Frantz Fanon. Black skin white mask - ACE311.6

Extract from Fanon’s letter of resignation, explaining that Arabs are aliens in their own country. Scenes of warfare; Vergès on Fanon’s feeling that Arabs were more "real" and more masculine that black men from the Antilles as they "had the courage to attack the castrating master". Fanon’s book Les Damnés de la Terre /The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Hall describes this as "a bible of the de-colonisation moment", dealing with the problems of national liberation movements. Raphaël Confiant says Martinique was totally brainwashed by the colonists, but Fanon made the people see that they had more in common with people in African countries that with the French. Footage of the 1960 Conference of Independent African States in Leopoldville, with representatives from Ghana, Liberia, Tunisia, Sudan, United Arab Republic, Algeria, etc. Soldiers laying down their weapons. Hall’s VO says that Fanon believed that only armed struggle would produce the right result. Vergès says Fanon wanted to be Algerian as only then could he achieve the masculinity he was dreaming of. Mohammed Harbi, former member of the FLN government, talking about meeting Fanon in Tunis. He feels he was an outsider in respect to general Arab society, and had a strong need for integration. Hall thinks Fanon was opposed to decolonisation (the coloniser handing over to the colonised); he wanted independence (liberty seized by the oppressed) as armed struggle brought self-respect. Harbi talking of Fanon’s support for extreme FLN factions, people like Abane Ramdane and Boumedienne. Hall on Fanon wanting to construct the post-colonial man, with the past wiped entirely away; in Algeria, though, the past has survived and taken its revenge on the present. Hall talking about Fanon’s controversial essay on the veil, pointing out that such symbols are not unchanging as Fanon predicates. Algerian women were able to use the veil to help them smuggle arms as they could depend on the reaction of French soldiers; they could subvert the veil’s meaning and turn "the look" the opposite way. Film extracts.