Continuer Fanon, or Sonko's Political Testament

The calendar's coincidence carries the weight of a symbol. On May 14, 2026, Ousmane Sonko published Continuer Fanon, a short book drawn from a speech delivered in 2025, released in a trilingual English-French-Wolof edition by Déberlinisation Lab. Eight days later, he was dismissed from the office of Prime Minister by President Bassirou Diomaye Faye. Then elected President of the National Assembly. Jules Crétois, writing in Le Monde, reads this political text as an ideological roadmap for what comes next.

The book opens on a central question: "How do we finish what Frantz Fanon began?" By claiming the legacy of the Martinican anticolonial thinker, Sonko intends to recall the radical core of his thought at a moment when his opposition to the president turned precisely on the scope of compromises acceptable in the exercise of power.

A Break with Liberalism

This text marks a shift in Sonko's intellectual trajectory. Where his 2018 bestseller Solutions. Pour un Sénégal nouveau adopted a technical approach and seemed open to economic liberalism, Continuer Fanon takes up a resolutely revolutionary language. He revisits Fanon's theses on the "parasitic" character of the bourgeoisies of decolonized nations and denounces the "colonial economic model" in which Senegal remains, he argues, trapped.

Without naming the IMF, he denounces the "external pressures, the injunctions," affirming that Senegal "will not be governed from the outside." The question of the CFA franc is also raised. "New men in old institutions: Fanon knew that this would never be enough," he writes.

Faced with the risk of inertia, Sonko addresses his militants with a cutting formula: "Excessive caution, wait-and-see, or fear of the markets' reprisals are other names for resignation."

"Sonkism," a Collective Work in Progress

For Félix Atchadé, who leads Pastef's training school, this text says the essential thing: "In claiming Frantz Fanon, Ousmane Sonko above all reminds us that his first battle is sovereigntism." A line that also encompasses his stance against homosexuality — the principal reform carried during his time in office — framed as an anticolonial struggle.

The "sonkism" that political commentators discuss owes more to evolving theory than to fixed dogma. It is built collectively around a heterogeneous entourage that mixes young technocrats with veteran Marxist and pan-African militants. His 2025 trip to China, according to those close to him, left a mark — the model of a planning state coexisting with a market economy.

It is above all to Pastef's youth that Continuer Fanon speaks. A member of the party's leadership tells Jules Crétois in Le Monde that "the ferment within Pastef is a way of keeping breath in our lungs, and it also lets the chief refine his method, find ideas." The declared candidate for the 2029 presidential election is charting his course.