Category Archives: Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon: The Brightness of Metal

This dossier offers a sparkling introduction to Fanon’s life and work, stressing the contemporary political traction of his radical humanism, and noting that his work carries an ‘irrepressible openness to the universal’ and an axiomatic commitment to ‘recognize the open door of every consciousness’. It examines, in particular, Fanon’s contribution as a theorist of praxis committed to move beyond the ontological and spatial ordering of oppression and undertake a form of insurgent and democratic praxis in which ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’ is developed between protagonists from different social locations.

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Frantz Fanon: The Brightness of Metal

The Rot Exceeds the Question of Corruption

Published in Business Day.

The Rot Exceeds the Question of Corruption

Richard Pithouse

Day after day, and year after year, the news in South Africa carries reports of people declaring that they are not animals. A migrant at the fundamentally corrupt and abusive ‘reception centre’ in Marabastad, Pretoria, says that “They treat us like a dog, they don’t do right. They just want money.” A report on an even more abusive prison in Bloemfontein notes that a leaked video shows an inmate shouting “No! I am not a donkey” before being injected with anti-psychotic drugs. People making their lives in shacks repeatedly declare that they are ‘living like pigs in the mud’, or that ‘we live like rats’. When the police open fire on a road blockade, or hurl teargas into a shack settlement, people are often say that they have been treated ‘like dogs’. Continue reading

Locating Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Mabogo More

There is a huge re-emergence of Frantz Fanon’s ideas and an equally huge interest in his work in post-apartheid South Africa, both in the academy and social movement and organizations. Contrary to some commentators, particularly his biographers, this article aims to locate Fanon within the South African struggle for liberation. It is argued here that Fanon, throughout his life, as evidenced by his writings, was highly concerned about apartheid just as he was about French Algerian colonialism. For him, the paper claims, apartheid was synonymous with colonialism and therefore his critique of colonialism was just as much a critique of apartheid. The resurgence of his name and ideas in the country is a consequence of this critique.

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Locating Frantz Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Frantz Fanon: Two quotes on political education

Frantz Fanon: Two quotes on political education

(1) The political education of the masses proposes not to treat the masses as children but to make adults of them.

(2) We often believe with criminal superficiality that to educate the masses politically is to deliver a long political speech from time to time. We think that it is enough that the leader or one of his lieutenants should speak in a pompous tone about the principle events of the day for them to have fulfilled this bounden duty to educate the masses politically. Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence … it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a hero that will save them with his magic hands, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the hero is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.