The Wretched Of The Earth Summary

Fanon, decolonization and violence: Fanon was a philosopher and a revolutionary writer; he was concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and wrote multiple books on the topic. This paper will focus on his book “The Wretched of the Earth.” This book mainly focuses on the important and vital role of violence, which Fanon thinks is essential in the decolonization struggle. He begins the book by mentioning how “decolonization is always a violent event” (citefanon pg. 1). He then goes on to define decolonization, he defines it as “decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another” (citefanon pg. 1). Fanon mentions that the colonizers and the colonised have a very violent history and that the historical process of decolonization creates disorder and chaos. He mentions that the colonial world is a world that is divided into two parts, it is a divided and a compartmentalised world, where divisions are done solely based on who are the natives (the colored subjects) and who are the colonisers (the white men). He calls this divided world based on color as a Manichaean world. In the Manichaean world, everything is divided on the basis of color. The natives are given evil attributes and considered as inhuman and animals whereas, the

Fanon also mentions that sometimes the colonised think that using nonviolence is better but it is not effective. An example of this can be taken from Ghandi’s process of Satyagraha which was a nonviolent movement but the followers would resort to violence on many occasions as they knew that violence was the way for their demands to be heard (cite Jalal and Bose). Fanon also mentions how the colonisers used multiple strategies to control the natives and to prevent them from uprising. Fanon calls the colonised as the slaves of the modern