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1
Bobby Seals~
Frantz Fanon, Alienation, and the Psychology of the Oppressed
“The colonial world is divided into compartments…the colonial world is a world cut in
two.”1
The details in the above excerpt sets the context of this treatise, as it will
centralize its focus on Frantz Fanon and his interpretive psychoanalysis on the vitality of
Alienation. Fanon transparently show how pervasively dangerous alienation can be
among the colonized populace. Historically, the compartmentalization of the colonial
world has been systemically divided into a dichotomous milieu, befittingly placing one
group superior over another. As a socially constructed phenomenon within the colonial
world, alienation creates an undying paradigmatic Apartheid-based realism. In a similar
vein, “apartheid is simply one form of the division into compartments of the colonial
world…the world of the dominator, guarded by the army and the police.”2 Fanon
embarked on a mission to de-pathologize the Third World peoples whom were trapped in
this world of colonialism, while simultaneously, attempting to politicize those whom
were oppressed. In this respect, Fanon’s rationality of counter-memory enhanced his
capacity to think critically and dialectically formulated a commitment, dedication, and
responsibility to facilitate dialogue, discourse, and spaces to build capacities to
revolutionize the psyche of the “wretched of the earth.” According to Judith Butler’s
book Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon, “Fanon’s work gives the European man a
chance to know himself, and so to engage in that pursuit of self-knowledge, based upon
an examination of his shared practices, that is proper to the philosophical foundations of
human life.”3 In other words, Fanon wants the European colonizer, the European elite, to
see his complicity in systemic violence inflicted upon the colonized.
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth: A Negro Psychoanalyst’s Study of the Problems of Racism &
Colonialism in the World Today. 1961 (New York, New York: Grove Press, Inc.), p. 31. 2 Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation. 1974 (New York, New York: Monthly Review
Press) p. 55. 3 Judith Butler. “Violence, Nonviolence: Sartre on Fanon” in Jonathan Judaken, Race After Sartre:
Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Post-colonialism. 2008 (Albany, New York: State University of New
York Press) p. 216.
2
Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, the capital of the French colony of
Martinique, on July 20th
, 1925; he was a black man, the descendent of slaves carried off
from Africa to the Antilles.4 Fanon’s family belonged to the bourgeoisie class and refused
to embrace their Creoleness, Africanness, Blackness or Otherness. Despite the racial
discrimination to which they were subjected, the situation of these Blacks differed from
that of the Blacks in the African colonies.5 Fanon’s family was a Francophile people that
embraced the French and Francophone conceptual ways of life. However, Frantz Fanon
saw this Francization process as a brainwashing tactical contrivance to turn the Afro-
Martinican into a Frenchified subject in relation to every aspect of life (i.e. culture,
language, education, history, legacy, etc.). Education in Martinique was – and is – an
induction into linguistic and cultural schizophrenia.6 Quintessentially, Fanon knew from
first-hand experiences how devastating, destructive and crippling racism, colonialism and
assimilation can have on the psyche of the colonized. Majority chose to assimilate, but
irrespectively some chose to resist. Fanon chose the latter. Conversely, after a happy
childhood in Martinique, a young Fanon enlisted in the World War II fight to defend the
freedom of Europeans persecuted by Nazism in the name of racial supremacy; after
coming home to the Antilles, he returned to France to pursue his education, studying
psychiatry in Lyon.7 His experience in France as a Black man and as an intellectual
exposed him to racism, but however, he was also exposed to the elements of ethnology,
phenomenology, and Marxism, but existentialism and psychoanalysis took top billing.8
This treatise is therefore an attempt to explain Frantz Fanon’s relationship to alienation
and how he planned to transform the world into a more conscious, liberating, and
respectful home. His genealogical and archaeological methodologies used to excavate
and analyze the immorality, malevolence, and monstrosity of alienation came to be a
revolutionary conceptual thought process that would help in the battle against systemic
racism9 within the realm of colonialism, colonization and European imperialism.
4 Ibid. p. vii.
5 Ibid. p. vii.
6 David Macey, Frantz Fanon; A Biography. 2000 (New York, New York: Picador USA) p. 61.
7 Alice Cherki. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. 2006 (Translated from the French by Nadia Benabid: Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press), p. 5. 8 Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. p. 16.
9 Systemic Racism is a broad range of racialized dimensions of this society: the racist framing, racist
ideology, stereotyped attitudes, racist emotions, discriminatory habits and actions, and extensive racist
3
Moreover, Fanon was an innovatory man known for his dynamism and uncompromising
gaze. In other words, his rigidity, rage and vitality shaped him into a Black revolutionary
freedom fighter with an emphasis in fighting endlessly for the liberation of all oppressed
peoples. His specificity was concentrated on the intense francophone prejudice, racism
and colonialism against the Algerian proletariat. Having Algeria and Martinique in mind
– the two dependent territories which he best knew – he talked of metropolitan policies
silently destroying indigenous social structures, imperceptibly deforming value systems,
tacitly rejecting the legitimacy of indigenous cultures, and categorically denying integrity
to African histories.10
Essentially European colonial hostility, Francized colonial context
in particular in Algeria and Martinique, produced resistance and counter-violence among
the alienated.11
The alienated in these ‘imagined communities’ began perceive life
through a non-Eurocentric trajectory. However, alienation is initially a Marxian (i.e. Karl
Marx) theoretical concept which was predicated on socio-economic dynamics, but, on the
other hand, “Fanon sees the alienation of the Negro, the colonized, as essentially socio-
economic, but it is a socio-economic (socio-political) alienation that has profound
psychological effects.”12
In other words, Fanon “speaks about the alienation of the Negro
in terms of cultural imposition, and of the exploitation of the native by the colonists, just
as Marx sees the alienation of the proletariat as their exploitation by the bourgeoisie.”13
As specified by David Caute in his succinct and informative analysis of Fanon’s
intellectual evolution writes, “Just as the later Marx roots alienation firmly in the division
of labor and in class struggle, the later Fanon locates it equally firmly in the imperialist
division of the world into poor countries and rich, exploiters and exploited, rulers and
ruled.14
In essence, Fanon gave a new fixity to alienation. L. Adele Jinadu points out that
to a certain extent, “psychological violence then becomes a form of cultural imperialism
in the context of the colonial situation…its victim is an alienated person, in the strong
institutions developed over centuries by whites. Defined in Joe R. Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of
Oppression. 2006 (New York, New York: Routledge; Taylor & Francis Group), p. xii. 10
B. Marie Perinbam, HOLY VIOLENCE: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon, An Intellectual
Biography. 1982 (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press), p. 7. 11
Perinbam, HOLY VIOLENCE: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon, An Intellectual Biography.
p. 7. 12
Onwuanibe, The Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 41. 13
Onwuanibe, The Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 41. 14
David Caute. Frantz Fanon. 1970 (New York, New York: The Viking Press), p. 32.
4
Marxian sense of man becoming a stranger to himself.”15
In a similar disposition, the
alienation of the native may take the form of assimilation, the loss of cultural identity or
its disruption, through which the social group imitate the oppressor.16
Within this context,
Fanon writes:
The oppressor, through the inclusive and frightening character of his authority,
manages to impose on the native new ways of seeing, and in particular, a
pejorative judgment with respect to his original forms of existing.17
In other words, as succinctly stated by Jean-Paul Sartre, “Oppression means, first of all,
the oppressor’s hatred for the oppressed.”18
Marx wrote on alienation in a similar way
portraying it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is fraught with violence and
dehumanization. In a similar vein, Fanon urged that alienated people recover their
material and spiritual losses through violence…in many ways this is exactly what
happened in Algeria.19
Michel Foucault’s Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, the Introduction
epigrammatically states that the “Setting aside the profound intentions of an author, the
creativity of genius, or the autonomy of tradition…. points to the work of historical
accidents, abrupt interruptions, and the play of surfaces.”20
In that similar vein, Frantz
Fanon points to the work of historical accidents or abrupt interruptions with prolific
significance and attestation as he imperatively writes in all four of his disquisitions.21
In a
sense, these historical accidents or abrupt interruptions throughout Fanon’s life as well as
what his African ancestors experienced, turned him into a Revolutionary activist whom,
15
L. Adele Jinadu. FANON. In Search of the African Revolution. 1986 (New York, New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul Inc.), p. 48. 16
Onwuanibe, The Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 32. 17
Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p. 38. 18
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Introduction” in Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. 1965 (Boston,
Massachusetts: Beacon Press), p. xxvii. 19Perinbam, HOLY VIOLENCE: The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon, An Intellectual Biography.
p. 81. 20
Donald F. Bouchard, “Introduction” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. 1977
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press), p. 17. 21Black Skin, White Masks (1952), English translation in 1967 by Charles Lam Markmann: New York,
Grove Press; A Dying Colonialism (1959), English translation in 1965 by Haakon Chevalier: New York,
Monthly Review Press; The Wretched of the Earth (1961), English translation in 1963 by Constance
Farrington: New York, Grove Weidenfeld; Toward the African Revolution (1964), English translation in
1969 by Haakon Chevalier: New York, Grove Press.
5
by all means, was ready to die for his cause. As stated by Peter Geismar, “Fanon always
had an underlying urge to move out of politics and back to his first interest: research in
new methods of psychotherapy, but he felt the revolution had to succeed to ensure a
proper environment for further advances within his own field; it was an unavoidable
interruption in what he considered his real work.”22
In other words, revolution was an
inescapable interruption, an intrusive continuity that was his ultimate fervor. Joining the
revolution to free the oppressed by European invasion was his definitive vocation.
Geismar raised the question, “Exactly when did Frantz Fanon become a revolutionary?”23
After years of emersion in “Western racism” and witnessing the “racist French troops
occupying his homeland (of Martinique), racism was pervasively destroying lives in his
proximity predicated on racial hatred. Fanon’s own traumatic experiential encounter of
racial difference, illustrated so symbolically in Black Skin, White Masks through his
reaction to being called ‘A Negro!’ and his ensuing impossible attempts at defense,
emblematizes the trauma of colonialism for himself but also for other colonized peoples:
the shock of the meeting of cultures, the shock of encountering the always-already
derogatory meaning pre-exiting for the black man from whatever culture.24
The salient
point is that colonial experiences can be a traumatic reality to cope with, especially in the
Fanon’s case of having, merely, to spend his entire life engulfed in a paradoxical world of
alienation, racial discrimination, and psychological manipulation. E. Ann Kaplan affirms
that, “Seeing Fanon through the lens of trauma, rather than that of fantasy or repression,
helps us understand more about both the phenomena of trauma and about what are often
seen as Fanon’s conflicting poles – the psychiatrist and the revolutionary.25
In other
words, these traumatic encounters prompted or incentivize Fanon wanting and yearning
for transformative socio-political and institutional change for the colonized. Moreover,
through Fanon’s scrutinizing trajectory, the ultimate incentive was envisioning freedom
and self-determination for the alienated and victimized “other.”
22
Peter Geismar. Fanon. 1971 (New York, New York: The Dial Press), p. 57. 23
Ibid. p. 59. 24
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. p. 93. 25
E. Ann Kaplan. “Fanon, Trauma, and Cinema,” in Anthony C. Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon: Critical
Perspectives. 1999 (New York, New York: Routledge), p. 155.
6
The authenticity of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary activism stems from influential
and powerful affirmations from Jean-Paul Sartre and Aimé Césaire, both quintessentially
(co) producing metaphysical bodies of knowledge – Existentialism26
and Négritude.27
These theoretical conceptualizations will find refuge and cultivation in the consciousness
of Fanon. One critical ideological concept that Fanon might have concretely adopted
from Sartre is the use of violence to free the oppressed. Sartre concluded: “to change this
situation, the oppressed has to use violence…the union of the oppressed will come about,
therefore, through violence.”28
A transcendentalized idealistic Fanon would see his
destiny, through self-transformation, that the world was in dire need of his philosophical
knowledge and guidance. Fanon’s discursive praxis, to a certain extent in reflexivity to
Césaire, calls on the world to move forward as rapidly as possible, and yet calls for the
overthrow of a master class’s ideology of progress, one built on violence, destruction, and
genocide.29
In other words, this ideological abstraction is precisely predicated on the
“renewal of colonialism”30
and if not ousted, the Third World peoples will ultimately
meet their demise. This quietus will be at the hands of those who are content with
26
Existentialism – According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, Existentialism is defined as a
philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and
responsible agent determining his or her own development through acts of the will. Generally taken to
originate with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, existentialism tends to be atheistic, to disparage scientific
knowledge, and to deny the existence of objective values, stressing instead the reality and significance of
human freedom and experience. The approach was developed chiefly in 20th
-century Europe, notably by
Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. In other words, Jean-Paul
Sartre emphasize that “the existentialist…thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all
possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a
priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it.” Quote found in Sartre’s essay
“The Humanism of Existentialism.” In Essays in Existentialism. Secaucus, New Jersey. 1999. p. 40-41. 27
Négritude – According to the Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Second Edition. By Bill
Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin define Négritude as theory of the distinctiveness of African
personality and culture. African Francophone writers such as Leopold Sédar Senghor and Birago Diop, and
West Indian colleagues such as Aimé Césaire, developed the theory of Négritude in Paris in the period
immediately before and after the Second World War. The concepts of ‘négritude’ implied that all people of
Negro descent shared certain inalienable essential characteristics. In this respect the movement was, like
those of earlier race-based assertions of African dignity by such Negro activists as Edward Wilmot Blyden,
Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey, both essentialist and nativist. p. 144-145. 28
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Notebooks for an Ethics,” (translated by David Pellauer, Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992. p. 142.) In David Macey, Frantz Fanon; A Biography. 2000 (New
York, New York: Picador USA) p. 463. Sartre was a one of the major influences in Fanon’s radical adult
life and due to close proximity and influenceable ideology, Fanon would embrace and espouse his concepts
of self-defensive violence and a key element for his own revolutionized methodology. 29
Robin D. G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anti-colonialism,” in Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism. 2000
(New York, New York: Monthly Review Press), p. 27. 30
Ibid. p. 26.
7
mimicking the colonial masters, whether they are the old-school British or French
officers, the new jack U.S. corporate rulers, or the Stalinists whose sympathy for the
“backward” countries often mirrored the very colonial discourse Césaire exposes.31
Both
Fanon and Césaire warn the colored world not to follow Europe’s footsteps, and not to go
back to the ancient way, but to carve out a new direction altogether.32
In a similar vein,
Fanon states with indomitable passion:
So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and
societies, which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for
something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an
obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America
into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to
Europeans…But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to
bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must
invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples’
expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.33
As true radicals and critics of post-colonial theory, Fanon’s symbiotic relationship with
Césaire and Sartre would solidify and cultivate revolutionized knowledge until Fanon’s
untimely death at the age of thirty-six. Fanon’s impugnability to dispute the “truth” or
validity of neo-colonial domination, within the conceptual and psychoanalytic
infrastructure, challenges the experiential existence of European hegemonic supremacy.
Because of Fanon’s vilification against colonial rule, he gained many enemies in which
would try to take his life through unsuccessful assassination attempts. In the summer of
1959 in Rome, Italy, “The Red Hand” or La “Main Rouge” made two attempts on
Fanon’s life; A time bomb at Rome airport exploded prematurely killing two children;
the nocturnal commando of assassins which penetrated into the hospital found his bed
empty as his suspicions had been aroused and he had insisted on being transferred to
another room that very evening.34
Moreover, Fanon’s anti-imperialist ideology posed a
monolithic threat and danger to the survivability of this permeating universalized
omnipresence of Eurocentricity. Fanon needed to be silenced. In that respect, Fanon was
a marked man. Due to his ideological and epistemological beliefs of demonizing
31
Ibid. p. 26. 32
Ibid. p. 27. 33
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 255. 34Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation, p. xiii-xiv.
8
European colonial legitimacy and their “Manifest Destiny”35
approach, Fanon was
labeled as an atheist. Michael Lackey writes that, “the writings of Frantz Fanon, the
French-Martinican psychiatrist and political revolutionary, for he brilliantly exposes how
the God concept has been strategically deployed to create a whole race of people as the
wretched of the earth.”36
In other words, Fanon theoretical perspective stems from his
personal and professional analysis in France, Algeria, and Martinique and amongst the
African Americans in the United States. He believed that the use of the dominant
religion, Christianity, has kept the “wretched of the earth” in a state of stagnation, making
them believe that “God” will free them (i.e. only when they are deceased) from the
oppressive and pervasive forces perpetuated by European domination. Fanon also
emphasized that freedom has nothing to do with “any supernatural power”37
therefore it
is solemnly up to the colonized to free themselves from this socially and politically
constructed oppressive paradigm. Lackey also points out that Fanon explicitly captures
his readers’ attention to the chosen people discourse: “The Church in the colonies is the
white people’s church, the foreigner’s church. She does not call the native to God’s way
but to the way of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this
matter many are called but few chosen.”38
In other words, the “white” church operates in
a similar apparatus in relation to colonialism and colonization as they are intended to
destroy every aspect of the subaltern’s culture, language and historical legacies; and
replace it with the colonizer’s culture, language and historical legacies. Fanon was
characterized with innumerable epithets, some positive and some negative; however,
principally he was delineated as a “Revolutionary Humanist.” According to Richard C.
Onwuanibe, revolutionary humanism is:
35
Manifest Destiny stems from an ideology of European American / European expansionism. It comprises
metaphysical dogmas of a providential mission and quasi-scientific “laws” of national development,
conceptions of national right and ideals of social duty, legal rationalizations and appeals to “the higher
law,” aims of extending freedom and designs of extending benevolent absolutism. In Manifest Destiny: A
Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. By Albert K. Weinberg. 1935 (Chicago, Illinois:
Quadrangle Books), p. 2. 36
Michael Lackey, African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-cultural
Dynamics of Faith. 2007 (Tallahassee, Florida: University Press of Florida), p. 19. 37
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 36. 38
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 42.
9
Essentially a human praxis whereby authentic human order and values are
initially forged. It restores the imbalance of one race or people dominating
another. Specifically, it is a criticism of the White world inferiorizing and
exploiting the Black world, of the European settlers in Algeria dominating the
Moslems, slave labor being used for the aggrandizement of Europe. It is a
practical way of rectifying the injustices perpetuated in the relationship of the
colonial powers of the west and the Third World.39
In that sense, Fanon symbolizes a “Revolutionary Humanist” based on his propagandistic
modus operandi with regard to his relentless attempt of denouncing and lambasting
European colonialism and its imperialistic demeanor through their violent and discursive
praxis. In a similar vein, the raisons d'être of revolutionary humanism is to destroy
alienating socio-political structures and replace them with ideal structures or
approximations, which offer opportunities for the full development of human beings.40
Moreover, the impenetrable mission, according to Fanon, “is the liberation of the man of
color from himself.”41
Yet, this impenetrability of liberating “men of color” is still a
problematic mission within the contemporary context.42
Lack of knowledge, chauvinism,
abhorrence, and manipulation are some of the fundamental barriers that would have to be
detached if the colonized were to be liberated: “I seriously hope to persuade my brother,
whether black or white, to tear off with all his strength the shameful livery put together
by centuries of incomprehension.”43
Fanon’s voice resiliently echoes and signifies self-
determination and cultural agency, which can be found in a profusion of Black
revolutionary thinkers (i.e. Sojourner Truth, Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Cheikh
Anta Diop, Mau Mau44
rebels led by Dedan Kimaathi, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame
39
Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 102. 40
Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 108. 41
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 8. 42
Within the contemporary context in the United States alone, men of color are either in prison or dying at
the hands of another man of color. In regards to violent acts on each other, Fanon deem such criminality as
collective ‘behavior patterns of avoidance.’ According to Renate Zahar’s chapter four, Man’s Alienation in
Colonialism in his book Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation, emphasize that the colonized rarely is
in close proximity to the colonizer, therefore, ‘whenever the colonized, with his nerves on edge, meet other
people, be it at work, in his closely packed lodgings, at the grocer’s where he still owes money, he meets
people who are like himself are under the colonizer’s heel: mirror images of his own misery. It is on them
that he vents his own hatred; it is them that he dares to assault as long as he is too frightened or apathetic to
revolt against the colonizer himself (55). 43
Ibid. p. 12. 44
Mau Mau was essentially an uprising of the peasants of Kenya (principally from Central Province)
against the (British) colonial state, its policies and agents, in 1952. When the revolt broke out, the colonial
authorities refused to acknowledge that there was any legitimate reason for such an uprising…believing
10
Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Almicar Cabral, etc.) that came
before Fanon or existing during the same time which inevitably faced martyrdom,
struggling uncompromisingly for “self-identification and self-assertion in a white
culture.45
Interestingly, Molefi Kete Asante states, “If W.E. B. Du Bois can be called the
great interpreter of race and Cheikh Anta Diop the great interpreter of culture, then Frantz
Fanon is the great interpreter of wars of resistance and anti-colonialism.46
Dubois, as well
as Fanon, exerted oneself to revolutionize Black “people’s leadership class through
inspiration, agitation, and even imprecation.47
Given Fanon’s posthumous fame as a
Third World revolutionary, his watershed manifesto – have the intention to inspire,
agitate and imprecate – which consist of the four published books,48
are by far, some of
the most read radical Black liberationist discourse by contemporary and non-
contemporary revolutionaries and scholars. For instance, Fanon’s inspirational work and
influential radical fierceness can be found in the discursive praxis or rhetorically among
international anti-colonial critical thinkers and revolutionary activist from: Kwame
Nkrumah, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, Malcolm X, Assata
Shakur, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Amiri Baraka,
Kwame Ture, Ayatollah Khomeini (i.e. leader of the Iranian Revolution during the 1960s
and 1970s), Bobby Sands (i.e. member of the Irish Republican Army in 1973) etc. Frantz
Fanon’s multifaceted insights had a predictive inference, above all his assessment of the
socio-historical ramifications that derive from the continuity of systemic racism,
that the Africans were bound to benefit from colonial rule. Colonialism, so it was argued, had brought with
it the benefits of education, religion, modern commerce, and government…. drawing Africans into the
mainstream of human civilization and away from the pervasive barbarism which had hitherto enveloped the
African continent. In MAU MAU and Kenya: Analysis of a Peasant Revolt. By Wunyabari O. Maloba. 1998
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press), p. 1. The Mau Mau rebels were fierce warriors led by
Dedan Kimaathi that refused to acquiesce to the British Colonial rule. Their legacy still lives on among the
indigenous African tribes in Kenya. Kimaathi stated: “It’s better to die on our feet than to live on our
knees.” Kimmathi was captured and “hanged on February 18th
, 1957.” Information on this death was found
in Mau Mau Warrior. By Abiodun Alao. 2006 (New York, New York: Osprey Publishing) p. 8. 45
David Caute. Frantz Fanon. p. 105. 46
Molefi Kete Asante and Abu S. Abarry, African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. 1996
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press), p. 598. 47
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race. 1993 (New York, New York:
Henry Holt and Company) p. 478. 48
Black Skin, White Masks (1952), English translation in 1967 by Charles Lam Markmann: New York,
Grove Press; A Dying Colonialism (1959), English translation in 1965 by Haakon Chevalier: New York,
Monthly Review Press; The Wretched of the Earth (1961), English translation in 1963 by Constance
Farrington: New York, Grove Weidenfeld; Toward the African Revolution (1964), English translation in
1969 by Haakon Chevalier: New York, Grove Press.
11
oppressive racial and cultural apartheid systems of power. With a keen and incisive
trajectory, Fanon put into question the ethicality, morality and conscience of the
oppressors.
Arguably, one of the most influential, analytical, and radicalized philosophers of
our time, Frantz Fanon epitomize and manifest a true revolutionary, in the continuous
fight for Third World liberation. Essentially, the epitomization and manifestation of
Fanon’s ideological perspective cultivated and facilitated a discursive praxis dedicated to
the eradication of racial oppression, European colonialism and colonization. Within this
contextual framework, Fanon, as an African Diasporan Black (erudite) man in a “White
world,” he experienced firsthand systemic racism as it was embedded within the bounds
of European hegemony. The world in which Frantz Fanon came of age was alive and
overflowing with revolutionary movements throughout the industrialized nations as well
as throughout the Third World nations. Nations in Africa were fighting for their
independence from colonial rule, Blacks throughout the Americas and the Caribbean
Islands were in the streets, on the airwaves, in the Ghettos, in the shantytowns, in the
Favelas facilitating movements advocating for social and political change. For Fanon,
this was revolutionary in itself. Fanon, however, according to Jinadu, points out that
one’s freedom is a function of one’s determination to act in order to remove obstacles
that stand in one’s way.49
Moreover, it’s a critical trajectory of Fanon’s perceptibility of
liberation, because “Fanon looks upon liberation in the sense of freedom as an
opportunity and a willingness to act. More importantly, it is a particular kind of action in
itself. One’s freedom, with this view, is incomplete if one does not consciously or
deliberately act to make good the opportunities and possibilities open to one.”50
In other
words, in the contextualization of emancipatory freedom, Fanon is referring to the
process of decolonization in which both liberation and decolonization are tantamount
with political self-determination from colonial directive and subjugation:
In decolonization there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of
the colonial situation. If we wish to describe if precisely, we might find it in the
49
Jinadu, FANON: In Search of the African Revolution, p. 66. 50
Ibid. p. 66-67.
12
well-known words: “The last shall be the first and the first last.” Decolonization
is the putting into practice of this sentence. That is why, if we try to describe it,
all decolonization is successful.51
In another logic, nonetheless, emancipatory freedom or liberation purports more than
political self-determination or sovereignty for Fanon. In order to fully obtain this liberty,
decolonization must necessitate a phenomenology of violence; only through the self-
defensive violence can true liberation be attained. True liberation is achieved only when
one fights for it; false liberation occurs or obtains where freedom is granted or conceded
by the alien (colonial ruling) power.52
In this sense, liberation is inescapably affixed to
the conceptuality of revolution, in which liberation is; consequently, in a sempiternal
pursuit for “truth.” Once that truth has been discovered, conditions of alienation will no
longer exist.53
The continuity of the process of liberation equates to Fanon’s vociferation
for the (re) formation of a new man or of “the Third World starting a new history of
Man.”54
Fanon goes on to add with strong conviction:
A history which will have regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which
Europe has put forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes, of which
the most horrible was committed in the heart of man, and consisted of the
pathological tearing apart of his functions and the crumbling away of his unity.
And in the framework of the collectivity there were differentiations, the
stratification and the bloodthirsty tensions fed by classes; and finally, on the
immense scale of humanity, there were racial hatreds, slavery, exploitation and
above all the bloodless genocide which consisted in the setting aside of fifteen
thousand millions of men.55
Writing with rage and conviction, Fanon’s jeremiad of triumphant resiliency and
illustrious intelligibility forces the reader to also problematize one’s own gaze toward the
evils and lingering legacies of colonialism, colonization and imperialism. Fanon’s
passion as a writer, professional psychiatrist, freedom fighter and liberation organizer
denotes an individual’s critical understanding of how history, legacy, and politics overlap
and intersect, formulating a macrocosmic paradigm of suffering, violence (physical,
51
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 37. 52Jinadu, FANON: In Search of the African Revolution, p. 68.53
Ibid. p. 68. 54
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 255. 55
Ibid. p. 255.
13
structural, and psychological) and lamentation. Essentially, this passionate idiomatic
expression of grief and sorrow can be rhythmically felt from Reggae artists like the
Wailing Souls and Bob Marley and the Wailers. In essence, these legendary reggae bands
were wailing sentiments of prolonged anguish, grief and sorrow from the legacies of the
enslavement of their African ancestors by European colonial exploiters. For instance, the
album titles: Wailing Souls (1974), Face the Devil (1995), Tension (1996), and Equality
(2000) speak for themselves as each album symbolizes the oppressed imaginary to
lyrically “Chanting Down Babylon.”56
In a similar vein, Bob Marley and the Wailers
album titles: Soul Rebels (1970), Burnin’ (1973), Exodus (1977), Survival (1979),
Uprising (1980), Confrontation (1983).57
Each album represents the revolutionary
sentiments of liberating the downtrodden, disenfranchised and marginalized. There exist
vast relevance and parallel with Fanon’s prolonged voice and the “wailing” reggae bands
as they both share the same commonalities in relation to the Transatlantic Slave Trade.58
Their experiential existence as African Diasporans is solely due to the fact that their
African ancestors were enslaved. A sensitivity of utter desolation, displacement,
loneliness, sterility and dejection lives in the souls of every African Diasporan.
56
Nathaniel Samuel Murrell’s “Introduction: The Rastafari Phenomenon” in William David Spencer,
Adrian Anthony Mcfarlane and Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader.
1998. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press) p. 1. “Chant Down Babylon” represents
Rastafari’s reggae music as they sing and chant to see the end to Western political and economic
domination and cultural imperialism. Babylon is described as what Rastas perceive as the oppressive social,
political, economic, and cultural realities of Jamaica and the Western World (p. 443). Rastafari is an
Afrocentric cultural movement originated in Jamaica during the early 1930’s; a system of beliefs and a
state of consciousness, that advances a view of economic survival and political organization and structure
that challenges the dominant cultural political “narrative” (ideology) in the “politics of Babylon (4).” 57
Bob Marley and the Wailers - reggae band created by Bob Marley in 1974 and was disassembled after
Bob Marley’s death due to illness. They made Rastafari internationally attainable through the medium of
reggae music. Moreover, the revolutionary reggae band were able to raise the consciousness of the
marginalized, disenfranchised, and systemically displaced Third World peoples the world over by the
imperialistic forces Fanon uncompromisingly denounced. 58
According to Basil Davidson’s The African Slave Trade: Pre-colonial History 1450-1850 (i.e. originally
published as Black Mother) illustrates “the steady year-by-year export of Africa labor to the West Indies
and the Americas that marked the greatest and most fateful migration – forced migration – in the history of
man” (xiv). It is important to know that “there was misery, unending misery. There was so much death in
the Americas that whole slave populations had to be renewed every few years. The records are eloquent
enough…” (xv). The latter passages transparently exemplify the magnitude of systemic violence upon the
enslaved African and African Diasporan for over five hundred years. Fanon is a successor to the enslaved
Africans that resisted uncompromisingly against European subjugation on the African shores as well as in
the West Indies and the Americas. Misery was prevalent, however, resiliency was prevalent as well. Fanon
inherited this legacy of durability, survivability, and irrepressibility.
14
Manifestly, Fanon was considered by the colonized as a freedom fighter, Black
revolutionist, political philosopher, anti-reactionary, abolitionist, anti-colonialist, anti-
imperialist, man of nobility, morality and ethics. Fanon was lionized by the colonized as
he symbolized hope for a better future that was non-imperialist, non-capitalist and non-
hegemonic. However, on the contrary, Fanon was painstaking considered by the
generality of the Western world as a threat to modern civilization and labeled as an
“urban terrorist,”59
“rabid (i.e. extremist, maniacal, fanatical, overzealous)
revolutionary,”60
or as a promoter for “planetary terrorism.”61
Macey writes a quote from
an anti-Fanonist, Allan Bloom, from a lecture given at Harvard in 1988 as he portrayed
Fanon as “an ephemeral writer once promoted by Sartre because of his murderous hatred
of Europeans and his espousal of terrorism.”62
Many other anti-Fanonist from the West
and ‘French Right’ made it a duty to denounce and criticize Fanon and his work that
condemned European colonialism. Macey also points out that sentiments and anti-
Fanonion thematics from the French Right “suggests that colonialism was not so
harmful”63
transparently shows how they viewed the colonized as well as how hated
Fanon was (and still is) in France and other Capitalist nations. In the trajectory of the
colonizer, they don’t see or don’t want to understand the psychological damage
colonialism inflicted on the colonized psyche. To Fanon, as I have read, the contradictory
variance in the “colonial world,” predominantly the French Colonial System in Algeria,
as he saw it, “was ridden with violence” perpetuated by the French military and their
brutalizing and sadistic debauchery. According to Onwuanibe, he laconically states that,
“The raping and murdering of Algerian girls and women make a grisly reading. When
power corrupts, it expresses itself in contradictions as it attempts to perpetuate itself. It
becomes a prisoner of its own domination.”64
The French colonial establishment in
Algeria upholds its suppressive domination by the utilization of savage and callous forms
of violence on the colonized, which includes the sexual assault and liquidation of the
powerless. Within the contextual framework of harmful brutality and violence, Fanon’s
59
Nigel Gibson, Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue. 1999 (Amherst, New York. Humanity
Books), p. 30. 60
Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 88. 61
David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography. 2000 (New York, New York: Picador USA), p. 21. 62
Ibid. p. 21. 63
Ibid. p. 21. 64
Onwuanibe, A Critique of Revolutionary Humanism: Frantz Fanon, p. 89.
15
view was based on self-defense; however, the French colonizers “justifiable” violence
was based on the control and subjugation of the colonized. Through the colonizers gaze,
Fanon was demonized for attempting to advocate for freedom through self-defensive
tactics. Because of Fanon’s courage to advocate and encourage self-defense, his legacy is
spat on by anti-Fanonion discursive practice and hateful rhetoric.
This is such a daunting world in which we live in. When someone chooses to take a
progressive and radical stance for humanity against evil oppressive forces, essentially
challenging the status quo, they become demonized by the powers that be. Paradoxically,
these evil oppressive forces characterize radicals as demonic, anti-modernity, or an
extremist. In my view, Fanon was neither demonic, anti-modernity, nor an extremist.
Frantz Fanon was a man that stood up for righteousness, human liberty and impartiality.
Fanon will always be remembered as a “Third World Revolutionary.” I think that is why
he is so hated and despised by western capitalist inhumane world. This demonization of
Fanon through discursive praxis attempted to devalue, minimize, and depoliticize
Fanon’s role as a revolutionary representative of the colonized (i.e. subaltern, Third
World, global south, communities of color, African / African Diasporan). According to L.
Adele Jinadu, “the purpose on colonialism, indeed the essence of the colonial situation, is
the perpetuation of the condition of social injustice.”65
This form of systemic perpetual
separation within the colonial world is still prevalent throughout the western and
developing nations. The reality is that the Apartheid apparatus is still alive and well.
The liquidation of colonization is nothing but a prelude to complete liberation, to
self-recovery.66
However, within a contemporary context, socio-economic and socio-
political alienation continues its wrath, psychologically, on people of color the world
over. Due to globalization, which is another synonymic word for colonialism,
colonization, and imperialism predicated on and implemented by the Western capitalist
nations – the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. Seems like a
daunting future to come when the oppressive ‘beast’ hasn’t changed, it only has
transformed into a much stronger and prolific entity. Within this context, Fanon’s legacy
65
Jinadu, FANON: In Search of the African Revolution, p. 46. 66
Memmi. The Colonizer and the Colonized. p. 151.
16
of revolutionary action will only turn into martyrization. Could there still be hope for
another revolutionary path? Only time will tell. However, when Frantz Fanon died in
December 1961, he was relatively unknown except among his fighting Algerian
comrades, a small group of French Leftists who had been attracted to his writings, and a
handful of radical Africans.67
Today, Frantz Fanon’s literature can be found utilized
amongst prestigious scholars throughout the United States and Western Europe to Third
World peoples in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Fanon’s philosophy of revolution has
assumed the quality of actuality in the brutal life-and-death struggle between the black
masses of South Africa and the arrogant white ruling class that would, if it could, reduce
black humanity to a thing – an object among other objects.68
As I have endeavored to
conceptualize throughout this treatise, the resiliency of a man that attempted to change
the universalized status quo; imperatively, it is crucially indispensable that Fanon be
recognized as a person, connected to the African Diasporic world that candidly devoted
and sacrificed his impermanent short-lived life to the social and psychological liberation
of all African peoples the world over. In order to comprehensively understand this
socialization process of alienation, it must be demonstratively deconstructed. Frantz
Fanon’s deconstructive process of alienation helped me understand, in a transformative
way, the destructive power of alienation. Alienation forces the “other” to yearn for
whiteness because that is what is at the apex, looking down upon the subaltern. In that
sense, the main purport of Fanon’s objectivity centered on awakening or invoking the
“power within”69
the populace themselves of the understandability to work toward self-
determination, self-worth, and non-Eurocentric truths. It is significant to note here the
authenticity of Frantz Fanon’s humanistic essence that transformed him into a
revolutionary humanist. Fanon asserted strongly, unrestrictedly and publicly to the world
that European colonialism and European colonization were both unjust acts against
humanity; therefore were unethical, immoral and nefarious traditional modes of
operations that were destroying the humanity, livelihood, and cultural legacies of Third
67
Emmanuel Hansen. “Frantz Fanon: Portrait of a Revolutionary.” In Nigel C. Gibson, Rethinking Fanon:
The Continuing Dialogue. 1999 (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books) p. 49. 68
Lou Turner and John Alan. “Frantz Fanon, World Revolutionary.” In Nigel C. Gibson, Rethinking
Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue. 1999 (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books) p. 103. 69
Naila Kabeer. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought.1994 (New York, New
York: Verso) p. 227.
17
World nations. In that respect, this detrimental normalization of colonialism and
colonization met the rage and vexation of Frantz Fanon. He problematized the normality
of systemic oppression, subjugation and imperialistic functionalities of the colonial rule.
Moreover, the affirmations that Fanon (i.e. as well as numerous Third World thinkers)
passionately and aggressively proclaimed were palpable affirmations of Third World
peoples for the implicit undertaking of a revolutionary stance for liberation.
Notwithstanding the socio-political complexities within that paradigm, in essence,
through Fanon’s revolutionized trajectory, the only way to fully obtain the latter is to
meet violence with violence. Fanon’s ideological conjecture of the rationality of violence
is analytically logical, sensible, and naturally instinctive (i.e. based on human nature and
survivability) when the possibility of martyrdom comes to be explicitly inescapable.
Fanon inspired a myriad of Blacks throughout the Diaspora as well as throughout the
colonized Africa to look toward a liberatory and independent future that is textural and
substantively obtainable. Furthermore, the obtainability to acquire liberation had to be,
without reservation, politicized (pervasively) as an indispensible apparatus. For socio-
political transformative change, the acquiring of this liberatory freedom would renew and
revitalize “forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination.”70
With the
revitalization of idiomatic motifs and the regeneration of the Third World imaginary will
only (re) cultivate a (new) pristine and reinvigorating consciousness. Fanon adds that,
“we believe that the conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-
establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural
manifestation that exists.”71
Fanon (concretely) was convinced that the moment when
absolute freedom and agency are confirmed and re-instituted back to the Third World
nations, the malevolent vindicability of colonialism would dematerialize. In a similar
vein, the colonized (individual) collective will also dematerialize, however giving birth to
a “new man.”72
70
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. p. 197. 71
Ibid. p. 197. 72
Ibid. p. 255.
18
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