MAKHOSAZANA XABA

Translating a dead man means stepping very warily through a minefield littered with debris of another time and another translation.

Richard Philcox
(French to English translator of The Wretched of the Earth (2004, p. 310)

It was in 1997 at an independent bookstore on Rocky Street in Yeoville that I happened upon Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks. I stood there with the copy in my hands wondering: how come I’ve never seen any Fanon book in any bookstore? This was my sixth year of living in Johannesburg and by now I had visited every bookstore I had heard of.

I asked myself this question because Fanon, had lived in the air I breathed during my earlier years of anti-apartheid and feminist activism in South Africa and elsewhere. His name often escaped through numerous lips, and, because I learn better from reading, I never learned to articulate Fanon’s ideas with the accuracy I desired. It was The Wretched of the Earth that people referenced, not Black Skin, White Masks. Not once, in those activism years did I hold any of Fanon’s books in my hands.

It was only in 2001 that I held a copy of The Wretched of the Earth in my hands. I smiled when I read that the book had been translated by a woman, Constance Farrington. This copy has a sad looking front cover of a man whose image fits the stereotypical look of a homeless or street person. Not long after purchasing this copy, I happened upon another edition, with a different cover.

This copy has a front cover that I like, a woman who to me has eyes that are piercing with determination and lips that augment the message in her eyes. As time moved on books on Fanon found a home on the shelves in bookstores and I bought these with the attendant passion of a lover of books.

The Unexpected Approach

In January 2020 when Mwelela Cele phoned and asked that we meet because they wanted to commission me to translate Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu I just giggled out loud, in utter disbelief. We agreed on a date and venue, and I knew exactly what I was going to tell them: a definitive NO! We met at Tashas in Rosebank and Mwelela arrived with his colleague Nontobeko Hlela.^{[1]I asked Mwelela to write about how the decision that I would be the translator was arrived at, as well as his own story and personal journey with Fanon. You can read that article here:}

When Mwelela spoke about the reasons they approached me, my jaw dropped as my mind went back to the reason I had decided to register and study towards a year-long  Diploma in Psychiatric Nursing at the college aligned to the Fort Napier Psychiatric Hospital. In 1984 I had been expelled for my activism from Ongoye University (also known as the University of  Zululand). In 1985 I needed to do something that looked and felt safe, a decoy of sorts because, I was already working in the underground as a cadre of uMkhonto weSizwe.  

The Tashas moment made it clear to me that I could not say no because I understood and fully embraced the significance of this project. The glaring challenge was that I had never translated anything before. After asking Mwelela and Nontobeko a hundred and one questions about the translation field in South Africa, questions they had no answers to, including how long they thought it would take me to do this work, I suggested that I conduct preliminary research including a month of pilot translation. Mwelela and Nontobeko agreed.

I had brought my two copies of the book; the Farrington and the Philcox translations so I asked: which version should I translate, and they said the latter, without the Foreword and the Preface. On this they were definitive. It seemed clear to me that this specific conversation had been held and a decision already made. Mwelela and Nontobeko mentioned Richard Pithouse, their colleague, several times during this meeting. Until then, I had heard of him from the lips of his former students and had seen him at events organised by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER).^{[2]I also asked Richard to write about the story behind the initial idea to translate The Wretched of the Earth into isiZulu. Read his article here:}

As I write this, I read from Adam Shatz’s The Rebel Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon that Josie, Fanon’s wife “… defended his legacy with passion and without compromise. When Jean-Paul Sartre sided with Israel during the 1976 war, she demanded that Francois Maspero ‘immediately cease the publication of the preface’ to The Wretched of the Earth since ‘his pro-Zionist attitudes were incompatible with Fanon’s work’.” (Shatz 2024: p. 361)  And Alice Cherki, in her Frantz Fanon: A Portrait has this to say about Sartre’s Foreword

Beautiful and violent as it may have been, Sartre’s Foreword had, in a sense, betrayed Fanon. After stipulating that the book was addressed to the Third World, Sartre proceeded to write mostly about Europe. More significantly, he justified violence whereas Fanon had analysed it and not promoted it as an end in itself but as a necessary phase. Sartre, who had wanted to please his friend, in fact, wrote a Foreword that distorted Fanon’s tone and intension.

(Cherki 2006: p. 181)^{[3]Sartre wrote a Preface for the 1961 edition of The Wretched of the Earth and in the 2004 Philcox’s translation version the Foreword is written by Homi K. Bhabha and Sartre’s original Preface is retained. Cherki however mentions a “Foreword” so I am concluding that there is an edition that used the word Foreword and not a Preface as the books I have call it.}

I received a three-month contract for this research work, began the research in March and submitted my report at the end of May 2020. After doing the research I had basic information on what resources were available. The pilot translation included a minimum of two hours of contextual Fanon-specific reading. The readings included all the books listed below, journal articles, opinion pieces, journalism, academic dissertations, everything and anything I could find that I thought would help the translation. Based on the pilot, I proposed an 18-month period for this translation. The real work of translating began in August 2020 after I received a contract.

Reading around as my translation process   

When I arrived home at the end of that day, at Tashas, I went straight to my bookshelves and took down every single book on Fanon. When I sat down, I had the following titles on the table: Black Skin, White Masks (1986); The Wretched of the Earth  (two 2001 editions and 2004);  FANON: A Critical Reader (1996); Frantz Fanon: A Life (2000);  Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015); What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought (2015); Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics (2017); and, Violence, Slavery and Freedom between Hegel and Fanon (2020). These titles are fully referenced below. I list the years to show the publication timeline of the Fanon scholarship.  

In March 2021, while conducting the research Mwelela invited  me to “Frantz Fanon: A Colloquium” hosted by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research where I met  and listened to Fanon scholars including Nigel Gibson and Lewis Gordon. As I write this, I am reminded that I had taken their books for signing. On the 5^th March 2021 Gordon wrote in What Fanon Said the following words: To Makhosazana, Life’s journey offers many paths. I’m glad that among them are our meeting and collaborations to come.” On the 6^th Gibson wrote “To Khosi, Toward a new world” in the Psychiatry and Politics book. Reading these messages now I am surprised by firstly, that I had forgotten about them and secondly, that Gibson’s words remind me of the concluding chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. More on this below.

While waiting to hear back after I submitted my research report, I began rereading the 2015 Jacana pocket history Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism by Christopher Lee because I enjoy these pocketbooks for the precision they offer for readers, so I collect them. I then returned to David Macey’s “tour de force”^{[4]I use “tour de force”, the words that appear on the cover of Macey’s book. The New Stateman calls the book “A biographical Tour De Force”.} selecting chapters as my mood dictated.

After I started translating Mwelela gave me three books from The Commune, a bookstore in Braamfontein: Fanon’s Dialectic Experience (1996); Fanon: A Portrait (2006); and Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo (2011). Later in the year I happened upon The Fanon Reader (2006) and bought it with excitement.

I wish I could say I had a well thought through system of reading these books. I wouldn’t even call it a literature review. What I needed was to; firstly, immerse myself in the Fanon-world, secondly, to clarify his ideas in my head so that my translation is informed by deep and varied readings. So, I began each day by reading a Fanon-something, often a chapter or a journal article that is closest to the content I was translating. And on some days, I got carried away and read non-stop. On some mornings, I jumped from book to book. As I look through Alice Cherki’s portrait and the Gibson and Beneduce book, I am surprised that I underlined, ticked, highlighted, wrote notes, stuck stick-on papers, bent page corners and put stars in so many pages!

One of the memorable details is the long quote below, from Gordon’s What Fanon Said (Gordon 2015: p. 31 & 32).

As Beauvoir scholarship reveals Jean-Paul Sartre’s indebtedness to her crucial concepts such as the look and discussions of concrete relations with others in Being and Nothingness, it is clear that Fanon, too, is influenced by her thought on at least the philosophical anthropology of human development, the limitations of Hegelian dialectics of recognition, and the importance of psychoanalysis in his inaugural work… I cannot, however excuse Fanon’s failure to articulate his indebtedness to Beauvoir. Although he acknowledges the psychoanalytical contributions of Anna Freud, the existential philosophical domains appear squarely in the hands of men such as Jaspers and Sartre when it is clear that Beauvoir not only offered much intellectual sustenance for Fanon’s thought but also that he is well aware of at least two of her major contributions at the time of writing Black Skin, White Masks as the presence of these books in his home library attest. (my emphasis) Beauvoir’s contributions to philosophy and especially the area of human sciences were by that point monumental, though controversial. Controversy is not a challenge of which Fanon was afraid, which makes his presence at the level of ideas but exclusion at that of citation is a form of epistemic sexism.

Epistemic sexism!

After reading Lewis Gordon’s text above, it took everything in me to not reread Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex a book of 762 pages with a 4.5 cm wide spine, that I had found in the same Yeoville bookstore. Instead, I returned to two books; the first by Judith Okely titled Simone de Beauvoir: A Re-Reading; and the second by Lisa Appignanesi titled Simone de Beauvoir. Okely does something curious in this book, one I had not read about before, she rereads The Second Sex many years after her first reading of it in the early 1960s and reflects (Okely 1986: p. viii)

In order to recall something of de Beauvoir’s impact, and to show how the reading has changed, I have introduced evidence from my past reading. There are extracts from my youthful diary and letters. I have added recollections which came through free association during this recent writing. My 1961 volumes of The Second Sex have ink underlinings which are a record of my response. More than twenty years later, some of the ideas marked in this way seem banal or simply mistaken, but they speak of the naivety or conditions of a white middleclass woman of that epoch. I have referred to these traces.    

From Lisa Appignanesi’s book what has stayed memorable is what I read as an echo of sorts of the Gordon quotation on epistemic violence. Commenting on de Beauvoir’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre (Appigannesi 2005: p. 32)  

The twosome read each other’s work and that process of frank criticism, that dialogue about each other’s literary production which was to last throughout their life was set in motion. In the examination for the agrégation Sartre came first, Simone second, though the examiners, recognising that Sartre had already sat and failed the exam once before, hesitated a long time over the final outcome of the ranking. They agreed that despite Sartre’s evident qualities, intelligence and culture, the real philosopher was Simone de Beauvoir.  

From Simone’s point of view there was never any doubt. Despite the fact that at 21 she was the youngest person ever in France to pass this highly competitive examination, Sartre was distinctly her superior.  

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote the 19-page Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.^{[5] Here, I counted pages of the Penguin Classic edition of The Wretched of the Earth.} I am moved to ask a rhetorical question; did it ever occur to Fanon to ask Simone de Beauvoir to write this Preface?

Beata Stawarska contributes a chapter, “Struggle and Violence: Entering a Dialectic with Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir” that looks at the philosophical ideas presented by the two in the book Violence, Slavery and Freedom: Between Hegel and Fanon (Ulrike Kistner and Philipe Van Haute 2020: p. 93 – 115). I read this book on days when my brain was super alert so I could connect to these demanding philosophical writings. Stawarska asserts

I want to expand this intertextual reflection in the light of works that have received less, if any, attention amid the burgeoning Beauvoir-Fanon scholarship, namely Beauvoir’s 1940 Philosophical Writings (Beauvoir 2012a) and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon [1961] 2004).       

On mornings when my brain was sleepy and my body was unwilling to sit upright at a desk, I began the day by reading Lee’s pocketbook. On days when starting the translation was super challenging, I read all six chapters – Martinique, France, Black Skin, White Masks, Algeria, Tunisia and The Wretched of the Earth – at one go, until I felt ready to start translating. There is a succinctness in this pocketbook that turned my reading into a motivation. The word “humanism” in the title nods to the conclusion chapter of The Wretched of the Earth. 

Professional translators have well established methods for translating, this, was my initiation. Translation specific books, one by Phindile Dlamini, titled Avoiding Potholes in Translation: A Practical Perspective on Translation between English and isiZulu and the second by A. M. Maphumulo called Ukuvamisa Imithetho Yokubhala Nobhalomagama LwesiZulu Lonyaka Wezi-2021 were extremely useful. I found both at the Hyde Park branch of Exclusive Books. I returned to Dlamini’s book many times and more so when I developed the style guide. Dlamini invited me to be part of a panel on “Ukuhumushela esiZulwini” during the 25^th Time of the Writer Festival in 2022. 

Reading all these books, made me curious about when and how The Wretched of the Earth had been translated and so I searched for the world’s translations of The Wretched of the Earth and I was excited to learn there is a book titled Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages, there is more on this below. The two books I still haven’t laid my hands on are titled Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (1998) and Frantz Fanon: Voice of Liberation (2017). I made up for the absence of the former by reading numerous feminist articles and for the latter I convinced myself it would have been a bonus rather than a necessity because I am familiar with the template used in this commendable Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) book series.

Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages: a biography of a book in eight chapters 

When I found out online about the book edited by Kathryn Batchelor and Sue Ann Harding titled Translating Frantz Across Continents and Languages, I contacted the scholar Stéphane Robolin, asked him to buy a copy in the USA as the cost of the online copy was just over R3 000. Stéphane came to South Africa, with the book, in 2023 while I was waiting to hear back from the copy editor. I read the book at leisure, from cover to cover as I was pleasantly surprised by its length and breadth.

Published in 2017 the book blurb lists twelve languages into which The Wretched of the Earth has been translated: Arabic, Danish, English, German, Italian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Swahili and Swedish. In the final section called “Gaps and silence” the editors list five additional languages: Japanese, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish and Tamil. It has been seven years since this book was published. How many other languages have joined this list of seventeen?

This book delivers an intriguing biography of The Wretched of the Earth told in eight chapters by scholars specialising in cultural studies, literature, modern languages, postcolonial literature, sociolinguistics, translation and interpretation studies, to name a few. Interestingly the editors write, “Attempting to categorise what our book is, in the sense of trying to fit it within existing parameters for classifying types of academic study, is difficult. This difficulty lies partly in the fact that there are very few precedents for our book.” (p. 3) The editors then discuss books that share some focus with theirs and end with an assertion:

… our study of how Fanon’s ideas spread around the world could position itself either as an effort to contribute to a broader understanding of patterns of translation behaviour, or as an effort to contribute to understanding of relevant political, social and cultural histories. While we do not view these goals as mutually exclusive, our study aligns itself primarily with the second one: rather than accumulating historical data in search of translating patterns, in the manner of the large translation history projects critiqued by Pym (2009, 27 – 30), our project looks to consciously construct a series of historical narratives that offer insight into the political, the social and cultural contexts in which Fanon’s ideas circulated. A key aspect to the construction of these narratives – once again in line with both microhistory and histoire croisée – is a focus on human historical subjects: the translators, the publishers, those who brought translator and publisher together, the preface writers, reviewers, writers, readers and others.       

I found this book enlightening in ways I had not expected. Reading about government involvement in the translation stories of some of the countries was intriguing. One of my take-aways from this book was what the editors claim is the “humanising approach to translation history.” I think there is a lot that is humanising about the very work of translation, long before its historicization.

A brief look at The Wretched of the Earth through its front covers

It is said we should never judge a book by its cover. The chapters in the book on translation histories, share images of front covers of these translated books. The discussions on these covers are fascinating and illuminating. Most noticeable though is how most of the images of these front covers project violence and pain. This then is my discomfort: the over-emphasis on violence and pain. I think this is counterproductive. The first chapter “On Violence” sets the scene for the revolution. What of the positivity and self-affirmation that comes with being involved in the revolution, this multifaceted and ever evolving revolution that the rest of the book is about?

How do most publishers engage with authors, editors and translators on book covers? Of the twelve books to date that have my name on the front cover I have memorable productive conversations with publishers on all these covers. I had long, very long conversations on only two covers because I was not happy with what the designers had come up with in response to my brief. In one of these two instances the publisher changed the designer and after further conversations we arrived at a cover I was comfortable with.

Izimpabanga Zomhlaba does not have my name on the front cover. I have seen translated books that do not place the names of their translators on the front covers. But other books do. I first saw the cover of Izimpabanga Zomhlaba on 2^nd April 2024 when Noloyiso Mthembu the Coordinator of Communications at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies (STIAS) where I was then showed it to me with excitement. The publisher had neither discussed nor shared it with me (we had only discussed the content on the back cover of the book). And, as I do not spend much time online, I had not known that the cover was already circulating until this Noloyiso moment.

How do publishers engage with authors, editors and translators on the ideas of designs of book covers? I want to believe that in-depth studies on this topic have been conducted in publishing and book history studies. This discussion on book covers is closely related to the discussion on the titles.   

The most enduring perturbation

From the very first time when I read the book I wondered about the choice of the title: The Wretched of the Earth. Why would an author choose a title that is the opposite of what the book is about? Why choose a title that centres the gaze of oppressing perpetrator? The Wretched of the Earth is about how people oppressed by colonisers rise against the violence of oppressing colonisers, how they respond to and handle the challenges they face during and at the end of the revolution, how culture plays a major role during all the phases and how mental health conditions do arise from these struggles. Why then the use of the words “the damned/wretched, in a book like this?  

This question continued to disturb me right through the period of doing this work. I used the working title Abanhlwempu Bomhlaba after a long discussion with our sister Nomvula Radebe who is our family’s trusted go-to person on language and memory. She convinced me on this working title.

While I waited to hear back from the copy editor I contemplated another working title, Abalomhlaba abahlezi phezu kwekeja lishisa/Abahlezi phezu kwegeja lishisa kulomhlaba. This common poetic expression “ukuhlala phezu kwegeja lishisa” translates directly as “to sit on a hot hoe” meaning, to live in a state of precarity. Implied in this expression is the understanding that this state of precarity is temporary because, it is impossible to endure the heat, in this position, and therefore something needs to be done to change the situation. That, for me felt like a more appropriate title for a book like this. The wholesome-all-embracing meaning of ukuhlala phezu kwegeja lishisa does not require any stretching to incorporate even the very essence of the five chapters of the book.

As I waited to hear back from the editor, I returned to Gordon’s What Fanon Said, where he discusses the title (2015: p. 112-113)

Above are Gordon’s references on Fanon’s “sources” for “the damned”, Christopher Lee also references “The Internationale” (Arise ye prisoners of starvation/Arise ye wretched of the earth”) p.148 and Adam Shatz references a source for “the wretched” in his book titled The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (2023). In this book, in the chapter titled “Voice of the damned” Shatz quotes the poem by a Haitian writer, poet and politician, Jacques Roumain titled “Sales Nègres” (Dirty Negroes) and notes that the title “…was lifted from a poem by Jaques Roumain Haitian Marxist who had died of an illness in 1944, at age thirty-seven – a year older than Fanon was at the time.“ in the following way (p. 314)

Finally, I thought this is the context I needed! In my opinion, irony works best in context, that’s when it is most effective. Now why hasn’t anyone, in any of the books I read contextualised this title? If anyone did, I missed it as I could not read every single one of these books page to page. When I heard back from the copy editor, I embraced the suggestion of Izimpabanga Zomhlaba because it seemed to me capture the “wretchedness” message better than ukubanhlwempu.

Interestingly, the chapter on “Fanon in the East African Experience: Between English and Swahili Translations” informs us that the first Swahili translation, is called Mafukara wa Ulimwengu/ The Wretched of the Earth, and the second in 1978, which was supposedly a better one, is called Viumbe Waliolaaniwa/The Damned. (2017: p. 95)  

If there is a future in which I could write notes on translation, the key intervention will be to contextualise the title Izimpabanga Zomhlaba by first translating the quoted stanza from Jacques Roumain’s poem titled “Sales Nègres” (Dirty Negroes). The other choice might be to return to Abahlezi phezu kwegeja lishisa kulomhlaba. 

On racism today, here, there, and …

The conversation some of us often ignore, minimise, and, or conduct in whispers as South Africans today – understandably, because focussing on positivity is more productive – is in fact, just how successful apartheid’s strategy of entrenching racial segregation and the attendant hierarchy was. I do not believe in embracing victimhood, so I am deliberate about not giving racism far too much airtime. Racism lives today, among us, everywhere we are, the variations are in the intensities, geographies have their own textures and modes of presentation and the stories that make it to the news always seem to be the grossest versions.    

In an essay I called “Serene in my Skin” published in 2009 in an anthology of essays Load Shedding: Writing on and over the edge of South Africa I shared my experience of being a target of racism from Indians in Richmond, Natal in my early teenage years, long before I experienced it as an adult from white people. It wasn’t until 1996 when I lived in Cape Town for two and half months that I experienced racism from Coloured people almost everywhere I went. The day a homeless Coloured man sitting at a corner of a street in Rondebosch stood up and spit into my face while calling me a “kaffir” and telling me to go away, I was reminded of the first time I was spat at. A white man spat into my face, in 1984 in Pretoria on a street opposite the prison as we both waited for the traffic light to turn green. In 1996 I moved to Bellevue East, Johannesburg. Over the years watching the changes in the nearby Cyrildene and Bruma introduced me to another brand of racism, from Chinese people. As Chinatowns have been sprouting all over Johannesburg, so has racism.

In the year 2024 I continue to experience racism from whites, Coloureds, Indians and the Chinese. I spent the first half of 2024 in Stellenbosch. The “subtle racism” from Coloureds in Stellenbosch, is no different from what I experienced in Cape town in 1996. To the Coloured waitresses (they have all been women) I encountered at restaurants in Stellenbosch, I do not deserve the dignity they afford other customers. They do not even pretend. And I was often the only Black diner at these restaurants. It was only at Col’cacchio that I encountered isiXhosa speaking waiters who were Black-like-me. Below is Rachel Hurst’s reflection on an encounter at The Fat Butcher restaurant. When I asked Rachel to write this she agreed immediately as she told me that she had, in fact, written about this in her diary, soon after the event.

We are at an upscale restaurant in Stellenbosch, two and a half months after Khosi and I first tried to eat supper here. It is my last night in South Africa, and my Mom is with me now. I am thrilled to see Khosi after three weeks, which has felt much longer, but I’m also feeling sad because I don’t know when we will be together next. It is early in the evening, so my mood is vibrant and we are enjoying catching up and the skinner (a new word for me for an old favourite activity). Khosi is the only Black patron that in this restaurant, as far as I can see. It wasn’t the first time. The whiteness of Stellenbosch is stark, and startling to me as a first-time visitor to South Africa, even one who is white. The impossibility of eating at this restaurant without a three-week-old reservation is part of an elaborate performance of exclusivity and affluence that is unintentionally funny for our trio, and at times the waiter’s frequent and longwinded attention feels intrusive. The only drink preference not on the menu is Khosi’s: “It’s dry, but you can drink it.” Weeks ago, she told me this history of this choice. She did not drink prior to her MK training during apartheid, but as not drinking alcohol might make her stand out, she landed on Savannah Dry as her drink. The waiter does not joke easily about the cider’s absence from the menu, and I am sympathetic as I imagine the unreasonable complaints he’s likely used to. Again, we start to settle into the rhythms of our conversation. A white man approaches our table and says, “I’m sorry to interrupt…” (he isn’t). He directs his gaze at Khosi. “…but I saw you here and I just wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done with the ICC.” He makes some remarks about the world stage and making South Africa proud but does not wait for a response as he wishes us a good evening. Khosi’s brows are raised. Although I don’t know who this man thought she was at the time—Minister Naledi Pandor—I know that the only resemblance between the woman before him and the woman he thought he saw is their Blackness. In my short time as a visitor to South Africa, I have noticed disquieting conjunctions that remind me of home (Canada): sublime natural beauty and world-destroying colonial violence in the past and present. His misrecognition is not innocent. A crystallisation of the racial politics of Stellenbosch, he asserts his superiority as the one who gives thanks on behalf of South Africa while not seeing Khosi at all.

The Fat Butcher restaurant is under a five-minute walk from Nyasa Hof on number 13 Van Riebeeck Straat where I lived. To add to Rachel’s reflection, I remember this person saying “I was sitting with my friends and when we spotted you, we agreed I need to come and extend our gratitude. Thank you for making South Africa proud.” After what felt like the longest jaw-dropping-eyes popping-speechlessness, I said: “I am not Naledi Pandor.” And he responded: “Oh, but her spirit is all over you.” As he said this, he lifted his arms from the table and used his hands to frame my head and shoulders in the air as a way of demonstrating how Pandor’s spirit lives in me.  His three white male friends/acquaintances at the table that was at a thirty-degree angle to ours were watching us. Why did I need this encounter to remind me of what Fanon said about moments like this?

Ubuntu and the concluding chapter of The Wretched of the Earth

I interpreted the message from Gibson as he signed my book as a nod to Fanon’s conclusion chapter, one that calls upon all of us to think about a new humanism. By “new” Fanon was referring to a humanism that is first and foremost different from that of the European colonisers. The scholars I read reference and discuss Fanon’s idea of a new type of humanism. Ubuntu has been a topic of innumerable writings in South Africa.

Reading this chapter reminded me of what uMama uGlenrose Nomvula  always insisted on: Unembeza akanamanga, ubowulalela, meaning “the conscience doesn’t lie, always listen to your conscience”. Even in instances when I was most desperate for her advice she would ask: Uthini unembeza wakho?/What is your conscience telling you?  Her interpretation of ubuntu was that I should always treat others as I’d like to be treated. She would then offer the details that I should always remember that ukuhlonipha/respect, and ukuzithoba/being humble and isithunzi/dignity, are what ubuntu is about. Mama’s emphasis on “dignity” was that I need to live my life in a dignified manner. The question I never got round to asking her, is: So, what if I do all this and the others do not reciprocate?

Christopher Lee’s biography title embodies the word humanism, clearly nodding to the essence of this final chapter. In the conclusion chapter Fanon writes with palpable passion as he calls for a new humanism and this is why I have chosen the concluding chapter as an excerpt to accompany this essay to capture the emotion of the last writing by Fanon before his death on 6 December 1961.

Okungapheli kuyahlola

In this first reflective essay, I have offered what I think of as broad brushstrokes and top of mind reflections. I first shared my reflections on work-in-progress on 1^st September 2021 in conversation with Hlonipha Mokoena during the 8^th Session of the WiSER Public Positions Series titled “Fanon After Fanon”. I have avoided rehashing these in this essay.

Philcox wrote ten pages of reflections titled “On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice” (p. 301 – 311). I thought long and hard about writing notes on my translation and discussed this with Efemia Chela from Inkani Books. I decided not to, arguing that I needed to firstly, focus on finishing the manuscript and secondly, I needed to allow time to pass by before I could reflect and write. It was important for me to separate these two processes. Aryan Kaganof, curator and editor of herri, was the very first person to approach me about this reflection process, long before I finished the work.

I am writing this before the first launch Inkani Books has planned for 27^th July. It makes absolute sense to me that isiZulu became The Wretched of the Earth’s first language of translation in South Africa as it is the majority language spoken by 23% – that’s 2% less than a quarter – of the country’s population. The consistency of these statistics over three decades has been interesting to witness. English, however, lives larger than isiZulu in South Africa’s publishing industry. Efemia Chela informed me that 250 copies of Izimpabanga Zomhlaba were printed.^{[6]Email communication on 03 July 2024 with Efemia Chela.}

Without a Preface, a Foreword, an Introduction and Notes on Translation Izimpabanga Zomhlaba enters this Fanon-world as South Africa celebrates 30 years since the first democratic elections. Efemia and I discussed finding an introduction writer but the person I suggested and approached was not able to undertake this task.

I am curious about Izimpabanga Zomhlaba’s landing, reception, critiques, reviews and most importantly, its practical value within the grassroots world of activism and academia. Did I succeed in translating like Pithouse suggested, in a manner that is “as accessible as an article in Isolezwe”? I read a few Isolezwe articles when I started this work and I soon realised that trying to understand the uniqueness of Isolezwe’s accessibility criteria would take far too much time. How different is it, for instance, from the over 100 years old Ilanga lase Natal’s accessibility? My goal and commitment were to write in what I consider accessible language while capturing Fanon’s writing style and tone. Did this balancing act work? This then is part of the layered story of how I stepped through a minefield littered with debris of another time and another translation.