Assessing his contributions amid uprisings in North Africa and ongoing national oppression in the Diaspora
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary thinker and practitioner who has had a tremendous impact politically on the African liberation struggle both on the continent and in the Diaspora. The recent outbreaks of strikes, mass protests and rebellions in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt requires a reassessment of the significance of the events that Fanon participated in during his lifetime as well as the views expressed through a series of articles and books published in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Fanon’s views on the nature of the psychology of the oppressed, which he studied systematically in France and in North Africa, his analysis of social class formations in colonial societies, attempting to gage the response of these classes to the developing revolutionary struggle against imperialism and for the construction of a socialist society, and his impact on continuing political movements that have arose since his death, such as the African American movement of the 1960s and 1970s, should be extended into the current period in examining the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the political upheavals in North Africa related to the influence and presence of United States military forces in the region, as well as the escalating struggles of Africans in the Diaspora, who are battling daily against intensified oppression, exploitation and racism.
Before we can make the case for not only a re-examination of Fanon’s works, but a broadening of his influence within the African world community, we have to look at both the political context under which Fanon produced his most significant theoretical formulations and how this context represents a continuation of struggles against U.S. and European imperialist domination in North Africa and the Arab Peninsula.
Also we must examine the extension of that same struggle of fifty years ago to events taking place today on a global level. Even though the form of struggle has changed, the underlying causes for the intensification of military interventions by western imperialism, is clearly an effort to re-gain the perceived losses of the anti-colonial period beginning with the close of World War II.
Fanon’s Time in History
Born in the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925, Fanon was a social product of French colonialism. During the post-World War I period there was a monumental upsurge in political violence throughout the colonized world. In the Caribbean and the United States, the influence of Marcus Garvey was paramount….
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