Frantz Fanon's account of libération in the third phase of decolonisation was anything but detailed in outline, perhaps because it was more a utopian inference than a recollection of lived experience. The dream of creating ex nihilo a new species of man or woman, capable in inventing themselves rather than being the effects of others, was too easily assumed to be about to become a reality.

A major reason for this may be found in Fanon's déraciné status: he grew up in Martinique, thinking himself French and white, only to discover that he was a West Indian to those whom he met after his arrival as a student in Paris. Thereafter, he lost all sense of local particularisms (a phrase he used with contempt in The Wretched of the Earth to describe the nationalist phase). According to the Tunisian writer Albert Memmi: ‘Fanon's private dream is that, though henceforth hating France and the French, he will never return to Négritude and the West Indies … never again set foot in Martinique.’ In that, he had much in common with early writers of the Irish Renaissance such as Oscar Wilde: for Wilde was another instance of the colonial intellectual who came to the metropolitan centre only to discover that he was Irish, not English, and who evolved there a vision which, lacking local specificity and addressing itself more to an English than an Irish audience, found in the end ‘an equal welcome in all countries’.