ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Frantz Fanons critique of Octave Mannoni's Psychologie de colonization as an aspect of the postwar debate about African decolonization and independence among West Indian, African, and French intellectuals, especially around the journal Preseme Africaine. It discusses the theoretical framework for Fanons approach to Mannoni, found in Fanons critique of psychological models, and his engagement with the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Senegalese militia who are ordered to carry out torture become the absolute other associated with fear and African blackness, which at one and the same time reinforces and problematizes Manicheanism. Africa is mainly in a "primitive" state of dependence and egalitarianism, or in some cases like the Malagasy at the feudal level of dependency, with lifelong pseudo-parents in the form of elders and ancestors. Fanon argues that the Malagasy have ceased to exist in their Malagasy-hood since the time of General Gallieni's slaughter of innocents in 1905.
