Toward the African Revolution

Toward the African Revolution (French: Pour la Revolution Africaine) is a collection of essays written by Frantz Fanon, which was published in 1964, after Fanon's death. The essays in the book were written from 1952 to 1961, between the publication of his two most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon expands on the themes of colonization, racism, decolonization, African unity, and the Algerian Revolution in the essays, most of which come from his time writing for El Moudjahid, the official newspaper of the FLN.

Summary

The essays in Toward the African Revolution are split into five sections, roughly grouped by topic and manner of original publication. They help to trace the evolution of Fanon's thought over time, from his years working as a psychiatrist through the period when he actively worked for the FLN and his exile from Algeria in Tunisia. Most of the writing involves his political theory of opposition to colonialism as a dehumanizing force that cannot be reformed, as well as the ways in which he thought Africans ought to resist colonialism.

The Problem of the Colonized

The first section of the book (French: Le colonisé en question) deals with the views that outsiders hold of North Africans. Fanon ostensibly wrote only two other essays on this topic, but one of them, "West Indians and Africans," was actually written by Pierre Chaulet. Fanon did not want to write the article, but it was incorrectly attributed to him after it was published anonymously in El Moudjahid.

In his essay "The North African Syndrome," Fanon challenged the prejudices of French doctors against Algerians and other North Africans, whose complaints of illness or pain were often dismissed as whining or laziness. Many European psychiatrists had concluded that Africans were destined to be less intelligent and less emotionally stable than Europeans, and this approach tainted their professional practice.