Fanon, the Wretched and Boko Haram

Frantz Fanon, the Afro-French revolutionary and psychiatrist, developed a theory as to how and why the socially marginalized, the abused, the dregs of humanity, The Other!, eventually rose up in an attempt to reclaim their lost humanity. Fanon’s political writings dealt primarily with the colonial situation, the colonizer and the colonized and the question of race, especially as it unfolded in the Algerian war for independence (1954–62). Boko Haram is a Nigerian jihadist group that has engaged the Nigerian state in all-out warfare since 2009. We use Fanon’s concept of the ‘wretched’ to explain the emergence of Boko Haram in a post-colonial situation in which the issue of a ‘racial foreigner’ is completely irrelevant and, in so doing, argue for the continued relevance of Fanonist thinking.