El Tuttle

He saw it coming. In 1961. And nobody listened. Frantz Fanon was dying of leukemia when he finished *The Wretched of the Earth*. He knew he would not live to see independence spread across Africa. But he warned — with surgical precision — what would happen after the flags went up. He said the national bourgeoisie, the African elite trained in colonial schools, would simply inherit the machinery of oppression. They would not dismantle the system. They would wear it. That is not a metaphor. That is the biography of dozens of African governments since 1960. Fanon understood that political independence without psychological and economic decolonization was theater. The colonial wound does not heal by changing the flag. It festers when the same structures remain — the same debt systems, the same land arrangements, the same educational frameworks designed to produce obedient workers, not sovereign thinkers. Sixty-five years later, the IMF still writes Africa's budget. Western capitals still decide who leads. And African children still learn history through the eyes of those who colonized them. Fanon did not predict failure. He predicted betrayal. Who exactly is doing the betraying — and are we willing to name them? References: Frantz Fanon, *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961, Grove Press); Achille Mbembe, *On the Postcolony* (2001, University of California Press)