Why Frantz Fannon still matters...

Frantz Fanon died almost 51 years ago at the premature age of 36 but he is more omnipresent than ever before. His great works:

“The wretched of the earth” and “Black skin, white masks” are almost like the Koran or the bible for many people across the planet. What makes this world citizen from Martinique in the Caribbean and freedom fighter in Algeria still a source of inspiration and enlightenment is his advocacy for the total abolishment of racism by the creation of an alternative “mankind” or “a new humanity”.

He writes in Black skin, white masks:

“The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. The disaster of the man (black) of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man (black). And even today they subsist to organize this dehumanization rationally. But I as a man of color, to the extent that it becomes possible for me to exist absolutely, do not have the right to lock myself into a world of retroactive reparations.

I, the man of color, want only this:

That the tool never possesses the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be. The black man does not exist, not any more than the white man. The tragedy of the man is that he was once a child. It is through the effort to recapture the self and to scrutinize the self; it is through the lasting tension of their freedom that men will be able to create the ideal conditions of existence for a human world.

Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?

Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the you?”

Fanon concludes by saying:

“I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness. “

Some accuse Fanon of worshiping and advocating violence which is completely baseless and beyond any content of truth and sanity. I do not see anything wrong in advocating for the oppressed, damned, wretched and colonized people of the planet who only liberated themselves from their enslavement and colonialism by using the same methods of violence as their colonizers and slave drivers.

I listened to a very interesting radio program on the BBC today:

“The museum of broken relationships”. It is about broken hearts and pleasant/unpleasant memories of the past. Collections of different items and objects that people value and treasure a lot. They have left these things to this special museum in Zagreb, Croatia once their love affairs have come to an unfortunate end. The cabinet of failed promises and animosities is a very exciting project and reminiscent of how powerful love is. Be it eternal, temporary or rusty. What would be your particular contribution to this museum? A 50 dollars note, a love letter, a book, an underwear, a shaver, pictures of romance, dried flowers, etc. Let us know.

The Nobel Prize has become a congregation of westerners and the justification of white supremacy. I do not get what sort of function it fills except the perpetuation of a racist establishment. The Swedish academy is an institution of western sentiments and values. They value their own “science” and cultural set ups more than others.

I do not anticipate, any man or woman of color, being given this prize this year either. We Africans may have to set up our own alternative “Nobel prize” to encourage the African youth to invest in science and research. Few people of color have ever won the Nobel Prize. When they won it, it was for peace or literature and not for economics, medicine, physics, or chemistry.

Somebody said:

“I am either nobody or I am my nation.”

Transcending my own nation and limitations of mental and physical borders, is my challenge as a human-being. I exist, therefore, I care.

My final prayer is like Fanon who still matters a great deal :

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!