Excavations

There is a brief passage in Frantz Fanon’s ‘Concerning Violence’ in which he discusses the relevance of occult superstitions to the colonised native, describing them as mechanisms for disavowal of the coloniser’s power, creating a narrative in which the subjugation of the colonised person is blamed on supernatural forces rather than on white domination. Occult beliefs, he says, contain and displace the native’s murderous rage against colonial masters and are a method of communal identity creation. This world of magic is yet another restraint that the colonised subject must escape from: It has always happened in the struggle for freedom that such a people, formerly lost in an imaginary maze, a prey to unspeakable terrors yet happy to lose themselves in a dreamlike torment, such a people becomes unhinged, reorganizes itself, and in blood and tears gives birth to very real and immediate action. (Fanon 1963, 56) Like the sense of inferiority that accompanies interactions with the settler’s whiteness and the traumas of the ‘native intellectual’ who must discover the shared humanity beyond Enlightenment individualism, casting off the bonds of traditional magic and witchcraft is fundamental for the process of decolonisation. Eschewing a ‘permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane’ that hinders the revolutionary process, Fanon says, the people must turn their attention to more pressing matters (ibid.). Witchcraft and occultism threaten to hold them back, to derail the progressive process. Magical beliefs are a hindrance to political action and to collective development

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