Frantz Fanon as Witness and Participant: Theorising a Peasant Revolution

Abstract

Frantz Fanon was not only a witness to colonial violence and its equally violent anti colonial response, he was also a participant who contributed to the fln’s campaign for liberation from the French metropole. Thus, the twin roles of witness and participant in the Algerian anti-colonial struggle allowed Fanon to theorise revolution away from the putative detachment of the ivory towers of academic speculation or distant commentators. This paper’s meditation on Fanon and his theorising of the anti colonial struggle as a peasant revolution is divided into two sections. I will first sketch out the background of colonial Algeria and the nature of anti-colonial liberation in the Third World in the middle of the twentieth century. The second section will discuss Fanon’s conception of revolution in which the peasantry, alongside the “illegalist militants,” initiate a wave of mobilisation that begins in the countryside and embraces the colonised centre of the towns.