A Dying Colonialism

In A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon examines how the Algerian people transformed themselves and their society during the first five years of their war of liberation against French colonialism, which began on November 1, 1954. Rather than cataloging suffering, Fanon argues that the Revolution produced an irreversible change in Algerian consciousness, as the colonized people shed old customs, hierarchies, and suspicions in order to fight for sovereignty.

The book opens with an introduction by Adolfo Gilly, who frames Fanon's work within a global chain of anti-colonial revolutions. Gilly situates Algeria's struggle after China's revolution in 1949, the Korean War, and France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended French rule in Indochina. He argues that Fanon's central concern is not the mechanics of warfare but the spirit of the masses, their daily heroism, and their capacity to remake themselves. Gilly draws parallels with Bolivian miners, Cuban women fighters, and Guatemalan peasant resistance to argue that Algeria's experience belongs to a universal revolutionary dynamic, one rooted in confidence in the masses' own power rather than paternalistic sympathy.

In his preface, Fanon acknowledges that the war had reached its sixth year with no political resolution. He concedes that some Algerians violated revolutionary directives, but argues that the Revolution consistently held itself accountable, penalizing offenders and publicly announcing disciplinary measures through Ferhat Abbas, president of the council of the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (G.P.R.A.), the provisional government. He contends that the old Algeria is dead: The blood shed on national soil has produced a new humanity that cannot be forced back into subjugation. The book's purpose, he declares, is to demonstrate that a new society has already come into being, making the Revolution irreversible.

The first chapter, "Algeria Unveiled," analyzes how the veil worn by Algerian women became a central battleground between colonial power and Algerian resistance. French administrators, guided by sociologists, identified the veil as the key to dismantling Algerian social cohesion. Colonial authorities launched campaigns portraying Algerian women as oppressed victims, distributing food aid alongside anti-veil propaganda and pressuring Algerian men through European employers to unveil their wives. This offensive paradoxically strengthened the veil's significance: Algerians elevated it into a sacred symbol of resistance. Fanon also examines the European psychological relationship to the veil, describing a complex of romantic exoticism, sexual frustration, and aggression.

After 1955, the revolutionary leadership began involving women as active participants. Women carried messages, money, weapons, and bombs through French checkpoints, adopting European dress to pass undetected. Fanon describes the profound bodily transformation this required: Without the veil, women experienced a sense of fragmentation and had to invent new modes of physical self-presentation. As French forces adapted their surveillance, the veil was reassumed as tactical camouflage, with women concealing explosives beneath the haïk, the large square veil covering face and body. When French colonialism staged coerced public unveiling ceremonies, Algerian women who had abandoned the veil spontaneously donned it again, affirming that their liberation would not come at the colonizer's invitation.

The second chapter, "This Is the Voice of Algeria," traces the transformation of radio from a rejected colonial instrument to a revolutionary tool. Before the Revolution, 95 percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, and Algerians dismissed Radio-Alger, the colonial radio station, as Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen. Owning a radio amounted to giving asylum to the colonizer's voice. The decisive shift occurred at the end of 1956 with the launch of the Voice of Fighting Algeria. Within 20 days, the entire stock of radio sets was bought up, and purchasing a radio became an act of national participation. French authorities responded by prohibiting sales without police vouchers and systematically jamming broadcasts. Listeners tracked shifting wavelengths for hours, often catching only fragments. When broadcasts were inaudible, groups collectively reconstructed the news, compensating for missing information with what Fanon describes as an autonomous creation of information. The Voice broadcast in Arabic, Kabyle (a Berber language spoken in Algeria), and French, reflecting a non-racial national conception that paradoxically liberated the French language from its colonial associations. Fanon notes a corresponding shift in psychiatric patients: Before 1954, Algerians experiencing hallucinations heard hostile voices in French, but after the Revolution, these voices became protective and friendly.

The third chapter, "The Algerian Family," examines how the liberation struggle dismantled traditional family hierarchies. Sons found fathers lagging in national consciousness and counseling prudence, but the son did not reject the father; rather, the scale of popular commitment collapsed the father's old authority. Daughters who carried grenades and faced torture in the maquis, the guerrilla forces based in the mountains, could not return to their former status. When a daughter returned on leave, she sat facing her father and spoke freely, and questions about virginity lost their former weight. Conjugal relationships were likewise transformed: Women began reproaching husbands for inactivity, an unprecedented act in a society where questioning a man's courage demanded reparation in blood. Marriage in the maquis became voluntary rather than family-arranged, with the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale, the National Liberation Front) opening registry offices. Traditional mourning practices disappeared under the weight of mass killings. Fanon concludes that colonialism's tactic of fragmenting the population through internment camps and forced regroupments paradoxically unified the nation.

The fourth chapter, "Medicine and Colonialism," analyzes how Western medicine, introduced as part of the colonial apparatus, was resisted under colonialism but embraced during the Revolution. The colonized patient's rigid, monosyllabic behavior before a doctor reflected not ignorance but the stance of a person facing a representative of the occupying power. During the struggle, European doctors largely aligned with colonial power: Some administered truth serum, a chemical substance injected intravenously to induce loss of self-control, for interrogation, while others revived tortured prisoners between sessions. French authorities imposed embargoes on antibiotics and anti-tetanus serum, causing agonizing deaths among wounded fighters. The Revolution responded by ordering Algerian medical personnel to join combatants and establishing public health systems in liberated areas. Populations rapidly embraced hygiene measures they had previously rejected, demonstrating that what colonial specialists attributed to innate resistance was in fact a product of the colonial situation itself.

The fifth chapter, "Algeria's European Minority," challenges the perception of Europeans as a monolithic pro-colonial bloc. European democrats sheltered fugitives, transported parcels, and supplied medications, with the FLN always ensuring these collaborators understood the risks. Arrested European militants resisted torture without revealing vital information. The FLN's policy toward Europeans was explicitly inclusive, holding that in the new society being built, there would be only Algerians. Fanon traces a spectrum within the Jewish community, from tradesmen fearing economic competition under independence to the great majority, a highly Arabized mass who considered themselves authentically Algerian. Among settlers, support was more widespread than commonly believed: Farms served as infirmaries, refuges, relay stations, and granaries for the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale, the Army of National Liberation), and no approached settler ever reported contact with the FLN to French authorities. Two appendices present firsthand testimonies: Charles Geromini, a European Algerian intern whose political awakening led him to join the FLN, and Yvon Bresson, a European police officer who passed intelligence to the FLN after witnessing systematic torture.

In his conclusion, Fanon synthesizes the book's central argument: The moment the colonized person braces to reject oppression, a radical inner transformation occurs that makes maintaining the colonial system impossible. He declares that Algerian society has stripped itself of the mental sedimentation resulting from 130 years of oppression. Addressing the French government directly, he states that restoring pre-1954 conditions is impossible, but if France recognizes the changes in Algerian consciousness, everything remains possible. He closes by affirming that the Revolution, "precisely because it changes man and renews society, has reached an advanced stage," and that this process of creating a new humanity is itself the Algerian Revolution (181).