Finding Fanon, Looking for second liberations

Nigel C. Gibson, Presentation at the Algiers conference on Fanon and Africa, June 2013

Finding Fanon, Looking for second liberations

[I]f action does not transform individual consciousness then it is nothing more than incoherence and agitation … Have faith in your people and devote your life to their dignity and betterment. For us there is no other way. Your brother, Franz

Fanon, Dedication to Bertène Juminer

A second phase of total liberation is necessary because [it] is required by the popular masses.

Fanon, “First Truths on the Colonial Problem,” 1958

Finding Fanon

I was introduced to Fanon via Steve Biko, and it was in 1981 that I first met Black Consciousness émigrés from South Africa in London. 1981 was the year of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands and other prisoners were also reading Fanon finding the measure of national culture as a “combat culture” essential as, in the hellholes of the H blocks, they taught each other the Irish language as a conscious anti-colonial activity.

From Ramle Prison to the World

by Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

On the first day of March in 1981 Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the Long Kesh for links to the armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland, began a hunger strike. For seventeen days he was able to keep a diary. The first entry begins with two lines that have become immortal: “I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.”