Quotes from Frantz Fanon

The more the people understand, the more vigilant they become, the more they realize in fact that everything depends on them and that their salvation lies in their solidarity, in recognizing their interests and identifying their enemies. The people understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the spoils from an organized protection racket.

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things.

The land belongs to those who work it.

The national bourgeoisie in the underdeveloped countries should not be combated because it threatens to curb the overall, harmonious development of the nation. It must be resolutely opposed because literally it serves no purpose.

The fundamental duel between which seemed to be that between colonialism and anti-colonialism, and indeed between capitalism and socialism, is already losing some of its importance. What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.

We must elevate the people, expand their minds, equip them, differentiate them, and humanize them.

The colonized, underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense of the term. Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech.

Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all, for in concrete fact everyone will be discovered by the troops, everyone will be massacred—or everyone will be saved.

There can be no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that "Negroes" are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural superiority. There will be no such thing as a black culture . . .

No leader, no matter how valuable he may be, can substitute himself for the popular will; and the national government, before concerning itself about international prestige, ought first to give back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because human consciousness and sovereign men dwell therein.

On the contrary we must persuade ourselves that colonialism is incapable of procuring for colonized peoples the material conditions likely to make them forget their quest for dignity. Once colonialism has understood where its social reform tactics would lead it, back come the old reflexes of adding police reinforcements, dispatching troops, and establishing a regime of terror better suited to its interests and its psychology. (147)

At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects her child form a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free reign to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune. (149)

Como el color es el signo exterior mas visible de la raza, se convierte en el criterio y en el angulo bajo el que se juzga a los hombres sin tener en cuenta sus logros educativos y sociales. Las razas de piel clara han llegado a despreciar a las razas de piel oscura y estas Ultimas se nie­gan a consentir por mas tiempo esa condici6n subordinada que les pretenden imponer

For the people the party is not the authority but the organization whereby they, the people, exert their authority and will.

Dernièrement, un camarade nous racontait cette histoire. Un Martiniquais arrivant au Havre entre dans un café. Avec une parfaite assurance, il lance : « Garrrçon ! un vè de biè. » Nous assistons là à une véritable intoxication. Soucieux de ne pas répondre à l'image du nègre-mangeant-les-R, il en avait fait une bonne provision, mais il n'a pas su répartir son effort.

The enemy digs in. The great showdown is not for today or for tomorrow. In fact it began on the very first day, and will not end with the demise of the enemy but quite simply when the latter has come to realize, for a number of reasons, that it is in his interest to terminate the struggle and acknowledge the sovereignty of the colonized people.

We have become so used to the occupier's contempt and his determination to maintain his stranglehold, whatever the cost, that any semblance of generosity or any sign of goodwill is greeted with surprise and jubilation.

New" national, international, or global emergences create an unsettling sense of transition, as if history is at a turning point; and it is in such incubational moments—Antonio Gramsci's word for the perceived "newness" of change—that we experience the palimpsestical imprints of past, present, and future in peculiarly contemporary figures of time and meaning.

Whatever gains the colonized make through armed or political struggle, they are not the result of the colonizer's good will or goodness of heart but to the fact that he can no longer postpone such concessions. Moreover, the colonized subject must be aware that it is not colonialism which makes the concessions but him.

In every combat unit and in every village, legions of political commissioners are at work enlightening the people on issues which have become stumbling blocks of incomprehension

The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a black or Arab face.

This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can only succeed by resorting to every means, including, of course, violence.

In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or the soldier.