ABSTRACT
Writing of the building up of anti-colonial struggle, Fanon in 1961 described the interaction of city and countryside. 21 First there is the formation of an underground party offshoot of the legal (bourgeois nationalist) party. Then its members move away from the cities to escape the police,
towards the countryside and the mountains, towards the peasant people ... a people that is generous, ready to sacrifice themselves completely, an impatient people with a stony pride. . . . The men coming from the towns learn their lessons in the hard school of the people at the same time these men open classes for the people in military and political education . . . but in fact the classes don’t last long, for the masses come to know once again the strength of their muscle and push their leaders into prompt action. . . . The armed struggle has begun . . .
The rebellion which began in the country districts will filter into the towns through that fraction of the peasant population which is blocked on the outer fringes of the urban centres, that fraction which has not yet found a bone to gnaw in the colonial system. It is within this mass of humanity, this people of the shanty towns at the core of the lumpen proletariat that the rebellion will found its urban spearhead. For the lumpen proletariat, that horde of starving men uprooted from their tribe and their clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneous and one of the most radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people. So the pimps and hooligans, the unemployed and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men. These 63workless, less-than-men are rehabilitated in their own eyes and the eyes of history. The prostitutes too and the maids who are paid two pounds a month, all the hopeless dregs of humanity, all who turn in circles between suicide and madness will recover their balance and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation.
