We say firmly that Algerian man and Algerian society have stripped themselves of the mental sedimentation and of the emotional and intellectual handicaps which resulted from 130 years of oppression. This same colonialism that held the people in the tight meshes of the police and of the army is today wounded to the death. French colonialism in Algeria has always developed on the assumption that it would last forever. The structures built, the port facilities, the airdromes, the prohibition of the Arab language, often gave the impression that the enemy committed himself, compromised himself, half lost himself in his prey, precisely in order to make any future break, any separation, impossible. Every manifestation of the French presence expressed a continuous rooting in time and in the Algerian future, and could always be read as a token of an indefinite oppression.

Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, loc. 619