Decolonizing Football: Frantz Fanon

Just as soccer has multiple, contested meanings, so does the idea of the nation. Former footballer Frantz Fanon understood this well.

Fanon played football in school, and organized matches as part of his work at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, following his psychoanalytic approach that connected patients’ rehabilitation to the rhythms of everyday life. The importance, as well as the contradictions, of culture, politics, and the nation was of course a bedrock of his politics as well. The following quote is from his last, and one of his most powerful works, “The Wretched of the Earth.”