It now emerges as a strikingly ambivalent account of decolonization. For the book’s sixtieth anniversary, it has been reissued, by Grove, with a new introduction by Cornel West and a previously published one by Homi K.
Sartre’s celebrity brought Fanon’s work widespread attention but also colored its initial Western reception. Fanon, who had spent years in Algeria agitating for its liberation, was, at the time of the book’s publication, little known and dying from leukemia. Sartre wrote these incendiary words in a preface to “ The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the French and West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” Sartre, despised in France for his solidarity with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted to goad people into seeing the “strip-tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.” “Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement.
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