Book Club

I think those are ideas driven by his background as a psychiatrist, yes. They do echo Marx's "Opium of the masses" - religion or, here, superstition, as a pacifier. In that sense Fanon explains how those beliefs serve an integral part in upkeeping the status quo, how they detract from the material conditions of those people and the real oppression they're suffering from.

The conclusion, I believe, is that belief can only impede the reversal of violence for so long before it reaches its end. There is a time where it isn't enough, when the oppressed do rise up. So that ritual catalyst for violence or sexual desire or whatever else isn't needed and dissolves.