Review of Fanonian Practices

African Studies Quarterly | Volume 13, Issue 3 | Summer 2012 http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/pdfs/v13i3a5.pdf

Nigel Gibson. 2011. Fanonian Practices in South Africa from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo. Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press. 312 pp.

The author employs a Fanonian theoretical and ideological framework in his penetrating critique of post-apartheid South Africa in an earnest commitment to the aspirations and “living politics” of the shack dwellers of South Africa. It is a highly important work that illustrates the relevance of Fanon’s philosophy of liberation to the socio-economic and political developments in South Africa since the ANC formed the country’s first multi-racial democracy in April 1994 to date. In short, “ultimately a Fanonian perspective insists that we view the sweetness of the South African transition from apartheid as bitter, realised at the moment when ‘the people find out that the ubiquitous fact that exploitation can wear a Black face’ (Fanon 1968: 145) and that a Black, too, can be a Boer (amabhunu amanyama)” (p. 5).

Fanon’s enduring relevance

by Ama Biney, Pambazuka

Fifty 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.