Destroying colonialism and building a nation of one’s own was a process that required more than straightforward political change: it needed, Fanon believed, a new world and a new man. For these, the ‘wretched of the earth’, the process of re-establishing an identity would have to be a revolutionary, internationalist enterprise, pursued with vigour and purpose. A powerful thinker and talker but – unfortunately for posterity – a poor writer, the Martiniquan psychiatrist and spokesman for the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale attempted to find ways in which the peoples of the global South could recover their identities as they emerged from the colonial experience.
Those who pioneered the expression, such as Frantz Fanon, would no doubt have become even more attached to the principle of violence if they had known how their cherished project had been enfeebled by soi-disant radicals in the name of political correctness.įanon, who plays a prominent part in Vijay Prashad’s stimulating book, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, was a key figure in the movement that gave meaning and content to the concept of a Third World. These days, in America especially, it is often seen as somehow derogatory, having a whiff of ‘third class’ about it and therefore best avoided for fear of upsetting visitors from less fortunate nations. Over the past two decades, as the last revolutionary era in world politics faded from view, it has become an outmoded, almost quaint term. Coined in 1952 by the French economist Alfred Sauvy to describe the global tiers état, the unrepresented and downtrodden majority of the world’s peoples, it was taken up by revolutionaries in the 1960s as a watchword for change. ‘Third World’ has always been a troublesome term.
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