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Metamorphic Thought: The Works of

Frantz Fanon
a
Achille Mbembe
a
University of the Witwatersrand
Published online: 22 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Achille Mbembe (2012) Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon,
African Studies, 71:1, 19-28, DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2012.668291

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 African Studies, 71, 1, April 2012

Metamorphic Thought: The Works of

Frantz Fanon
Achille Mbembe ∗ , ∗ ∗
University of the Witwatersrand

Fifty years ago, the Paris-based Maspero published Frantz Fanon’s last work, Les damnés de la
terre, a book that achieved an almost biblical status and became a cornerstone of postcolonial
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thought. Last year saw the publication of Fanon’s Oeuvres by La Découverte. This article explores
the meanings of Fanon and the metamorphic nature of his thought.

Key words: Fanon, postcolonialism, metamorphic thought, Algeria, violence

We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind.
(Fanon 1961:251)

It is 50 years since Frantz Fanon died leaving us with his last testimony, The
Wretched of the Earth. Written in the crucible of the Algerian war of indepen-
dence and the early years of Third World decolonisation, this book achieved an
almost biblical status. It became a living source of inspiration for those who
opposed the Vietnam War, marched with the civil rights movement, supported
revolutionary black struggles in America, the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa and countless insurgent movements around the world. Fanon’s life
had led him far away from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean where he
was born a French citizen. He took part at the age of 19 in the war against
Nazism only to discover that in the eyes of France he was nothing but a
‘Negro’, that is, anything but a man like any other man. He would end up
feeling a deep sense of betrayal. Black Skin, White Mask – his first book – in
part relates the story of this and many other fraught encounters with colonial
forms of dehumanisation (Macey 2011).

By Any Means Necessary

But it was in Algeria where he worked as a psychiatrist that Fanon finally cut the cord
that bound him to France.1 The country for which he had almost lost his life in the
struggle against Hitler had started to replicate Nazi’s methods during a savage and
nameless war against a people which it denied the right to self-determination. The
dehumanising violence of colonialism, to which he was exposed daily and which
he attempted to heal, took the form of relentless racism and, more especially, the
torture of Algerian resistance fighters by French troops.2 About this war Fanon
∗
Email: achillembembe@hotmail.com
**This article has been translated from the French by Professor Libby Meintjes.
ISSN 0002-0184 print/ISSN 1469-2872 online/12/010019 – 10
# 2012 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2012.668291
 20 African Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 April 2012

often said it had taken on ‘the look of an authentic genocide’,3 ‘an exercise in exter-
mination’.4 It was the ‘most horrifying’, ‘the most hallucinatory [war] that a people
has conducted in order to destroy colonial oppression’,5 a war that was responsible
for the imposition, in Algeria, of a ‘bloody’ and ‘ruthless’ regime of violence. The
war was characterised by the large-scale ‘generalisation of inhumane practices’,
which led many of the colonised to believe that they were ‘witnessing a veritable
apocalypse’.6 During this fight to the death, Fanon sided with the Algerian people
and France disowned him. He had ‘betrayed’ the nation. He became an enemy
and, long after his death, France still treated him as such.
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Following its defeat in Algeria and the loss of its colonial empire, France plunged
into a post-imperial winter (Stoler 2010). Suffering from aphasia, it turned its back
on its colonial past and forgot Fanon, thus largely missing out on the new voyages
of thought which characterised the last quarter of the 20th century – most notably
postcolonial theory and critical race studies (Mbembe 2010a). But in the rest of the
world many of the movements fighting for the emancipation of people continued
to invoke this heretic name. For those committed to the cause of oppressed people
struggling for racial justice or for new psychiatric practices, Fanon’s name
remained not only a sign of hope, but also served as an injunction to rise up
(Mellino 2011). Today there are thousands of works and scholarly articles on
Fanon and there exists a growing ‘Fanon library’, a vibrant, global critique
inspired by his writing and which strives to develop his thought.7
Even if France is yet fully to experience the Fanon phenomenon, everything would
seem to indicate that Fanon has finally emerged from the obscurity to which he had
been relegated.8 His complete Works have recently been published. For almost
half a century, the goal had been to prevent his name from being lost and forgotten
(see Cherki 2000). The veil has been lifted on his work and we are finally in a pos-
ition, at the start of the 21st century, to read, in relative serenity but nonetheless
with sense of some urgency in regard to the brutal reality which confronts the
new wretched of the earth.
But reading Fanon today, we have to take the exact measure of his project in order
to develop it further. If Fanon’s thought is like the ringing of the angelus, filling
those times with the pealing of bells, it is because it was responding to the
bugle call of colonialism, to the need for implacable and forceful opposition to
the latter. Fanon’s thinking was born of real, lived, unstable and changing experi-
ence. For Fanon, to think meant travelling along the same road as others towards a
world that was perpetually and irrevocably created in and through struggle.9 In this
process, critique had to be like a bullet destroying, traversing and transforming the
rocky, mineral wall and the interstices of colonialism. It is this energy that charac-
terised Fanon’s thought as metamorphic thought. For Fanon, the irrepressible and
relentless pursuit of freedom required us to mobilise all life reserves. It drew the
colonised into a fight to the death – a fight that they were called upon to assume as
their duty and that could not be delegated to others.
 Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon 21

In this almost sacrificial aspect of his thought, to rise up, to revolt was an injunc-
tion. It went hand in hand with the duty of violence – a strategic term in Fanon’s
lexicon which, following many hasty and superficial readings, has given rise to
much misunderstanding. It is therefore useful to review briefly the historical con-
ditions in which Fanon developed his conceptualisation of violence. In this regard,
it is perhaps important to bear in mind two things. First, that in Fanon violence is
both a political and a clinical concept. It is as much the clinical manifestation of a
political ‘disease’ as an act of ‘re-symbolisation’, which allows for the possibility
of reciprocity and hence for relative equality in the face of the supreme arbiter
which is death. Thus, by choosing violence rather than being subjected to it, the
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colonised subject is able to restore the self. He comes to the realisation that ‘his
life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler’ or that ‘the
settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin’.10 In so doing, he rede-
fines himself and learns to value his life and the shape of his presence in relation to
his body, his speech, to the Other and to the world.
For Fanon, the political and the clinical share in common the fact of being eminent
psychic sites (Postel and Razanajo 1975). In these a priori empty spaces animated
by la parole the relation between body and language is played out. Body and
language are events. They testify to the fragility of the relationship to the self
and to the other as engendered by the colonial situation, on the one hand,11 and,
on the other, to the extraordinary vulnerability of the psyche when confronted
with the trauma of the real. But the relation between body and language is far
from being stable. In the long run, Fanon does not confuse the healing of the
colonised (la politique du patient) and the political itself as a form of healing
(la clinique du politique). He oscillates continuously between the two. At times
he views the political as a form of the clinical and the clinical as a form of the pol-
itical; and at times he stresses the inevitability as well as the failure of the clinical
or its impasse, especially where the trauma of war and destruction, the pain and
suffering caused in general by the colonial nomos undermine the ability of the
subject or of the patient to return to the world of human speech (Douville
2006:709). Revolutionary violence is the shock that causes this ambivalence to
explode. But Fanon shows that, although it is a key phase in the becoming
subject of the colonised, violence is in turn, at the very moment of its occurrence,
the cause of deep psychic damage. If truly subjective violence at the time of a lib-
eration struggle can be articulated as speech, it is also capable of weighing on
language and producing, in those who survive the war, mutism, hallucinations
and trauma.
At the historical level, France attempted, in Algeria, to conduct ‘a total onslaught’
which provoked in return a response that was just as total on the part of the Algerian
resistance. Following his experience of the war, Fanon was convinced that coloni-
alism was a necropolitical force animated at its core by a genocidal drive.12 Since in
order to reproduce and perpetuate itself colonial violence had to be transformed
into an ontology and genetics, the destruction of colonialism could only be
 22 African Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 April 2012

assured by means of an ‘absolute praxis’.13 It was on the basis of this observation

that Fanon developed his thoughts on three forms of violence – colonial violence
(which reached its pinnacle with the Algerian war), the emancipatory violence of
the colonised (the final stage of which was the war of national liberation), and vio-
lence in international relations. In his view, colonial violence had three dimensions.
It was institutional insofar as it oversaw the entrenchment of subjugation by force,
the origin of which was dependent on force and the maintenance of which was
dependent on force. It was, in the second instance, empirical. It enmeshed the
daily life of the native in nodes, network and detail. This control was indeed phys-
ical – like the barbed wire fences surrounding the internment centres and camps
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during the period of insurrection – but it was also made up of a network of

mesh, which, in spatial and topological terms, extended both horizontally and ver-
tically.14 Moreover, searches, unlawful assassinations, expulsion and mutilation
targeted the individual subject who had to be monitored down to his every
breath.15 This violence was imposed even on language. It weighed heavily on
everyday life, including speech. It was evident especially in the everyday behav-
iour of the settler vis-à-vis the native: aggression, racism, contempt, interminable
rituals of humiliation, murders – what Fanon referred to as the ‘politics of
hatred’.16
In the third instance, colonial violence was phenomenal. It touched both the
senses, the psychic and affective domains. It was the purveyor of mental disorders,
which were difficult to treat and cure. It excluded any dialectic of recognition and
was indifferent to any moral argument. Over time it attacked even the most
private, innermost areas of subjectivity and ran the risk of depriving the colonised
of any mnesic trace that turned such ‘loss into something more than a haemorrha-
gic void’ (Douville 2006:709). Its goal was not only to void the colonial subject of
any substance, but also to foreclose the future. It attacked the subject physically,
causing his muscles to contract and stiffen and his body to bow. His psyche was
not spared since the violence was intended to do nothing less than decerebrate. It
was these scars, wounds and gashes, criss-crossing the body and psyche of the
colonial subject that Fanon, in practice, attempted to narrate and cure.17 According
to Fanon, this three-fold violence (let us refer to it as sovereign violence) – made
up in reality of ‘multiple, diverse, repeated and cumulative violence’ – was lived
by the colonial subject at the level of blood and muscle. It forced the colonised to
see his life as a ‘permanent battle against atmospheric death’. It gave the whole of
his life the semblance of ‘incomplete death’.18 But above all, it released in him the
internal anger of a ‘pursued man’ forced to contemplate the reality of a ‘truly
animal existence’.19
Every single word of Fanon was a deposition in favour of this damaged and ruined
existence. For him, critique became a relentless search for the traces of life, which,
he believed, continued to exist within this thunderous destruction. He understood
the task of critique to be a first-hand combat with death at the same time as it
announced the birth of new forms of life (Renault 2009). His incandescent
 Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon 23

words were both an attestation to and declaration of justice. To bear witness to the
colonial situation meant ‘travelling step by step the length of the wound inflicted on
the people and on Algerian soil’. It was necessary, he said, ‘to interrogate Algerian
soil, inch by inch’, to measure the fragmentation and ‘dispersal’ caused by colonial
occupation. It was necessary to bear witness to the ‘haggard and famished
orphans’; to the ‘husband carried off by the enemy and who returns with his
body covered in bruises, his life nearly extinct and his spirit extinguished’.20 In
such a context, the task of critique was to bear witness to scenes of mourning, in
those spaces of loss and destruction where the lamentations of old were replaced
by new forms of behaviour. Having experienced the struggle, one does not
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weep, nor cry out, one does not behave as one used to, he comments. Instead,
‘one grits one’s teeth and, after one more step, the death of a moudjahid who has
fallen in the field of honour will be met with cries of joy’.21 Eventually, this trans-
figuration of suffering and death would give rise to a new ‘spiritual community’.22

The Emancipatory Violence of the Native

For Fanon, settler violence was different from the violence of the native. In the first
instance, the violence of the colonised was not ideological. It was diametrically
opposed to colonial violence. Before consciously turning against colonial repres-
sion at the time of national liberation, the violence of the colonial subject was
purely responsive – ad hoc, reptilian and epileptic violence, the murderous
gesture and primal affect of ‘the hunted man’, ‘with his back to the wall’, ‘knife
pressed against his throat or, more accurately, electrodes pressing against his gen-
itals’,23 who desperately seeks ‘to show that he is prepared to fight for his life’.24
How can one convert this excess energy and this banal instinct for self-
preservation into a full and complete political statement? How can one turn it
into a counter-affirmation in the face of death purveyed by an occupying
power? How is it possible to turn it into an emancipatory gesture loaded with
value, reason and truth? This is the starting point for Fanon’s reflections on the
violence of the colonised – the violence which the colonised no longer suffers,
which is no longer imposed on him and to which he is no longer more or less
resigned. On the contrary, this is the violence that the colonised chooses to give
to the colonist. This gift is described by Fanon in the language of ‘work’ –
‘violent praxis’, as a ‘response to the initial violence of the settler’. This violence
is produced in the form of circulating energy, out of which ‘each one creates his
own violent armour’ in ‘a large chain’, a ‘large violent organism’, in the ‘mortar
built through blood and rage’. This radical rejection of imposed violence rep-
resents a significant moment in the process of re-symbolisation (Doray 2006).
The objective of this labour is to produce life. However, this life can only
‘emerge from the decomposing cadaver of the settler’.25
Fanon is aware that by choosing ‘counter-violence’, the native is opening the door
to a possibly disastrous response – the ‘coming and going of terror’.26 He believes
 24 African Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 April 2012

that in extreme circumstances, where there is no distinction between civil and

military power, the only way for the native to be restored to life is for the terms
that dictate how death is distributed to be radically redefined. The resulting
exchange is nonetheless unequal. Surely the ‘ensuing air raids and cruise missiles’
are far in excess ‘in terms of horror and size, of the response of the native’? More-
over, recourse to violence does not automatically restore the balance of empathy
between the native’s cause and the settler’s. For does not the injury or death of
‘seven Frenchmen at the Sakamody pass’ rouse greater ‘outrage among the civi-
lised’ than ‘the sacking of Guergour douars, the Djerah dechra [or] the massacre of
people who were precisely the reason for the ambush’?27
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Be that as it may, the ethical dimension of the violence of the native lies in the
close relationship between violence and healing – treatment provided to the
injured in the military hospitals of the resistance fighters, to prisoners who the
resistance refuses to kill in their beds as is done by the colonial troops, to perma-
nently mentally disordered torture victims, to Algerian women who have been
driven mad after being raped, and even to torturers haunted by the twofold
trauma and horror of their victims.28
In addition to healing the wounds of colonial atrocities, the violence of the native
achieved three goals. First it served as a call to a people caught in the grip of
history and placed in an untenable situation to exercise their freedom, to take
charge, to name themselves, to spring to life or, if they failed to do this, to be
seen to be in bad faith. They were forced to make a choice, to risk their lives,
to expose themselves, to ‘draw on all their reserves and hidden resources’29 – a
condition for achieving liberty.
Nonetheless Fanon’s theory of violence only makes sense within the context of a
more general theory, that of the rise in humanity (montée en humanité). The colo-
nised has to propel himself, by his own force, to a level above the one to which he
had been consigned as a result of racism or subjugation. The embattled human
subject, brought to his knees and subjected to abuse, rallies on his own, scales
the ramp and pulls himself up to his full height and to that of other human
beings, if necessary through violence – what Fanon termed ‘the absolute
praxis’. In this way, he restores the possibility, for him personally and for human-
ity as a whole, starting with his executioners, of new and open dialogue between
two equal human subjects where, previously, there had been opposition between a
man (the colonialist) and his object (the colonised). From then on there is no more
black or white. There is only a world finally rid of the burden of race, a world to
which everyone has a right.

Conclusion
Fanon was, at one and the same time, Martinican, Algerian, black, French and
African. He was, even more, a man of the world. Life choices had taken him
far from the Caribbean, where he was born, to Africa, where he experienced a
 Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon 25

‘new birth’ in Algeria. He had nonetheless sought this re-rooting of himself in

African soil as a way of bearing witness on behalf of the entire human race,
and, in particular, as a sacrifice in the name of the suffering body of humanity.
This is why the figure of the patient or the subject in the face of his own agony
is so fundamental to Fanon’s thought. How was one to put an end to this suffering
and agony to allow another world and other figures of the human to emerge in the
future? This is primarily what interested him.
If he was proposing any form of knowledge, this was knowledge in context –
knowledge of the dehumanising colonial context and knowledge of the means
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to bring this to an end. Whether it was a case of ‘touching the misery of the
Black man’ in the face of the racist social order or of being aware of the transform-
ation engendered by the war of liberation in Algeria, this knowledge was always
openly partisan. It did not aim for objectivity or neutrality. ‘I did not wish to be
objective. In fact that is not true: I was not allowed to be objective,’ he declared.30
It was in the first instance a case of accompanying and – wherever this was still
possible – of curing and healing those who had been wounded, decerebrated and
sent mad as a result of colonial violence.
To read Fanon today means, on the one hand, to restore his life, his work and his
language to its place in the history which he saw unfolding at the time and which
he wished to change through struggle and critique. On the other hand, it means to
translate into the language of our times the major questions which forced him to
stand up, uproot himself and travel with others, his companions, along a new
road which the colonised had to carve out on their own, through their own inge-
nuity and their indomitable will. In order to re-enact his project in contemporary
terms, we have to think both with and against Fanon, the difference between him
and some among us being that, for him, to think meant placing one’s life at risk.
Having said this, our world is no longer the same as his. His diagnosis of life after
colonialism was uncompromising. For him, there was a distinct possibility that
post-liberation politics and culture might take the road of retrogression if not
tragedy. The project of national liberation might turn into a crude, empty shell;
the nation might be passed over for the race, and the tribe might be preferred to
the state. He believed that the liberation struggle had not healed the injuries and
trauma that were the true legacy of colonialism. After liberation, the native elite
had been ensconced in intellectual laziness and cowardice. In its will to imitation
and its inability to invent anything of its own, the native bourgeoisie had assimi-
lated the most corrupt forms of colonialist and racist thought. Afflicted with
precocious senility, the educated classes were stuck in a great procession of cor-
ruption. He warned against the descent of the urban unemployed masses into
lumpen-violence. As soon as the struggle is over, he argued, they start a fight
against non-national Africans. From nationalism they pass to chauvinism, negro-
phobia and finally to racism. They are quick to insist that foreign Africans go
home to their country. They burn their shops, wreck their street stalls and spill
 26 African Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 April 2012

their blood on the city’s pavements and in the dark or dusty alleys of the shanty-
towns.
Surveying the postcolony, Fanon could see a coming nightmare – an indigenous
ruling class luxuriating in the delicious depravities of the western bourgeoisie,
addicted to rest and relaxation in pleasure resorts, casinos and beaches, spending
large sums on display, on cars, watches, shoes and foreign labels. In his post-lib-
eration nightmare, he could distinctly see stupidity parading as leadership, patri-
archy turning women into wives, vulgarity going hand in hand with the
corruption of the mind and the flesh, all in the midst of hilarity and demobilisation.
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The spectacle of Africans representing themselves to the world as the archetype of

stupidity, brutality and profligacy, he confided, made him angry and sick at the
heart.31
Globally, new forms of colonial warfare and occupation are taking shape, with
their share of counterinsurgent tactics and torture, Guantanamo-style camps,
secret prisons, their mixture of militarism and plundering of resources from
afar. New forms of social apartheid and structural destitution have replaced the
old colonial divisions. As a result of global processes of accumulation by dispos-
session, deep inequities are being entrenched by an ever more brutal economic
system. The ability of many to remain masters of their own lives is once again
tested to the limits. The question of self-determination has perhaps changed
face, but it continues to be posed in terms that are as fundamental as those in
Fanon’s time. Novel forms of balkanisation are being re-instituted around increas-
ingly deadly walls and boundaries. The freedom to move is increasingly restricted
for many racial categories. No wonder under such conditions, many are not only
willing to invoke once again Frantz Fanon’s heretic name, his sparkling, volcanic
voice and exploding face. They are willing to stand up and rise again.
If we owe Fanon a debt it is for his idea that in every human subject there is some-
thing indomitable and fundamentally intangible which no domination – no matter
in what form – can erase, eliminate, contain or suppress, or at least completely.
Fanon tried to grasp how this ‘something’ could be reanimated and brought
back to life under conditions of subjugation. He argued that this irrepressible
and relentless pursuit of freedom required the mobilisation of all life reserves. It
was the way in which this ‘something’ worked that Fanon strove to understand.
This is why his work represented, for all the oppressed, a kind of fibrous
lignite, a weapon of steel.
I myself have been attracted to Fanon’s name and voice because both have the
brightness of metal. His is a metamorphic thought, animated by an indestructible
will to live. What gives this metallic thinking its force and power is the air of
indestructibility and, its corollary, the injunction to stand up. It is the inexhaustible
silo of humanity that it houses and which, yesterday, gave the colonised strength
and which, today, allows us to look forward to the future (Mbembe 2010b).
 Metamorphic Thought: The Works of Frantz Fanon 27

Note on Contributor
Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits
Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the
Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of many books,
including On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
His latest book is Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l’Afrique decolonisee
(Paris: La Decouverte, 2010).

Notes
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1. ‘My decision is not to assure responsibility at all cost under the fallacious pretext that nothing
else is to be done’, see Oeuvres (Fanon 2011:733–5).
2. See Fanon’s notes on psychiatry in Oeuvres 623 et ss.
3. Oeuvres 266; then 627.
4. Oeuvres 403.
5. Oeuvres 261.
6. Oeuvres 627.
7. See A. Mbembe ‘L’universalité de Frantz Fanon’ [The Universality of Frantz Fanon] in
Oeuvres.
8. See ‘Vers une pensée politique postcoloniale. À partir de Frantz Fanon’ [Towards postcolonial
thought. After Fanon], Tumultes 31, octobre 2008; ‘Frantz Fanon, 50 ans après’ [Frantz Fanon,
50 years on], Contretemps, 10, juin 2011; Temps modernes. See also Olivier Doubre, ‘La
dignité de Fanon’ [The dignity of Fanon], Politis 10, novembre 2011; Louis-Georges Tin,
‘Frantz Fanon, la colère vive’ [the anger of Frantz Fanon], Cahiers du Monde 20773, vendredi
4 novembre 2011; Philippe Chevalier, ‘Fanon, l’homme révolté’ [Fanon the rebel], L’Express
19/25 Octobre 2011; Éric Fassin, ‘La question raciale . . .’ [The question of race], L’Humanité
Dimanche, 24/30 novembre 2011. Also see, André Lucrèce, Frantz Fanon et les Antilles,
[Frantz Fanon and the Caribbean] La Teneur (Éd), 2011; and Mathieu Renault, Frantz
Fanon. De l’anticolonialisme à la critique postcoloniale [Frantz Fanon. From anticolonialism
to postcolonial criticism], Paris, Éd. Amsterdam, 2011.
9. ‘Nous nous sommes mis debout et nous avançons maintenant. Qui peut nous réinstaller dans la
servitude?’ [We stood up and are now moving forward. Who can return us to servitude?]
Oeuvres 269.
10. Bernard Doray ‘. . . De notre histoire, de notre temps: à propos de Frantz Fanon, portrait d’Alice
Cherki’ [Our history, our times: on Frantz Fanon, portrait by Alice Cherki], http://www.frantz-
fanon.com/Histoire_Temps.htm
11. See Renault (2011) on the paradoxes and possibilities of Fanon’s politics of love.
12. Oeuvres 266, see ‘Pourquoi nous employons la violence’ [Why we resort to violence].
13. Oeuvres 413 et ss.
14. Oeuvres 494.
15. ‘Ce n’est pas le sol qui est occupé . . . Le colonialisme s’est installé au centre meme de l’indi-
vidu . . . et y a entrepris un travail soutenu de ratissage, d’expulsion de soi-meme, de mutilation
rationnellement poursuivie . . . C’est le pays global, son histoire, sa pulsation quotidienne qui
sont contestés . . . Dans ces conditions, la respiration de l’individu est une respiration observée,
occupée. C’est une respiration de combat” [There is not occupation of the land . . . Colonialism
has occupied the very heart of the human subject . . . and has carried out a exercise of sustained
scouring, expulsion of the self, rationally argued mutilation . . . It is the country as a whole, its
history, its daily pulsation that are contested . . . under these conditions the individual’s breath-
ing is observed breathing. It is combat breathing] Oeuvres 300.
16. Or sometimes, ‘le cercle de la haine’ [the circle of hatred] Oeuvres 492.
 28 African Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 April 2012

17. ‘. . . Nous aurons à panser des années encore les plaies multiples et quelquefois indélébiles faites
à nos peuples par le déferlement colonialist’ . . . [We will have to heal the multiple and some-
times indelible wounds inflicted on our people by the colonial flood] Oeuvres 625.
18. Oeuvres 361.
19. See ‘Pourquoi nous employons la violence’ [Why we resort to violence] Oeuvres 413–8.
20. Oeuvres 151.
21. Oeuvres 350.
22. Oeuvres 351.
23. Oeuvres 408.
24. Oeuvres 415.
25. Oeuvres 495.
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26. Oeuvres 492.

27. Oeuvres 492.
28. See the chapter on colonial wars and mental disorders.
29. Oeuvres 281.
30. Oeuvres 131.
31. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. In particular the chapter on ‘The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness’.

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