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«It is often believed, with criminal carelessness, that politicizing the masses means occasionally delivering a grand political speech to them. People think that it is enough for a leader or official to speak in a professorial tone about the major issues of the day to fulfill this imperative duty of politicizing the masses. But to politicize is to open the mind, to awaken the mind, to bring the mind into the world. It is, as Césaire put it, “to invent souls.” Politicizing the masses is not—and cannot be—simply delivering a political speech. It is striving with fierce determination to make the masses understand that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate, it is their fault, and that if we move forward, it is also their doing, that there is no demiurge, that there is no illustrious figure responsible for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and that the magical hands are, in the end, nothing but the hands of the people. To achieve these things, to truly embody them—let us repeat—we must decentralize to the extreme. The flow from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top must be a rigid principle, not out of a concern for formalism, but simply because adherence to this principle is the guarantee of salvation.»
– Frantz Fanon.
Editor's note:
This passage is taken from Frantz Fanon’s book *The Wretched of the Earth*, published in 1961. More specifically, it appears in the chapter titled “On Violence,” in which Fanon explores the processes of decolonization and the need to politicize the masses in order to bring about genuine change, while emphasizing the central role of the people in social and political transformation.
