Church Land Programme: Is Fanon's Liberation of the Colonized Mind by violence on the Rotting Corpse of Settler Still Relevant Today?
Psych: Frantz Fanon advice in Wretched of the Earth is that liberation of the Africans 'colonized mind' requires him to enact violence upon the rotting corpses of the settlers. True liberation for Fanon could only be achieved through violence. False liberation, occurs where “freedom” is granted or ceded by those in power, such as by the Apartheid regime. For Africans to be truly free, they must liberate themselves by violence.
Why did Mandela refer to The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon's Famous Handbook for Black Liberation by Cleansing Violent Revolution in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech?
"Moved by that appeal and inspired by the eminence you have thrust upon us, we undertake that we too will do what we can to contribute to the renewal of our world so that none should, in future, be described as the "wretched of the earth"." - Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 10 December 1993
Andrea Muhrrteyn | White Refugees | 07 October 2012
Church Land Programme's Frantz Fanon conference: 50 years on - Why is Frantz Fanon still relevant today?". Animation is CLP's core practice. This practice involves an iterative process that applies the learning and action cycle in people's specific situations and with the intention that they mobilise themselves to act to change that situation in ways that they decide.
On May 30th, Nigel Gibson, the author of Fanonian Practices in South Africa was joined by a group of "writers, militants and thinkers from South Africa in Pietermaritzburg: S'bu Zikode, Richard Pithouse, Michael Neocosmos and Itumeleng Mosala". The discussion "was a practical matter - a question of praxis and living politics: what are the ways in which Fanon's radical humanism and fighting spirit might still be relevant, helpful and challenging for the praxis of people engaged in, or connected with, grassroots emancipatory struggle here and now? As the Church Land Programme, we were also interested to explore an important historical line connecting Fanon's work with black theology, black consciousness and emancipatory struggles in South Africa."
Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925 – December 6, 1961) was a Martinique-born French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer whose work is influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. Fanon is known as a radical existential humanist thinker on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization.
Fanon supported the Algerian struggle for independence and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. His life and works have incited and inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
For Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, the colonizer's presence in Algeria is based on sheer military strength. Any resistance to this strength must also be of a violent nature because it is the only 'language' the colonizer speaks. Thus, violent resistance is a necessity imposed by the colonists upon the colonized. The relevance of language and the reformation of discourse pervades much of his work, which is why it is so interdisciplinary, spanning psychiatric concerns to encompass politics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and literature
Frantz Fanon inspired among others Mandela (A Land Ruled by the Gun) and Steve Biko's concepts of Black Consciousness. Fanon is considered one of the twentieth century's most important theorists of revolution, colonialism, and racial differences. His book Wretched of the Earth was considered the Handbook for the Black Revolution, and considered a classic alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Wretched of the Earth provides an analysis of the psychology of the native: or as Fanon refers to the 'colonized mind' and how liberation can only occur by means of “violence on the rotting corpse of the settler”. Wretched of the Earth had a major impact on the anticolonialism and black-consciousness movements around the world.
American president Barack Obama cites Fanon as an intellectual influence in Dreams from My Father (pg 100-101): “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night,in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.”
