In profile: Lindsay Johns

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Lindsay Johns is an Oxford alumnus (Lincoln, 1994) and a successful writer and broadcaster.

In a recent interview with the Oxford University alumni magazine, Quad, he explains why he is endowing the Clément Olympe Lavanne Prize, which will be awarded for the first time in July 2023. This is a Francophone literature prize at Oxford in memory of Clément Lavanne, who visited Oxford with his wife Paulette in 1999 and met Lindsay’s former tutor at Lincoln, Dr Ted Nye.

Lindsay says that Clément was like a second father to him and one of the few people in his life to ever show him unconditional love. Clément was also a contemporary of the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), and Lindsay likes to draw parallels between the two men, so different yet in other ways so similar.

A decorated French army veteran like Fanon, ‘Clément Olympe Lavanne was also a proud Martinican, and his life was full of Fanonian paradoxes - a black man fighting for colonial France in an age of trenchantly anti-colonial thinking,' Lindsay says. He adds: ‘The psychological scars of racial oppression, exploitation and self-hate engendered by French colonialism - which Fanon magisterially articulated - were all known to Clément, since he had not only seen France’s pernicious 'mission civilisatrice' up close, but had lived it.’

As such, Lindsay explains, there is a particular purpose to the prize, beyond encouraging existing and future students at Oxford to not let their flourishing be stymied by their circumstances, since Clément rose from rural poverty in 1930s Martinique to have a distinguished military career which took him across the world. ‘The Clément Olympe Lavanne Prize is also intended to engender an awareness of - and a sensitivity to - the colonial and post-colonial plight of the inhabitants of the French Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe’, he says.

In the article, Lindsay also discusses his life and career and gives advice to the next generation of students: 'My advice for students considering an application to Oxford is to study the subject that you are genuinely passionate about and which intellectually excites you ... Irrespective of your racial or social background, dare to dream big, find out what you love doing and what you would willingly do for free, then just work out how to get paid for it. At Oxford, I learnt the value of knowing my own mind, how to be my own man and that it’s OK to be different.’

You can read the full interview here: https://www.alumni.ox.ac.uk/article/lindsay-johns