Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a militant thinker, both in his capacity as a psychiatrist and as a member of the National Liberation Front in Algeria. Over 60 years after his death, it is about time we read Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in, Africa, and the Arabic-speaking region, the global neocolony.
Doing so, entails highlighting the importance of people’s struggle and principle of neocolonialism, a common term the militant psychologist re-defines in the third chapter of his final testament Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched and the Earth). Fanon had the audacity and the foresight, to predict that the elites of the party alongside whom he was struggling for Algeria’s independence, would follow in the footsteps of their enemies, the colonisers:
This bourgeoisie which turns its back more and more on the people,… [w]hen this caste has vanished, devoured by its own contradictions, it will be seen that nothing new has happened since independence was proclaimed, and that everything must be started again from scratch. The changeover will not take place at the level of the structures set up by the bourgeoisie during its reign, since that caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists. (176)
It is that scenario of neocolonialism that Fanon warns his readers of—a system of shared power between inside and outside forces—that we wallow in still today.
Curated by Philip Rizk, Ways of Seeing Fanon elucidates this argument, while also moving beyond it to ask what the militant thinker was not prepared to, or maybe could or would not admit to himself. What could it mean to disentangle ourselves from the throes of that neocolonialism Frantz Fanon saw so clearly before his eyes?
Philip Rizk’s upcoming edited volume Neocolonialism and its Dismantling puts in conversation Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth with the wave of mobilization that has moved across the Arabic-speaking world in the past 15 years marked by the chant “the people want the fall of the system.” The book is a re-reading of Fanon’s final testament from the global neocolony, with an eye on strategies of its undoing.
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet
Set in the months before and after the Congo declared its independence from Belgium, this gripping, deeply personal political film from Raoul Peck, who grew up in the Congo, depicts the rise and fall of legendary African leader and first Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba became a lightning rod of Cold War politics as his vision of a united Africa gained him powerful enemies in Belgium and the US. This new restoration – strikingly photographed in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Belgium as civil war raged in the Congo – mixes Peck’s reflections and home movies with archival footage and vivid re-creations of the shocking events that led to the birth of a country.