The Twilight of Imperialism
(Perry 463-65)
 
World War II accelerated the disintegration of l Europe's overseas empires. The European states could hardly justify ruling over Africans and Asians after they had fought to liberate European lands from German imperialism. Nor could they ask their people, exhausted by the Hitler years and concentrating all their energies on reconstruction, to fight new wars against Africans and Asians pressing for independence. In the years just after the war, Great Britain surrendered India, France lost Lebanon and Syria, and the Dutch departed from Indonesia. In the 1950s and I 960s, virtually every colonial territory gained independence. In those instances where the colonial power resisted independence for the colony, the price was bloodshed.


Frantz Fanon, "The Evils of Colonialism" from The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
 

One of the keenest modern critics of colonialism was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). A black from the French West Indies, Fanon was familiar with racial discrimination, and he was influenced by Marxism. He was trained in France as a psychiatrist and decorated for valor in World War If. In the 1950s he sided with the Algerian rebels in their fight for independence from France and became an embattled advocate of African decolonization. In his book the Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 when colonial rule in Africa, although on the wane, still persisted, be examined the relations between the colonial masters and their subject peoples with the keen eye of a psychoanalyst. Reflecting the tensions built up under colonialism and the fury of the Algerian war, Fanon focused on the oppressive and dehumanizing aspects of imperialism. lie did not even spare the Christian churches from criticism, although they had of-ten trained those who eventually led the anti colonial struggles.

Fanon also anticipated the ambitions of the emerging African leaders. As he observed, "The colonised man is an envious man," who wanted what the masters possessed—wealth and power in an independent state. Rejection of colonial domination did not rule out imitation of the colonial masters' way of life—an attitude that sometimes brought a new dependence, branded as colonialism. Yet the memory of colonial exploitation that Fanon so vividly described persists, kept alive by the poverty and powerlessness of the new African states. In the following passage from The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon starkly compares the two realms of the colonial world: ruler and ruled.

 


The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by bar-racks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, and spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of mortal reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs fro in harmonious relations and good behaviour---all these esthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing consider-ably.... In the colonial countries... the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of governnment speak the language of pure force...

The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by die settlers. The two zones are opposed, bur not in the service of a higher unity...

No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. The settlers' town is a strongly-built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly-lit town; the streets are covered with asphalt, and the garbage-cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown and hardly thought about. . The settlers town is a well-fed own, an easy-going own; its belly is always full of good things. The sealer's town
a town of white people, of foreigners.

The town belonging to the colonised people, or at least the native town, the negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill tame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters hale where or how; they die there, it matters out where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top (Teach other, and their huts are built one on top of the other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a own on its knees, a town wallowing in the mire. It is a town of niggers and dirty arabs....The look that the native turns on the settler's own is a look of lust, it look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession all manner of possession: to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible. The colonised man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well; when their glances meet he ascertains bitterly, always on the defensive "They want to take our place" It is true, for there is no native who does not dream at !cast once a day of sorting himself up in the settler's place.

This world divided into compartments, this world out in two is inhabited by two different species. .. . When you examine at dose quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels our the world is o begin with the fact of belonging o or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies.... you are rich because you are white, you are whim because you are rich...

As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence devil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. 1 'he native is declared insensible o ethics; lie represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil....

.... I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to Cods ways bur to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor....

....Colonialism dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man's reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native filly in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary. The... native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he is thinking of.