The day I met Frantz Fanon

Yes, he was introduced to me not as a person but as the writer of ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, published by Penguin Books in 1961. It was 1976 at the University of Dar es Salaam when I was young and green about the world and its movements for change. I did not know it then but to the pundits of this movement at the campus I was being recruited to believe in a better world. Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’ and ‘Black Skins, White Masks’ were two of the books I was given to read, besides others.

All I remember is that the book had a forward by Jean-Paul Sartre, who heralded Fanon’s work as: ‘A classic of anti-colonialism in which the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice.’ I was curious as to what was this third world he was talking about. Later on I discovered that Satre also had a very interesting story on how human beings live and I was to read his books too. More recently though, I had the privilege of meeting Fanon’s daughter, Mireille, at the World Social Forum.

Fanon hailed from Martinique, studied in France, but talked of the Algerian revolution. He called on men to decolonise the mind, but lucky for him then, I was not yet awakened as a woman. In that era it was a man’s world where man meant woman also. It is still the case in this era too, except now we, as women, are more aware of it.

‘When I search for man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders,’ is one phrase from his book which is still in my diary of those days. He called: ‘Comrades let us flee from this motionless movement where gradually dialectic is changing into the logic of equilibrium…’ He constantly talked of how lost Europe was spiritually and called for a ‘re-humanized’ world.

Fanon saw ‘the Third World starting a new history of Man…a history which will not forget Europe’s crimes…consisting of the pathological tearing apart of his functions and crumbling away at his unity…” As I read his pages and his psychiatric analysis of European society, the words, I remember, made sense at that time. We in Tanzania were going through the process of the decolonisation of the mind which Ngugi wa Thiong'o talked about and Mwalimu Julius Kabaranga Nyerere was eluding to with his Ujamaa policies and the Arusha Declaration.

These inspirational words resurrected with us then as we self-built our children’s schools and believed in upliftment of society through adult education in workers’ factories and peasant communities. Mwalimu talked of the breaking of barriers between mental and manual labour. We actually believed we were making a difference and took upon ourselves emotionally the task of rebuilding our nation – a dream that we felt could become a reality.

Frantz Fanon’s work contributed to that hope of a new dawn. He talked of not wanting to create a new Europe in Africa, ‘if we are to create humanity to try and set afoot a new man’ then imitating Europe was not the solution.

In retrospect, it is particularly sad when one looks around and sees the devastation of our continent. We cannot say we did not know for lack of literature, for the intellectuals of the time gave us much food for thought about how to come out of colonialism and the dangers of the colonised mind. But it seems it takes a lifetime, if ever.

Is it because our leaders do not read? That cannot be. Why do they feel skyscrapers mean development? Why do they feel destruction of architectural history means progress? Why do they feel inviting NATO to bomb a country is the solution to dictators? Why do they feel inviting foreign soldiers to take care of internal strife and rebels, as they call them, is a solution to this continent? In the past, we claimed that we were hoodwinked with superior arms and we gave beads and took the bible, but what do we say now?

Fanon had studied in France and had faced racism and come out believing that the system was the problem. Other writers of his time did so too. They did their task by putting their thoughts to paper so that the next generation can understand history and its atrocities to the continent. By celebrating Frantz Fanon we are also playing our part in putting history on the agenda of Africa – lest they forget.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Fatma Alloo is the founder of Tanzania Media Women’s Association (TAMWA).
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.