Haitian Beatz

What would Fanon make of 'the myriad socio-economic and political problems facing Africans and people

of African descent today,' asks Ama Biney, on the 50th anniversary of his death.

years since the untimely death on 6 December 1961 of Frantz Fanon, he continues to have immense relevance in our times. His writings were focused on the dialectics of the colonised and the coloniser during the era of the 1960s. Whilst that era has passed, new forms of colonialism between Africa and the former colonial powers, or Africa and the developed world, now manifest in the 21st century.

Fanon had a clear grasp of the problems confronting emerging African states. The core themes pervading his radical perspective forged from his role as a scholar, psychiatrist and political activist are: The indispensability of revolutionary violence to decolonisation, class struggle in Africa, neocolonialism, alienation and his profound commitment to freedom. What he would make of the myriad socio-economic and political problems facing Africans and people of African descent today with the intellectual tools of analysis he bequeathed is the focus of this article.

VIOLENCE IN OUR TIMES

The violence Africa experienced in the wake of independence i.e. since 1960 onwards has been of two forms. There have been the protracted national liberation struggles that engulfed countries such as Guinea-Bissau, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The material conditions and intransigence of the settler colonial powers in these aforementioned countries forced the nationalist forces to adopt armed struggle as a last resort to secure their political freedom from foreign rulers and settler colonialism. In Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, it is well-known that these forces were ideologically divided and on the formal attainment of independence, the struggle became an internal one of civil war that wrought death, injury and destruction on the lives of millions of Africans.

East African

Franz Fanon had predicted the crisis colonization and capitalism will cause to the poorest of the earth.