Half a century after his death, the specter of Frantz Fanon haunts postcolonial studies and his reflections on decolonization, nationalism and violence seem more poignant than ever. Part of the reason is that a majority of the ex-colonies have become sites for gruesome conflicts in the name of ethnicity, race, power, religion and territory. Thus, in the current context of relentless postcolonial wars, it becomes imperative to re-read Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth there is a disturbing prophecy about the way the “postcolony” would develop in the years that followed: “Obviously the violence channeled into the liberation struggle does not vanish as if by magic after hoisting the national colors.” And furthermore, “Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped, there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homogeneity. The colonized have adapted to the atmosphere.” He calls the new, independent nation a “muzzled nation” that is continually drenched in a bloodbath after years of being repressed.
The paper attempts to examine what can be termed as a violent rupture during this complex historical moment and its relationship to the present states of bloody, civil strife in most of the previously colonized spaces. The predictions of the occasionally messianic Fanon are juxtaposed with present-day theorists such as Achille Mbembe and Mahmood Mamdani to draw up a paradigmatic framework within which the contemporary postcolonial violence can be situated as a whole and the reasons and nature of it could be explained and understood.