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Some Aspects of the Political Philosophy of Frantz Fanon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

L. Adele Jinadu
L. Adele Jinadu*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Extract

Political philosophy is concerned with the ends and purposes of government. It involves a conception of “the good life” and is primarily, though perhaps not exclusively, concerned with human beings. A conception of the good life presumably implies a view of how to attain that end. In this view, then, political philosophy is also concerned with the question of means, or how is the good life to he won and secured for the members of a particular community or society or state? Of those people of African ancestry who have done systematic thinking about the ends and purposes of government in Africa in the period since the end of World War II, there are few who measure up to the stature and originality of Frantz Fanon. (For biographical sketches on Fanon, see Caute 1970; Geismar 1969, 1970; Césaire et al. 1962; de Beauvoir 1965, Ch. 5, especially pp. 583, 591-597, 606-607.)

A rejected evolué in both Martinique and France, Fanon came to realize the extent of his own depersonalization and that of other blacks. It was this awareness which, in Geismar's words (1969, p. 24), led him first to make “a revolutionary carthartic break with the past,” and then to “a more definite African revolutionary ending.” His life, as Aimé Césaire (1962, p. 119) pointed out, was short, active and full of personal tragedy.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , September 1973 , pp. 255 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1973

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