Fanon is a skilled writer, full of bravura and wonderful words. Alas, much of the work, especially in the first half, is best read by someone with a background in the history of the cultures about which Fanon writes. Not knowing African colonial history, I felt lost for much of it.
Where Fanon shines most for a reader like me comes about midway through the book. Here, Fanon begins to focus on how colonial subjects react when they are finally given their freedom from the colonizing country. In essence, Fanon notes, they often fall into same traps that existed in the culture beforehand. A few take the lead and become, essentially, the colonizers, playing the roles that have been left vacant, while the rest continue in their colonized state. No real solution, as such, comes into being, despite national freedom. This seems almost a running them throughout the rest of the book, as Fanon examines cultural output and personal views of one's self.
The last chapter, indeed, talks of how colonizers often talk of the colonized people--that is, that such people have less intellectual capacity and a tendency toward violence rather than suicide. But Fanon shows clearly how these cultural projections of the colonizers onto the colonized are unfair and inaccurate, if not in part a response to the colonial state itself. Without the ability to act against the colonizer and reduced to low states, the colonized turn on each other, fighting for the few resources granted. "Crime," Fanon notes, drops in a revolutionary period, as people move against power rather than themselves.
The conclusion calls for people to build new models of government and existence. It is all good and well for the third world to thrive, but if it merely mirrors the first world, real gains to the human race will never be achieved.
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