The primary categories embodied in social life responsible for the widespread failure of recognition in Algeria since the French invasion in 1830 and until its independence in 1961 are those of colonised and coloniser. Frantz Fanon's revolutionary psychiatry, most fully developed in The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004), aimed to dispel the insidious effects of these embodied categories from social life.
However, despite Algeria's achieving independence from France, the violent means by which Fanon thought a society of equals could be constituted in Algeria did not bear the fruits he hoped for. Over a million pieds noirs (Algerians of European ancestry) fled Algeria after the war in one of the largest mass migrations of the twentieth century. Had they stayed, they would likely have been slaughtered by the Front de libération nationale (FLN), the movement Fanon loyally supported, as were thousands of Harkis (Muslim Algerians who fought on the side of the French during the war) and their families in the wake of the FLN's ascension. This is to say nothing of the thousands massacred and murdered in the internecine jostling for power and extrajudicial summary executions of FLN members during the war. The FLN, following the footsteps of its foe, left a veritable trail of blood in its wake and laid the groundwork for the ensuing dictatorship still in power today, posthumously dashing Fanon's hopes.
Contrary to Fanon's predictions and hopes, since 1961 Algeria has remained a country blighted by a recalcitrant FLN-led dictatorship that has murdered thousands of Muslim Algerians during its protracted reign. Fanon would have been horrified had he lived to see the failed fruits of his efforts. His failure to predict the outcomes of the violence that he endorsed points to the failure of his revolutionary psychiatry. An Indigenous counterpart replaced endogenous dehumanisation. So the question remains: how could a society guided by the ideal of mutual recognition be built after over a century of unspeakable colonial denigration? This is the question I aim to explore in the pages that follow.
I will contrast Fanon's views with Hannah Arendt's, particularly those explored in On Violence (1970), where Arendt offers a plausible critique of Fanon (and Jean-Paul Sartre's bloodthirsty interpretation of Fanon), and On Revolution ([1963] 2006), where she defends republicanism as a politics grounded in the ideal of active and ongoing citizen participation in a society where all are recognised as equals. I should mention at the outset that Arendt's republicanism would not, for reasons she provides, have found fertile ground in Algeria. Fanon's ideal political order is not all that distinct from Arendt's, but the means by which Fanon thought such an ideal could find expression in society could not give him what he wanted. Indeed, it seems that any attempt to rectify the living legacy of iniquity in Algeria was doomed, pointing to the tragic predicament Fanon found himself in.
I should mention that Fanon's defenders tend to fail to place Fanon's philosophy in the richly complex context from which it emerged or pay serious attention to the lessons of history. More historically sensitive scholars, historians and sociologists amongst them, are often deeply critical of Fanon, for his views failed the test of history. Even though Fanon tends to attract ardent followers, very few of them, if any, accept his defence of revolutionary violence in the form it appears in his writing. Defenders of Fanon, such as Lewis Gordon (2015) and Nigel Gibson (2003), tend either to make his account seem more palatable than it is to contemporary sensibilities or, relatedly, to show that his endorsement of violence is only one relatively minor aspect of his writings. It is undoubtedly true that Fanon thought, not entirely unreasonably, that armed struggle was the only legitimate response by the disenfranchised in Algeria and other countries blighted by extreme colonial brutality. However, he did not think that violence in the form of armed struggle was necessarily the best response to colonial oppression. Instead, Fanon thought it was a pragmatic necessity in the Algerian case. Unfortunately, violence did not do the liberatory work Fanon hoped it would for reasons at the heart of Arendt's critique of Fanon. Even though Fanon did not think violence was the only means by which a people could liberate themselves, and contrary to his defenders, violence is tightly woven into his entire account of Third World liberation. To be sure, violence rid Algeria of French imperialism in its crudest form, but it left a ruthless dictatorship in its place, which was born of violence, for reasons we will explore below. So, I cannot entirely agree with Fanon's defenders, and I will show that, in fact, his endorsement of violence is woven into the entire fabric of his last two books, those he wrote once he had committed himself entirely to the cause of Algerian independence. His defenders miss the genuinely tragic dimension of his situation, where you are “damned if you do, damned if you don't”.
Arendt, on the other hand, has quite rightly been criticised for her often heavy-handedness, brutal insensitivity, and blinkered outlook on struggles for Black emancipation on campuses in the United States. Still, her flippant and insensitive comments do not affect the rich aspects of her argument that I deploy on these pages.
Fanon's revolutionary psychiatry, developed most fully in The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004), aimed to create a society where each recognised the humanity of all, a disalienated society no longer hobbled by dehumanising prejudice. For mutual recognition to transform the colonial Manichean order, Fanon argued, the socially embodied categories of colonised and coloniser had to cease to inform the shape of Algerian society. He thought this could only be achieved through armed struggle, a kind of shock therapy exerted on colonialism. Not doing so would fail to expunge the dependency complex, responsible for self-misrecognition, informing the lives of the colonised and that it would perpetuate the culture of entitlement and the racism that is a defining mark of colonialism.
But Fanon did not only show us this. He also offered a rich account of how colonial relationships were transformed through the armed struggle against a colonial foe. In his last two books, A Dying Colonialism ([1959] 1980) and The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2004), he explored in considerable detail how human relationships, in general, would be transformed by the revolutionary process. The transformation, he thought, would not happen if the only concern was to rid the country of colonialism. How colonialism is deposed is crucial for erecting a healthy democratic order. And, perhaps most importantly, Fanon stressed the dangers of neocolonialism, of a political order that, rather than bringing something new into the world, namely a democratic order constituted by disalienated citizens, reproduces the horrors of colonialism by other means.
Fanon knew that the Algerian majority was in no position to govern itself before the revolutionary onslaught, given to a large extent the levels of degradation brought about by over a century of French brutality. He thought that the revolutionary process itself, the ‘brutality’ that is ‘typically revolutionary’ ([1961] 2004: 95), would bring about the relevant transformation in the psyche of the Algerian people, downtrodden, rigidly traditional and suffering from a dependency complex. He showed us how, during the War of Independence, women were on the path of becoming emancipated, of appearing, so to speak, ‘unveiled’ in social space as equals to men through the pressures imposed on them and their families by the creative momentum that reconfigured human relations set in motion by the pragmatic needs of the independence struggle; how relationships between siblings and between siblings and parents were becoming less hierarchical and rigid and more equal; how the relationship between Western-trained doctors and Muslim patients shifted from racism and suspicion to a relationship of trust; how the racist Manichean order was being undermined by the presence of European and Jewish Algerians willing to put their lives on the line for independence; and how artists and intellectuals were coming closer to the fellagha and how the character of their art and their concerns were becoming less remote and nostalgic the more it was placed at the service of the struggle. I should mention in passing that I cannot entirely agree with Fanon's instrumental conception of good art, and Fodéba Keïta's propagandistic poem ([1961] 2004: 163–166), approvingly quoted in its entirety in The Wretched, attests to my concerns. Nonetheless, in general terms, his account of disalienation is attractive and, initially, at least, plausible. It furnishes us with a rich trove of possible lines of flight. At the heart of his concerns are transformations in regimes of solidarity, where people increasingly find themselves – that is, recognise themselves – fully as people once again or for the first time.
The alienation he wanted to eradicate affected and probably still affects Algerian society, where people across the board fail to meet each other or even themselves. This was also a feature of concentration camp life as vividly described, among others, by Primo Levi ([1958] 2013), József Debreczeni ([1950] 2023), Victor Frankl ([1946] 2004) and Jean Améry (2005). Indeed, both Améry and Frankl compare concentration camp life with the life of the colonised, and Fanon ([1961] 2004: 88) compares colonialism with concentration camp life. Dehumanising brutality – that is, the brutality that, among other things, destroys the ability of people to recognise themselves and to recognise those they suffer with as full-blown human beings – is a feature of colonialism and concentration camp life.
Despite the attractiveness of Fanon's account of the process of disalienation, it is mistaken. The mass brutality necessary for ridding Algeria of the French could not lead to the politics of recognition that Fanon envisaged, that is, a regime where the humanity of all is recognised and affirmed.
When Theory Meets Reality
The net result of the struggle for independence was the replacement of one tyranny for another. The democratic order informed by the mutuality of ‘brothers’-in-arms, which channelled the energies of the entire Algerian population in the direction of radical egalitarianism, where the humanity of the oppressed was validated and affirmed, was not to be. Algeria today is a country blighted by a recalcitrant FLN dictatorship that, when threatened, does not shy away from indiscriminate ferocity as attested by the Algerian Civil War (December 1991 – February 2002), where thousands perished, many in ways inspired by the atrocities committed by the French in Algeria during the War of Independence (1954–1962). There is little evidence that the transformations Fanon explored endured beyond this conflict, if they existed at all outside Fanon's vivid imagination.
Moreover Fanon, in spite of his brilliant analysis of neo-colonialism and of the failure of the national elites of the Third World, failed to foresee how tragically or even just pathetically these once-inspiring revolutions can ebb, and how readily the human being that has just emerged from the spirit of violence surrenders his new-found dignity and submits to dictatorship. He was spared having to witness how the Algeria of Ben Bella and certainly that of Boumedienne perverted the revolutionary dream. (Améry 2005: 17)
At any event, no body politic I know of was ever founded on equality before death and its actualization in violence; the suicide squads in history, which were indeed organised on this principle and therefore often called themselves ‘brotherhoods’, can hardly be counted among political organizations. But it is true that the strong fraternal sentiments collective violence engenders have misled many good people into the hope that a new community together with a ‘new man’ will arise out of it. The hope is an illusion because no human relationship is more transitory than this kind of brotherhood, which can be actualised only under conditions of immediate danger to life and limb.
Indeed, it could be argued that solidarity in arms is always compromised in revolutionary situations where death comes cheap and fast. Such ‘brotherhoods’ are only brotherhoods in a corrupted sense. In that case, it is even harder to imagine how corrupted solidarity, if indeed this could be thought of as a form of solidarity, could form the basis for creating an adequately constituted democratic order. But in any case, brotherhoods ‘founded in equality before death’ cannot create a ‘body politic’. Even if widespread solidarity amongst combatants were genuine, it would still be the case that the solidarity in question is of the wrong sort. It is not, as Arendt argues above, the requisite political solidarity, the kind that creates political order and the institutions that constitute it. People in a revolutionary situation congregate with the precise and finite aim of defeating the enemy, and the structures formed in battle are unavoidably shaped by command obedience relationships. This basic structure more closely resembles a dictatorship than a democracy, and this is indeed what came to pass in Algeria, rather than a genuinely democratic order grounded on the principle of equality, which at its heart is the principle of mutual recognition. Fanon failed to see these problems clearly in his writing, although he sometimes expressed more clarity of vision in private conversations with trusted interlocutors.
In private conversations, as reported by Simone de Beauvoir ([1963] 1971: 430) and Claude Lanzmann (2012: 340–341), Fanon expressed his highly idealised conception of the fighters in the interior but also talked about the climate of suspicion, intrigue and murder amongst the FLN's exiled leadership in Tunis. For instance, he knew full well that his friend, known as the architect of the FLN, Abane Ramdane, was murdered by men working for shady high-ranking FLN official Abdelhafid Boussouf, and knew that he would probably end up like Ramdane if he did not toe the line.
‘Look! A Negro!’ It was a passing sting. I attempted a smile.
‘Look! A Negro!’ Absolutely. I was beginning to enjoy myself.
‘Look! A Negro!’ The circle was gradually getting smaller. I was really enjoying myself. ‘Maman, look, a Negro; I'm scared!’ Scared! Scared! Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question. . . . Nausea. (Fanon [1952] 2021: 90–92)
The social order held up by force and responsible for the overdetermination must be transfigured through a struggle that changes the relationships between human beings such that they recognise each other as fully human. For Fanon, this amounted to working cooperatively on the joint project of building and maintaining a just order. Such an order is one where freedom can prosper, where the gaze of the other does not adversely affect agents’ abilities to have a say on how their lives will go.
Exposed to daily incitement to murder resulting from famine, eviction from his room for unpaid rent, a mother's withered breast, children who are nothing but skin and bone, the closure of a worksite and the jobless who hang around the foreman like crows, the colonised subject comes to see his fellow man as a relentless enemy. If he stubs his bare feet on a large stone in his path it is a fellow countryman who has put it there, and the meager olives he was about to pick, here are X's children who have eaten them during the night. Yes, during the colonial period in Algeria and elsewhere a lot of things can be committed for a few pounds of semolina. One can kill. You need to use your imagination to understand these things. Or your memory. In the concentration camps, men killed each other for a morsel of bread. I can recall one horrible scene. It was in Oran in 1944. From the military camp where we were waiting to embark, the soldiers threw bits of bread to some Algerian children who fought for them in a frenzy of rage and hatred. A veterinarian could no doubt explain these events in terms of the famous ‘pecking order’ noted in farmyards where the corn is bitterly fought over. The strongest birds gobble up all the grain while the less aggressive grow visibly thinner. Any colony tends to become one vast farmyard, one vast concentration camp where the only law is that of the knife. (Fanon [1961] 2004: 231–232)
Solidarity through an armed anti-colonial struggle was, Fanon thought, the only way to channel unproductive energies born of frustration and pain around a meaning-making nation-building project. The broken peasant would transmogrify into fellagha. The ‘colonised intellectual’, through his contact with the peasant warrior, would become a nationalist intellectual who would transcend his stifling nostalgia for a remote past that is no more, or which never was, and would become the voice of the nation and, later on, internationalist struggle. The urban worker would see the light and join the ranks of the revolutionaries. Family relations would be transformed, mainly as veiled women, initially confined to the home, would be liberated by becoming active members of the struggle. By shifting their relations with the majority population, European Algerians would cease to be oppressors, and race talk would lose its currency, giving way to a non-racialist future and the birth of a ‘New Man’. These shifting relations would oust the colonial order, and the same efforts would create a new order guided by an ethics of mutual recognition. In short, the revolutionary process that Fanon envisioned would humanise the social gaze by transforming human relations from unproductive, mutually demeaning relations to relations where the humanity of all Algerians, Muslim and non-Muslim, would be recognised and affirmed.
But the means by which Fanon thought this regime could be constituted did not bear the fruits he hoped for. Arguably, his central mistake was to believe that revolutionary solidarity could be the basis for constructing a just social order guided by the ideal of mutual recognition, which Fanon thought was the proper aim of revolutionary violence. As Arendt points out in her On Revolution, as quoted above, another form of solidarity is required for healthy nation-building. The solidarity of armed struggles, the solidarity of ‘brothers’, is temporally bound by the exigencies of war and remains only in so far as the revolutionary aims are being pursued. It lacks enduring stability and the creative, open-ended character required for building a healthy political order. The solidarity of ‘brothers’ is very different from that of citizens. The solidarity of ‘brothers’, if that is what it is, is driven by the need to destroy the oppressor and is constituted mainly by directives from above accompanied by genuine threats to life and limb. The solidarity of ‘brothers’ is a solidarity of militants rather than of citizens. The solidarity of citizens is the solidarity of those involved in a nation-building process. One is solidarity in construction and dialogue, and the other is solidarity in destruction, obedience and fleeting fraternity. In On Revolution, Arendt argues that these two processes are radically distinct and must not be confused. This is why she thinks that violence is anti-political in so far as it cannot build anything new. It can only clear the ground for the birth of something new, a political process guided by the ideal of mutual recognition.
Moreover, the danger of violence, even if it moves consciously within a nonextremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world. (Arendt 1970: 79–80)
Can people who kill innocents in cold blood be called liberators? If so, have they considered for a moment that their ‘violence’ will engender more ‘violence’, will legitimise it, and will hasten its terrible manifestation? They know that the people are unarmed, bunched together in their villages, immensely vulnerable. Are they knowingly preparing for the massacre of ‘their brothers’? Even by admitting that they are bloodthirsty brutes – which in any case does not excuse them but, on the contrary, goes against them, against us, against the ideal that they claim to defend – they have to consider sparing us so as not to provoke repression. Unless liberation means something different for them than it does for us. We thought that they wanted to liberate the country along with its inhabitants. But maybe they feel that this generation of cowards that is proliferating in Algeria must first disappear, and that a truly free Algeria must be repopulated with new men who have not known the yoke of the secular invader. One can logically defend this point of view. Too logically, unfortunately. And, gradually, from suspicions to compromises and from compromises to betrayals, we will all be declared guilty and summarily executed in the end. (Feraoun [1962] 2000: 84–85)
There is a brutality and contempt for subtleties and individual cases which is typically revolutionary, but there is another type of brutality with surprising resemblances to the first one which is typically counterrevolutionary, adventurist, and anarchist. If this pure, total brutality is not immediately contained it will, without fail, bring down the movement within a few weeks. (Fanon [1961] 2004: 95)
The rarity of slave rebellions and of uprisings among the disinherited and downtrodden is notorious; on the few occasions when they occurred, it was precisely ‘mad fury’ [these are Fanon's words] that turned dreams into nightmares for everybody. In no case, as far as I know, was the force of these ‘volcanic’ outbursts, in Sartre's words, ‘equal to that of the pressure put on them’. To identify the national liberation movements with such outbursts is to prophesy their doom – quite apart from the fact that the unlikely victory would not result in changing the world (or the system), but only its personnel. (Arendt 1970: 21)
At the time, if I had had the money, I would have paid the French soldiers so that they would torture Algerians. Why? Because when an Algerian dies as a result of torture, he has ten to twenty relatives who will avenge his death and join the FLN. (Yacef and Dingeman 2008: 57)
Martyrs and their families are mere commodities in the eyes of the revolutionary elites. Murder, in such circumstances, comes cheap. Humans in Yacef's mind are chips in an unholy game. And Yacef's views are not outliers. They are the norm in violent revolutions. This is only to be expected when a concern for the ends overwhelms a concern for the means.
Over a million pied noirs (Algerians of European ancestry) fled Algeria in the wake of the war in one of the largest mass migrations in the twentieth century. Had they stayed, it is almost certain they would have been slaughtered. Evidence for this is that thousands of Harkis (Muslims who fought on the side of the French during the war) and their families were murdered by the FLN, the movement Fanon loyally supported, as soon as the FLN rose to power. This is to say nothing of the thousands murdered in the internecine jostling for power during the war and extrajudicial summary executions of FLN members driven by the paranoid fear stoked by French intelligence of vast spy networks. One killed just in case, something that points in the direction of dehumanising the warrior in the eyes of the leadership. They were meant for higher aims and, hence, were disposable. Everything was placed at the service of higher aims and the consequent instrumentalisation of concrete lives for the sake of a promise, indeed a dream.
Today, Algeria is a country blighted by a recalcitrant FLN-led dictatorship, run by some of the worst elements to come out of the movement, that has murdered tens of thousands of Muslim Algerians during their protracted reign. Fanon would have been horrified had he lived to see the fruits of his efforts. His widow Josie Fanon's suicide in 1989, it seems, was at least partly motivated by the carnage on the streets, which she witnessed shortly before her final act. In his forward to The Wretched, Homi K. Bhabha comments that after seeing the carnage and speaking to Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Josie Fanon sighed: ‘Oh Frantz, the wretched of the earth again’ ([1961] 2004: XXX). Indigenous terror replaced exogenous terror. I wonder what book he would have written after The Wretched of the Earth had he witnessed the long-term effects of the therapeutic violence he inconsistently endorsed. Maybe revolutionary and psychiatrist would have become reconciled. He died prematurely of leukaemia in 1961, shortly before independence. It is anyone's guess how his revolutionary philosophy would have changed in light of what came to pass after independence. But, being honest with himself, he would have had to recognise that his revolutionary politics of recognition failed. Dehumanisation continued unabated.
A Tragic Predicament
So, the question remains: how could a society guided by the ideal of mutual recognition and solidarity be built after over a century of unspeakable colonial denigration? My meandering will not satisfy those who, like Fanon, seek perfect justice at any cost. But even a highly imperfect justice seemed to elude Algeria. It appeared that after decades of low-level resistance, punctuated by moments of revolt and repeated attempts at achieving a more just integration, the only option left open to Muslim Algeria was to lash out violently with relentless fury. They were placed between a rock and a hard place. The result was carnage and the perpetuation of tyranny by other means.
Fanon wanted colonialism to end. He wanted the coloniser–colonised duality to end. In other words, he wanted the Manichean order set up by the French – the order that fostered alienation and misrecognition – to come to an end and, in its place, a society of equals working together for the love of country could to be created from the ashes of the old. This is the aim of his last book, The Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon's was a tragic predicament. He dreamt of justice, and the best he got was a personnel change. The path of negotiations had failed repeatedly for decades before the war, and it was clear that France would not leave voluntarily. It had to be forced out violently if it was going to leave. France was blighted by greed, arrogance and racism. It was in no position, psychologically (politically, demographically and economically) speaking, to leave those it saw as vermin to have their freedom.
So, gentlemen, why do you fight? If nothing is going to change, at least spare lives and let us be. When soldiers kill children, women, simpletons, innocents, it is neither new nor scandalous. You are neither French soldiers nor police officers. Do not consider yourselves powerful men or administrators. You have no right to do that. And if you insist on it, we will hate you. When the country begins to fear and detest you, you will no longer amount to anything. You will be nothing more than bandits, just as you are already called, or criminals who deserve to be hanged. And when they execute you, the country will breathe a sigh of relief. (Feraoun [1962] 2000: 86–87)
Feraoun's was a desperate plea, given the daily brutalities he witnessed from all sides against his Berber neighbours. His view, distilled from his Journal ([1962] 2000), is that whatever solution is sought must not only aim to dispel the French. It must also effectively bring about change for the better where all can live together, recognising each other's humanity and all this implies.
If asked, ‘Was the war worth it?’ I would reply in the negative. But, then, what alternative exists for giving Algeria a more human face, to borrow Fanon's expression? Perhaps none. This possibility must not be discounted. But it must not be embraced too eagerly either, for it can easily lead to complacency. What is crucial is that revolutionaries must think beyond violence. They must, always shunning mere abstractions and wishful thinking, start building institutions mediating between political power and the wider population such that the polyphony of voices that is the mark of a free society can influence the political sphere. This polyphony is a crucial expression of a society structured by the idea of mutual recognition.
In her On Violence (1970), Arendt observes that all politically motivated violence can achieve is destroy an old order, good or bad. It cannot build anything. If she is correct, the redemptive violence proposed by Fanon is a chimaera. And I think it is. One cannot build by destroying.
Institution-Building: Arendt's Republican Ideal
Arendt argues that a revolution driven by necessity cannot build the institutions required to give birth to a new political order. The masses, driven by necessity, become a unanimous voice, a mob responding to the dual commands of their leaders and the necessities of life. This undifferentiated mass – described as such because it operates as one, like prisoners of echo chambers – cannot build the structures that would allow for an agential order to arise, which promotes a society of individuals working together for the common good of all, a society guided by the ideal of mutual recognition. Their interests are fundamental and are informed by the bare necessities of life. They are the voice of hunger. Incidentally, this argument is borrowed from Marx and implicitly criticises Fanon's departure from Marx and his Maoist leanings.
For all voices to be recognised, we need institutions where individuals can dialogue with their peers and influence political processes. Mechanisms must be in place for the ongoing toing and froing of humans involved in the conversation to find its way up to the highest echelons of political power. One way of describing Arendt's republican ideal is as a politics of recognition where citizens appear in the public domain through active participation as distinct human beings rather than as masses to be mobilised for this or that cause. Arendt worried about the ‘tyranny of the majority’. The litmus test of a healthy political order is whether or not minority voices are crowded out.
From the tragic corner where the world had pushed him, Fanon thought that solidarity in violence brought about by a shared vision of justice could save Algeria and the so-called ‘Third World’ from the predators up north. There was no other option in his eyes, and he was almost certainly right to think that it was only through violence that France would depart. But he was wrong to believe that solidarity of the right sort, or even the mythical solidarity of ‘brothers’, could be born of violence. As Arendt recognised, this form of solidarity, if it can be called that, is transient and hence unstable, built around specific aims that, once achieved, no longer demand the bonds of fighters. These bonds do not lead to the solidarity required for the nation-building that Fanon hoped for. Without being blind to the horrors of slavery and the mass genocide of Indigenous populations in the United States, Arendt thought that a republican order, roughly modelled on the United States’ early experiments with politics before independence, betrayed shortly after independence, could do this ideally.
Political solidarity is the solidarity of new beginnings, of natality, as Arendt ([1958] 1998) put it. The horrors witnessed and perpetrated by the fellagha, including the indiscriminate murders committed by them against their people, did quite the opposite of the politico-therapeutic work Fanon had envisaged. If people can think independently, they will tend to diverge from the lightning certainties that lead true believers to take up arms and fight to the death. There is a kind of anti-democratic tendency in the single-minded heroism demanded of armed revolutions. And there is also the significant fact that life is cheapened once killing becomes the order of the day. Pawns in an unholy game will tend to struggle to recognise each other as humans. A new humanity did not and cannot rise from the ashes. Violence can, at best, help clear the ground for constructing a political order. Fanon's political Elysium could never spontaneously emerge from the violence of ‘brothers’ working together to depose the colonial order. Algeria continues to be blighted by the culture set in motion by colonial power and the reaction to it.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kelly Hamilton for her valuable feedback on an early version of this article, in which she invited me to rethink the idea of brotherhood-in-arms.
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