L'Africa e il post colonialismo nello specifico Franz Fanon

GEOGRAPHY

Saharian Africa

Sub-Saharianan Africa

1. West Africa (Africa Occidentale)
2. Central Africa (Africa Centrale)
3. East Africa (Africa Orientale)
4. South Africa (Africa del Sud/Meridionale)

HISTORY

1. Pre-Colonial Age (origins-1884)
2. Colonial Age (1884-1951)
3. Postcolonial Age (1951-today)

PRE-COLONIAL AGE

There were various empires and societies and it was the age of explorations. Portuguese from the 15th century started mapping the coasts. Start of the slave trade:

1. The Atlantic route
2. The Trans-Saharian route
3. The Red Sea route
4. The Swahili coast route

PRE-COLONIAL AGE ECONOMY

1. Hunting-gathering
2. Pastoral nomadism
3. Agro-pastoralism
4. Subsistence-oriented trade
5. Market-oriented trade

BELGIAN CONGO

King Leopold II of Belgium reigned as the King of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909 and became known for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State as a private venture. Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the

price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labour from the native population to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime more than 10 millions of the Congolese people died and were abused (Genocide). Mass mutilation.

COLONIAL AGE

The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, also known as the Congo Conference (German: Kongokonferenz) or West Africa Conference (Westafrika-Konferenz), regulated European coloniza\on and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power. The conference was organized by OIovon Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany; its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formaliza\on of the Scramble for Africa. The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial ac\vity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most exis\ng forms of African autonomy and self-governance. Africa was the target of the third wave of European colonialism, aaer that of the Americas and Asia.

Many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate the Scramble for Africa, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. As a champion of Realpolitik, Bismarck disliked colonies and thought they were a waste of time, but his hand was forced by pressure from both the elites and the general population which considered the colonization a necessity for German prestige. German colonies in Togoland, Samoa, South-West Africa and New Guinea had corporate commercial roots, while the equivalent German-dominated areas in East Africa and China owed more to political moves. The British also took an interest in Africa, using the East Africa Company to take over what are now Kenya and Uganda. The British crown formally took over in 1895 and renamed the area the East Africa Protectorate. The Dutch Empire continued to hold the Dutch East Indies, which was one of the few profitable overseas colonies. In the same manner, Italy tried to conquer its "place in the sun," acquiring Somaliland in 1899-90.

Eritrea and 1899,and, taking advantage of the "Sick man of Europe," the Oeoman Empire, also conquered Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya) with the 1911 Treaty of Lausanne. The conquest of Ethiopia, which had remained the last African independent territory, had to wait \ll the Second Italo-Abyssinian War in 1935–36 (the First Italo-Ethiopian War in 1895–96 had ended in defeat for Italy). The Portuguese and Spanish colonial empire were smaller, mostly legacies of past colonisa\on. Most of their colonies had acquired independence during the La\n American revolu\ons at the beginning of the 19th century. In 1945, the United Na\ons (UN) was founded when 50 na\ons signed the UN Charter, which included a statement of its basis in the respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determina\on of peoples.

In 1952, demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term "Third World" in reference to the French Third Estate. The expression dis\nguished na\ons that aligned

Themselves with neither the West nor the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War. In the following decades, decolonization would strengthen this group which began to be represented at the United Nations. The Third World's first international move was the 1955 Bandung Conference, led by Jawaharlal Nehru for India, Gamal Abdel Nasser for Egypt and Josip Broz Tito for Yugoslavia. The Conference, which gathered 29 countries representing over half the world's population, led to the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Although the U.S. had first opposed itself to colonial empires, the Cold War concerns about Soviet influence in the Third World caused it to downplay its advocacy of popular sovereignty and decolonization. France thus had a free hand in the First Indochina War (1946-54) and in the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62). Decolonization itself was a seemingly unstoppable process. 1951: Libya 1960s: British and French colonies 1974: Portuguese colonies 1994: the end of

Apartheid in South Africa (seeler colony). In 1960, after a number of countries gained independence, the UN had reached 99 member states: the decolonization of Africa was almost complete. In 1980, the UN had 154 member states, and in 1990, after Namibia's independence, 159 states.

POST-COLONIAL AGE

Post-colonialism is a term used to recognize the continued and troubling presence and influence of colonialism within the period we designate as after-the-colonial. It refers to the ongoing effects that colonial encounters, dispossession, and power have in shaping the familiar structures (social, political, spatial, uneven global interdependencies) of the present world. Post-colonialism, in itself, questions the end of colonialism.

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS IN POST-COLONIALISM

1. Democracy (more widespread) + liberalism
2. Socialism + state control
3. Communism + state control

FRANTZ FANON POST-COLONIALISM THEORY

Frantz Fanon's relatively short life yielded two potent and influential statements.

Of an\-colonial revolu\onary thought, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). These works have made Fanon one of the most prominent contributors to the field of postcolonial studies. Fanon was born in 1925, to a middle-class family in the French colony of Mar\nique.

Black Skin, White Masks is part manifesto, part analysis; it both presents Fanon’s personal experience as a black intellectual in a whitened world and elaborates the ways in which the colonizer/colonized rela\onship is normalized as psychology. Because of his schooling and cultural background, the young Fanon conceived of himself as French, and the disorienta\on he felt aaer his ini\al encounter with French racism decisively shaped his psychological theories about culture. Fanon inflects his medical and psychological prac\ce with the understanding that racism generates harmful psychological constructs that both blind the black man to his subjec\on to a universalised white norm and alienate his consciousness.

Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from himself. Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black." Neither exists without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest. His work swings toward a more psychological shape that defends the entire black race and any other race under oppression by attacking.

the oppressor, he did well deconstructing and dismantling the binary opposition of white and black, and he didn't dive into the dilemma of gender that much, but still by defending the black race, he defends for sure both sexes, male and female. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961, Les damnés de la terre), published shortly before Fanon's death, the writer defends the right of a colonized people to use violence to gain independence. In addition, he delineated the processes and forces leading to national independence or neocolonialism during the decolonization movement that engulfed much of the world after World War II. In defence of the use of violence by colonized peoples,