Saïd Bouamama: Settler Colonialism and Fanon

The year 2025 marks the 100th anniversary¹ of the birth of the Guinean and Cape Verdean Amilcar Cabral, one of the many as-yet little-known revolutionary intellectuals in the field of national liberation processes and struggles. The year 2025 will also mark the centenary anniversaries of the African-American Malcolm X (May 19), the Congolese Patrice Lumumba (July 2) and the Martiniquan and Algerian² Frantz Fanon (July 20). These four anniversaries take place in a historical sequence in which from Kanaky to Palestine, via Western Sahara, Polynesia, Mayotte, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc., the question of direct colonization remains unanswered. Above all, they are taking place at a point in the global imperialist system when new colonization processes are unfolding. From Libya to Syria, from Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo, balkanization and chaos are being promoted as a strategy for maintaining the bond of total dependence—in other words, colonization under new masks.
Unsurprisingly, in the same historical sequence, popular mass movements are developing, reviving the concepts, demands, figures, and aspirations of the 1950s to 1970s (i.e., the period associated with the Bandung Conference³), armed independence struggles, Pan-African congresses, the tricontinental movement, the denunciation of neo-colonialism, and so on. The yearning for Bolivarianism in many Latin American countries and movements for Pan-Africanism in many African countries, the return of expressions such as “neo-colonialism,” “second independence” struggles, “patriotism,” the rediscovery and vindication of the figures of Cabral, Keita, Sankara, etc., by many African and African youth movements and among those in the diasporas—all of these express the opening of a second phase in national liberation struggles. This opening follows several decades of global counterrevolution in the wake of the upheaval in the balance of power in favor of hegemonic US imperialism after the demise of the USSR.
Of course, this new phase is far from homogeneous. Each national situation has its own specificities, linked to national history and to the class configurations that have crystallized since formal independence, i.e., since the substitution of neo-colonialism for direct colonization. The above-mentioned consciousness-raising processes are still fraught with ideological confusion and political illusions. This in no way diminishes their importance or the transformative force they carry. Historical necessities take the paths they can. Great qualitative leaps in emancipation never take a “pure form.” They come about in whatever way they can, depending on the legacy and transmission of past struggles, the state of the global balance of power, the existence or non-existence of an anti-imperialist movement in the imperialist centers, the degree of organization of the bearers of these new aspirations and their integration within the working classes, who remain among those who have a vested interest in breaking free from colonial dependence. Of course, the other classes that have crystallized since formal independence may have an interest in loosening the colonial stranglehold—but only the working classes have a vital interest in breaking it completely. In these periods of renewed struggle, it is essential to take account of the lessons of the past.
This conclusion applies to all forms of colonization and is all the more relevant for settler colonialism, such as that being practiced in Palestine, Western Sahara, or Kanaky. Frantz Fanon’s thought and practice are particularly relevant to these types of colonization. Both were developed in the context of the colonial settlement of Algeria.

On Colonization in General. . .

Current definitions of colonization tend to be purely descriptive. As a result, they often underplay what is the driving force behind colonization: the total dependence of a social-national economy on the needs of another national economy. It is this process of dependence that distinguishes colonization in the age of capitalism from other territorial occupations that have marked the history of mankind.
From its very beginnings in the fifteenth century, the new capitalist mode of production, which emerged in Europe in the midst of the feudal regime, was characterized by a tendency to expand. The laws of profit and competition drive towards expanded reproduction, i.e., the annexation and destruction of other modes of production and their social relations, and with them the cultures and superstructures that accompany them. Aimé Césaire sums up this logic of enlarged reproduction:

[W]hat, fundamentally, is colonization? . . . To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.⁴

Faced with competition from other capitalists, each owner of capital is forced to expand quantitatively in order to survive. To do so, they constantly seek out cheaper raw materials, more profitable technologies and new markets. In other words, capitalism can only function by expanding.
This process of expansion is all-encompassing. It involves both the destruction of a national formation’s existing modes of production (France, England, etc.) and the violent conquest of its first colonies. These two types of expansion are inextricably linked. The “colonization of the New World” boosted the primitive accumulation of capitalism in Europe. For this reason, capitalism and colonization are two facets of the same process; they are consubstantial. This same logic also led to the proliferation of slavery to supply labor to the mines and plantations of the colonies, on the one hand, and to racist theorizations which legitimized both such slavery and colonization ideologically, on the other. Capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and racism thus emerged in the same historical sequence (15th–16th century). Together, they form a coherent system.⁵ For this reason, colonization must also be defined as a process of universalization of the capitalist mode of production and its relations of production.
This second definition completes the first, but does not replace it. The capitalism imposed by force in the colonies is not, unlike in Europe, the result of the internal dynamics of the colonized nations. It is not the result of the social contradictions at work in their history. In fact, as Cabral rightly said, colonization is the violent interruption of that history. It follows that the national liberation struggle constitutes a renewal of that history:

[N]ational liberation is the phenomenon in which a given socio-economic whole rejects the negation of its historical process. In other words, the national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, its return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which it was subjected.⁶

The extension of the capitalist mode of production through colonization leads to a process of global unification, though not homogenization. It unfolds, explains Samir Amin, on the basis of a structuring of the world into dominant imperialist centers and dominated colonial and semi-colonial peripheries.⁷ Colonial peripheral capitalism is dependent, the development of its productive forces limited, its class configurations specific, and so on. Recognition of the dependent nature of colonial capitalism led Frantz Fanon to warn of the danger of applying schemes developed in Europe to the colonies:

In the colonies the economic substructure is also a super structure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem.⁸

. . . To Settler Colonialism

The above definitions of colonialism take different forms, depending on the specific characteristics of the colonial power, as well as on the state of the balance of power and resistance. Amilcar Cabral distinguishes between direct colonialism (“a power made up of people foreign to the dominated people”) and indirect colonialism (“[an] indirect domination, by a political power made up mainly or completely of native agents; this is called neocolonialism”⁹). With regard to direct colonization, he highlights three possible scenarios: the complete destruction of the social structure of the colonized people, its partial destruction, and its preservation but confinement to zones of relegation and reservations. While we agree with Cabral’s presentation, we believe that this triptych can be reduced to a duality: settlement colonialism, which covers the first and third cases, and exploitation colonialism, which covers the second. French-administered Kanaky, with its system of segregation based on reserves for the Kanak population up until 1946, and Algeria, with its massive seizure of indigenous lands, are both part of the same settler colonialism, which is the subject of Frantz Fanon’s theses.
Amilcar Cabral underlines the inevitable genocidal tendency of settlement colonialism, painfully recalled last year by the genocide being suffered by the Palestinian people.

[The] total destruction [of] the social structure of the dominated people [is, he stresses,] generally accompanied by immediate or gradual elimination of the native population and, consequently, by the substitution of a population from outside.¹⁰

In Kanaky, this genocide is now widely documented. A UNESCO publication from 2008 recalls: “The main island of New Caledonia had at least 100,000 inhabitants in 1800; a century later, only a third of the population was counted.”¹¹ A study of Melanesian¹² demography concludes:

The Melanesian population continued to decline. The 1901 census counted just 28,800 Melanesians, a level that was maintained until 1936, before the population began to grow appreciably again.¹³

The genocide is just as well documented in Algeria. Demographer Kamel Kateb, author of the most comprehensive study on the subject, estimates the Algerian population at 4 million at the time of the conquest, and puts the death toll between 1830 and 1872 at 825,000, or over 20% of the total population.¹⁴ Others, such as Djilali Sari, put the death toll at 1 million, representing a 25% drop in the total population in less than half a century—a process he calls “the demographic disaster.”¹⁵
All instances of settler colonization inevitably tend towards genocide. Whether this tendency becomes a reality, as in the case of the “Indian” peoples of North America or the Aborigines in Australia, or fails, totally or partially, as in Kanaky and Algeria, depends on factors linked to the historical context and the balance of power. The pace of European settlement in Kanaky and Algeria, made possible by the state of French society in the first decades of the conquest (which took place in the same historical sequence for both colonies), was too slow to completely annihilate the survival mechanisms of the colonized peoples.
Yet no effort was spared to accelerate the pace of European settlement in Algeria and Kanaky. They were met with resistance in the form of peasant and tribal uprisings with all their consequences. This was the case in 1878 and 1917 in Kanaky. The same was true of Algeria, where similar insurrections broke out almost every decade until the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to the feeling of insecurity that discouraged potential settlers, these atrociously repressed peasant uprisings monopolized most of the available colonial budget, leaving few resources to support the installation of new settlers.
The cruel and barbaric nature of the repression of these insurrections is well documented. To cite just one example, let’s consider a practice common to both colonial periods. Ethnologist Jean Guiart recalls it as follows for Kanaky:

In 1878, a bounty was given for each pair of ears of a so-called rebel killed. As the soldiers brought the ears of women and children, it was decreed that the heads should be brought in, and these macabre pieces of evidence were taken into account.¹⁶

Historian Alain Ruscio adds that this practice, known as “essorillement,”¹⁷ was also used during the conquest of Algeria:

“Essorillement” had its followers during the war of conquest of Algeria, with French troops and Algerian auxiliaries employing it either out of vengeance, or for financial gain (“ten francs for each pair of ears” of indigenous rebels brought to the authorities).¹⁸

The deterrent effect on potential settlers is just as well researched. Historian Charles-André Julien, for example, gives the following figures for the period 1842–1846: 194,887 Europeans emigrated to Algeria, but 117,722 others left the new colony.¹⁹ In Kanaky, the establishment of the penal colony in 1864 was explicitly legitimized by the need to compensate for the low number of voluntary settlers.
We do not recall these colonial atrocities for their own gruesome sake. They simply illustrate the total violence that colonization implies. You cannot forcibly replace one people with another without logically mobilizing limitless forms of exterminatory state violence. It is not a question of the “excesses” of the colonial settlement project, but of its very nature. That’s why Aimé Césaire is right to point out that the most abominable traits of Nazism have existed and been experienced in the colonies before:

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of America.²⁰

Total Violence and Colonization

One of Frantz Fanon’s essential contributions is to have correctly analyzed the congenital violence of settler colonialism and its effects. All of his analyses are permeated by the thesis of “colonialism [as] violence in its natural state.”²¹ It was this thesis that he developed at the Accra Conference in April 1960, in response to Kwame Nkrumah’s faith in non-violence:

The colonial regime is a regime instituted by violence. It is always by force that the colonial regime is established. It is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have prevailed. I say that such a system established by violence can logically only be faithful to itself, and its duration in time depends on the continuation of violence. . . . No, the violence of the Algerian people is neither a hatred of peace nor a rejection of human relations, nor a conviction that only war can put an end to the colonial regime in Algeria. The Algerian people have chosen the unique solution that was left to them and this choice will hold firm for us.²²

This fundamental thesis of Fanon’s posits two key political and strategic conclusions. The first is that colonialism cannot be reformed; it can only be destroyed. The second, reformulated decades later by Nelson Mandela:

[I]t is always the oppressor, not the oppressed, who dictates the form of the struggle. If the oppressor uses violence, the oppressed have no alternative but to respond violently. In our case it was simply a legitimate form of self-defense.²³

For Frantz Fanon, physical violence is only the most visible part of a deeper violence that is nothing less than the total destruction of the historical and national identity of the colonized people:

The officials of the French administration in Algeria, committed to destroying the people’s originality, and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality.²⁴

At the same time as physical violence, settler colonialism deployed legal, symbolic, and cultural violence, all of which converged with the former to completely destroy the very idea of an Algerian or Kanak people. Physical genocide is inevitably coupled with cultural, historical, and political genocide. Colonialism, however, is not content with this violence against the present reality. The colonized people are therefore portrayed ideologically as arrested in its evolution, impervious to reason, incapable of directing its own affairs, requiring the permanent presence of outside leadership.

The history of the colonized peoples is transformed into meaningless unrest, and as a result, one has the impression that for these people humanity began with the arrival of those brave settlers.²⁵

Beyond the physical suffering and grief, the process of colonization requires the production of “self-shame” and an inferiority complex. This dimension of Fanon’s analysis is essential for understanding the mutations within a settler colonialist project, when it realizes that total physical genocide is no longer possible, even in the long term. Since the goal of total destruction is impossible, it mutates to maintain the relationship of domination. Instead, the aim becomes the development of an attitude of “collaboration” by the dominated people who take part in their own subjugation, with the hope of improving their condition in the long term. In an article entitled “Decolonization and independence” published in El Moudjahid on April 16, 1958, Fanon responds to De Gaulle’s promises of an “economic, social, and moral renewal plan” [for Algeria] in the following terms:

French colonialism will not be legitimized by the Algerian people. No spectacular undertaking will make us forget the legalized racism, the illiteracy, the flunkeyism generated and maintained in the very depth of the consciousness of our people. This is why in our declarations there is never any mention of adaptation or of alleviation, but only of restitution. . . . The Algerian people has refused to let the occupation be transformed into collaboration.²⁶

These words are, in our view, essential for all the current French colonies (euphemistically renamed “Overseas Departments or Territories”) and, in particular, for Kanaky. The purpose of this euphemized colonial terminology is to anchor the idea that decolonization is possible without independence. If, for Fanon, formal independence is not enough to achieve real decolonization, the latter is impossible without independence. Formal independence is a necessary but insufficient condition for real decolonization.

The Resistance of the Colonized

The total violence of colonization, whether in Algeria, Palestine, or Kanaky, is both physical and symbolic, economic and cultural, political and social, religious and civil. In the literal sense of the term, it’s about substituting one society for another, replacing one people for another, destroying a history to justify an illegitimate present. The victims of these settler colonial projects have only one choice: resist or disappear. To date, the annals of humanity know of no example of a people having chosen to disappear. Resistance is inescapable, in multiple and evolving forms.
Fanon brilliantly describes the mutations in the forms of resistance as colonial domination of the colonized society takes hold. The first forms of resistance were logically dependent on pre-colonial social and economic formations. Consequently, they were agrarian and tribal, communal and local, insurrectionary and guerrilla. These represent two different eras in the history of mankind, two different models of collective identification (the tribal confederation for the colonized, the nation-state for the colonizers), two different types of military technology, two different conceptions of war. Despite the imbalance of forces, this primary resistance of a society that refuses to disappear, and which harnesses all its energies to survive, will have a lasting influence on colonized peoples. Of course, the colonizer’s military superiority leads to the enforcement of colonialism, but as a response, a sense of collective dignity becomes deeply entrenched among the oppressed and is passed down through the generations.
In Algeria, as in Kanaky, the transmission of the history of resistance to conquest and then colonization was the subjective foundation on which the subsequent revival of the anti-colonial struggle was built. Memory is thus an important form of resistance, as Frantz Fanon explains:

The memory of the anti-colonial period is very much alive in the villages, where women still croon in their children’s ears songs to which the warriors marched when they went out to fight the conquerors. At twelve or thirteen years of age the village children know the names of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in the douars [are] dreams of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic death still today moves them to tears.²⁷

The book by Alban Bensa, Kacué Yvon Goromoedo, and Adrian Muckle, Les Sanglots de l’aigle pêcheur. Nouvelle-Calédonie : La guerre Kanak de 1917 underlines the same mobilization of transmission and memory as a tool of resistance:

Defeated by arms, decimated, dispersed and yet still standing, it was to words and writing that they entrusted the task of preserving the memory of this time.²⁸

In Algeria, as in Kanaky, storytelling, song, poetry, and legends were the mainsprings of survival in the face of the bulldozer of colonial settlement.
Another mutation of resistance described by Fanon concerns the multiple dimensions of identity. These are the site of a double movement: rootedness and expansion. The process of tying one’s people back to its roots comes first, because the colonized perceive the danger of disappearance, and react by fully immersing themselves in everything that makes up their historical identity, their cultural specificity, and their social, religious and civilizational differences. Almost instinctively, they draw back on their values, their ancestors, their religion, etc., to maintain their existence in the face of multi-faceted genocide. Women wearing the veil becomes a form of resistance, as does fleeing all contact with the colonial power and its institutions, reinvesting in the djemaas²⁹ and religiosity, and so on. Explaining the colonizer’s determination to unveil Algerian women, Fanon explains:
The (colonial) administration specified:

“If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight.”³⁰

The same logic of rooting oneself in old customs and tradition as a form of resistance and survival can be found today, for example, in the workings of the FLNKS.³¹ To the incomprehension of many Western activists, the appointment of delegates to various organizational bodies mobilizes, among other things, the question of respect for customs. Anthropologist Isabelle Leblic recalls that at a small FLNKS convention of the Centre-Sud region, the delegates in charge of defining the criteria for nominating candidates for regional elections decided on the following criteria:

be an active militant, have a good knowledge of customs and be well connected to them, be capable of defending FLNKS positions, be representative of the region and respect the principle of non-accumulation of political mandates.

Describing the start of the various meetings, she explains the essential nature of the moment dedicated to perform customs:

It’s custom, the moment of honoring customs. In the empty space in the middle of our circle, packs of cigarettes were piled up, as were sticks of raw and compact tobacco, a few CFP franc bills,³² and above all “manus,” those long, thin pieces of cloth that symbolize the ties between people. Each of the participants brought these objects with him or her. They are a sign of the respect we all owe to each other, and to this land, the land of the valley that welcomes us.³³

To this first change in identity, that of deepening one’s roots, was grafted a second, which involved expanding one’s self-image and that of the group to which one belongs. The colonized, in a context of settler colonialism, very quickly become aware of the impossibility of sustained resistance on the basis of tribal organization, or even on that of a tribal confederation structure. Faced with the colonizer, the process of national identification, already more or less in place depending on the country, inevitably accelerates. Frantz Fanon sums up the process as follows: “The mobilization of the masses. . . introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a common cause, of a national destiny, and of a collective history.”³⁴
Similarly, in her description of the use of customs in the political life of the FLNKS, Isabelle Leblic mentions a difference with the mobilization of these same customs in everyday life:

The only notable difference between the two types of gathering lies in the fact that for the political ones, the “arrival customs” most often end with the raising of the flag of Kanaky.³⁵

The question of mobilizing the armed struggle stems both from the realization that the so-called peaceful struggle has proven inefficient and from the prevailing balance of power.
We emphasize these changes in identity and the work of transmitting resistance because they constitute a subjective heritage on which subsequent resistance is built. They make the latter inescapable. There is no third alternative to colonization: either colonialism is destroyed, or the colonized people disappear. The contradiction is entirely antagonistic, concludes Frantz Fanon:

On the logical plane, the Manicheism of the settler produces a Manicheism of the native. To the theory of the “absolute evil of the native” the theory of the “absolute evil of the settler” replies. The appearance of the settler has meant in the terms of syncretism the death of the aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.³⁶

The Centrality of the Peasantry

In the majority of incidences of settler colonialism, the countryside and villages are the main location for the processes described above. However, this is not the case in other contemporary situations, such as, for example, in Canada or the US. As societies that are primarily agrarian and communitarian, countries that have been and/or are being colonized by settlers feel the destructive impact first and foremost in the countryside, where the vast majority of the population lives. What the Algerian geographer Djilali Sari called “the dispossession of the fellahs”³⁷ and the Algerian film-maker Lamine Merbah called “the uprooting”³⁸ took the form of a large-scale process of land grabbing by settlers, which caused the destruction of the material foundations of peasant collective life. In Algeria, as in Kanaky, the colonial question was triggered by the question of land. Frantz Fanon concludes that the peasantry plays a decisive role in the anti-colonial struggle that it constitutes its centrality. “[I]n the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain,”³⁹ explains Fanon, describing the attitude of these rural masses to colonization:

[T]he mass of the country people have never ceased to think of the problem of their liberation except in terms of violence, in terms of taking back the land from the foreigners, in terms of national struggle, and of armed insurrection. It is all very simple.⁴⁰

In Kanaky, too, the peasantry is the primary social base of the independence movement. Nearly 70% of the country’s Melanesian population is rural. Colonial land theft has led to a steady decline in Kanak subsistence farming as a proportion of national agricultural production. “More than 80% of New Caledonia’s agricultural production is carried out by European farmers, located in the south of the archipelago, in Nouméa’s⁴¹ peri-urban ‘green belt,’”⁴² as sociologist Marcel Djama summarized in 1999. One of the colors of the Kanak flag, green, symbolizes the rural roots of the independence movement. At the time of its creation in 1984, the FLNKS explained the presence of this green color on the national flag as follows:

It’s the color of the plant kingdom and of living waters, it represents “green pastures,” food, the peasantry, the rural environment. It’s the color of nature’s awakening, the awakening of life, of hope, of remedies. It’s the emblem of salvation.⁴³

It was also the peasant origins of the urban “lumpen proletariat” that led Frantz Fanon to see it as possessing significant revolutionary potential, making it the “urban spearhead” of the struggle. These peasants, driven off their land, accumulated on the urban outskirts, unable to occupy any professional position due to the dependent nature of colonial capitalism. The agricultural overpopulation was not transformed en masse into a proletariat, but instead turned into a “lumpenproletariat”:

The men whom the growing population of the country districts and colonial expropriation have brought to desert their family holdings circle tirelessly around the different towns, hoping that one day or another they will be allowed inside. It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns, at the core of the lumpenproletariat, that the rebellion will find its urban spearhead. For the lumpenproletariat, that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.⁴⁴

The situation is hardly any different in contemporary Kanaky. The rural exodus to Nouméa has led to the buildup of a poor Kanak population, including that of a lumpenproletariat. Thousands of Nouméa’s Kanak inhabitants now live in shacks set up on public land in the capital. These “squatters” survive by scrapping and subsistence farming. Unsurprisingly, these Nouméa “squats” were important areas of mobilization during the insurrection that shook Kanaky from May 2024 onwards. The board of directors of the Société des océanistes presents the situation during these popular revolts:

Many of those who are now referred to as rioters come from marginal and excluded populations made up essentially of Kanak and other Oceanians. These poor populations, including a lumpen proletariat, have emerged with the massive urbanization of Greater Nouméa over the past thirty years. They are the forgotten castaways of the Matignon and Nouméa Accords.⁴⁵ How many of them would have stayed, or even returned, to their villages if they had been able to find the means to live in decent conditions? From now on, they too must be considered citizens in their own right.⁴⁶

This reading of the class structure of settler colonies is, of course, a political statement against a dogmatic reading of Marxism that seeks in an embryonic proletariat the social and offensive basis of the national liberation struggle. Fanon even considers that this proletariat, weakly developed due to the very nature of colonial capitalism, enjoys a social position incomparable to that of the other components of the colonized people:

[I]n the colonial territories the proletariat is the nucleus of the colonized population which has been most pampered by the colonial regime. The embryonic proletariat of the towns is in a comparatively privileged position. In capitalist countries, the working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. In the colonial countries the working class has everything to lose; in reality it represents that fraction of the colonized nation which is necessary and irreplaceable if the colonial machine is to run smoothly.⁴⁷

Some have interpreted Fanon’s analysis as a total rejection of the Marxist approach, whereas the whole of his argument aims to underline the importance of taking into account the specificities of colonial capitalism (dependent and outward-oriented to serve the interests of the metropolitan economy), in order to understand settler colonialism. Moreover, Fanon is not the only theoretician of national liberation to have reached this conclusion. Amilcar Cabral, for example, considered that he had initially dogmatically applied certain European approaches to the question of national liberation, which led the independence movement to a dramatic impasse. This courageous self-criticism led him, like Fanon, to advocate the centrality of the peasantry in the struggle for national liberation:

I cannot presume to organize a Party, to organize a struggle, in accordance with what I have in my head. It must be in accordance with the specific reality of the land. . . . [A]t the start of our struggle, we were convinced that if we were to mobilize the workers in Bissau, Bolama and Bafata to go on strike, to demonstrate in the streets, to challenge the administration, the Portuguese would change and would grant us independence. But it is not true. In the first place, the workers in our land do not have the same strength as in other lands. Their strength is not so great from the economic point of view, because the great economic strength in our land lies basically in the countryside.⁴⁸

The Ambiguities and Contradictions of the Petty Bourgeoisie

Fanon died too soon to be a witness to the Algerian independence he fought so hard to achieve. He was, however, a witness to the first national independence movements in Africa, and with them the rise of the national petty bourgeoisie, often at the head of pro-independence organizations. As the itinerant ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in Africa from the spring of 1960, he had the opportunity to observe from close quarters the first steps towards independence, from the Congo to Senegal, from Liberia to Guinea, and from Mali to Ghana. Bitterly, he noted the complicity of certain African countries in the isolation and assassination of Lumumba:

The great success of the enemies of Africa is to have compromised the Africans themselves. It is true that these Africans were directly interested in the murder of Lumumba. Chiefs of puppet governments, in the midst of a puppet independence, [faced] day after day the wholesale opposition of their peoples.⁴⁹

For Fanon, the African complicity in the Congolese tragedy confirms his observations, made in regard to a host of African countries, of an independence thwarted by the introduction of a new type of colonialism: indirect colonialism, colonialism mediated by African elites who became stewards of the interests of the former colonizer, neo-colonialism, etc. Popular hopes and expectations placed on the country’s independence began to be dashed as soon as the new governments took their first steps:

The discontented workers undergo a repression as pitiless as that of the colonial periods. Trade unions and opposition political parties are confined to a quasi-clandestine state. The people, the people who had given everything in the difficult moments of the struggle for national liberation wonder, with their empty hands and bellies, as to the reality of their victory.⁵⁰

To understand this historical sequence where national independence was achieved for so many countries, we need to distinguish, as we mentioned earlier, between independence and decolonization. It was precisely in order to avoid genuine decolonization that certain African countries’ independence was unexpectedly promoted by the French colonial power itself after 1956. A decade earlier, at the Brazzaville conference in February 1944,⁵¹ the latter still asserted that

The aims of the civilizing work accomplished by France in the Colonies, rule out any idea of autonomy, any possibility of evolution outside of the French imperial bloc; the eventual constitution, even in the far future, of self-government in the colonies is ruled out.⁵²

In an attempt to eliminate any hope of independence, massive repression had become the norm. This was the case in Algeria on May 8, 1945,⁵³ in Vietnam in September 1945,⁵⁴ and in Cameroon in 1947.⁵⁵ But just over a decade later, it was the French government that advocated autonomy for the colonies of French West Africa (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF), starting with the granting of autonomy in 1956 and independence in 1958. Between these two historical sequences lie the victory of the Vietnamese independence fighters at Dien Bien Phu, the outbreak of armed struggle in Algeria and Cameroon, the Bandung Conference, and the Anglo-Franco-Israeli defeat in Egypt during the nationalization of the Suez Canal.⁵⁶ Fear of the radicalization of national liberation struggles led the colonizer to adapt in order to maintain his position, and to promote formal independence, backed by economic and military agreements that reproduced colonial dependence in a new guise.
Describing these “puppet” forms of independence, Fanon compared them in 1958 to real independence, i.e. independence that went as far as real decolonization:

True liberation is not that pseudo-independence in which ministers having a limited responsibility hobnob with an economy dominated by the colonial pact. Liberation is the total destruction of the colonial system, from the preeminence of the language of the oppressor and “departmentalization,” to the customs union that in reality maintains the former colonized in the meshes of the culture, of the fashion, and of the images of the colonialist.⁵⁷

The reference to “departmentalization” indicates that Fanon was not fooled by the new colonial discourse of 1946 regarding the “four old colonies,” Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion, and French Guiana, later extended to include Kanaky and Polynesia. Although he had been so inspired by Césaire’s work, Fanon distinguished himself from him by rejecting the “realism” that had led Césaire to accept the logic of departmentalization in place of the goal of national independence.
Three years later, in his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon offers us a thorough analysis of these post-independence “puppet” regimes. He defines the class nature of the new rulers of these “puppet” states:

The psychology of the national bourgeoisie is that of the businessman, not that of a captain of industry; and it is only too true that the greed of the settlers and the system of embargoes set up by colonialism have hardly left them any other choice.⁵⁸

He describes the type of economy this new ruling class implements once in power:

The national economy of the period of independence is not set on a new footing. It is still concerned with the groundnut harvest, with the cocoa crop and the olive yield. . . . [N]ot a single industry is set up in the country. We go on sending out raw materials; we go on being Europe’s small farmers, who specialize in unfinished products.⁵⁹

Politically, he characterizes the social and political function of the new rulers, namely to serve as intermediaries and business agents:

The national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism. The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complexes in a most dignified manner.⁶⁰

Concrete reality has proved Fanon right in the cases of many African countries. Independence was often just another scramble for colonial assets. Wealth accumulated in the space of a few months. This wealth was then considerably increased by further accumulation carried out by the state apparatus. In short, the process of crystallization of social classes, previously all compressed by colonialism, suddenly accelerated to give rise to a commercial comprador bourgeoisie and a class of large landowners. Unlike Fanon, we characterize the social strata installed in power by the colonizer as predominantly petty-bourgeois, and at best middle-bourgeois in the case of landowners. The process of neo-colonization is, in our view, precisely the transformation of these social strata into comprador (commercial and agrarian) social classes.
Fanon draws a political balance sheet for this process, warning of the nature of nationalist organizations, their programs, and their social bases. There is no possibility, he stresses, of an “independent” capitalism emerging in former colonies. The petty bourgeoisie engaged in the national liberation struggle must choose between betraying their ideals and betraying their class interests:

[T]he historical vocation of an authentic national middle class in an underdeveloped country is to repudiate its own nature in so far it as it is bourgeois, that is to say in so far as it is the tool of capitalism, and to make itself the willing slave of that revolutionary capital which is the people.⁶¹

Such “betrayal” does not happen spontaneously. It can only be the result of a democratic political organization with a program and a social base in the popular classes (peasantry and working class), and instituting grassroots control of its leaders.
Amilcar Cabral came to the same conclusion in his thesis on the “class suicide of the petty bourgeoisie,” which he presented at the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference:⁶²

In order not to betray these objectives, the petty bourgeoisie has only one road: to strengthen its revolutionary consciousness, to repudiate the temptations to become “bourgeois” and the natural pretensions of its class mentality; to identify with the classes of workers, not to oppose the normal development of the process of revolution. This means that in order to play completely the part that falls to it in the national liberation struggle, the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie must be capable of committing suicide as a class, to be restored to life in the condition of a revolutionary worker completely identified with the deepest aspirations of the people to which he belongs.⁶³

The colonizer did not remain inactive in the face of this choice. As independence approached, it multiplied the number of overtures, bureaucratic bodies, commissions, special offices, etc., with the aim of bureaucratizing the pro-independence political organizations and thereby steering them in the direction of neo-colonialism. In Kanaky today, the institutionalization and bureaucratization of a significant part of the petty-bourgeoisie is juxtaposed with the radicalization of the popular movement. The lessons of Fanon and Cabral sound a warning and a call to vigilance.

***

The 100th birth anniversaries of Lumumba, Malcolm X, and Fanon are taking place in a world where the anti-colonial struggle is being revived (as witnessed by France’s troubles in West Africa and the October 7 operation in Palestine), while the imperialist offensive is taking shape with the multiplication of wars (Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, etc.). Against this backdrop, Fanon’s message is undeniably modern. Whether on the nature of colonial oppression, its links with capitalism and imperialism, the resistance it inevitably provokes, the attitude of different classes and social strata towards it, or the link between independence and decolonization, between decolonization and socialism, the possible dead-ends and contradictions of national liberation struggles, etc., Fanon’s works remain a must-read for anyone wishing to bring down the colonial system, which persists by constantly donning new masks. As long as our world continues to be structured between a dominant imperialist center and dominated peripheries, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Lumumba will remain relevant.

1. Amilcar Cabral was actually born on September 12, 1924.—Ed., Material.
2. Born in Martinique, F. Fanon was legally French by birth. Upon joining the FLN, he symbolically and politically rejected this French nationality. In his writings, he refers to himself as Algerian. For example, in Year V of the Algerian Revolution, he writes: “What we Algerians want,” “our struggle,” “our cause,” or even “our Revolution.” Fanon died before independence and was never officially granted Algerian nationality. However, he was a representative of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic [GPRA], indicating that he was considered Algerian by the authorities of the new state.
3. The Bandung Conference of 1955 was a landmark gathering of 29 newly independent Asian and African nations. It was a powerful act of decolonial solidarity. Rejecting Cold War binaries, it fostered South-South cooperation, challenged Western imperialism, and laid the groundwork for the Non-Aligned Movement, advocating for economic self-determination and anti-colonial resistance.—Ed., Material.
4. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 32–33.
5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism is a System, speech given at a meeting “pour la paix en Algérie” (“for peace in Algeria”) in 1956.
6. Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory. Address delivered to the first Tricontinental Conference of the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America held in Havana in January, 1966.
7. Samir Amin, Unequal Development. An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1976).
8. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 40.
9. Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory.
10. Amilcar Cabral, The Weapon of Theory.
11. Ali Moussa Iye and Khadija Touré, History of Humanity, vol. 6 (Paris: UNESCO Publishing, 2008), 1388.
12. Melanesia includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kanaky, and the Fiji Islands. The term Kanak refers to the Melanesian population of Kanaky.
13. Jean-Louis Rallu, La population de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (The Population of New Caledonia) (Aubervilliers: Revue Population, n° 4–5, 1985), 725.
14. Kamel Kateb, Européens, « indigènes » et juifs en Algérie (1830-1962). Représentations et réalités des populations [Europeans, “natives” and Jews in Algeria (1830-1962). Representations and realities of population groups] (Paris: INED, 2002), 16, 47.
15. Djilali Sari, Le désastre démographique (The demographic disaster) (Algiers: SNED, 1982), 130.
16. Jean Guiart, Bantoustans en Nouvelle Calédonie (Bantoustans in New Caledonia) (Paris: Droit et Liberté, n° 371, July–August 1978), 14.
17. Essorillement was a brutal French colonial practice of cutting off the ears of resistance fighters, especially in Algeria, as a form of terror, punishment, and trophy-taking. It exemplified the dehumanization and extreme violence of colonial rule.—Ed., Material.
18. Alain Ruscio, La première guerre d’Algérie. Une histoire de conquête et de résistance (The First Algerian War. A Story of Conquest and Resistance) (Paris: La Découverte, 2024), 394.
19. Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (Contemporary History of Algeria), vol. 1 (Paris: PUF, 1964), 250.
20. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36.
21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 61.
22. Frantz Fanon, Why We Use Violence. Address to the Accra Positive Action Conference, April 1960.
23. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 537.
24. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 37.
25. Frantz Fanon, Why We Use Violence.
26. Frantz Fanon, “Decolonization and independence,” in Towards the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 101–102.
27. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 114.
28. Alban Bensa, Kacué Yvon Goromoedo, and Adrian Muckle, Les Sanglots de l’aigle pêcheur. Nouvelle-Calédonie : la guerre Kanak de 1917 (The Cry of the Osprey. New Caledonia: The Kanak War of 1917) (Toulouse: Anarcharsis, 2015).
29. The Djemaa is a customary political institution made up of representatives of all the families in a village and in charge of decisions concerning the community and its internal and external relations.
30. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 37–38.
31. The Front de Libération Kanak Socialiste (Kanak Socialist Liberation Front, FLNKS) is an alliance of pro-independence parties and organizations. Founded in 1984, it currently comprises the Union Calédonienne (UC), the Rassemblement Démocratique Océanien (RCO), the Union Progressiste en Mélanésie (UPM) and the Palika (Kanak Liberation Party).
32. The CFP franc is a colonial currency that keeps French Pacific territories economically dependent on France by restricting monetary sovereignty and facilitating resource extraction through French-controlled financial policies.—Ed., Material.
33. Isabelle Leblic, « De la démocratie à la base : coutume et militantisme kanak dans les années 1985–1986 » (“Grassroots Democracy: Kanak Customs and Activism in 1985–1986”), in Jean-Marc, François Mitterrand et les territoires français du Pacifique (1981-1988). Mutations, drames et recompositions ; enjeux internationaux et franco-français [François Mitterrand and the French Pacific Territories (1981-1988). Changes, Tragedies and Rearrangements; International and Intra-French Issues] (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2003), 314, 316.
34. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 93.
35. Isabelle Leblic, “Grassroots Democracy: Kanak Customs and Activism in 1985–1986,” 316.
36. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 93.
37. Djilali Sari, La dépossession des Fellahs, ENAG, Algiers, 2012.
38. Les déracinés, directed by Lamine Merbah, Algiers, March 1977.
39. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 61.
40. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 127.
41. Capital of Kanaky.—Ed., Material.
42. Marcel Djama, « Transformations agraires et systèmes ruraux mélanésiens en Grande Terre de Nouvelle-Calédonie » (“Agrarian Transformations and Melanesian Rural Systems in the Grande Terre Region of New Caledonia”), in La Revue d’ethnobiologie – JATBA, no. 41–1 (Paris: 1999), 210.
43. Proposition de loi du pays relative au drapeau de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (“Draft Bill on the Flag of New Caledonia”), introduced by the FLNKS group before being registered as “Proposition no. 116,” of December 1, 2022, by the Congress of New Caledonia. The fight continues to have the FLNKS flag adopted as the country’s official flag.
44. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 129.
45. The Nouméa Accords (1998) were a French strategy to delay decolonization in New Caledonia, granting limited autonomy while maintaining economic and political control. Despite promised independence referendums, France’s influence ensured continued dependence.—Ed., Material.
46. Motion by the Board of Directors of the Société des Océanistes, available on the Société des Océanistes website: https://www.oceanistes.org. Consulted on January 22, 2025.
47. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 108.
48. Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 45.
49. Frantz Fanon, “Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?,” in Towards the African Revolution, 194.
50. Frantz Fanon, “This Africa to Come,” in Towards the African Revolution, 186–187.
51. The Brazzaville Conference was a French colonial meeting that rejected independence for African colonies while offering limited reforms. Held by the “Free French” government, it aimed to secure colonial loyalty during WWII, maintaining economic and political control under a rebranded imperial framework.—Ed., Material.
52. Charles de Gaulle, « Discours de Brazzaville, 30 janvier 1944 » (“Brazzaville Speech, January 30, 1944”), given during the French African Conference in Brazzaville. In Gary Wilder, Freedom Time. Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke Univerity Press, 2015),137–138.
53. The Sétif and Guelma Massacres of May 1945 saw French forces brutally repress pro-independence protests in Algeria, killing tens of thousands. This massacre exposed the myth of France’s “civilizing mission,” reaffirming colonial rule through extreme violence and foreshadowing the Algerian War (1954–1962).—Ed., Material.
54. The 1945–1946 Haiphong and Hanoi Massacres were the French government’s response to Vietnamese demands for independence. French forces bombed Haiphong and massacred civilians in Hanoi, killing thousands. This brutal repression marked the beginning of the First Indochina War, exposing France’s refusal to relinquish its colonial grip.—Ed., Material.
55. In 1947, French forces violently suppressed a growing independence movement in Cameroon, particularly the uprising in the Western region, using mass arrests, torture, and executions.—Ed., Material.
56. In a decisive act of defiance against British and French imperialism, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, previously controlled by the Suez Canal Company, which was dominated by British and French interests. This move aimed to reclaim Egypt’s sovereignty over a vital resource and fund the construction of the Aswan High Dam, following the withdrawal of Western financial support. The nationalization sparked the Suez Crisis, where Britain, France, and Israel launched a military intervention. However, international pressure, particularly from the United States and the Soviet Union, forced a ceasefire.—Ed., Material.
57. Frantz Fanon, “Decolonization and Independence,” in Towards the African Revolution, 105.
58. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 150.
59. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 151–152.
60. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 152–153.
61. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 150.
62. This was a historic gathering of revolutionary movements from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, held in Cuba. Organized by Fidel Castro and the Cuban government, it aimed to foster solidarity among these regions in their shared struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism. The conference emphasized the importance of armed struggle, anti-imperialist unity, and support for liberation movements, particularly in Africa.—Ed., Material.
63. Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 136.