Violence In Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth

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Fanon was recognized as the prophet of decolonization on the publication of his monumental study, The Wretched of the Earth; To understand the central thesis in The Wretched of the Earth summed up in a single sentence, ‘The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence’. (Fanon, (1967; 73). One needs to put Fanon’s views in a triple context: that of the history of colonization, of modernist thought on the historical necessity of violence, and of the post-war movement to decolonization. Put in context, Fanon’s thesis was at the same time a description, a claim and a problematization. First, it was a description of the violence of the colonial system, of the fact that violence was key to producing and sustaining the relationship between …show more content…

And third and most important for this essay it was a problematization, of a derivative violence, of the violence of victims turned killers. Native violence, Fanon insisted, “was the violence of yesterday’s victims, the violence of those who had cast aside their victimhood to become masters of their own lives”. ‘He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force” (Fanon, 1967; 73-74). For Fanon, the proof of the native’s humanity consisted not in “the willingness to kill settlers, but in the willingness to risk his or her own life. ‘The colonized man’, he wrote, ‘finds his freedom in and through violence’. (Fanon, 1967; 33). 3. THE ORIGINS OF THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE The Twentieth Century witnessed an unprecedented number of genocides. However, the most chilling of them all was the Rwandan genocide because it was the most rapidly executed state sponsored mass murder and it could have been prevented. Between April and July of 1994, an estimated eight hundred thousand people were murdered in Rwanda, in what was eventually called a

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