***** ...[T]he colonial situation is precisely such that it drives the colonized to appraise all the colonizer's contribution in a pejorative and absolute way. The colonized perceives the doctor, the engineer, the schoolteacher, the policeman, the rural constable, through the haze of an almost organic confusion. The compulsory visit by the doctor to the _douar_ is preceded by the assembling of the population through the agency of the police authorities. The doctor who arrives in this atmosphere of general constraint is never a native doctor but always a doctor belonging to the dominant society and very often to the army.
The statistics on sanitary improvements are not interpreted by the native as progress in the fight against illness, in general, but as fresh proof of the extension of the occupier's hold on the country. When the French authorities show visitors through the Tizi-Ouzou sanitorium or the operating units of the Mustapha hospital in Algiers, this has for the native just one meaning: "This is what we have done for the people of this country; this country owes us everything; were it not for us, there would be no country." There is a real mental reservation on the part of the native; it is difficult for him to be objective, to separate the wheat from the chaff. (121-122) *****
Difficult, but separate the wheat from the chaff we must.
Fanon discusses how Algerian perceptions of Algerian doctors changed in the course of anti-colonial struggles:
***** The Algerian doctor, the native doctor who, as we have seen, was looked upon before the national combat as an ambassador of the occupier, was reintegrated into the group. Sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the _mechtas_, living the drama of the people, the Algerian doctor became a part of the Algerian body. There was no longer that reticence, so constant during the period of unchallenged oppression. He was no longer "the" doctor, but "our" doctor, "our" technician. (142) *****
We need the kind of struggle that would recruit an increasing number of doctors, technicians, scientists, & others on our side & make them "our" doctors, "our" technicians, etc. However, a large number of Americans -- including many leftists -- may have given up on such an emancipatory possibility even in theory, not to mention in practice. Hence the oft-heard note of _all-encompassing, indiscriminate skepticism_ about science, medicine, & any kind of expert knowledge, unwilling to separate the wheat from the chaff, leaving us trapped in the haze of colonial ambivalence (which may make many Americans credulous believers in anyone who claims to debunk expert knowledge).
Yoshie