by Orlando Patterson, New World Quarterly, Volume 2, Nos. 3 & 4, 1966 (Guyana Independence Issue) Edited by George Lamming.
It is impossible to do justice to this remarkable work in the short space I have at my disposal. Fanon’s The Damned
is one of those rare books which stands out not only through the
brilliance of its penetrating social and psychological insights, or
through the sheer vigour and originality of its style, but derives its
greatest importance from the fact of being the key work which embodies
the zeitgeist of a revolutionary social movement. That same relationship
which the works of Voltaire and Rousseau bore to the French Revolution,
which the Communist Manifesto to the revolutionary labour movements of the 19th century, is to be found in the relationship between The Damned and the movement of the colonised peoples of the world in overthrowing their oppressors.
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