Success and Failure: Frantz Fanon and Lamine Senghor as (False) Prophets of Decolonization?

Abstract

Frantz Fanon has often been hailed as the great prophet of decolonization. At the same time, his most severe critics have accused his work of providing intellectual-political cover for some of the worst excesses of the newly independent regimes. This article builds on David Macey's contextualizing work in order to think in a more general fashion about the processes involved in deeming a given thinker or movement to be either a failure or a success, comparing Fanon's legacy with that of Lamine Senghor, a neglected anti-colonial militant of the interwar period.