This book is based, in large part, on private and never before seen archives of key public intellectuals during the decolonization of Algeria. Scholars who focus on decoloniztion and post-colonial studies will find this work provocative and enlightening, with far-reaching implications for today's world. Some notable characteristics of the book include the following: this is the first book to really look at conversations between French and Algerian intellectuals during decolonization; also, Pierre Bourdieu wrote a very moving forward about his relationship with Mouloud Feraoun before Feraoun was assassinated by the OAS; the chapter on Camus is fascinating and relies largely on his private papers; Le Sueur's critical analysis of the concept of the "Other" and its use by various intellectuals provides a refreshing and critical perspective. This book makes a unique contribution to fields of study such as history, anthropology, sociology, post-colonial studies, education, cultural studies, decolonization studies, and African studies. It's definitely a great read!

I think that the book was good. I can totaly relate to Qa Wasef. I also like chicken fried rice.

This collection of Tocqueville's essays concerning the colonization of Algeria and slavery are useful in forming a historical analysis of North Africa and for civil rights analysis, but I found it to be very insightful in regards to modern policy analysis, too.

Tocqueville very articulate about his desires for France's occupation of Algeria. Although he begins steadfastly in favor of colonization and never totally abandons that position, the nature of France's method of occupation heavily criticized. At one point, Tocqueville paints a strangely accurate picture of the state of the region after colonization. The description ends with "we have made Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us."

By describing colonial Algeria in terms of its utility to France, Tocqueville reminds us that misuing other nations still impacts our own welfare. By pointing out French abuses of themselves, he reminds us that our own welfare is not the only important goal. In the end, the lesson he teaches is that we are interconnected. No one empire can pay attention only to local issues.

It is true that Tocqueville was not for granting equal rights, or even citizenship, to natives...nor was he in favor of ending colonialism in any way. Rather, his comments worked within the system to encourage a more tolerant, more effective, means of working with natives. His plan did not succeed. Frances heavy-handed ways ultimately ended in a violent overthrow of the French regime. Algeria, like many Muslim colonies, is more barbaric and less educated now than before European rule.

With the US attacks on Afghanistan and continued military presence in Saudi Arabia, one hopes that we may learn the lessons offered by Tocqueville more readily than did the French.

Of all Horne's French histories, this is probably the most epic. The bleeding sore that was French Algeria led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and almost led, on three separate occasions, to a right-wing military takeover of all metropolitan France. On the other side, the ruthlessly bloody tactics of the Algerian nationalist party, FLN, make the Viet Cong look chivalrous by comparison. There are many memorable characters in this story, including the pied noir supporters (Massu, Soustelle), the French Army leaders (Challe, Salan), and the Algerian leaders (Abbas, Ben Bella, Boumedienne). But the giant of the Algerian story is and will remain General Charles De Gaulle. His political comeback in 1958, during which he founded the Fifth Republic and made his historic address ("Je vous ai compris!") to the pied noirs, bisects the whole narrative: this book falls cleanly into two sections (before and after May 1958), and De Gaulle's leadership in extricating France out of this morass was and remains monumental.

I take issue with the reader who compared The FLN to the Taliban. If anything the French were more like the Taliban--their use of torture was routine and people could hear the screams of prisoners from police stations every day.
The tragedy of North Africa and the Mid-East after colonial rule is the failure of the secular regimes and the rise of a retrograde Islam. What that area needs now are more people like Nasser or Ben Bella though hopefully with a broader vision of democracy. The alternative is Bin Laden and the Taliban. Any brutalities committed by the FLN (and there were many) pale in comparison to the French many of whom fresh out of German concentration camps apparently brought what they had learned from their captors. French colonialism in Africa was second only to Belgum in its ferocity racism and pure cruelty. That was then--what happens now is anybody's guess.

Although it was one of the deadliest counter-insurgency campaigns in history, costing over 1 million lives, English-speaking writters tend to overlook the war in Algeria. Alistair Horne's book fills that gap with a masterful narrative that weaves quotations, statistics, and analysis in a readable, journalistic style. The author balances the full horror of the conflict - massacres, razzias, torture, mob-violence - with the war's political dimension. The war in Algeria nearly cost France its democracy. An embittered, defeated military twice mutinied against a corrupt and cowardly civil authority. It concluded with De Gaulle's return (deus ex machine). The entire government resigned to make way for "le grand homme." The National Assembly granted him dictatorial powers. In a display of self-restraint all too rare in history, De Gaulle used his power to re-write the French Constitution (a dramatic improvement) and restore peace. An astute reader will be struck by the similarity between the ruthless F.L.N. and our present enemies, the Taliban. The book vividly demonstrates what can happen when civil and military authorities collide, and each decides to take matters into its own hands.

This book is an in depth look into the complexities of oppression including the master/slave relationship.

This book is expensive but it is worth it. Bulhan explicates Fanon's theory of oppression and violence from the perpsective of the oppressed as well as the oppressor. Observations and perspectives of oppression have generally come through rational thinking - here Bulhan opens the door of Fanon's mind and heart to show us what the experience of oppression and violence feels like and the damage it does to the psyche of the oppressed.

Violence is redefined as "any relation, process, or condition by which or a group violates the physical, social, and/or physical integrity of another person." This definition is then explained from the personal, institutional and structural levels where violence is an often sanctioned and legitimatized activity.

The chapter on the Master Slave Paradigms provides powerful insights into the development of the inferiority/superiority complexes. This chapter will take you past the socioeconomic causes of slavery and oppression into the human cause.

And there is much more. If you want a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of oppression, read this book.

This book is a must read. Bulhan takes the reader on a tour beginning with a "Quest for a Paradigm", to suggestions for practical solutions. The index is also packed with valuable references that will educate the reader and give a more in-depth understanding of Bulhan's and Fanon's thinking. The most interesting and captivating chapter is the one on the 'Master and Slave Paradigms.' This is not a one time read. This book book must be studied over and over due to the in-depth analysis and research that it possesses. For anyone interested in psychology and is looking for new answers to the issues facing us today, this is a must have book.

Albert Camus. I have always liked his books, especially The Plague. My favorite part of that book was not necessarily the conversations between the characters but the moments of solitude where the sensual beauty of the world is silently looked upon. Reading The First Man I found a book by Camus that I prefer to his novels and stories because in this unfinished autobiography you get the feeling you are listening to the loneliest man on earth. It is sad, but it is heartwarming, this is Camus alone and what is important to Camus stands out like it does nowhere else. In other words this is Camus outside the context we normally encounter him in which is the turbulent intellectual debates in France of the 40's and 50's. Camus never believed in the politics of the French left in regards to the Arab countries and the future course of leadership for those nations which were his home from a very early age and where this autobiographical novel takes place. Camus believed in an alliance of European and Arab peoples that would rule together. You cannot help but think Camus was perhaps trying to come to terms with his own identity which was a combination of both places, and perhaps an uneasy combination. In some ways he reminds me of T.E. Lawrence in that his ultimate vision was always at odds with almost everyone elses. Both were ultimately very lonely figures. This book concentrates on the childhood years but since we all know what the future held for Camus it is all the more moving. And that feeling for nature which required no identity and had none of its own it seems was there from the beginning.

It is, after all, about their own lives that writers write best. Here is no exception, and this book, far beyond any other recollection of childhood I have ever read, exhumes the anguish of memory. The chronicle of his past is underscored by poverty, but out of that, Camus has built an evocation of childhood that overcomes bitterness and misanthropy and finds redemption. Somehow, Camus has emerged as the completed man, the mature man, who can finally be consoled, rather than confronted, by his own past; above all, he has sketched his life as an emotional journey, and in finding solace in the destination to which he has arrived, for better or worse, he elevates those principle forces that steered his course, his mother and his childhood instructor. This is indeed, as Camus himself termed it, the novel of his maturity, and the only unfulfilling aspect of his story is that it will remain unfinished. As the story relates, however, we can always find happiness in what we have, even if it is not exactly all that we wanted.

It is, after all, about their own lives that writers write best. Here is no exception, and this book, far beyond any other recollection of childhood I have ever read, exhumes the anguish of memory. The chronicle of his past is underscored by poverty, but out of that, Camus has built a recollection of childhood that overcomes bitterness and misanthropy and finds redemption. Somehow, Camus has emerged as the completed man, the mature man, who can finally be consoled, rather than confronted, by his own past; above all, he has characterized his life as an emotional journey, and in finding solace in the destination to which he has arrived, for better or worse, he elevates those principal forces that steered his course, his mother and his childhood instructor. This is indeed, as Camus himself termed it, the novel of his maturity, and the only unfulfilling aspect of his story is that it will remain unfinished. As the story relates, however, we can always find happiness in what we have, even if it is not exactly what we wanted.

Having spent my childhood years (1976-81, when I was 5-10) in Algeria, I rushed out to get this handsome book of sixteen essays by Francophone writers reflecting on their own childhood spent in Algeria. Having read the book in one sitting, I have to confess a certain disappointment. While several of the essays are quite good and evocative, a number suffer from a kind of overwrought impressionism. The selections are to be commended for the wide range of contributors (male, female, Arab, Kabyle, Jewish, pied noir), and mainly focus on the era from the end of the first World War to independence.

My favorite essays were Malek Alloula's recounting of the springtime joy of tekouk; Albert Bensoussan's straightforwardly telling of getting lost in the market and making friends with an Arab girl who naturally disappeared to him at age eleven; Roger Dadoun's celebration of cuisine and a trip to the bathhouse; Fatima Gallaire's adventures in the house with her little brother; and Mohamed Kacimi-el-Hassani's essay on the arrival of independence and the confusion it caused in he and his classmates. The other essays do have merits scattered amongst them, most notably a solid vision of how multiethnic and multireligious Algeria has been in the past, but too often the authors forego the opportunity to present a straightforward reflection on their childhood in favor of a hindsighted metaphorical or allegorical scene. Still, those interested in Algeria would be well advised to spend the few hours it takes to read the entire work and find their own touchpoints.

Camus was right: only the sun has been kind to Algeria. Geography, demography and history have not. The thread of green with which desert yields to sea was originally named Ifriqqiya, whence comes "Africa." (Below the Sahel was "Niger.") Over the last 2,000 years its many cultures were side-by-side civilizations speaking in common the tongue of the marketplace but otherwise each their own. Among those cultures were the pre-Muslim Berbers (themselves of many tribes), Jews who condensed over the millennia like dewbeads on a thread, Arabs who arrived with the Qur'an and remained to trade. A handful of Christians remained from Roman times and many more coattailed the reconquista seeking a quick dirham. And finally the French, nominally Christian bourgeois but culturally Imperial Bourgeois. When the Algerians exploded after Dienbienphu showed colonies need not submit, the French left, but only after a ghastly fight. The political scirocco still blows and headlines in red tell of it.

How could one possibly have a happy childhood in a place like this?

A book with the right editor can illuminate the souls politicians and economists forget. The Algeria that Leïla Sebbar finds was a courtyard more than a country, and in it people reconciled their differences and got on with their lives. That's not what the history books say, but historians, too, know how sensation sells.

Ms. Sebbar is an Algerio-French professor and writer who has written of her ancestral land for many French literary reviews. Here she has revived a niche of the Algerian literary world quite popular in the 1950s that withered during the Algerian war: childhood reminiscences.

The sixteen authors in her anthology do not Pollyanna their pens through days of happy yore. There is much between the lines, and even more between those lines. The jacket blurb describes Hélène Cixous's Bare Feet as, "a deeply resonant story about a young girl's search for place in a colonial society," which "recounts how, at the age of four, an encounter with a shoeshine boy awakened her to the harsh realities of her own class standing." Anne Donadey's foreword expands that to, "The protagonist, a four-year-old girl, constantly wonders where she belongs in a world divided between colonizers and colonized ... innocent of and responsible for the injustices of the world in which she is growing up." (p. xv)

Then we get to Ms. Cixous herself, who gives flesh to these: "Suddenly I was a grown woman. ... I resolutely pretended to be the little girl I had been ordered to be. Again the feelings of shame that accompanies our lies invaded me. And it is shame that is the sign of our childhood. ... I saw the face of the little shoeshine boy and I recognized the sparkle in his eyes: it was the lust of hatred, the first shimmer of desire." (p. 58) One is only fleetingly aware until this that, as she is middle-class Jewish and he dirt-poor Arab, social standing hurls a curse even on awakening desire.

There are other references to the social chasms of skin color-the arrival of a room-hushing lily-white French boy in Mohammed Dib's Encounters relates, "We would not take our wide-open eyes-and rightly so-off him anymore, we weren't doing any work, incapable as we were of doing anything but staring." (p. 110) Jean-Pierre Millecam's grandmother's driver, "... whose soul is as delicate as his features pure, suffers from his swarthy skin tone." (p. 165) This reminds of India, where skin color still cleaves societies more visibly than economic standing and more permanently (these days) than caste.

The Algeria of these writers was no happy barrio of race and religion thriving beneath the colonial rubric "the locals." The cities were divided into enclaves-this district in Tlemcen for the Arabic Muslims; that rue in Oran where the Jews lived. Locals, yes, real people the more so. Algerian-turned-Parigot Mohammed Dib describes the arrival of his physician with, "Two imperious thumps on the front door with the knocker ... were not only dealt to the door of the house but also to that of my heart, which would instantly crumble with sadness, just that-sadness-because I already knew how to take my pain in stride. ... As if to announce them, my mother used to boil two needles for the syringes. ... He saved my leg, which by all logic should have been amputated." (p. 107)

Throughout it is writing that enchants. There are so few simple declaratives that they could hardly stand out more if printed in yellow. Annie Cohen's Viridiana my Love is a stream of consciousness romp through word-images like dessert-case sweets. As befitting the Arabic reverence for poetry, the Algerian writers are the most lyrical of the lot. Jemel Eddine Bencheikh writes sumptuously baggaged sentences-caravans, really-between first cap and full stop there is a lot of tapestry, and yet you never lose the main image. His dreamcatching story Tlemcen Up High gives us five stanzas of a uniquely Algerian popular metrical style called the tahwîf, which consists of two sung phrases to each line, originally meant to accompany pushing someone on a swing.

Ironic, the monopoles of cultural imperialism that drew these literary filings author by author to Paris. All these reminiscences were written there, encouraged there, published there. The capsule bios that preface each dolefully announce in the sentence after their name, "So-and-so has been living in Paris since ...." Pushed there by the Franco-Algerian war of the 1960s and the ethnopolitical pogroms thereafter, they now write mainly for Francophone literati. How cheering it must have been for them to disalign from the magnet of Racine, Stendahl, et al, and realign themselves to the multipole that once was Algeria-ethnic, religious, economic, geographic-by way of childhoods regained. These memoires are stunning testimony to the eloquence France ignored but these filings retained.

This is a unique collection of 16 autobiographical recollections by male, female, settler, indigenous, Arab, Kabyle, French, and Jewish writers who grew up in Algeria. Anne Donadey, in the book's foreword, explains how the history of Algeria influenced its writers. Sewn through some of the stories are hints at children's reactions to social distinctions, colonialism, restrictions, and war. Algeria, North Africa's largest country, has been the home to blacks, whites, Arabs, Jews, Romans, Berbers/Kabyles, Europeans, Corsicans, Christians, and Moslems. Jews moved to Algeria in the Sixth Century, the Arabs arrived in the Seventh, naming it the Maghreb for the Western setting sun of the expanding empire. More Jews and Moslems arrived during the Iberian Inquisition, the Turks arrived, and the French took over in 1830 after fighting Abdelkader for three years. Algeria's war for independence from France lasted eight years, from 1954-1962, and it and the murders that occurred before and after independence play a role in the stories. The book opens with Malek Alloula's "My Exotic Childhood" in which the Parisian poet recalls the Tekouk, that springtime season of anticipation, smelling of pine resin and paella, a time of languid craziness that preceded Easter and Summer vacation from school. Jamel Eddine Bencheikh, a Sorbonne poet from a Tlemcen family, contributes "Tlemsen Up High." In it he recalls the springtime celebrations of al-Ourit, where girls would sing tahwif, Jewish women would pass by singing Passover songs and exchange greetings and sweets, young men sought to play pranks, and his grandmother would recount her dreams. He recalls his Summer visits, the colors and smells, and the places he can recall only in dreams. Among my other favorites in the collection of 16 are the following: Mohammed Dib, who was born in Algeria over 80 years ago, recalls David with the Tunisian pastry stand, and the kids' fears of French people, and the fist of the French teacher. "By Independence Clear" by Mohamed Kacimi el Hassani of Zaouia d'El Hamel in Southern Algeria's plateau. In his story he recalls second grade and the Algeria's independence, when all the women baked cakes and sewed flags, his classmates wondered whether they would have to study French, and the author met Colonel Chaabani of the FLN (who would later be assasinated). In Albert Bensoussan's "The Lost Child", he recalls his mother's shopping trips to the market and his family's Rosh Hashana traditions in Algiers, where the ADA (tradition) was to eat fish, sweets, and go to the crowded casbah to purchase and eat jujube fruits that tasted of dates. It is there that the author, who knows little Arabic, loses sight of his mother at the age of six, and is saved by an Arab man (Sidi Lardjouz) and his 8 year old daughter. They become playmates for the next 3 years until... In "Bare Feet", Helene Cixous, a native of Oran, now a director at Paris VIII, she recalls Oran, its sailors and natives, how her doctor father became a pedicure under Vichy. The oppression makes her happy, since she no longer feels an ambiguity as to her social class. Annie Cohen, a native of Sidi-Bel-Abbes, in "Viridiana My Love", recalls housekeepers, their children, and the children of the employers. Roger Dadoun in "The Hammam" provides a story from his Shem chronicles, recalling the hammam (bath), the foods, the Sabbath shopping trips, the stores, the fritters, recipes, the backgammon at Café Benayoum, and the conversations in tetouanais/staonne. Jean Daniel, born in Blidan eighty years ago, was editor in chief of L'Express. He recalls the banality of a fun childhood, his god-like teachers, the Spanish war, and his Jewish father, a grain merchant, who could speak Berber and worshipped knowledge. In all, a quick unique reading experience.

Set in North Africa on the Mediterranean in the 1940's, the town of Oran becomes infested with bubonic plague, at first the authorities pursue a path of denial, finally the town is put under total quarantine for months until the disease has run its course. People are dying by the hundreds each week, some trying to escape or smuggle, some engaged in the most heroic acts of their lives, no one can leave and no one can come into the town as though under a siege.

Unfortunately, I found this to be the dullest thing I've read since Naipal's "A Bend in the River". In spite of the horrific events continually taking place in the book the story went on in the same monotone, passionless style from beginning to end. There is much philosophical insight in the behavior of humans in times of exile and stress from continual fear, but I think this author should have stayed away from fiction and stayed with philosophy or perhaps documentaries.

This book was like reading an extremely well written composition but it never engaged my emotions.

Of course there have been more than enough positive reviews of The Plague to make any effort on my part sound rather like preaching to the choir. What I would like to add is that, reflecting what another reviewer mentioned, this book is radically different in both its message and delivery from Camus' other masterwork, The Stranger. While I think the latter is ultimately the more effective and groundbreaking of the two, Meursault and the 'absurdity' which governed the context for his execution never reached me with the kind of explicit emotional honesty we see here displayed in Dr. Rieux. The Stranger is a thinly veiled philosophical treatise on man's powerlessness while The Plague is a book which recognizes other, more crucial, aspects of man: namely, empathy, compassion, fraternity and bravery. I found each of these characters, from the deeply conflicted Rambert to the frighteningly psycopathic Cottard, intricately sketched and almost tangibly real.

As a side note, and to finally address why this book is given four stars instead of the full five, I would just mention that Camus' fictional style has always seemed a bit bloodless and guarded to these eyes. He is a master philosopher and an utterly engaging social phenomenon, but as a writer of prose he pales in comparison with people like Faulkner and Graham Greene.

I think I actually prefer this to "The Stranger". That novel was excellent and concisely explained Camus' philosophy, but it lacks the humanity and realistic characterization that is so rich here. All the characters are well defined and believable, but also unique, and they never feel incompletely sketched or generic. Equally importantly, Camus does an excellent job showing the way these different personalities react to their horrible situation, which makes the plague in question seem all the more real.

"The Plague" is also a more uplifting slice of existentialism than "The Stranger". (What? Uplifting existentialism?) Yes, the novel creates a universe indifferent to mankind, but the novel's real stress is on individual responsibility and the necessity of struggling against evil. In a world full of various plagues, Camus encourages us to attempt to be healers. Here, he delivers the theme powerfully in a wonderful novel.

Those reviews that castigate Fanon for "glorifying violence" ought to be ignored. Fanon is writing, among other things, a phenomenology of anti-colonialism. It is meant neither as a recommendation nor a condemnation but as a description of the objective truth of a historical condition. That is, for Fanon reverse racist violent nationalism is a stage in the emergence of a political consiciousness that will eventually overcome and, indeed, renounce its own beginnings. What is remarkable is that people at present are so manifestly incapable of reading a dialctical unfolding such as this. The violence of the Algerian War had already largely taken place at the time of Fanon's writing and, let it be recalled, it was primarily the murder of Algerians by the French, for whom African imperialism is still a profitable if somewhat unsavory business.
While Fanon tracks the stages in the evolution of a radical anti-capitalist consciousness in the underdeveloped world, there is no question of his endorsing or advocating violence. One has only to read the final chapter on the psychological effects on both the colonizer and the colonized to see that Fanon is acutely aware of the brutality for all concerned of the Algerian War, even or, indeed, especially, for the oppressors themselves. There is certainly no question of his endorsing the indiscriminate horrors committed that were committed by the FLN against their oppressors.
The other thing, of course, that the petulant, anti-intellectual, ahistorical reactionaries who have shared their opinions here conveniently ignore is the violence inherent in the settler colonialism Fanon was addressing. As for the comparison with India, it is indeed illuminating, and one might profitably develop Fanon into a critique of the post-colonial India elite. After all, the real thrust of the book is its attempt to push anti-imperialism in a genuinely democratic direction, insofar as this was even possible for a largely peasant agricultural society caught within a much larger capitalist cosmos. At any rate, contra one reviewer, in the much-vaunted democracy of India, were peasants substantially liberated by the Indian National Congress from their indebtedness and from coercive labor practices? For his part, Fanon is not content with such liberal eye-wash as the talk of "Indian democracy" achieved through non-violence. In stark contrast to many other romantic commentators, he is keenly aware that there is nothing save radical democratic organized politics that can prevent post-colonial societies from a descent into poverty, despair, and the reactionary resurgence of "leadership" and virulently post-traditional "ethnicities" and "religiosities" though, in the face of the further defeat of the radical left in the West, most likely there is nothing to prevent the implosion of the Third World and the exhaustion (and extermination) of progressive energies there. Pages 95ff. in which Fanon discusses the terrible brutality of the very attempt to create industrialism in a country such as Algeria, and the awful irony of "independence" from the wealth of the colonizer are powerful and utterly ignored by most "radicals" who refuse to see that the resources already exist for the world to enjoy both opulence and sustainability.
Another thing - Fanon is inconceivable without Marxism. It informs his every argument, even if his point is only to criticize actually existing Marxisms. Therefore, the claim that "Fanon is great, except for the Marxist bit" is absurd and puerile. The real problem is that that entire intellectual language and with it the vast majority of the history of 20th century social hope is being actively forgotten. The nuances of so much of Fanon lies in the way he handles, refashions, and pushes up against the limits of the Marxian legacy as it came to him. (The idea that Fanon is a "genius" and that there are none else like him is similarly an indication of a tragic social and political amnesia, and this is not meant to detract in the slightest from the incredible achievement that is both this work and youthful masterwork "Black Skins, White Masks").
Finally, to uncritically drag Fanon into the American context, as some other reviewers want to do, is, it seems to me, potentially extremely misleading. Far more so than "Black Skins," "Wretched" is a book of its time and place. Certainly, any comparison with Malcolm X, who was no leftist and certainly no Marxist, is hopelessly misguided. Never mind the fact that Fanon's project of a liberated Algeria can scarcely be compared with the project of black American radical activists. American blacks were not colonized but forcibly transported and enslaved. More importantly, American blacks live within the heart of capitalism and Fanon's recommendation to the New World descendents of slaves would never be so crackpot as a separatist black nationalism.
There are many good grounds for criticizing Fanon, but since few reviewers seem capable of even approaching those matters, a more basic commentary seemed necessary.

Fanon is among the few thinkers who successfully wrote about emerging post-colonial nation-states. Many prefer to delve into the psychological implications of his work but I would rather view it as a warning againt the new tyranny that has its roots in the national struggle. Indeed, many nationalist movements became the new proxy for the departing colonial power thus ignoring the fact that fighters do not by default make good politicans. The dicourse of national struggle became the harbinger of the national dictatorship despite the evidence pointing to the outskirts and villages as being the impetus behind the drive for independence and not the educated classes as many claimed. I am not claiming that national struggle is bad but it has to be viewd objectively and its role must therefore end with independence to allow for genuine restructuring or else a political neo-imperialism emerges to replace direct military colonization. In both cases the winner is the colonizer who has returned in the form of the new nationl government mainly those who were educated in the West during colonization.

Reading this amazing book in 2001, the first fact that blew my mind was how relevant this book is in today's world, even though it was written in 1961.
This book is an attempt at understanding the processes of decolonialization, and offering a constructive way to make this process successful and meaningful. Seemingly, it has only historic value in today's decolonized world. But as I read the book, from its beginning to its end, I could not help finding parallels to many current world issues. Wherever there is a situation of oppressed groups trying to put an end to their oppression - the words of Fanon are relevant and enlightening.

Fanon helped me understand the attitudes of the oppressed (found today mainly in Africa and Asia), and the pitfalls of the national liberation struggles. Reading this book explained why so many countries replaced colonialism with corrupt dictatorships.

This book shows that Fanon is one of the sharpest and most truthful intelectuals of the 20th century.

I know I did not manage to convey the full impact this book had on me. The impact may become clear when I say that this book must be translated to every language, taught in every high school system, and discussed at every academic and political level.