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Abstract

This article examines two milestones separated by eight months: the fifty-year anniversaries of Frantz Fanon’s passing and the independence of Jamaica. Although Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago each achieved independence from the United Kingdom the same year, the latter became a republic whereas the former, similar to the Bahamas, has remained a British Commonwealth polity. The article contends that Fanon, in an appropriation of Aimé Césaire, develops an archetypal figure of the Rebel as central to his overall political thought and one that, when applied at the macro-level to contemporary Jamaica, presents a challenge applicable to the heated discourse on whether Jamaica should become a republic. It explores Fanon’s Rebel, the independence-freedom distinction, the Rebel’s role in achieving freedom, and what Fanon would say today about the political future of late modern Jamaica under incumbent Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller.