Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”