NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF MORE TIME – AND SO MANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I WANT TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Franz Fanon. Born into a middle-class family in Martinique, educated in France, and buried in Algeria, Fanon’s flame burned bright, but only briefly. A philosopher, a psychiatrist, and an activist as well as a writer he died at age 36 – though not before leaving behind a book that became a classic, The Wretched of the Earth.
In the tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s Fanon was what, decades later, the New York Times described as a “minor celebrity on the radical left.”* More recently however – most dramatically during the time of Trump – Fanon has become “an icon.” Especially on college campuses he is enlisted in agendas ranging from black nationalism and Islamism to cosmopolitanism. And he is admired for the extremity and consistency of his rage against, for example, colonialism and racial injustice.
In part Fanon is invoked so frequently because of his simplicity. His world view was Manichean: masters and slaves, colonizers and colonized, whites and blacks, the former free, the latter in chains if not physically then psychologically. As I earlier wrote, his “mission in life was to end gross inequity, once and for all, by using force if necessary to bring down those with power, authority, and influence in favor of those without.”**
I include him in this short course on leadership literacy because The Wretched of the Earth is a leadership classic of a certain genre. It openly advocates the use of force to compel change. Specifically, change that is deemed not just desirable but necessary – such as ending colonialism and racial injustice. In fact, it was Fanon’s fury, and his unambiguous and unapologetic defense of violence to eliminate extreme inequity, that explains his influence on revolutionary leaders such as Cuba’s Che Guevara. And that explains his intellectual leadership even now.
*
Excerpts from Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth – 1961
- Decolonization is always a violent event…. Decolonization is quite simply the substitution of one “species” of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless.
- Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder.
- Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces.
- [This explains] why decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists. This determination to have the last move up to the front, to have them clamber up (too quickly, say some) the famous echelons of an organized society, can succeed only by resorting to every means, including, of course, to violence.
*https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/frantz-fanon-colonialism.html
**Kellerman, Leadership: Essential Selections. (As above.)