From Urban Press
Selected quotes from Wretched of the Earth. These annotations are provided for educational purposes only and copyright is retained by the original author. If you find this information interesting seeking out a copy of texts in their entirety is, as always, recommended.
Preface
First we must face that unexpected revelation, the strip-tease of our humanism...and it's not a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, it's affectation of sensibility were only alibis for our aggression
(Sartre in Fanon 1969, p 21)
In the past we made history and now it is being made of us.
(ibid. p 23)
Concerning Violence
The settler owes the fact of his very existence, that is to say his property, to the colonial system.
(Fanon 1969, p 30)
The originality of the colonial context is that the economic substructure is also a superstructure...you are rich because you are white and you are white because you are rich.
(p 32)
The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odessey. He is the absolute beginning : "This land was created by us"; he is the unceasing cause: "If we leave all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages"
(p 41)
The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native that he alone is the master.
(p 43)
Violence in the International Context
This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and comes directly from the soil and from the sub-soil of that under-developed world. The well being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negros, Arabs, Indians and the Yellow races.
(p 76)
Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under-developed peoples.
(p 81)
Spontaneity : Its Strength and Weakness
This is why you often hear the country people say of town dwellers that they have no morals...it is the antagonism which exists between the native who is excluded from the advantages of colonialism and his counterpart who manages to turn colonial exploitation to his account.
(p 91)
The Pitfalls of National Conscious
In these poor under-developed countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime.
(p 139)
This get-rich-quick middle class...remembers what it has read in European text-books and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe but its caricature.
(p 141)
The bourgeoisie... tries to hide this mediocrity by buildings which have prestige att the individual level, by chromium plating on big American cars, by holidays on the Riviera and weekends in neon-lit night-clubs.
(p 141)
Wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organized, protected robbery.
(p 153)
