Chapter 1, Concerning Violence Summary and Analysis

Upon reading the first page, indeed the first paragraph, the reader realizes at once there is a vast difference between Frantz Fanon's approach to the black struggle and that of Rev. Martin Luther King's nonviolent consciousness raising. Fanon asserts that decolonization is always a violent struggle and those who would undertake it must be prepared to get and keep the upper hand.

Although Frantz Fanon does not endorse violence per se, he describes the act of colonization wherein one class of human beings subjugates another as pure violence, often accompanied by the brutality of knives and guns. Wherever there is colonization there is institutionalized violence of a type that systematically robs the native of his civil, economic, and human rights, and is thus a highly abnormal and unnatural condition, the psychiatrist says.

A complete upheaval of the...