It would depend on one's view of the legitimacy of psychoanalysis and its patchwork utility in describing a mental complex.

Basil Davidson recognizes the alienated consciousness of Africans, albeit from a politico-historical rather than a psychological perspective. He phrases it in terms of forced African rejection of its own history under hopes of prospering in the new modernization the colonial system pushed for: "The future was not to grow out of the past, organically and developmentally, but from an entirely alien dispensation."

Like Fanon's, his book the Black Man's Burden is critical of any notion that liberation could only come from outside Africa through a denial of African roots and acceptance of European models.

His sketch of African history is poignant. Unlike Fanon's book, Davidson's aim is not to liberate the mentality of black men from a colonial alienation. However, he does ultimately suggest a possible way forward that has...
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