‘That the tool never possess the man’:¹ taking Fanon’s humanism seriously

Abstract

The key argument in this article is that there are three good reasons to take Fanon's humanism seriously. The first is that he took it seriously; the second is that he wrote to wrest humanism from the distortions of racism and colonialism; and the third is that Fanon's humanism is a current in the movement that Michael Hart and Antonio Negri call revolutionary humanism, which they distinguish from reactionary humanism. The second and more subterranean argument is that Fanon's humanism can incite and hone a revitalisation of our thinking and practice of politics in contemporary South Africa.