Frantz Fanon and the Opposition

Frantz Omar Fanon, also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique. 

His writings were largely levelled at defeating colonialism, in all its infamy. 

In 1971, a student of the university of Dar es Salaam called Yoweri Museveni wrote an undergraduate thesis, ‘Fanon’s Theory of Violence: Its Verification in Liberated Mozambique.’ 

Thus, guided by Fanon, a young Museveni developed a strategy to battle against what he viewed as oppression.  However, an older Museveni has come to personify the oppression he once railed against.  

So maybe it is time the Opposition used his own Fanonian tactics against him. 

After all, Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, once said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

To know their enemy, the Opposition must start with his mindset. 
Fanon (and thus Museveni) believed that a world inhabited by the coloniser and colonised was a Manichean world. That means it was defined by a “duality” between good (the colonised) and evil (the coloniser). 

In our context, though, coloniser is a byword for government while colonised connotes the Opposition. 

However, I believe it would be simplistic to have such a bipolar view of a multipolar world; especially when taking on a leader like Mr Museveni who bundles all those who disagree with him into one group hastily labelled “To be crushed”. 

The Opposition in Uganda, it is true, is not a homogenous group that is opposed dichotomically to the monolithic Museveni state. 
To be sure, the Opposition has differences which orient it to different platforms; platforms it cannot simply abandon. 

In abandoning them, the world would be made less safe for diversity. 

However, together, they may practice unity in diversity, or what Fanon called Syncretism.

This, syncretism, is defined as the combining of different beliefs and various schools of thought, which may be done by the varying constellations of the Opposition uniting to defeat a common enemy. 

President Museveni’s so-called broad-based government was his own fallacious attempt at syncretism. We say fallacious because it was a veil to conceal his one party rule. 

Also, Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth could be used to trace evolving patterns of sectarian thinking. 

During colonial times, biologistic forms of racism were used by the British to establish civil bureaucracies in Uganda which led to cleavages forming between south and north. 

Today, in a more pluralistic society, cultural-religious differences instead of biological dichotomies are the norm as clericalism and ethnic bigotry are on the rise. 

The two tendencies are evidenced by the Opposition accusing government of persecuting certain religious minorities, while government counter-accuses politicians from the central region of sub-nationalism of a particular kind. 

In echo of Fanon’s idea of decolonisation, we could redress this situation by replacing a certain “species” of rule by another “species” of rule.

This presupposes the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a new state and recasting its institutional relations towards a fresh political dispensation. 

If we are to truly liberate ourselves we must realise that, like Fanon’s estimation of the colonial world, our fight for freedom is not a rational confrontation of points of view between us and President Museveni. 

Instead, it is essentially a contestation between a world whose time has passed and a future whose time has arrived.