Many intellectuals who came of age during and after the struggle for political emancipation embraced a vision of solidarity among peoples oppressed by colonialism and racism. Some argued that genuine freedom required a total rejection of Western values in addition to an economic and political break with the former colonial powers. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) expressed these views in his powerful study of colonial peoples, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

According to Fanon, a French-trained black psychiatrist from the Caribbean island of Martinique, decolonization is always a violent and totally consuming process whereby one “species” of men, the colonizers, is completely replaced by an absolutely different species — the colonized, the wretched of the earth. During decolonization the colonized masses mock colonial values, “insult them, and vomit them up” in a psychic purge. Fanon believed that throughout Africa and Asia the former imperialists and their local collaborators — the “white men with black faces” — remained the enemy:

During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on. . . . We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. . . . Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.3

Fanon’s passionate, angry work became a sacred text for radicals attacking imperialism and struggling for liberation.

As countries gained independence, some writers looked beyond wholesale rejection of the industrialized powers. They, too, were anti-imperialist, but they were often also activists and cultural nationalists who celebrated the rich histories and cultures of their peoples. Many did not hesitate to criticize their own leaders or fight oppression and corruption.

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) rendered these themes with sharp insight. Achebe sought to restore his people’s self-confidence by reinterpreting the past. For Achebe, the “writer in a new nation” had first to embrace the “fundamental theme” that Africans had their own culture before the Europeans came and that it was the duty of writers to help Africans reclaim their past.

In his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe brings to life the men and women of an Ibo village at the beginning of the twentieth century, with all their virtues and frailties. Woven into the story are the proverbs and wisdom of a sophisticated people and the beauty of a vanishing world:

[The white man] says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.4

In later novels Achebe portrayed the postindependence disillusionment of many writers and intellectuals, which reflected trends in many developing nations in the 1960s and 1970s: the rulers seemed increasingly corrupted by Western luxury and estranged from the rural masses. From the 1970s onward, Achebe was active in the struggle for democratic government in Nigeria.

Novelist V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad in 1932 of Indian parents, also castigated governments in the developing countries for corruption, ineptitude, and self-deception. Another of Naipaul’s recurring themes is the poignant loneliness and homelessness of people uprooted by colonialism and Western expansion.

For peoples emerging from colonial domination, or confronting the poverty and social exclusion that was commonplace outside of industrialized nations, the post war challenge of liberation was not simply political and economic, but also cultural and spiritual. The middle decades of the twentieth century saw a broad awakening of voices among peoples who had been rendered voiceless by their marginalization.