Frantz Fanon · Politics
The closing vision of <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em>: Fanon’s call to ‘leave this Europe’ - which preaches humanity while murdering it - and to ‘work out new concepts’ and ‘set afoot a new man,’ building a humanism that finally includes everyone. The revolutionary psychiatrist’s last testament, written as he was dying at thirty-six.
Fanon ends his most famous book not with a battle plan but with a startling summons: ‘Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different.’ He is not rejecting the ideals Europe proclaimed - the dignity of man, liberty, equality, the universal human. He is charging that Europe betrayed those very ideals, preaching the sacredness of humanity in its philosophy lectures while enslaving, colonizing, and slaughtering human beings across the whole surface of the earth. ‘Leave this Europe,’ he writes, ‘where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them.’ The point is not anti-Europeanism for its own sake; it is that a humanism which excludes most of humanity is a fraud, and that the colonized should not model their new nations on a civilization whose grand words were contradicted by its every deed. To imitate Europe would be to inherit the contradiction. The task is to do better than the teachers.
The heart of Fanon’s closing vision is the call to ‘set afoot a new man.’ He means something more radical than better policies or fairer laws. Colonialism, he has argued across the whole book, deformed everyone it touched - it made the colonized into objects taught to despise themselves, and the colonizers into masters corrupted by mastery. A liberation that simply swapped the personnel of this arrangement, putting the formerly colonized into the roles of the formerly colonizing, would keep the deformation intact. What Fanon wants is the birth of a genuinely new kind of human being: one no longer defined by the colonial relationship at all, neither master nor slave, neither the European’s inferior nor his imitator. This is why he speaks of turning over a new leaf and working out new concepts - the old categories, forged in domination, cannot describe or build the world he is reaching for. The struggle was never only to change who holds power. It was to bring into being a humanity that colonialism had made impossible.
These closing pages carry an extraordinary weight when you know the circumstances of their writing. Fanon composed The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 while dying of leukemia, racing to finish before the disease took him. He was thirty-six. He had crammed several lives into those years: a Martinican who fought for Free France in the Second World War, a psychiatrist trained in Lyon, the head of a hospital in colonial Algeria who resigned to join the Algerian revolution, a diplomat and theorist of that revolution, and finally a dying man dictating his testament to the future. He would not live to see Algeria win its independence the following year, nor to witness the betrayals he had so precisely foreseen. The call to ‘set afoot a new man’ is, in the most literal sense, the last word of a man out of time - a final message flung forward to generations he knew he would never meet. That knowledge gives the ending its urgency and its strange serenity. Fanon was not writing for applause he could enjoy. He was writing for a future he was staking everything on and would never see.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth by rejecting the imitation of a Europe that betrayed its own humanist ideals, and calling on the colonized to ‘turn over a new leaf,’ ‘work out new concepts,’ and ‘set afoot a new man’ - a genuinely universal humanism. Explain what he was rejecting and what he was…
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.