Honest intellectuals in new states are the barrier against corruption and dictatorship.

Evidence

In those underdeveloped countries which accede to independence, there almost always exist a small number of honest intellectuals … who instinctively distrust the race for positions and pensions which is symptomatic of the early days of independence… . The personal situation of these men … explains their manifest contempt for profiteers and schemers. Closing the road to [these] is, certainly, the means whereby the vicissitudes of newfound independence may be avoided, and with them the decline of morals, the installing of corruption within the country, economic regression, and the immediate disaster of anti-democratic regime depending on force and intimidation. But it is also the means towards progress. — Abdi Ismail Samatar, Africa’s First Democrats, 1068

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense proposition about why newly independent states fail: the purging of honest intellectuals is the mechanism by which corruption and dictatorship set in. Fanon’s argument lands with unusual weight in this closing context.