A Dying Colonialism

“[A Dying Colonialism] continues to have for the reader years afterwards the same freshness it had at the time it was written, because Fanon’s main preoccupation was not to document the facts of exploitation, nor the sufferings of the people, nor the brutality of the imperialist oppressor. . . . His main interest has been to go to the essentials: the spirit of struggle, of opposition, of initiative of the Algerian masses;... — Adolfo Gilly, from his introduction

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Originally published in 1967

Psychiatrist, humanist, revolutionary, Frantz Fanon was one of the great political analysts of our time, the author of such seminal works of modern revolutionary theory as The Wretched of the Earth & Black Skin, White Masks. He has had a profound impact on civil rights, anti-colonialism, & black consciousness movements around the world.

A Dying Colonialism is Fanon’s incisive & illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns & embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as “primitive,” in order to destroy those oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression. This is a strong, lucid, & militant book; to read it is to understand why Fanon says that for the colonized, “having a gun is the only chance you still have of giving a meaning to your death.”

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Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925. He served in the French Army during World War II, & later studied medicine & psychiatry in France, where he published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. He joined the Algerian Nationalist Movement in the mid-1950s, & published The Wretched of the Earth shortly before dying of leukemia in December 1961.