![]() The challenge is once again being laid down these last few years with an explosion of revolts and uprisings all over the world that includes the second wave of the Arab uprisings from Algeria to Lebanon and from Sudan to Iraq. They inspired anti-colonial struggles all over the world shaped Pan-Africanism and profoundly influenced the Black Panthers in the US.įanon wrote: ‘Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’ (Fanon, 1967a, p166). Fanon’s ideas were always influenced by practice and also transformative. His experience and analysis was the prism through which many revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and helped to make the country synonymous with Third World revolution. This radical intellectual and revolutionary devoted himself, body and soul to the Algerian national liberation. He did not live to see his adoptive country become free from French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. ![]() In his trajectory, we can see the interactions between Black America and Africa, between the intellectual and the militant, between thought/theory and action/practice, between idealism and pragmatism, between individual analysis and collective movement, between the psychological life (he trained as a psychiatrist) and the physical struggle, between nationalism and Pan-Africanism and finally between questions of colonialism and those of neo-colonialism (Bouamama, 2017, p140-159).įanon died less than a year before Algeria got its independence on July 5, 1962. He wrote his first book Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 1986) two years before Dien Bien Phu (1954) and his last book, the famous The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1967a), a canonical essay about the anti-colonialist and third-worldist struggle, one year before Algerian independence (1962), at a moment when African countries were gaining their independence. As a true embodiment of ‘l’intellectuel engagé’, he has transformed the debate on race, colonialism, imperialism, otherness and what it means for one human being to oppress another.ĭespite his short life (he died at the age of 36 from leukaemia), Fanon’s thought is very rich and his work was prolific from books and papers to speeches. ![]() In another way, he represented the maturing of the anti-colonial consciousness and was a decolonial thinker par excellence. He strongly and compellingly argued for a path to a future where humanity ‘advances a step further’ and breaks away from the world of colonialism and European universalism. One might ask, can his analyses transcend the limitations of time? Can they be universal or impregnated with universalist tendencies? Can we learn from him as a committed intellectual and revolutionary thinker? Or should we just reduce him to another anti-colonial figure, largely irrelevant for our “post-colonial” times?įor me, as a young Algerian activist, Fanon’s dynamic and revolutionary thinking, always about creation, movement and becoming, remains utterly prophetic, vivid, inspiring, analytically sharp and morally committed to disalienation and emancipation from all forms of oppression. Born Martinican, Algerian by choice, he wrote from the vantage point of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism and of his political experiences on the African continent. Not only relevant, but insightful to the extent that they have helped us to grasp the violence of the Manichean world we live in, and the rationality of revolt against it.įanon’s writings took place in a period of decolonisation of countries in Africa and elsewhere in the global South. What would he say about the new Algerian revolution? How might he act in the face of current events? What can we as young Algerians learn from his reflections and experiences? This long read, based on a chapter in the upcoming book ‘Fanon Today: The Revolt and Reason of the Wretched of the Earth’ (Edited by Nigel Gibson, Daraja Press 2021) is an attempt to analyse the 2019-2021 Algerian uprising through a Fanonian lens, trying in this way to shine a light on Fanon’s genius, the timeliness of his analysis, the lasting value of his critical insights and the centrality of his decolonial thought in the revolutionary endeavours of the wretched of the earth.ĭuring the upheavals that the North African and West Asian region witnessed a decade ago (2010-2011) – what has been dubbed the “Arab Spring” –, Fanon’s thought and praxis proved to be as relevant as ever. ![]() Six decades after the death of the revolutionary thinker Frantz Fanon and the publication of his masterpiece The Wretched of the Earth, Algeria is witnessing another revolution, this time against the national bourgeoisie that Fanon railed against in his passionate and ferocious chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’.
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