Prisoner of Hate

THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH by Frantz Fanon. 255 pages. Grove. $5.

This is not so much a book as a rock thrown through the windows of the West. It is the Communist Manifesto or the Mein Kampf of the anticolonial revolution, and as such it is highly important for any Western reader who wants to understand the emotional force behind that revolution. But the readers of the work who really matter are the would-be leaders in the jungles and mountains of Africa and Asia. Its ideas have already found bloody reality in the Simba massacres in the Congo, in the shouts of Indonesia's Sukarno against "neocolonialism," and in Red China's rallying call to the Afro-Asian nations to turn their backs on the West.

The author was a Negro intellectual who was born in Martinique and died at 36 of leukemia in a Washington hospital. A friend recalled: "He was still shouting and arguing with people on his deathbed." Educated in French medical schools, Frantz Fanon was assigned to an Algerian hospital in 1952. He quickly identified himself with the Algerian rebels, whose leaders were deeply influenced by Fanon's thinking on racism, colonialism and war, though shocked by his atheism. It was in his psychiatric work at Blida hospital--now renamed for him--that Fanon gained his insights into the minds of colonized peoples. The book closes with a dozen case studies of mental disorders resulting from the war. Fanon is something of a case study himself.

Modern Slaves. Up to a point, his book is a powerful indictment of the undeniable sins and stupidities of colonial rule. In nothing-to-lose tones he tells his fellow blacks: "Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men wherever they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets." The colonized races are "the slaves of modern times." He defines the colonial world as a Manichaean one where the settler regards the native as the "quintessence of evil" and the native wants "to sit at the settler's table, to sleep in the settler's bed, with his wife if possible." The native peoples must not only riot or strike but employ skilled guerrilla techniques. Fanon argues that hatred alone is not enough to sustain a war of liberation; only constant political work and propaganda can convince the peasant masses that freedom will be worth the ordeal; brutality must be used purposefully.

Fanon is able to criticize his own side, particularly the one-party regimes, chauvinism, and native elites who grab all the cushy jobs and Cadillacs. But, in general, the anger is directed the other way, including the ritual indictments that native peoples were deprived of all benefits of colonialism and that Europe's wealth was "stolen" from the undeveloped countries. Fanon insists that colonial rule was as bad as Nazi rule in Europe. Above all, though colonialism was rapidly fading as he wrote this book in the late 1950s, he denounces neocolonialism as the same old evil and defines it as any kind of tie with the former ruling countries, including aid; yet in the same breath Fanon asserts that the West must send aid to the underdeveloped countries as a matter of simple justice.

Impresario of Mischief. Fanon never really looked beyond independence to the Utopia supposedly lying ahead, except to prophesy with almost Biblical fervor that "the last shall be first." He was occasionally criticized by the Communists. Yet his book's title is taken from the International ("Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth"), and in his last years he was turning more and more toward the Peking line, while scorning Russia as just another white country added to the black man's burden.

The book is introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre, who has acted as impresario to so much other mischief. It is easier to condone Fanon's fury than Sartre's hysterical endorsement of it. Even though he was writing at the time of O.A.S. bombings, when the Algerian war seemed on the verge of spreading to France, there is something revolting in the sight of Sartre baring his unheroic chest to beat a nostra culpa for everyone else and proclaiming, with masochistic shouts, that Europe is dead. In a way the preface, like the book, is outdated. Harping on the guilt of the white man--amply admitted and partly expiated--is simply no basis for new nations to build a modern future on. If they cling to Fanon, they will only live as prisoners of their own hates.

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