The process of colonization is really multifaceted and has a profound psychological effect on the natives. Fanon (2004:2) theorizes that the colonization process is a violent one and so is the decolonization period. This is evident in South Africa because as soon as the settler arrives there ware a series of wars and mostly about land and live stock. Fanon (2004:3) further explains that the colonized world is divided into two sections and law enforcements are the keepers of the dividing line. Fanon uses the “compartmentalized world” of South Africa as an example as natives exist in their own towns and the Europeans also have separate lives. During the process of decolonization in South Africa, especially after the release of Nelson Mandela, there were endless “peaceful transition” negotiations. This is would have angered Fanon immensely had he been alive. Fanon (2004:8) critics the inferiority complex adopted by the natives because as soon as the natives pose a threat to colonial rule, they are reminded by their colonizers about “Western values”. The colonized is then called upon to be “reasonable” in the decolonization process says Fanon (2004:8). The result is African countries like South Africa begin adopting systems of governance that mimic that of the West because they don’t trust their own systems. The international community also plays a role in terms of coercion and uses “aid” as a threat if Western like systems are not adopted.

The psychological impact of colonization can not be underestimated; it was fabricated as an inevitable consequence that would eventually save the savage native from himself. Fanon (2004:149) affirms that colonization was to remind the indigenous people of their darkness and that if the “colonist were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation and bestiality”. For colonizers Africa was nothing but a continent of savages, with no separation of particular countries, the whole continent is just seen a place of darkness writes Fanon (2002:150). This becomes the same view the native intellectual adopts in his decolonization strategies, in that he never fights colonizers under specific country or ethnicity but as an “African”. This is true of the present day discourse in Africa and the world. Fanon (2004: 150) argues “when the black man, who has never felt as much a ‘negro’ as he has under white domination, decides to prove his culture and act as a cultivated person, he realizes that history imposes on him a terrain already mapped out, that history sets him along a very precise path and that he is expected to demonstrate that existence of a ‘negro’ culture”. This depicts the convoluted predicament that the native finds himself, especially the intellectual native. Natives have a need to rehabilitate themselves to shed colonialism; this becomes a near impossible challenge as they only know their native status through the interaction with colonizers.

Quotations taken from : The Wretched of the Earth (2004) by Franz Fannon