Frantz Fanon and the Psycholinguistics of French Language Learning in Nigeria: A Critical Reappraisal

Frantz Fanon's analysis in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs of the psycholinguistic dimensions of Black colonial subjects' engagement with French provides a foundational but underexplored theoretical resource for understanding the psychological dynamics of French language learning among Nigerian students in the postcolonial present. This study conducts a critical reappraisal of Fanon's psycholinguistic framework and applies a revised and extended version to the contemporary Nigerian French language learning context. A critical theoretical methodology integrates close reading of Fanon's primary texts, postcolonial psychological theory from Memmi, Bhabha, and Wynter, and empirical grounding from in-depth psycholinguistic interviews conducted with 50 Nigerian French learners at universities in Lagos, Ibadan, Zaria, and Enugu. Interviews explored learners' psychological experience of French language acquisition, identity negotiations, and self-perception in relation to French speaker communities. Discourse analysis was applied to interview transcripts within the theoretical framework of Fanon's concepts of epidermialisation and linguistic masking. Results reveal that contemporary Nigerian French learners navigate psycholinguistic tensions that retain structural homology with Fanon's original analysis while diverging in significant respects shaped by the pan-African decolonial intellectual climate, the regional rather than purely colonial framing of French, and the Nigerian multilingual identity matrix. A revised psycholinguistic framework for African French learning contexts, designated the Postcolonial African Language Self model, is developed and proposed for empirical testing. The study constitutes an original contribution to both Fanon scholarship and Nigerian applied linguistics. Keywords: Frantz Fanon, psycholinguistics, French language learning, postcolonial psychology, Nigeria