Tracing Frantz Fanon´s African connections

Departing from a postcolonial perspective, this study adopts the notions of travelling theories (Said, 1994), to trace Fanon´s thinking as enacted in political discourses of the Senegalese Leopold Senghor´s (Roynette, 2005; Vivaldi, 2007) and the first Mozambican president, Samora Machel. According to Said (Said, 1993), it is precisely the geographical dispersion which allows for the renewed revolutionary potential of travelling theories and we will explore this claim through what we call the tracing of Fanon´s African connections focusing on selected political discourses from the 60s and 70s, but also providing examples of traces of Fanon´s legacy in contemporary Senegal and Mozambique. We will contextualize these with examples of Fanonian practices from other social and political movements in contemporary Africa, such as South Africa, (Gibson, 2011). Based on analyses of a sample of political discourses, newspaper articles, memoires and secondary literature, the study discusses the Fanonian traces in these African connections and includes a discussion of acknowledged or unconscious influences, creative borrowing and the wholesale appropriation of Fanon´s thinking and relate these to his main works: Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 2008 , [1952]), The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 2004, [1961]) and Towards the African Revolution (1964). The hypothesis is that the Fanonian discourse works as a travelling memory for many African leaders since the independence. Preliminary results attest to the continued relevance of the Fanonian dual emphasis on the individual (subjective) and the social and, as his comment to Sartre, the specificity of the Fanonian perspective on the racial relationship entrenched in a colonial setting. As a preliminary reflection we claim that the emphasis on the individual (subjective) was disregarded in the discursive superseding of the racial relationship, particularly identified among liberation movements that adopted (the most purist) socialist/marxist ideologies. We trace what we consider the erasure and invisibilization of the everyday racism and provide examples of more recent resurgences of Fanonian discourses and practices in contemporary social and political movements. We identify a renewed interest for the dual emphasis on the individual and the social and recognition of a reproduction of the colonial alienation and segregation in globalized late modernity