Fatin Abbas: Year of the boomerang? Frantz Fanon and the Arab uprisings
[Fatin Abbas is a Sudanese-born writer based in the U.S, and is a Teaching Fellow and doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She has written on Africa and Middle East related issues for The Nation and Bidoun Magazine. Her first documentary film, Mud Missive (2009) was shot in Khartoum, Sudan.]
Fifty years ago, in 1961, a young Martinican psychiatrist by the name of Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, a political tract that, in the years to follow, would become the handbook of revolutionaries everywhere, from Ché Guevara in South America to Steve Biko in South Africa. At the time of writing the book, Fanon was stationed as a psychiatrist in Algeria, a country that was then in the grip of a protracted and bloody revolution. In 1954 the Algerian people had risen en masse against French colonizers who had ruled them brutally for more than a century. The Algerian War for Independence lasted eight years, ending with the expulsion of the French in 1962. It came to be known as the “War of a Million Martyrs” because of the countless Algerians who died in the struggle.
The popular uprisings that have swept through north Africa and the Middle East in recent months – erupting in Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, Libya and Bahrain among other places – not only recall those heroic struggles for independence that swept through Algeria and the rest of the colonized world in the 1950s and 60s, they also attest to the visionary power of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. At the time of its publication the book was marketed as “[a] negro psychoanalyst’s study of colonialism and racism in the world today,” but in fact Fanon’s work was much more than that. While Fanon devoted part of the book to theorizing the corrosive effects of colonial racism and the most effective ways by which the colonized could combat their oppressors, much of it in fact served as a kind of cautionary tract, warning against the corruption of the regimes that – under the mantles of "nationalism," "Pan-Africanism" and "Pan-Arabism," – would come to power after independence.
One object of Fanon’s scathing critique was the post-independence dictator-leader bloated with his own power. Fanon repeatedly emphasized what he called the “detrimental role of the leader,” warning that “in certain regions the party is organized like a gang whose toughest member takes over leadership.” In his characteristically wry style, he cautioned against the excesses of power: “Leader comes from the English verb ‘to lead,’ meaning ‘to drive’ in French. The driver of people no longer exists today. People are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven. If the leader drives me I want him to know that at the same time I am driving him.” Certainly, the egotistical, delusional, and murderous performances of dictators from Hosni Mubarak to Muammar Gaddafi in recent months lend credence to Fanon’s early warning that “the nation should not be run by a big boss.”..
Read entire article at openDemocracy (UK)
Fifty years ago, in 1961, a young Martinican psychiatrist by the name of Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, a political tract that, in the years to follow, would become the handbook of revolutionaries everywhere, from Ché Guevara in South America to Steve Biko in South Africa. At the time of writing the book, Fanon was stationed as a psychiatrist in Algeria, a country that was then in the grip of a protracted and bloody revolution. In 1954 the Algerian people had risen en masse against French colonizers who had ruled them brutally for more than a century. The Algerian War for Independence lasted eight years, ending with the expulsion of the French in 1962. It came to be known as the “War of a Million Martyrs” because of the countless Algerians who died in the struggle.
The popular uprisings that have swept through north Africa and the Middle East in recent months – erupting in Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, Libya and Bahrain among other places – not only recall those heroic struggles for independence that swept through Algeria and the rest of the colonized world in the 1950s and 60s, they also attest to the visionary power of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. At the time of its publication the book was marketed as “[a] negro psychoanalyst’s study of colonialism and racism in the world today,” but in fact Fanon’s work was much more than that. While Fanon devoted part of the book to theorizing the corrosive effects of colonial racism and the most effective ways by which the colonized could combat their oppressors, much of it in fact served as a kind of cautionary tract, warning against the corruption of the regimes that – under the mantles of "nationalism," "Pan-Africanism" and "Pan-Arabism," – would come to power after independence.
One object of Fanon’s scathing critique was the post-independence dictator-leader bloated with his own power. Fanon repeatedly emphasized what he called the “detrimental role of the leader,” warning that “in certain regions the party is organized like a gang whose toughest member takes over leadership.” In his characteristically wry style, he cautioned against the excesses of power: “Leader comes from the English verb ‘to lead,’ meaning ‘to drive’ in French. The driver of people no longer exists today. People are no longer a herd and do not need to be driven. If the leader drives me I want him to know that at the same time I am driving him.” Certainly, the egotistical, delusional, and murderous performances of dictators from Hosni Mubarak to Muammar Gaddafi in recent months lend credence to Fanon’s early warning that “the nation should not be run by a big boss.”..