the killers need it; they’ll go for us
and hit out blindly to left and right.

 

Thus
the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or
rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you
condemn this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the
side of the Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the
settlers and the hired soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge.
Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at
last that new violence which is raised up in you by old, oft-repeated
crimes. But, as they say, that’s another story: the history of mankind.
The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of
those who make it.

   

Jean-Paul Sartre

 

1961

 

Paris