What’s in it for me? Gain a better understanding of the effects of colonialism on the colonized, and why violence erupts.
Decolonization movements past and present have drawn inspiration from Frantz Fanon's seminal critiques of colonial oppression and advocacy for revolution. This Blink provides an accessible overview of some of his most influential ideas around the trauma of colonialism and the imperative of violence in anticolonial struggles.
Readers will come away with a visceral understanding of the psychological toll of living under colonial rule. By exposing the pervasive mental violence colonizers inflict to attack identity and culture, we gain insight into resulting harms that are often invisible on the surface. This perspective explains why original nonviolent methods frequently fail oppressed populations.
The Blink also reveals how winning nominal political independence is insufficient without securing economic sovereignty. Understanding the transition from colonialism to neocolonialism shows how modern empire-building continues to exploit developing nations through finance rather than brute force.
Finally, it explores constructive visions for the cultural rehabilitation, psychological healing, and revolutionary discipline required for successful liberation movements. Alongside empathy for the oppressed, readers see warnings against counterproductive extremism or overconfidence once in power.
Is violence necessary?
In the mid-1950s and early ‘60s, during the anti-colonial struggles of the Algerian War, many considered violence not just acceptable but imperative in dismantling colonial regimes – and felt that this was true in any effort to decolonize. Let’s delve into the arguments that support the idea of the inevitability and necessity of revolutionary violence.
First, a colonial regime, deeply entangled in violence and built on brutality and subjugation, demands a showdown. As tools of the colonizers, warfare, brutal repression, and systemic military and police abuses are used with a heavy hand to subjugate the people whose land is being colonized. These actions demand a confrontation with the oppressors in the language they understand – the language of force.
A second reason for the necessity of violence is that cultural violence is the covert weapon of colonialism. The sinister strategy of erasing native identities is a psychological chess game in which the aim is to supplant Indigenous culture with the colonizer’s own, leaving the population in a vacuum of identity. While many colonized intellectuals strain to reason their way to freedom, the idea of negotiating the terms of identity is a tough pill to swallow. For people who fear losing their culture and have already lost their land and freedom, talking just isn’t going to work quickly enough.
Additionally, institutional violence is woven into the political and economic fabric of the colonial regime. Political domination goes hand in hand with economic exploitation, treating the colonized and their resources as mere cogs in a profit-generating machine. This gives rise to slavery and servitude, to seeing one race of people as less than another. The foundations of the colonial system are built upon this exploitation.
The Algerian fighters’ stories echo with the resounding truth that violence, for them, was not only a tool of self-defense but a means of reclaiming their humanity. Faced with the choice of silently enduring oppression or rising against it, they chose the latter. Through guerrilla attacks against French colonial forces, they rediscovered their communal ties and agency, effectively rewriting their destinies. This isn’t just a story – it’s a living testament to how revolutionary violence becomes a forceful response to the foundational violence of the colonial system.
Finally, to truly understand the necessity of violence, you have to understand the mindset of the colonized. They aren’t wondering how they can be free within the system of the colonizer’s government. Instead, they are motivated by the idea that the last shall be first. It isn’t enough to be given equal rights by the colonizer; the colonized want to overthrow the colonizer and take back their land. For the colonized, this isn’t an issue of ideas, but of survival, of land, and of identity.
For the colonized, violence isn’t just a choice but a demand, a response to a system built on brutality. It's a call to arms, echoing the resilient spirit of those who refused to be silent, who took up the mantle of revolution to reshape their destinies.
The power and fragility of spontaneous violence
In the simmering rage born of oppression, spontaneous violent uprisings can explode without warning. The raw emotion driving these revolts makes them intense yet fleeting. Though the temptation looms to glorify the violence as righteous fury channeled by an enlightened few, the truth is less romantic. Still, spontaneous violence carries a potency demanding respect.
The great strength of spontaneity is its raw force, deriving not from ideas or elites but from people’s lived experience of injustice. This organic quality makes spontaneous violence nearly impossible to predict or counter with traditional strategies. It inspires previously uninvolved sectors to join the eruption against the shared oppressor. In spontaneity’s contagiousness lies the power of insurrection.
Yet violence alone will not suffice when revolutions require concrete political vision. Here, spontaneity suffers limitations. Unchecked emotion clouds strategic thought. Anger drowns out dialogues to build revolutionary infrastructure across communities with diverse needs united only by oppression. Lacking coherent structure, spontaneous violence loses direction and dissipates rapidly.
Another weakness is how the colonizer exploits this disorder to divide revolutionary ranks. Those initiating spontaneous violence often lack widespread representative legitimacy. Their visible passion causes others to suspect that they seek personal glory or power rather than collective liberation. The colonizer fans these suspicions through propaganda. Spontaneous violence becomes easier to infiltrate and fracture when the colonized have no accepted leadership to rally around.
To overcome limitations, revolutions must channel emotional release into purposeful movement-building, guided by the colonized people’s shared vision of justice. This means grounding spontaneous violence as the radical spear tip of a disciplined, inclusive political body providing necessary leadership and structure.
The burden thus falls on organized liberation movements to incorporate eruptions of violence into comprehensive strategic programs, elevating organic anger into planned change. Spontaneity provides the blistering spark – it is up to revolutionary institutions to supply sustainable fuel and the engine to mobilize people’s power. With no outlet into structured dissent, spontaneous violence will never progress beyond catharsis. Its ultimate defeat comes not through oppression, but disintegration from within.
The colonizer’s formidable defenses can only be punctured if the colonized are united behind political will. Lacking firm support, spontaneous violence may wound, but can’t topple, the structures of injustice. It can do so only in disciplined symbiosis with organized movements.
From colonialism to neocolonialism
As the sun sets on colonial rule, national consciousness emerges among the formerly oppressed. However, the victories against colonial powers, while paving the way for independence, don't necessarily guarantee true freedom. The challenge lies in navigating the shift in power and identity without falling prey to a new form of external control known as neocolonialism.
Revolutions offer a chance to rebuild society after a rupture, incorporating people’s history and culture into new governing structures. But national consciousness, rooted in opposition to the colonizer rather than a shared identity, presents challenges. Colonizers have often exploited divisions among native peoples, setting intellectuals against warriors and city dwellers against peasants. For the marginalized native, even a fellow native thriving under colonization may be seen as a collaborator. Meanwhile, intellectuals seeking reason may view passionate peasants fighting for their land as an obstacle.
In this case, nationalism can be insufficient to unite heterogeneous populations whose local power conflicts now surface without a common colonial enemy. Reaction defined the past; determining the future requires proactive unity. A national identity that seeks simply to reverse colonial structures also risks becoming rigid and oppressive to dissenting groups or minorities. As well, charismatic leaders gaining prominence through anticolonial rhetoric often end up prioritizing personal power over collective liberation.
The most significant danger, however, is the looming specter of neocolonialism, casting shadows over the unrealized promises of independence. As military forces withdraw, global economic powers exploit vulnerable nations via international finance tools, masking a form of modern empire-building. New nations, strapped for cash, accept seemingly generous loans and investments that covertly indenture entire economies.
Multinational corporations also accelerate neocolonial takeovers, buying out mines, plantations, utilities, and industries at bargain prices from departing colonists. Lucrative infrastructure ends up being foreign-owned, straining government budgets further through expatriated profits. Market domination becomes untethered from political control, subjugating newly sovereign economies to unofficial overlords.
So, even as flags change, the economic foundations binding developing countries often remain unchanged. National consciousness, seeking cultural freedom without fundamental policy reform, inadvertently allows neocolonial powers to establish uncontested economic dominance. Those benefiting from the status quo ignore the fact that foreign capital continues to exact a toll of bondage, albeit through financial instruments rather than military force.
This stark reality serves as a cautionary revelation for revolutionary movements. Winning political battles may not be enough. Without dismantling the financial superstructure fortifying modern empires, they risk losing economic wars and global standing for generations. While colonialism exploited land and bodies, neocolonialism now exploits entire economies, gaining plunder with pens rather than swords. Without economic sovereignty, the force of national consciousness diminishes, underscoring the essential need for self-reliance to secure the promise of freedom.
Reclaiming and rebuilding culture
As the chains of colonialism break, rehabilitating national culture becomes imperative for both healing trauma and powering liberation movements. But friction may emerge regarding just what restoring native culture means after prolonged colonial subjugation.
Envisioning national culture after generations of physical and psychological violence and assimilating colonial mindsets is a complex effort. Native intellectuals mimicking colonizer culture risk perpetuating colonial structures of oppression if they simply reverse positions rather than fundamentally transforming systemic inequality.
Additionally, a collective national culture has to resist the idea that reducing the ongoing influence of colonial culture is enough. Because culture comprises beliefs, creative expression, institutions, rituals, and behaviors – not just artifacts – ousting colonialism requires the restructuring of everyday life by consciously rediscovering historically rooted identity while selectively integrating or improving older cultural touchstones.
This is key – framing national culture not as a fixed thing to resurrect but as an evolving, participatory process of reclamation. Culture never exists in isolation – it continuously absorbs influences both internal and external. While totalitarian policing to root out all colonial elements can run the risk of a reactionary fundamentalism, defending cultural dynamism opens doors to diversity and progress, as long as core values guide change.
Turning from retroactive what-ifs toward proactive creation also energizes culture. No cultural revival is sustained solely by reclaiming the past. Present participation is vital to developing an independent identity that will be resilient in the face of future attempts at colonization. This means orienting cultural reconstruction toward enabling self-determined, equitable development that meets all people’s needs.
Indeed, culture detached from improving lives grows stale and irrelevant. Integrating cultural touchstones like ancestral practices and community histories into new economic and governing philosophies can guard against hypernationalism by keeping heritage connected to practical action. Eventually, cultural identity melds into driving development models.
Of course, the necessary examinations, experimentation, heated debates, and inevitable missteps making up this culture-building journey can’t be rushed. As poisonous assumptions that had been taught over generations wash away, and young minds bloom under cultural education rather than colonizer indoctrination, national culture slowly transforms on its own terms – not those of an external authority. In the patient struggle, revolutionary change takes deepest root.
The invisible wounds of colonial oppression
While colonial regimes often use overwhelming physical force to conquer territories, these brutal methods comprise only superficial violence. Equally potent is mental violence – the intentional infliction of psychological wounds to attack culture, relationships, and identity more pervasively than any military ever could. Although invisible, mental violence leaves scars passed down through generations.
Let’s examine the systematic mechanisms inflicting mental trauma under colonialism. First, there are overt methods like conditioning dissident minds through torture. Withholding medical treatment for physical abuse creates psychological agony. Public executions, disappearances, or displays of mutilated corpses terrorize communities. Rape as calculated policy abases women, emasculates men, and sabotages family structures.
More insidious is cultural suppression attacking social bonds and memory – forcibly installing foreign customs and beliefs. Institutionally diminishing or erasing native history in academia erodes identity further by severing new generations from their heritage. Other daily abuses, like verbal harassment or economic exclusion, amount to constant psychological microaggressions.
Over time, persistent exposure to both overt and covert mental violence causes victims to mirror their oppressors. Self-hate, reactionary violence among fellow natives, despair, and suicidal thoughts become commonplace. Loss of unity, dignity, and purpose manifests as listlessness, addiction, petty crime, and broken families.
But most dangerously, this creates apathy and complacency about the status quo – the colonized subject begins identifying with the value systems and assumptions of colonizers as inevitable and irreversible. Native culture becomes associated with weakness and poverty. Mental colonization succeeds by transforming the oppressed into agents reinforcing their own dehumanization.
Acknowledging this complex trauma means recognizing that revolutionary violence responds as much to psychological desperation as to physical deprivation. While native intellectuals debate fine political details, for the masses, already dehumanized through mental violence, cathartic aggression symbolizes the rejection of internalized inferiority and the reclamation of power over identity.
Countering systemic mental violence thus becomes imperative for true decolonization. From cultural reeducation to economic justice to political representation, holistic change must heal both visible and invisible wounds simultaneously. This means any revolution secured solely by military victories will always be incomplete without profound psychological transformation that cements people’s humanity. Matching external political changes with internal mental liberation results in durable freedom.
Mental violence under colonialism aims to convince the oppressed that their defiant spirit is aberrant. But challenging injustice is always preceded by acknowledging it – and those who seem complacent may simply be the most harmed. Recognizing the psychological underpinnings of political domination is the first step toward emancipation. For revolutions to last, they must help entire communities reconcile externally imposed trauma by restoring cultural identity and collective purpose.
Final summary
The traumatic psychological effects of colonialism point to the virtual inevitability of violent revolution as the only escape from its dehumanizing force. Colonialism’s pervasive mental violence, which erodes identity and relationships, gives us visceral insight into the resulting harms that explain why nonviolence often fails the oppressed. We must also keep in mind the transition from colonialism to neocolonial financial domination, and concepts of how cultural rehabilitation, mental healing from trauma, and unity of purpose help secure true liberation built to last.