Prison Radio
Mumia Abu-Jamal

The Wisdom of Frantz Fanon.

His name was Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique, in the West Indies, 1925. At the time of his death 36 years later, his words would inspire freedom movements around the world. And his ideas, captured in his posthumously-published book, The Wretched of the Earth, would become a classic, selling over a million copies.

Fanon was actually Dr. Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist who considered the vile system of colonialism a social pathology. Dr. Fanon worked with the FLN–National Liberation Front–of Algeria. It was an anti-colonial forces that fought against French imperialism there. He actually became the voice of Algerian national resistance and wrote pieces for the FLN journal, El Moudjahid. He wrote searing, biting critiques of French political support for Algerian colonialism and similar systems in Black Africa.

When Dr. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale began to organize the Black Panther Party in 1966, Seale handed Newton a copy of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Newton reportedly read it six times. His ideas seeded the ideas that would later permeate the leadership and membership of the Black Panther Party. His general idea was that the colonized and the oppressed had to fight against their oppressors with every tool at their disposal. His words gave heft and weight to the Algerian Revolution, which triumphed after seven years of war. His writings continue to awake [inaudible] after over half a century since his death in an American hospital.

With love, not fear, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.

These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.