A panel of environmental and human rights activists acted as judges in a People’s Health Tribunal organized by African communities impacted by the operations of extractive corporations Shell and Total Energy. Supported by organizations like Medact, We the People, the People’s Health Movement, #STOPEACOP, and others, they found the corporations guilty of harming the health of people across Africa. Nnimmo Bassey, Jacqueline Patterson, Kanahaus Manuel, and Dimah Mahmoud condemned Shell and Total’s activities, stating that they were “extremely harmful to the livelihoods, health, right to shelter, quality of life, right to live in dignity, quality of environment, right to live free of discrimination and oppression, right to clean water, and right to self-determination.”
This edition of the People’s Health Tribunal was built as activists witnessed extensive greenwashing by the oil and gas industry at COP 27 in Egypt last year. In response, they became even more determined to support the struggles of communities in Africa who are affected by the corporations who attempted to gaslight the public at COP 27.
However, governments in the Global North, where most extractive corporations have their headquarters, still choose to ignore the destruction caused by these industries. In 2022, Shell made a profit of $40 billion, while Total Energy ended the year with US$36 billion in profits. These profits came at the expense of the health and lives of people living in regions where these corporations operate.
Uprooting Set the Ground for Total’s LNG Operations in Mozambique
Decades of exploitation of African land have resulted in devastating consequences, including air pollution, water contamination, deforestation, violence, land grabbing, and forced migration. People in the Niger Delta and Mozambique experience these things daily. Omar Elmawi, who provided an overview of Total’s impact on Mozambique communities, emphasized that in the current situation, “everyone loses, except Total.” Elmawi said he believed that African countries must take control of their own resources and development to make sure that justice is restored.
In Mozambique, Total Energy’s plan to construct an onshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility led to the displacement of hundreds of families dependent on farming. Total’s plans also decimated traditional fishing activities, leaving people destitute. Instead of providing the uprooted communities with adequate living conditions and compensation, the company’s plan resulted in people being left without shelter, living in refugee camps, and exposed to violence.
At the same time, pointed out Elmawi, the company was not shying away from tax evasion, bleeding even more resources out of the country and leaving Mozambique without necessary means to build essential infrastructure.
Similar experiences were echoed by activists from Uganda and South Africa, who bore witness to the baleful behavior of Total Energy and Shell in the face of the communities which they so violently entered. The testimonies also highlighted the environmental impacts being shouldered by the same communities, as floods and storms regularly devastate local food production.
Shell Operations in the Niger Delta
Shell has been furiously extracting resources in the Niger Delta for over 60 years, attracting more companies to exploit the region due to its rich reserves. Videos from villages in the Niger Delta clearly show oil contamination of water sources, while Shell ignores the grievances raised by the communities. With Shell’s arrival, people’s health deteriorated, in addition to the environmental devastation caused by oil and gas extraction. People began suffering from previously uncommon diseases, including blindness, respiratory problems, and kidney disease, according to one of the testimony-givers.
However, the people of the Niger Delta aren’t asking for charity or pity; they are determined to fight for justice and see Shell restore the land it has devastated. In the light of that, Shell’s announcement of divesting from operations in the Niger Delta is seen as inadequate by community members. They view it as an attempt to evade responsibility for the damage caused over the years. After all, they pointed out, Shell would not be giving up on their business—they would be simply selling their assets to someone else.
The judges stressed the need to establish infrastructure for a reparative justice process to achieve true reparation for affected communities. They also called for Shell and Total Energy to halt all plans for expanding existing fossil fuel extraction sites, implement a permanent moratorium on exploring new sites, and cease supporting violence against communities through military, paramilitary groups, or private security forces.
In order to achieve that, it is necessary to constantly bear witness about the destruction caused by extractive corporations. By doing that, the people who spoke about their experiences during the People’s Health Tribunal showed extreme courage and deserved respect, said Nnimmo Bassey. “Staying alive and speaking out is the best we can do,” he said.
People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by thePeople’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, clickhere.
Dilio Muelas Morales, 62, a traditional doctor of the Misak Indigenous community in Colombia, inside the ‘Michaya,’ where he receives patients / credit: Antonio Cascio
BOGOTÁ, Colombia—The center of this South American capital city filled out on August 6 with Indigenous peoples, Afro-Colombians and peasants dressed in traditional attire to carry out the spiritual inauguration of recently elected President Gustavo Petro. The event took place a day before the official inauguration and was accompanied by rituals, songs and speeches.
For the first time in decades, fear does not reign among the vulnerable and historically abandoned sections of society. Representatives of these groups saluted the president during the inauguration.
“Certainly, the only possible path to real transformation in the country will be achieved with articulated and respectful work between governmental bodies and our own forms of government,” said human-rights defender Marcela Londoño, while reading the popular mandate the collective handed to Petro.
The Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities that campaigned in favor of center-left former militant Petro and the first Afro-Colombian woman vice-president, Francia Márquez, helped the pair win up to 99 percent of votes in some regions. Now, these oppressed communities see Petro’s proposal to reform healthcare—among other aspects of Colombian society—as aligning with their culture as well as their spiritual understanding.
“[Under the current system], health is seen as a business that does not value life,” said Mama Luz Dary Aranda, governor of the Guambia reservation in the Cauca department, in an interview with this reporter. “The proposal presented by Petro is the opposite.”
Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro (right) announced in March Afro-Colombian activist Francia Márquez as his vice-presidential running mate on the Pacto Histórico ticket / credit: Twitter / Francia Márquez
‘Health for Life and Not for Business’
Petro’s campaign promoted the slogan, “health for life and not for business,” advocating a reformed healthcare system based on the principles of prevention, participation, decentralization and an intercultural approach. Part of the proposed solution would involve creating a National Health Council, with the participation of civil society including, academics, healthcare workers, patients, peasants, and Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Other proposals include ending EPSs (Empresas Prestadoras de Servicios or intermediary health providers); improving scientific investigation and technological development; investing in education; and fighting climate change, among others.
During the first healthcare meeting between Indigenous peoples and the Ministry of Health that took place on September 7, Minister Carolina Corcho ratified the compromise of working with the communities to develop the healthcare reform and announced future visits to continue the dialogue.
“The political will by the government of Gustavo Petro—and today more specifically by the Ministry—is very important for this [Indigenous health] system to become a reality,” said Polivio Rosales, senator of the Indigenous Authorities Movement political party.
Floresmiro Calambas, 53, head of the laboratory at the Sierra Morena natural medicine center, controls one of the machines that distills plants / credit: Antonio Cascio
Incorporating Indigenous Practices
Petro’s program could contribute to complying with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) recommendation that health policies and programs should recognize and include traditional practices, such as medicine, to ensure the participation of the populations involved, as well as take into account respect for human rights, an intercultural approach, and gender equality.
After modernizing medicinal production and engaging government officials—among other actions—the Indigenous and Intercultural Health System (IIHS) was founded in 2014. Yet, such advances have been unequally implemented.
“Within the state’s policies, the Indigenous wisdom of health automatically becomes only an ancestral practice or a belief,” said Mama Ximena Hurtado, director of the Mama Dominga Hospital and health program coordinator on the Indigenous reservation of Guambia in the Cauca department. The title, “Mama,” is given to a woman who holds or has held a position within the Misak government. “Those words minimize our own science, and create a disadvantage and a barrier.”
In the days before and after Petro’s inauguration, he and a delegation of ministers held regional summits. The administration has prioritized historically abandoned regions, such as the Pacific, the Amazon and the island of San Andrés in the Caribbean Sea, where inequality as well as poor access to healthcare and education reign. Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples have participated in these summits.
The Sierra Morena center is not only based on maintaining and reviving Misak ancestral knowledge of natural medicine. One of the structures located in the center, the so-called “Casa Payan” or Payan House (which appears on the right in this photo), preserves the history and worldview of the Misak Indigenous people. The paintings that fill the walls of the three levels of the Payan House and the sacred objects that are preserved inside provide a pedagogical, didactic and historical memory function on Misak thought / credit: Antonio Cascio
Misak People Develop a Healthcare Model
Most Misak—around 21,000 people or 1.5 percent of the Colombian population—live on the Guambia reservation. It is located in the steep southwestern mountains of the Cauca region, a rich ecosystem characterized by moors, or high-altitude grasslands. This community has been leading nationally in developing a healthcare model, as well as in the recovery of traditional practices.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Misak community began taking back ancestral territories through occupation and, later, by negotiating with the government. Within this land, they have set up the House of Medicine Sierra Morena and the Mama Dominga Hospital. The Payan House of Memory, a three-story building constructed according to Misak traditional architectural practices, preserves their history and knowledge.
“This generation has had the opportunity to receive both types of knowledge: The Western and the one taught here by the ‘shures’ and the ‘shuras’ (traditional doctors), which are transmitted from generation to generation and based on the knowledge about plants,” explained Floresmiro Calambas, in charge of the laboratory in the House of Medicine Sierra Morena.
Within the House of Medicine, the community has set up a medicinal garden with more than 200 species of plants that are processed in the laboratory to be distributed in the community. Misak people affiliated with the healthcare system can acquire natural medicines free of charge. Other services include midwifery, physiotherapy and care from a traditional doctor.
The Misak community also manages Mama Dominga Hospital, where locals can access basic health services.
“Many of our Indigenous people do not like to leave the territory for fear of how they will be treated or because they do not speak the language,” Mama Ximena said.
The availability of a healthcare model within the Misak territory guarantees wider coverage in the community, closing the healthcare gap other rural Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples have experienced.
Aranda argues respecting traditional knowledge while deploying Western practices, when necessary, is essential.
“Sometimes the national healthcare system wants to impose their institutional practices on us,” she said.
The Sierra Morena pharmacy sells products the Misak make in the natural medicine center / credit: Antonio Cascio
‘The Transition Will Be Difficult and We Understand It’
“As Indigenous Peoples, we see health as a whole,” said Alberto Mendoza, delegate of the Wayuu people, after the September 7 meeting. “For that reason, the lack of water or the consumption of low-quality water, as well as the absence of sustainability, impact the health of individuals, families and communities.”
During the Pacific region summit, Petro announced Márquez will facilitate regional equality. He committed to designating the first social expenditure to this region as it is the most unequal. Multidimensional poverty in the Pacific region—which takes into account access to health, education and employment—increased from 26 percent to 31 percent between 2019 and 2020.
Petro recognized during his inauguration speech that the government needs to secure resources to implement social reforms.
Congress members like Gustavo Bolivar recently have denounced the poor state of finances left by the previous president, Iván Duque. According to a report presented by the government transition team, the healthcare system has a budget deficit of 6.4 billion pesos (about $1.4 million) for 2022 and 4.6 billion (about $1 million) for 2023.
A tax reform has already been presented in congress that is expected to raise about 25 billion pesos ($5.76 million) over the next year to help execute social programs. The reform includes increasing personal income taxes for the top 2 percent, who earn more than 10 million pesos monthly (around $2,300). Fossil-fuel exports and sugar-based products also will be taxed. The latter tax is designed to reduce health problems associated with sugar consumption.
Aranda recognizes Petro’s proposal will take time.
“The transition will be difficult and we understand it,” she said. “But this is when new proposals will be needed and we believe we will be heard to present our proposals on Indigenous healthcare.”
The Misak, as is customary among Colombian Indigenous communities, gather to carry out work collectively, or in “minga.” The work takes place after members of the Sierra Morena center are free from their tasks. Here, they are packaging, for sale, quinoa flour, which serves as a food supplement for children / credit: Antonio Cascio
‘Food As Healthcare’
Indigenous communities understand health goes beyond the absence of an illness. To them, health is linked to the environment, their territory, agricultural practice and nature in general. A relationship that, according to Mama Ximena, previous governments have not understood.
“For us, for instance, food and food production are part of healthcare and, therefore, should be financed,” she said. “But [the Health Ministry] sees it as a responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture.”
Petro’s health reform proposal, as well as a wide range of policies that address education, drinking water, the environment and climate change, align with the cosmovision (understanding of life) of Indigenous communities.
“It looks at how health can become a right,” Aranda said, “so that we all can live with dignity.”
Natalia Torres Garzongraduated with an M.Sc. in Globalization and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom. She is a freelance journalist who focuses on social and political issues in Latin America, especially in connection to Indigenous communities, women and the environment. With photographer Antonio Cascio, she founded the radio-photography program, Radio Rodando. Her work has been published in the section Planeta Futuro from El País, New Internationalist and Earth Island.
Zachariah Mokhothu inside the home he shares with his mother in the South African township of Kutlwanong. In his 15-year mining career, he got injured and developed tuberculosis before his paralysis / credit: Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by New Frame.
Zachariah Mokhothu, 49, was excited when he got his first job in mining. He is the eldest son and was the only breadwinner. He never imagined that working underground would change his life. As he gets into the car to head home to Kutlwanong township outside Odendaalsrus in the Free State, pieces of his wheelchair keep falling off.
“Is there anyone who used to work in mining who has a scrap of a wheelchair like this?” he asks casually as he sits in the car.
According to Statistics South Africa, the mining industry generated Rand 527.5 billion ($36 billion USD) in sales in 2019, with 16 commodities ranked in the top 10 internationally. South Africa is currently ranked fifth in the world for mining’s contribution to GDP and in the top three globally in terms of production.
While the industry continues to thrive, there are plenty of men like Mokhothu who pay for its success. During his 15-year career in mining, he got injured and contracted tuberculosis (TB) before his paralysis.
Mokhothu says he was pushing a wheelbarrow at work when he realised that his left arm had gone numb and he couldn’t move it. He went to the site manager and asked for his medical aid documents so he could go to the doctor. He was told his documents were missing and that he possibly didn’t sign for medical aid. “It is impossible that I didn’t sign for my medical aid when I know that anything can happen underground. Mining is dangerous,” he says.
Mokhothu’s relationship with his employer, Redpath Mining, deteriorated from the moment he walked to the hospital after being denied a company car to take him. He was alone there and a few days after a stroke had caused the numbness in his arm, the rest of his body followed.
Former mineworker Zachariah Mokhothu / credit: Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame
Trickery and Denial
His mother Regina Mokhothu says it was difficult when he couldn’t move at all. “We got no support from the mine, not even a check-up. Luckily Zacharia still had medical aid from his former employer, so he went to a couple of physiotherapy sessions before it expired.
“My heart breaks when I see his situation and how the mine has treated him. He was the only breadwinner when he was working. The family didn’t want for anything. I’ve become too old to work. I used to be a domestic worker in the city.”
A Redpath mining representative said Mokhothu wasn’t injured on duty and that he wasn’t an employee yet when he had the stroke. “If he was injured on duty, the process would be to complete forms, send them to [insurance company] Rand Mutual, observe how severe the situation is and pay accordingly. Rand Mutual makes that decision.”
Mokhothu says he was tricked into signing a voluntary termination agreement and that he has a document to this effect. He also has a letter from Rand Mutual notifying him about his payments towards medical aid.
Thabani Tsokodibane, 56, had worked in the mining industry for over 10 years. In 2010, he was diagnosed with drug-resistant tuberculosis / credit: Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame
Mining Fatalities
More than 11,000 mineworkers died in South Africa between 1984 and 2005, according to the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy. The death toll from mining accidents was about 270 in 2003 and the department, Minerals Council South Africa and other industry stakeholders reached an agreement to reduce mining fatalities by 20 percent a year. There was an improvement from 2010 onwards, but fatalities have increased again in recent years.
Those who survive mining accidents, such as Thabani Tsokodibane, 56, tell of the lack of care and blatant disregard they experience at the hands of managers and employers when they are injured or fall ill. Tsokodibane had been working in the mining industry for more than a decade when he contracted TB at Harmony Gold’s Bambanani mine in Welkom in 2010.
He went to the clinic and was told he had drug-resistant TB. “I took my medicine every day. I was at the clinic daily for almost a year. At work, nobody said much to me or called to check. I thought everything was still in order. But when I went back to work, they said, ‘We have put somebody else in your shift, go home.’”
Disappointed and worried about providing for his wife and seven children, he applied for a job at another mine. But the human resources (HR) department told him in the final stages of the process that the mine could not employ him because his health tests had shown he was not fit to work underground. The TB had affected his lungs, leaving him with chronic breathing problems.
“My body has never been the same. I can build and do plumbing, which I used to do for extra income, but now I work slower because I just get weak,” says Tsokodibane. He says it is more difficult to breathe and he comes down with flu-like symptoms, including coughing every five minutes, that sometimes last for weeks. “I go to the clinic, get cough mixture and that’s all.”
Thabani Tsokodibane worked in a mine in Welkom in South Africa’s Free State / credit: Ihsaan Haffejee / New Frame
‘Some Sort of Justice’
Mokhothu and Tsokodibane hope to receive compensation from their respective former employers through the Tshiamiso Trust. They are hopeful that, after a long wait, they will get some sort of justice for the effects of mining on their bodies and would like more than monetary compensation.
Mokhothu says he is most frustrated with how his employer treated him. “I was tricked. After years, I got a letter from [medical insurance company] Discovery about the payments that were deducted from my salary, which means they hid my medical aid from me. I think it’s because they wanted to deny that I had the stroke at work. Mines are very good at denying responsibility. Even with TB, you will be asked if you have proof that you got it from work.
“I have a diploma in secretarial services from Standford college. I thought I could do admin at the mine and the HR person came and said he can give me light duty, I should just sign. But when I read the document, it was a voluntary termination agreement. I refused to sign and was very angry that they tried to trick me like that.”
Mokhothu wants to run his own business one day. He lives with his mother, apart from his wife and children who live in another township, because the roads in Kutlwanong are easier to navigate in a wheelchair; it doesn’t get stuck in the mud. He takes taxies to the hospital, to collect his grant or to submit documents at the Tshiamiso Trust offices and it is hard.
“I never wanted to be a miner. I wasn’t finding a job with my diploma and the opportunity came up. I regret being part of this industry where people see you get hurt in the line of duty, on their premises, and refuse to take responsibility. It’s as if I put myself in this wheelchair.”
Harmony Gold spokesperson Moeketsi Maloeli said: “All employees have a choice on whether to take medical aid or not. If they happen to fall sick without medical aid, there are health hubs with state-of-the-art equipment, some are even better than government hospitals. A miner can go there until they get well.”
Frantz Fanon’s 60th death anniversary is an occasion to explore the impact of the Martiniquais writer and psychiatrist, who has influenced many a revolutionary with his study of the psychology of the oppressed.
Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis.
“The master’s room was wide open. The master’s room was brilliantly lit, and the master was there, very calm… and our people stopped dead… it was the master… I went in. “It’s you,” he said, very calm. It was I, even I, and I told him so, the good slave, the faithful slave, the slave of slaves, and suddenly his eyes were like two cockroaches, frightened in the rainy season… I struck, and the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today.” —Aimé Césaire
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the passing of one of the greatest thinkers to have emerged from the ranks of the oppressed, Frantz Fanon (1925-1961).
Fanon’s contributions are timeless. As long as white supremacy and neocolonialism remain in the driver’s seat of human relations, Fanon’s thought will continue to arm the colonized in the Battle of Ideas.
The Radicalization of Fanon
Born and raised in what is still France’s Caribbean island colony of Martinique, Fanon was exposed to and shaped by the everyday class and race relations that characterized the island in the early 20th century. Forced to join a segregated column of Black troops, he fought in World War II. Upon continuing his studies in post-war France, he came face to face with the racism that dominates the European world. In his first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon reflects on coming of age in a world, where, “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” At the time of publication, Fanon had just turned 27.
In 1953, the Martiniquais psychiatrist was assigned to Algeria, where he treated patients who were severely traumatized by the violence French colonialism had spun into motion. He met Dr. Pierre Chaulet, a French doctor who secretly treated members of the guerrilla resistance, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), who had survived torture and captivity. “Viscerally close to his patients whom he regarded as primarily victims of the system he was fighting,” Fanon immediately became a cadre of the Algerian Revolution.1
By 1956, Fanon’s consciousness no longer allowed him to oversee operations at Blida Hospital in Algeria. In an influential resignation letter that moved many on the left, he wrote:
“There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. The ruling intentions of personal existence are not in accord with the permanent assaults on the most commonplace values. For many months my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. And the conclusion is the determination not to despair of man, in other words, of myself. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost, on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done.”
The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon produced a prodigious amount of intellectual work. Toward the African Revolution is a compilation of his writings on forging African and Third World unity with the Algerian Revolution at the vanguard of this process.2A Dying Colonialism explores how the Algerian people threw off their internalized inferiority complex by turning away from the colonizer’s cultural practices and embracing their own traditions.3
He dedicated his last days to dictating the final ideas of his most moving work to his wife, Josie. Six decades after it first hit the streets of Paris, The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World is as accurate and explosive as ever. The title comes from the line “Arise, ye wretched of the earth” from “The Internationale,” the Second Communist International’s official anthem, and from Haitian communist intellectual Jacques Romain’s poem, “Sales négres:”
too late it will be too late
on the cotton plantations of Louisiana
in the sugar cane fields of the Antilles
to halt the harvest of vengeance
of the negroes
the niggers
the filthy negroes
it will be too late I tell you
for even the tom-toms will have learned the language
of the Internationale
for we will have chosen our day
day of the filthy negroes
filthy Indians
filthy Hindus
filthy Indo-Chinese
filthy Arabs
filthy Malays
filthy Jews
filthy proletarians.
And here we are arisen
All the wretched of the earth
all the upholders of justice
marching to attack your barracks
your banks
like a forest of funeral torches
to be done
once
and
for
all
with this world
of negroes
niggers
filthy negroes.4
How many revolutionaries the world over became enraptured in his eloquent portrayal of the “Manichaean” differences between the neighborhoods of the rich white colonizer in Algiers and the casbah (ghettoes) of the colonized?
Here within this classic, that all revolutionaries have a duty to study, reside some of the most poignant prose on how the oppressed internalize violence and project it onto themselves:
“Where individuals are concerned, a positive negation of common sense is evident. While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native, for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-a-vis his brother.”
Based on his treatment of patients in the Blida Hospital, which today bears his name, Fanon’s final chapter, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” examines the “ineffaceable wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people.”5
The fundamental pillar of the book, however, was Fanon’s conviction that the colonized could only shed their fear and shame through a baptism of revolutionary violence. Fanon’s former high school teacher and mentor, Aimé Césaire, had a profound influence on him. Césaire’s words cited at the beginning of this article from his epic poem on slave liberation, “And the Dogs were Silent,” set the tone for the Fanonian worldview. Despite a chorus of liberal complaints from the West that Fanon was “too violent,” Fanon concluded:
“As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs, there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.”
‘You Can Kill a Revolutionary, But You Can Never Kill the Revolution’
Though Fanon died of leukemia when he was only 36, revolutionaries the world over have picked up his fallen weapons, his ideas, and applied them to their own particular national liberation struggles. Fanon’s observations and thesis continue to mold the thinking of awakening generations in life-and-death struggles from Johannesburg to Gaza to Harlem.
As political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, the Black Panthers were Fanonists. His audio essay and tribute to Fanon discuss what the psychiatrist’s anti-colonial perspicacity meant to a 15-year-old Mumia, who has spent 40 years in prison. In Seize the Time, Bobby Seale talks about the influence of Fanon on the young Panthers and how Huey P. Newton read the book seven times.6
Malcolm X, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Nelson Mandela all traveled to independent Algeria, which emerged as an epicenter of Pan-Africanism and internationalism. Paulo Freire stated that he had to rewrite Pedagogy of the Oppressed after reading The Wretched of the Earth. Hamza Hamouchene, president of the London-based Algerian Solidarity Campaign, discusses in CounterPunch what he deems Fanon’s unique contributions to understanding nationalism, the national bourgeoisie, political education and universalism, among other themes.
It is important to highlight that Fanon was more than just a doctor and writer.
At his graveside, Vice-president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) Krim Belkacem emphasized Fanon’s diverse roles in the FLN’s total war. Beginning in 1954, Fanon worked as a writer, editor and propagandist for FLN periodicals Résistance algérienne and El Moudjahid. He also was a researcher; lecturer; a FLN representative in Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Guinea and Congo; as well as a clandestine militant.
Looking at the work of Karl Marx, Steve Biko, Cedric Robinson, Sylvia Wynter and other examples of revolutionaries/intellectuals, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research wrote a tribute to Fanon because of how he embodied the praxis of a radical or organic intellectual: “The world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle.”
Fanon survived an assassination attempt, exile in Tunis and was staring down a crippling disease that he refused to talk about but that ultimately claimed his life. Aware he was dying, he pledged, “I will not cease my activities while Algeria still continues the struggle and I will go on with my task until my dying day.”7
Today, it is more necessary than ever to study Fanon to understand the psychological, emotional and spiritual damage wrought by neo-colonialism on the peoples of Africa, the Americas, Asia and what the Black Panthers referred to as the United States’ internal colonies. Fanon’s conclusion in The Wretched of the Earth on African and human liberation begs the same questions six decades later:
“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe [U.S.A.] where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of everyone of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.”
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.
Notes 1 Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 2 Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press. 1964. 3 Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press. 1965. 4 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 5 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012. 6 Seale, Bobby. Seize the Time: The Story of The Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton. Random House: 1970. 7 Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. London and New York: Verso. 2012.
