Frantz Fanon. David Macey

Tourtet was a career officer with a deep sense of loyalty to his superiors and therefore a very reluctant rebel, but his decision to move against Robert’s sailors was the decisive factor in Martinique’s ‘June Days’. Robert’s position was increasingly untenable, and his actions increasingly irrational. He had on three occasions refused to obey Vichy’s orders to scuttle the ships under his command, and was still convinced that he might have to use them to defend Martinique from an American invasion.⁶² Faced with popular unrest in the streets and a growing mutiny in Balata, he was forced to negotiate a ‘change of regime’ at the end of June. In order to avoid bloodshed, he now agreed to surrender his authority to a French plenipotentiary.⁶³

      On 14 July, the destroyer Terrible docked in Fort-de-France and Henri Hoppenot, representing the Free French, announced to the delirious crowd on the Savanne: ‘I bring you back France and the Republic.’ Speaking on behalf of the Comité de Libération, Dr Emmanuel Véry went on:

      Henri Hoppenot has come to deliver us from the yoke of the men of Vichy, who are Hitler’s lackeys. For us, he is the France that made the Revolution of 1789, the France that flung in the face of the world the immortal principles of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the generous France of 1848, the France which, after the defeats of 1940, and faithful to her past and traditions, took up the fight once more alongside the Allies, the France which we can never divorce from the Republic, because we cannot forget that it was the Republic that made us men and citizens.⁶⁴

      In September 1944, Admiral Georges Robert was sentenced by the courts of the Provisional French Government to ten years’ hard labour for hampering the French war effort. In October 1946, he was released on bail after suffering a brain haemorrhage and eighteen months later his sentence was quashed because of irregularities during the original trial.⁶⁵ In 1950, he published his own self-serving account of the last days of Tan Robè:

      This was a time when the idea spread throughout the island that General de Gaulle was a black general who, just like Toussaint L’Ouverture, wanted to liberate people of colour from the yoke of the white land-owners. To complement this fable, dissidence was either the General’s wife – and, like him, coloured – or a neighbouring island under his control. And so people left en dissidence, in the way that one went to Guadeloupe for a change of air and to find better conditions of existence than those prevailing in Martinique, which was subject to the rigours of the American blockade. And this later came to be known as the Resistance.⁶⁶

      The story of those who believed that dissidence was de Gaulle’s wife has become part of the collective memory of Tan Robè, but its meaning shifts considerably depending on whether it is told by the ever-patronizing Robert, or by a self-aware Martinican with a critical perspective on his or her history.

      A fortnight after the arrival of Hoppenot, the decision was taken to raise a local unit of volunteers to fight alongside the Free French and the Allies. It was a light infantry battalion known as the 5ème Bataillon de Marche des Antilles (5BMA) but, although recruitment began almost immediately, its actual formation was delayed by a shortage of weapons and trained men.⁶⁷ It was not ready to leave Martinique until the following March. Young men volunteered for all the reasons that lead young men to volunteer for war. Some wanted adventure, others glory. Some no doubt saw the war as a means of fulfilling the classic Martinican dream of leaving the island, which really had come to resemble a prison. Fanon’s own motives were grounded in the conviction that his own freedom, that of Martinique and that of France were inextricably bound up together. His decision to enlist meant that he once more had to go against his family’s wishes and the advice of his elder brother. He again ignored Henri’s warnings about the fire that burns and the wars that kill. Manville recalled that Fanon told his teacher that, when freedom was at stake, ‘we are all involved, white, black or yellow’.⁶⁸ He was not alone in believing this. His fellow volunteers included Charles Cézette, Marcel Manville and Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole, who had also made the dangerous voyage to Dominica.⁶⁹ As they prepared to board ship, Manville promised a tearful Eléanore Fanon: ‘Yes, yes, Madame Fanon, I will look after Frantz for you’, but he was only too aware that his size – and Manville was a big man – could offer no one any protection in a modern battle.⁷⁰ This must have been the one occasion in his life in which the voluble Marcel Manville was almost lost for words.

      At 14.00 hours on 12 March 1944, the Oregon, a cargo boat converted into a makeshift troop ship, slipped out of Fort-de-France with a lone Dutch torpedo boat as an escort. The 1,000 men on board were under the command of Tourtet and, with the exception of the officers and some of the NCOs, all were black. The békés’ attempt to create a local version of the Vichy regime had ended in failure, and they were not about to fight for de Gaulle’s Free French. No béké volunteered. Fanon, who at eighteen was the youngest man on the Oregon, muttered to Manville that they should be flying the black flag. As they sailed out of the harbour, the elated volunteers sang in Creole: ‘Hitler, nous ké roule en bas morne-là’ (‘Hitler, we’re going to knock you off your hilltop’).⁷¹ The elation masked fear. Manville recalls that he and Fanon were afraid that they were going to a watery grave rather than to the glory of battle. Such fears were not entirely unfounded. The Oregon carried only the light weaponry of a transport, and her tiny escort could have provided little protection against a submarine attack. Most of the men on board were violently seasick as the ship hit the rough waters of the Martinique Passage. Fanon had entered a military world of confusion and secrecy, and had no idea of where he was going on the ship that was taking him away from the Caribbean for the first time. Some of his comrades thought they were going to Italy, while others were convinced that their destination was the Far Eastern theatre. The Oregon was in fact steaming north-west towards Bermuda, and reached it within four days. After a night in port to take on supplies and fresh water, she joined a convoy of 120 ships and sailed east into the Atlantic. After fourteen days at sea, she reached the Moroccan port of Casablanca on 30 March, and Fanon’s battalion was immediately transferred to the El Hajeb camp near Meknes. They remained there for two months of very basic training as officer cadets.

      The anonymous soldier who meticulously kept the 5BMA’s daily log, or journal de marche, noted that his unit received a very poor reception and wrote that their living conditions were deplorable. He gives no explanation for his remarks, but a later entry in the log suggests that inter-ethnic tensions were high. The camp was crowded with Algerians, Moroccans and troops from the African colonies, and on 22 May, a new Mobile Field Brothel – that most curious item of French matériel de guerre – was brought in for the exclusive use of the Martinican contingent. Whether this was because certain of the prostitutes were reluctant to service Martinicans, or whether the latter were reluctant to share ‘their’ women, is not made clear by the journal de marche, which provides a terse and sometimes incomplete record of events, but no analysis. It is, on the other hand, quite clear from the 5BMA’s records that, on other occasions, the sexual rivalry between the West Indians and the Africans led to physical violence, as there were serious outbreaks of brawling when some Tirailleurs sénégalais attacked those West Indians they found in the company of white women in Nantes in August 1944.

      Fanon and Manville’s knowledge of Morocco was restricted to the little that they had learned at school: ‘From a geographical point of view, it was a beautiful country where the sun was cold; from a historical point of view, it was a country conquered by Marshal Lyauetey, who declared that in a colony you have to show your strength so as not to have to use it.’ They now found that the French protectorate was also a divided country in which there co-existed a privileged world of European conquerors and a devalorized world in which an Islamic people lived in squalor.⁷² The camp at El Hajeb was another divided world. The Martinicans and the volunteers from Guadeloupe were not billeted in the same barracks as the African troops. They did not eat the same food, much to the annoyance of Manville, who would much rather have eaten spicy African stews than ‘the food served to those who came from the great cold’.⁷³ And they did not wear the same uniforms. The West Indians were from the ‘old colonies’, were treated as semi-Europeans and wore the same uniform as their metropolitan counterparts. The Africans of the Tirailleurs sénégalais wore the traditional chechia, or fez, red flannel belts and jerkins with rounded collars. Not all of them were happy with this convention, and unsuccessfully demanded the right