Frantz Fanon at a press conference in Tunis (1959) | Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
Of all the ways Frantz Fanon has been misinterpreted, none is more persistent or consequential than the misunderstanding of his theory of violence. His reflections, especially as represented in The Wretched of the Earth, have drawn intense debate and condemnation, particularly from liberal and post-Enlightenment humanist circles.
Among his most notable critics was political theorist Hannah Arendt, who (without always naming him) accused Fanon of glorifying violence and descending into nihilism. Arendt distinguishes sharply between power and violence, viewing the latter as purely instrumental and incapable of generating a legitimate political order. “The practice of violence,” she writes in On Violence, “like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”
This reading, however, rests on a narrow and literalist interpretation of Fanon’s thought. Many critics latch onto Fanon’s oft-cited claim that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon,” interpreting it exclusively in terms of physical confrontation: guerrilla warfare, political assassinations, and bloodshed. Such interpretations reduce Fanon’s analysis to a crude defense of armed struggle, ignoring the deeper existential, psychological, and ontological dimensions of his argument.
For Fanon, violence was never confined to the battlefield. He advocated a deliberate destruction of the habits and assumptions the colonizers had imposed on its subjects: He wanted Africans to reclaim their native languages and to reject imported ideals of civility and beauty. These intimate acts of defiance were a form of inward combat that ruptured the psychic architecture of colonial rule. They were inseparable from physical confrontation.
For example, in Algeria, where Fanon himself took part in the struggle, the National Liberation Front’s war of independence (1954–62) combined the brutal kinetics of guerrilla warfare, torture, and mass displacement with a decisive rupture in France’s self-image as a civilizing power. In Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising (1952–60), armed resistance targeted settler farms, colonial infrastructure, and loyalist collaborators, aiming to reclaim stolen land and dismantle the myth of British invincibility. The British countered with detention camps, forced labor, and public executions, creating deep psychological scars. Yet the insurgency itself (through its acts of sabotage, oathing ceremonies, and rejection of colonial authority) broke the mental hold of the empire and reasserted the political agency of the Kikuyu and allied communities. In Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle (1965–80) and Angola’s war of independence (1961–74), colonial power was broken both physically and psychologically: Armed conflict weakened colonial control, while the resulting mental shift gave rise to new political identities.
To overlook this dual register of violence is to miss the profound philosophical stakes of Fanon’s work. The inner and outer dimensions of revolt were intertwined necessities for Fanon, each incomplete without the other and each a condition for reclaiming the agency and dignity systematically stripped from the colonized.
At the same time, one has to understand that decolonization, as theorized by Fanon, entails a revolutionary substitution of one species of humanity for another. This “species” language is deliberate and provocative. The colonial order for Fanon is not just exploitative but ontologically Manichaean. It bifurcates the world into irreconcilable realms of existence. The colonizer and the colonized exist in incommensurable realities. The colonized is rendered a “thing,” an objectified non-being, fabricated through colonial discourse, domination, and control.
Decolonization, then, requires a total restructuring of the world—not just political and economic institutions but symbolic and cultural institutions as well, the inner and outer aspects of existence grasped as a whole. Borrowing a Latin phrase made famous by John Locke (the British empiricist philosopher who famously argued that human minds were devoid of innate ideas, and shaped entirely by experience), Fanon called for deliberately creating a tabula rasa, a blank slate from which every internalized trace of the colonial oppressors had been erased, scrubbed clean. Fanon rejects the liberal humanist illusion of peaceful transition; since colonialism is built and maintained through coercion and violence, only coercion and violence can dismantle it. To decolonize is to destroy all traces of the past in order to create, as if writing on a blank slate, a radically new world and a radically new human species essence, built through revolutionary reconstruction.
We must critically interrogate why the very subject for whom Fanon wrote—the colonized—has, in the decades following nominal liberation from colonial rule, remained mired in structural disarray. Is this persistent condition the result of a failure to embrace what Fanon called “revolutionary violence”? Or, more troublingly, is it a consequence of that violence being misread (or misapplied)? Fanon’s vision of violence aimed at creating a “new humanism”—a radical redefinition of humanity beyond colonialism, capitalism, and racism. It was the essential condition for true decolonization.
The symbolic dawn of this project seemed to arrive at midnight on March 6, 1957, when Ghana hoisted its flag and proclaimed itself free. It was a moment of seismic significance, the first spark of African sovereignty in the long night of colonial rule.
Kwame Nkrumah, who had led the charge toward this moment, stood before a jubilant nation and declared that Ghana’s independence was meaningless unless yoked to the total liberation of the African continent. His words ignited a continent-wide awakening. The air crackled with historical possibility. To many, it felt as though a metaphysical rupture had occurred, an emphatic rebuttal to the colonial myth that Africa was incapable of reason and self-governance. But if examined in terms of Fanon’s larger conception of violence, Ghana’s independence was not a gentle or purely ceremonial transition. Ghana’s independence was, in contrast to the insurgent theaters of Algeria, Kenya, or Zimbabwe, principally a juridical and symbolic rupture: Mass mobilization, strikes, and political organization toppled colonial authority more by stripping it of legitimacy than by seizing it on the battlefield. That symbolic severing (the public unmaking of colonial authority) was itself a form of violence in Fanon’s sense of the word, breaking the psychic hold of empire and making continued domination impossible. It was a psychological detonation, undoing decades of humiliation and dependency.
In the months and years that followed, the winds of independence swept across Africa with contagious urgency. National flags waved. Guided by ideals like Pan-Africanism and African socialism, leaders reimagined the continent’s future, and for a brief moment it seemed history was finally on Africa’s side. People believed deeply in the promise of a new era.
Yet because Ghana’s victory, and others like it, did not entail the kind of sustained social rupture and collective reconstitution that Fanon associated with “revolutionary violence,” the transformative power of these transitions was fragile. Without the prolonged crucible of struggle that might have reshaped consciousness as well as institutions, the triumphs proved more vulnerable to elite capture. Across the continent, euphoria gave way to disillusionment as new states fell under the suffocating grip of their own new elites. The independence that had once seemed to herald a total rebirth became, in case after case, a stage for the rise of ruling classes, who inherited the structures of colonial power rather than dismantling them.
And Fanon had foreseen the problem. Liberation, he argued, had to mean freeing not just a people and a land but each and every single self. Africa got nations, but even the most avowedly revolutionary leaders were not themselves remade into blank slates, and their professed radical humanism did not give rise to a genuinely new human consciousness. That absence still haunts the present.
What, then, would it have taken to achieve such a blank slate? In Fanon’s account, it would have required more than political handovers or new constitutions. When he spoke of “revolutionary violence,” he meant not just the use of armed force when necessary but also a deconstruction of the old coordinates of identity, opening a path for new forms of inner life. Fanon’s vision touches Marx’s and, further back, Rousseau’s: All believed that truly emancipated people could emerge only from a radical break with the social order that had shaped them, and that such a break must be accompanied by a reeducation that leads to new ways of living together.
But there is a distinction. For Marx, the crucible of transformation was rooted in changes to the material base—the abolition of private property, the reorganization of labor, the dissolution of class—from which a new social consciousness would emerge. Fanon, while recognizing the centrality of material liberation, placed greater emphasis on the psychic and cultural dimensions: The colonized subject had to be remade not only as a participant in a new economy but as a self no longer trapped in the colonial gaze. His tabula rasa was not the erasure of history but its unbinding; consciousness would be freed from the categories in which colonialism had fixed it so that genuinely new forms of political and human community could take root.
Instead of building new men and women on this existential foundation, the postindependence African state emerged in a semicolonial condition, led by urban elites and privileged groups who adopted Western models ill-suited to African realities. Detached from the social majorities whose lives had borne the brunt of colonial dispossession, these elites reproduced colonial prejudices and prioritized stability over transformation. In avoiding the confrontations that might have catalyzed deeper change, they allowed the colonial order to persist, repackaged but intact. Even today, that system remains embedded in the structures of postcolonial governments, and despite many efforts to change it, breaking free has proven incredibly difficult.
History shows how hard it is to remake human beings wholesale: The French Revolution, the Soviet experiment, and postindependence Africa have all demonstrated both the ambition and the dangers of such projects.
However, Fanon’s insistence that true liberation requires both structural transformation and the deep psychic reconstitution of the colonized remains a necessary provocation. Without that existential tabula rasa, colonial domination survives under new flags and the promise of a new humanism remains only half realized.
His challenge still stands: The work of decolonization is not finished until the colonized have remade themselves as free beings capable of building societies where freedom is sustained by both new institutions and new ways of being human. That, for Fanon, was the true measure of liberation, and it remains Africa’s unfinished task.
