Frantz Fanon: the Platonic form of human resentment.

While browsing in a secondhand bookshop recently, I came across an English children's story entitled Although He Was Black. Readers might like to complete the title for themselves: although he was black, he was clean; although he was black, he was honest; although he was black, he was clever. The last sentence of the book, however, reveals all, and reads:

 
   Dear old chap, he was one of the whitest fellows I ever knew--although he 
   was black! 

The dear old chap in question was Sambo, an orphaned black boy brought to England by a wealthy Englishman called Mr. Darrell who, for a reason unspecified, had spent some time in Kentucky. His two sons were expecting him to return with a parrot or a monkey as a present from such exotic climes, but he brought back Sambo instead, telling his two sons that

 
   "I want you each to understand that Sambo is to be kindly treated, although 
   never allowed to take liberties; the negro is faithful to death if properly 
   handled. You will find him most amusing, some of his ways, and also his 
   lingo is quaintness itself. Of course, the latter will improve in time." 

Actually, Sambo's lingo doesn't improve in the slightest, despite his close and lengthy association with two boys whose highest term of approbation is "Ripping!" When one of Mr. Darrell's two sons is sent to the attic as punishment for disobedience, Sambo loyally offers to take his place:

 
   "Might dis dirty ole nigger stop up in de attic 'stead of Massa Hugh? 'Im 
   eat up all de bread and drink de water. Laws, dis chile lub dry bread, 
   sometimes 'im live on it for days in de ole times, and 'pears like jes' de 
   right fing for 'im to be up in de attic." 

The book had been awarded as a prize to a child in the Beginner's Class at a Baptist Sunday school in 1944, when Frantz Fanon, the Martinican who posthumously became one of the founders and heroes of Third Worldism--the doctrine that three-quarters of the world's population is pitilessly exploited by the remaining quarter--was fighting for the Free French. (Fanon was decorated for bravery by Colonel, later General, Salan, who eventually became head of the terrorist OAS in the last days of French Algeria.) Although He Was Black was not the only book of its kind, then or later. My wife, who is French, remembers reading very similar books as a child in Paris in the 1950s: while across the Channel, I read stories about Billy Bunter, a very fat and rather dim pupil in a minor English public school, who repeatedly translated "Magna est veritas et praevalebit" as "Great is the truth and it will prevail a bit" (a profound, if unconscious, insight into the working of the world). Bunter was known as the Fat Owl of the Remove because, short-sighted and wearing thick round spectacles, he spent his entire life scheming to obtain and consume cream cakes. One of his classmates was Harry Jamset Ram Singh, the son of an Indian rajah who, as everyone agreed, was "a white man deep inside," a fact which satisfactorily accounted for his thoroughgoing decency and sportsmanship.