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), a French-trained black psychiatrist from the Caribbean island of Martinique, argued that 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. Fanon believed that throughout Africa and Asia the former imperialists and their local collaborators — the “white men with black faces” — remained the enemy.

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. Achebe took up this task in his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, which brings to life the men and women of an Ibo village at the beginning of the twentieth century, with all their virtues and frailties. 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.