From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
Looking back, Drif felt little regret about the three who died and the twelve—including children—who lost limbs from her bomb and from a second that detonated in another café minutes later. The European cafégoers weren’t civilians, in her view, but colonizers. Their “offensive carefree attitudes” made a painful contrast to those of the eighty thousand Muslims, herself included, penned by barbed wire and checkpoints within what she described as the “open-air prison” of Algiers’s Casbah. The month before, European settlers had bombed an apartment building in the Casbah, killing seventy.
Algerians had been waging an independence war for nearly two years, and the French had been fighting back fiercely, including with widespread torture and indiscriminate killings. The September 30th bombings, however, marked what Drif called a “turning point,” bringing the war “to the heart of the enemy districts.” Yet even the Communist who had built the rebels’ explosives laboratory balked at bombing crowded public places. The philosopher Albert Camus, an Algerian-born Frenchman, sympathized with the Algerians but could no longer support them. Their attacks, he noted, might kill his mother: “If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.”
Nearly the only French writer to defend the bombs was the Martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who directed a hospital near Algiers. Attacks on civilians were the “logical consequence” of France’s “systematic dehumanization” of Algerians, he argued. Fanon had already been secretly aiding the rebels, but shortly after the Milk Bar bombing he resigned his post and joined them. The authorities raided his hospital, killed one of his co-workers, and threw the battered body of another into a pigsty for the hogs to devour. (That man survived, barely.)
Fanon did not back down. He became, his biographer David Macey wrote, the “most famous spokesman” of Third Worldism and a staunch defender of anticolonial violence. “Every Frenchman in Algeria is at the present time an enemy soldier,” Fanon insisted. Killing French people wasn’t only tactically necessary and morally justified; it was therapeutic. In his view, violence was a “cleansing force” (“la violence désintoxique”) that “rids the colonized of their inferiority complex.”
Perhaps it could even induce one in the colonizers. A month after the Milk Bar bombing, France joined Britain and Israel in an invasion of Egypt. The aim was to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal but also, Fanon wrote, “to strike the Algerian revolution,” given Egypt’s support for the rebels. Either way, it was a fiasco. The United States made the invaders retreat—a shattering humiliation for the formerly supreme British Empire. The British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, already frazzled and taking amphetamines, had a nervous breakdown.
Eden fled to Jamaica, a calmer corner of the Empire, where he could sunbathe, swim, and paddle a rubber boat around a reef. “I do not think there is any other place anywhere that could have given me the rest I had to have,” Eden wrote to his host. That host, the author Ian Fleming, knew Jamaica’s restorative power, too. It was at his estate there, Goldeneye, that he wrote all of his James Bond novels.
Fleming’s fame is undimmed, in large part owing to the twenty-seven James Bond films. Fanon lives on, too, as a mainstay of the college syllabus and the rebel’s bookshelf. Today, they are probably the most enduring authors on decolonization, Fanon for and Fleming against.
The pair never met, and they would have hated each other. Yet, as important new biographies reveal, they had much in common. Adam Shatz’s “The Rebel’s Clinic” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and Nicholas Shakespeare’s “Ian Fleming” (recently published in the U.K. and forthcoming in the U.S. from Harper) present two Caribbean-connected authors who became entangled in espionage. They saw the end of empire as a wrenching psychological event. Healing its wounds, both believed, would require violence.
That Ian Fleming should have thought about decolonization at all was surprising. A champagne cork bobbing along on the sea of life, he did not initially seem overburdened with profundity. Fleming’s grandfather was a wealthy financier—Shakespeare compares him to Logan Roy, from HBO’s “Succession”—and Ian suffered the symptoms of affluenza. “Everyone felt that he was just a rich, rather bored, rather aloof young man,” a contemporary recalled. Fine things and heedless women dropped easily into Fleming’s outstretched arms.
Too easily, perhaps. Fleming, who was born in 1908, drifted through Eton and the Royal Military College, bastions of the British élite, without earning diplomas. He seemed far less impressive than his father, Val, who died a hero’s death in the First World War, or his older brother, Peter, a gifted writer. His mother sent the aimless youth to a chalet in the Austrian Alps which served as a combination university and sanatorium.
Fleming’s tutors there, Ernan Forbes Dennis and Phyllis Bottome, were devotees of Alfred Adler, the Viennese psychotherapist. Adler had coined the term “inferiority complex” and placed great importance on birth order. Ian, overshadowed by his brother, seemed a textbook case. Dennis and Bottome treated him as a laboratory subject for Adlerian therapy, with Adler helping from afar. Without this intervention, his psychiatrist felt, Fleming would have become a psychopath. With it, he was still a rake, but a well-read, stable one. (Fleming gratefully inserted an Adler reference into a Bond novel.)
After faring poorly on the Foreign Service exam, Fleming tried journalism, then finance (he ranked “among the world’s worst stockbrokers,” a friend said). Nothing in these endeavors suggested military greatness, but in 1939 Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, John Henry Godfrey, tapped Fleming to be his assistant. This odd choice, Shakespeare explains, had Adlerian grounds. Godfrey also had a towering older brother, and his resentment of that “tyranny,” as Godfrey called it, drew him to the underqualified Fleming.
The usual thing to say about Fleming’s intelligence work is that he was a deskbound underling—a “microscopic but perky cog,” the writer Simon Winder called him—who turned his daydreams into spy novels. But Shakespeare presents evidence of Fleming’s centrality. “I shared all secrets with him,” Godfrey explained, so that if Godfrey were “knocked out” his subordinate could step up. One officer felt that it was Fleming, not Godfrey, who effectively directed naval intelligence for most of the Second World War. If Fleming wasn’t Bond, he bore some resemblance to Bond’s chief, the spymaster M.
Shakespeare’s most striking claim is that Fleming helped to found the United States’ Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. When the war started, U.S. intelligence capabilities were feeble, so Britain sent Fleming over. He stayed for two months in Georgetown, often with William J. Donovan, the future O.S.S. director, outlining the British system and making suggestions. In fact, Fleming claimed to have written the original O.S.S. charter with Donovan.
The war also took Fleming to the Caribbean. When it was over, he declared, he would “just live in Jamaica and lap it up.” Fleming bought a beachfront estate (Goldeneye), hired servants (they addressed him as Commander), and took a mistress (“Ian’s black wife,” Ann called her, though she was neither). He stayed there every winter, relishing the “unbounded drink” and the “infinite cigars rolled on Jamaican thighs.”
“Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday?” Fleming later wrote. “I doubt it.” He dreamed up Bond while swimming at Goldeneye, in 1952, and wrote the Bond books there, one per winter. Four of the fourteen feature Jamaican settings, and two more send Bond to nearby Nassau and Miami. In the first novel, “Casino Royale,” Bond arrives at the eponymous French casino posing as a “Jamaican plantocrat” and scans his surroundings through West Indian eyes: a card player’s hands are “two pink crabs,” the table’s baize is a “green lagoon,” and Bond’s enemy, Le Chiffre, watches him “like an octopus under a rock.”
Despite his Caribbean ties, Fleming remained, to use Fanon’s phrase, “sealed in his whiteness.” His novels teem with outrageous stereotypes: Blacks are “apes,” Koreans are “lower than apes,” and the Japanese are a barely civilized “separate human species.” The thought of such people coming into their own was, for Fleming, alarming. The great powers will “reap the father and mother of a whirlwind by quote liberating unquote the colonial peoples,” one of Bond’s allies warns. “Give ’em a thousand years, yes. But give ’em ten, no. You’re only taking away their blow-pipes and giving them machine guns.”
It’s a fear that haunts Fleming’s novels. Supervillains of complex hues menace the world from breakaway spaces: islands, large ships, secret fortresses, newly independent countries. “Mister Bond, power is sovereignty,” Doctor No, a half-Chinese criminal with a Caribbean island, explains. It falls to Bond to restore No’s island to British rule.
This was imperialist escapism, and the more territory Britain lost the more Fleming’s sales grew. But Fleming struggled, amid success, to stay upbeat. In the final Bond novel, “The Man with the Golden Gun” (1965), written in the wake of Jamaican independence, the villains allude to a looming “big black uprising,” which Bond does nothing to forestall. He kills a Rastafarian (“He smelled quite horrible”) and forces some Jamaican women to dance naked. Yet he ends the book hospitalized, recovering from poison and, like Eden, “acute nervous exhaustion.”
By all rights, it was the diligent Frantz Fanon, not the dissolute Ian Fleming, who should have passed easily through life’s open doors. Fanon followed the rules assiduously. Was Martinique French? Then so was he. “Je suis français” were the first words Fanon could write, and his French was exquisite. He had both African and European forebears (hence the name Frantz, apparently a nod to his Germanic heritage), but, when he watched “Tarzan,” he identified with Tarzan, not the Africans.
In the Second World War, France surrendered but Frantz stood firm; in 1943, at seventeen, he fled Martinique, making a clandestine, treacherous sea journey to Dominica to join Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. Fighting with them in Europe, he won a medal and sustained a shrapnel wound. A worse blow, however, came to Fanon’s psyche. For the first time, he saw the scorn in which he, a Black man, was held by the Europeans he had helped liberate. “He was torn, quartered,” his brother Joby recalled.
After the war, Fanon returned to Europe, more serious yet less controlled. He wrote three absurdist plays that vibrated with frustrated meaning. (“I want to spatter this pregnant sky with a vertiginous act!” one character announces.) After a brief attempt at dentistry (“I will teach you to bite into the mammaries of life,” another character declares), Fanon turned to psychiatry (“I fragment the hypotenuse that redoubles the World”—it sounds better in French).
He never stopped writing drama, though. His theoretical texts described social types—the West Indian, the colonist, the colonized intellectual—as if they were characters in a play. Fanon felt that Alfred Adler’s “individual psychology” fell short for the colonized because, under imperialism, whole populations could become neurotic, with the colonizers playing the role of Adler’s older brother. Looking back on his Francophilic upbringing in Martinique, Fanon recognized an inferiority complex induced by empire.
He saw worse when he took a post in Algeria, in 1953. Unlike Martinique, Algeria had recently been scarred by violence, most notably in 1945, when, after a clash with nationalists, the French massacred thousands of Algerians. In 1954, nationalists launched a war of liberation. Fanon’s patients included the lone survivor of a massacre, a police torturer, and two Muslim youths who had killed their European friend.
Individual traumas could be handled clinically, but what about societal ones? Fanon believed that the act of defying empire could cure Algerian neuroses. “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence,” Fanon wrote. Shatz, eager to present a palatable version of his subject, hastens to add that, for Fanon, vengeance was only a step on the liberation ladder. Still, it was a crucial step. As Fanon insisted, what the colonized needed wasn’t concessions granted by the master but “quite literally the death of this master.”
Fanon considered taking up arms. Instead, he aided the National Liberation Front (F.L.N.) by furtively treating rebels in his psychiatric hospital. After the authorities caught wind of his activities, he moved to neighboring Tunisia, where he continued treating combatants and writing. Fanon was never at the revolution’s helm, Shatz explains, but he mattered enough to require a bodyguard, an alias, and a false passport. His chief task was propaganda: explaining the F.L.N. to outsiders. If this required cleaning up the facts—as when the F.L.N. massacred hundreds of Algerians connected to a rival nationalist group—Fanon stood ready with a mop. Revolutionaries could never commit such crimes, he insisted; it must have been the French.
Secret identities, cover stories, cunning ruses: there were times when Fanon’s life resembled Bond’s. In 1959, when he visited Rome for medical treatment, the car slated to collect him exploded. Shatz suggests that this was the work of French terrorists. Worried about another attempt, Fanon quietly changed his hospital room. A gunman burst into his original room shortly afterward.
The next year, Fanon joined an undercover commando to establish a Saharan route into Algeria. Opening “great lines” between the independent countries south of the Sahara and the still unfree Algeria, he hoped, would allow him to smuggle weapons and march armies across the vast desert—to “hurl a continent against the last ramparts of colonial power.”
The James Bond films brim with sophisticated gadgets, generously supplied by Bond’s colleague Q. The novels, however, are low-tech and mention Q only obliquely. Instead, Bond relies on the assistance of Sir James Molony, the “greatest neurologist in England.” Molony’s services are repeatedly required because Bond is a mess. He has nightmares, wobbles under stress, suffers “psycho-neurosis,” requires electroconvulsive therapy, and despises his own reflection.
Fleming had his own maladies. He wrote of his “constant depression” when contemplating “the fantastically rapid contraction of our influence, commercial and cultural, over half the globe.” In the novels, Bond’s personal woes and Britain’s political ones are linked. They are resolved only when Bond, with his license to kill, rouses himself to dispatch the Empire’s enemies. This was Fanon in reverse: bloodshed as balm not for the colonized but the colonizer.
This commitment to carnage was, it should be said, unusual in the era. In most cases, European leaders facing rising nationalism relented before reaching the battlefield. Nationalists, too, were generally cautious about using force. “We have chosen just one weapon for our struggle, and that weapon is non-violence,” Patrice Lumumba, one of decolonizing Africa’s leading lights, explained.
Algeria was a special case. It had a million white settlers, who were largely hellbent on keeping Algeria French. Some even tried to assassinate France’s President de Gaulle, after he proved amenable to Algerian independence. Other African countries with European settlers, like South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, and Mozambique, would see high levels of violence, too. (Mozambique now has an AK-47 on its flag.) Even so, war was not the norm. Between the Second World War and Algeria’s independence, in 1962, twenty-eight African colonies became free, yet only four saw anticolonial fighting at any scale—and none approached Algeria’s. Lumumba gained power in the former Belgian Congo by election, not violence.
For Fanon, peaceful liberation was a fool’s paradise. In a telling passage in “Black Skin, White Masks,” he describes the French Caribbean, where slavery had been abolished and rights extended by French decree, as “unbearable.” He prefers the United States, where “the Negro battles and is battled.” On that “field of battle, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes hanged by their testicles,” Fanon envisions a “majestic” monument arising. At its top stands, finally, “a white man and a black man hand in hand.”
These bloody visions turned real for Fanon in Algeria. French interrogators there regularly used torture; soldiers had applied electric shocks to the vagina of one of Zohra Drif’s comrades and violated another with a beer bottle. When French intellectuals expressed horror, Fanon rolled his eyes. Couldn’t they see that their whole empire was built on such acts? Torture, at least, clarified things. “With his back to the wall, the knife at his throat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, the colonized subject is bound to stop telling stories,” Fanon wrote. In such moments, “the colonized subject discovers reality.”
In “Casino Royale,” Bond has his own encounter with reality when Le Chiffre captures and sadistically interrogates him, assailing his exposed testicles. Bond fears entering a “sexual twilight” where he’ll feel pleasure and develop a “masochistic infatuation” with his tormentor. (Flagellation was an important element of Fleming’s own sexual diet.) Yet after a stumble into relativism—perhaps Communism isn’t so bad?—Bond rights himself. The torment of his “sensitive parts,” plus a romantic betrayal, steels his resolve, and he dedicates his life to hunting Britain’s foes.
This was direct violence: not the impersonality of a café bombing but the intimacy of the interrogation room. And, as the testicles suggest, it was fundamentally male. Fleming wrote a terrible Bond novel from a woman’s perspective (“The Spy Who Loved Me”), and Fanon discussed Muslim women who infiltrated settler spaces (though he understated their importance, his biographer Macey shows). Yet, mostly, their protagonists were men, with women serving occasionally as props in men’s psychological journeys. “When my restless hands caress those white breasts,” Fanon wrote, “they grasp white civilization.” Surely Bond knew the feeling.
Both authors redirected violence onto their partners: Fanon publicly struck his wife and Fleming practiced sadomasochism. And both saw women as complicit. “Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped,” Fanon asked, “can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?” One could, and Fleming frequently did. “All women love semi-rape,” his lone female narrator explained. “They love to be taken.” After Bond kills Doctor No, his dark-skinned (yet white) Jamaican companion throws herself at him, demanding “slave-time.” Such passages are cringeworthy, but they weren’t misfires. Rape, torture, subjugation—this was empire, red in tooth and claw.
It was all leading, Fanon thought, to the “great showdown.” Yet the collapse of Europe’s empires didn’t only mean the rise of Third World nationalism; it also meant the rise of the United States. And neither author quite knew what to make of that.
For someone obsessed with empire, Fanon had surprisingly little to say about the world’s greatest power. The United States was a “country of lynchers,” he felt, yet also a potential ally—he touted John F. Kennedy’s “decisive and implacable” opposition to French colonialism. Fanon’s openness to U.S. power may help explain his disastrous alliance with the C.I.A.-backed Angolan leader Holden Roberto, who fought both colonizers and Angolan leftists. Shatz reveals that Roberto informed Fanon of a secret plot against Lumumba (there were several, including one involving a C.I.A. assassin). Roberto regarded Lumumba as “a puppet in the hands of international communism” and believed that “blood must flow.” When Lumumba’s enemies killed and dismembered him, in January, 1961, Fanon blamed himself.
Fanon had hoped to die in battle, but instead he grew sick with leukemia. He flew to Moscow for treatment, without success. Ailing, he dictated his most impassioned and important book, “The Wretched of the Earth.” Then, accepting the help of the C.I.A., Fanon moved with his family to Bethesda, Maryland, for care (Roberto visited him in the hospital there). Fanon died in December, 1961, at the age of thirty-six; the U.S. Air Force carried his body back to Africa.
Fleming, too, fell into the United States’ widening gyre. After Suez, his books sold well, but it wasn’t until John F. Kennedy came out as a Fleming fan, in 1961, that “the gusher burst,” as Fleming’s New York agent put it. U.S. sales grew frenzied, and the films followed. The first, “Dr. No,” opened in the U.K. in October, 1962, two weeks before the Cuban missile crisis. With the free world menaced by nuclear arms on a Caribbean island, life seemed to be imitating Bond, and Bondmania mounted further.
Fleming played along but regarded the United States—“Eldollarado,” he called it—warily. An affable C.I.A. officer in the novels, Felix Leiter, seems to exist only to be diminished: he is bursting with cash and warm feelings, but he defers constantly to Bond and soon gets horribly maimed. Fleming also inserted references to the real-life C.I.A. director Allen Dulles, a known Bond admirer, into three of the books. Yet this flash of reality only highlights how much of Bond—the shark tanks, the loquacious villains, the endlessly up-for-it women—is consoling fantasy. Perhaps the largest consolation is the idea that, in the actual Cold War, a British spy would be allowed at the adults’ table.
In the end, Fleming couldn’t keep pace with the insatiable U.S. market. A lifetime of frankly heroic excess (bourbon counterbalanced the harms of cigarettes, he maintained) had wrecked him. “I smell the undertaker’s wind,” Fleming told his niece. He died soon after, in August, 1964, of a heart attack.
Fanon and Fleming envisioned empire ending, but neither lived to see it fully happen. In Algeria, decolonization snagged on the issue of settlers and provided exactly the “murderous and decisive confrontation” that Fanon hoped for. Yet was this, in the end, therapeutic? The eight-year war not only killed hundreds of thousands; it elevated men of violence to power, with predictable consequences. Three years after independence, Algeria’s President was overthrown in an Army coup, and the ways of war—torture, surveillance, dictatorship—continued into the time of peace. Had Fanon survived leukemia, he may not have survived Algeria.
A month after the exhausted French abandoned Algeria, in 1962, the British, in a flurry of self-congratulation, allowed Jamaica to go free peacefully. Fleming insisted that Jamaicans still carried the Queen in their hearts, but the gin-soaked ruling class to which he belonged washed out with the tide. In 1976, Goldeneye was bought, sight unseen, by Bob Marley, the bard of Third World rebellion, who had overtaken Fleming as Jamaica’s leading cultural export. Marley deemed the estate too posh, though, and signed it over to his producer.
It was an apt symbol. Empire wasn’t simply a gladiatorial contest; it was also a complex business of currency areas, tariffs, and property rights. Ending it required more than achieving catharsis. There’s something undeniably satisfying about the dramatic scenes that Fanon and Fleming conjured: you want to see the villain get eaten by an octopus and his base blown up. But history doesn’t always offer that release. Some things die not with a bang but with a whimper.
