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Life
He said the most potent weapon in the oppressor's hand is the mind of the oppressed, and he spent his life building the alternative.
He was born in Martinique, studied psychiatry in France, and spent his life analyzing what colonialism does to the mind, and what it takes to undo it.
Connection
Frantz Fanon colonial psychology and liberation Steve Biko — Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks was central to Biko's development of Black Consciousness. Both argued that the colonized person internalizes the colonizer's view of them, and that liberation therefore requires a prior psychological revolution. Biko applied this analysis specifically to the apartheid context.
Ideas
Words
“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”
“You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can't care anyway.”
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”
“The colonist makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his metropolis, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that metropolis.”
Key Moments
1969
Founded the South African Students Organisation
1973
Banned by the apartheid government
1977
Killed in police custody
1956
Joins the Algerian revolution
1961
The Wretched of the Earth dictated while dying
Works
I Write What I Like
The Wretched of the Earth