Quote by Frantz Fanon: “The colonial world is a Manichean world.”

Fanon used the word 'Manichean' — meaning a world divided into absolute good and evil — to describe how colonialism sorts people into categories: civilized and savage, human and subhuman. This false binary is the ideology that makes oppression feel natural and justified.

Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth while working as a psychiatrist treating both French soldiers and Algerian fighters traumatized by colonial war. He observed firsthand how colonial ideology produced psychological damage, and this line opens his analysis of the structured dehumanization that colonialism requires.

Martinique-born psychiatrist and political philosopher whose writings on colonialism and revolution shaped anticolonial movements worldwide. His 1961 work The Wretched of the Earth, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, remains one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory.