Frantz Fanon’s Ambivalence towards Religion

Abstract

Frantz Fanon has for more than fi fty years been a celebrated theorist, intellectual and activist of the black struggle for recognition, to the degree that he has assumed the status of a “sacred cow” in African nationalist discourse. Without seeking to raise the signifi cance of religion in Fanon’s thinking, I use a critical, postcolonial literary reading of Fanon texts to critique his conception of religion. Although he regarded Catholicism and Islam as orthodox religions that deprived the colonized of their dignity, he referred to them as the “great revealed religions.” Interestingly, Fanon’s writing refl ects a particular ambivalence towards indigenous religions, in the Caribbean and Africa, which he regarded as primitive, terrifying and pre-modern — always depriving the colonized of the gains of modernity. His refl ections on indigenous religion are less considered and more visceral. He describes these traditions as irrational and more terrifying than the colonial settler. Ultimately his ambivalence towards religions leaves Fanon unable to expel colonial representations of the black as  superstitious, primitive and child-like from his theories of transformation.