L'an V de la révolution algérienne

"A Dying Colonialism" is one of the lesser known books by Franz Fanon, the other better known works being "Black Shin, White Masks"-"Peau noir, masques blancs" (1952) and "The Wretched of the Earth" - "les damn?s de la terre (1961)". Fanon was born on the French colony of Martinique, a descendant of African slaves, who had been brought to the Caribbean to work on the island's sugar plantations. In this book, Fanon espouses his beliefs and ideas that it is only through violent revolution that colonial repression and cultural trauma in the Third World can be ended. He argued that violence is a cleansing force which frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction, making him fearless and restoring his self-respect. In his teenage years, Fanon was politically active and participated in the guerrilla struggle against the supporters of the pro-Nazi French Vichy government. He served in the Free French forces. After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry in Paris and Lyons. Fanon argued that white colonialism imposed an existentially false and degrading existence upon its black victims to the extent that it demanded their conformity to its distorted values. The colonized is not seen by the colonizer a human being; this is also the picture the colonized is forced to accept. In 1954 the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) started its open warfare against French rule. In 1957 Fanon joined the Algerian liberation movement that sought to throw off French rule. Fanon traveled guerrilla camps, hid terrorists at his home and trained nurses to dress wounds. In 1959 he was severely wounded on the border of Algeria and Morocco. Fanon then worked briefly as an ambassador of the provisional Algerian government to Ghana and edited in Tunisia the magazine "Moudjahid". Fanon distinguished himself as revolutionary writer, whose writings had profound influence on the anti-colonial as well as revolutionary movements in the 1950s and 1960s not only in third world countries but also in the United States and Europe. Fanon himself died in 1961 and could not witness Algeria's independence.