Fanon, the recovery of African history, and the Nekyia

Black history is the study of the human past that focuses on people with black skin: the things those people have done, the past societies of Africa, world events from the perspective of Black people, and so on. Nowadays, the recovery of Black history is increasingly seen as important in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.1 People campaign for its inclusion in school curricula; there are documentaries exploring past African civilisations, and university research programmes devoted to it. The recovery of African history was also deemed important by the Négritude Movement (a Black consciousness movement developed in Paris), which was a central part of the intellectual context for Fanon's work. It is perhaps, therefore, surprising to find that Fanon is highly critical in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, 2008), of négritude writers' attempts to recover African history. In this paper, I will argue that his critique can only be fully understood if we read his text as adopting an important idea from Césaire (1995) that, following Jung (2009), can be called a nekyia. As such, Fanon's text is a form of therapy.

I will begin by briefly explaining what the Négritude Movement is, and why writers associated with it were concerned with African history, before presenting Fanon's explicit objections to their arguments. After this, I will offer a further reason from Fanon's text for recovering African history that is not defeated by his objections. The final part of the paper will present Fanon's nekyia and show how reading Black Skin, White Masks as therapy helps explain why Fanon dismisses attempts to recover African history in the text.