Hamza Hamouchene, CounterPunch
Frantz Fanon died a few months before Algeria’s independence
in July 1962. He did not live to see his adoptive country becoming free from
French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. This
radical intellectual and revolutionary devoted himself, body and soul to the
Algerian National liberation and was a prism, through which many
revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and one of the reasons the country
became synonymous with Third World revolution.
With the weight of its recent past and in particular its long
struggle for independence that served as a model for several liberation fronts
across the globe and given its assertive diplomacy and audacious foreign policy
in the 60s and 70s, the Algerian capital was to become a Mecca for all
revolutionaries. As Amilcar Cabral announced at a press conference at the
margins of the first Pan-African Festival held in Algiers on 1969: “Pick a pen
and take note: the Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Christians to the
Vatican and the national liberation movements to Algiers!” Fanon would have
been surely proud of that moment of Algeria’s and Africa’s history. The
festival was impregnated with a revolutionary fervour and with his ideas around
a combative culture that is fuelled by people’s daily struggles. The radical
atmosphere of a few days in July was captured in an important and powerful film
by William Klein: The Pan-African Festival of Algiers, 1969, which attests that
this Pan-African gathering was not only a slogan or a generous utopia but also
a genuine meeting of African cultures in unison in their denunciations of
colonialism and fight for freedom.
Political leaders like António Agostinho Neto and Cabral saw
culture at the heart of their concerns because they associated it with
liberation which they theorised as a form of political action. They strongly
echo Fanon’s words in The Wretched of the Earth: “A national culture is not a
folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s
true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that
is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality
of the people….It is around the people’s struggles that African-Negro culture
takes on substance and not around songs, poems or folklore.” [i]
It is worth bearing this in mind when we think about the role
and the conception of culture today. Is it simply a culture that entertains
people and diverts them from the real issues? Or is it a culture that speaks to
the people and advances their resistance and struggles? Is it an independent and
free culture that fosters dissent and criticism or is it a folkloric one that
comes under the suffocating patronage of some authoritarian elites?
Fanon had high hopes and strongly believed in revolutionary
Algeria and his illuminating book “Studies in a Dying Colonialism” (or as it is
known in French L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne) attests to that and
shows how liberation does not come as a gift . It is seized by the masses with
their own hands and by seizing it they themselves are transformed. He strongly
argued that for the masses, the most elevated form of culture, that is to say,
of progress, is to resist imperialist domination and penetration. For Fanon,
revolution is a transformative process that will create ‘new souls’. [ii] For
this reason Fanon closes his 1959 book with the words: ‘The revolution in
depth, the true one, precisely because it changes man and renews society, has
reached an advanced stage. This oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity
– this, too, is the Algerian revolution.’ [iii]
Fanon’s concern with what the masses do and say and think and
his belief that it is the masses, and not leaders nor systems, who make and
determine history, is at the centre stage in his books. It is crucial to
analyse Fanon’s testimony because it illustrates how, in the midst of the worst
disasters, the masses find the means of reorganising themselves and continuing
their existence when they have a common objective. In that respect, Fanon’s
descriptions of the conduct of the masses is of great importance as they show
how the masses go on living and how they go forward. [iv]
This focus and vivid attachment to the wretched of the earth,
their lives and their struggle is put in opposition to an instinctive aversion
to a national bourgeoisie that will betray the masses, halt liberation and
set-up a national system of tyranny and exploitation, reminiscent of the
colonial counterpart. Fanon rightly observed how nationalist consciousness can
very easily lead to ‘frozen rigidity’, merely replacing the departed white
masters with coloured equivalents.
Understanding Africa: Fanon today
More than five decades after his death, the question seems to
be: why Fanon is relevant now? Rather than, is he relevant at all? It would be
instructive to explore how this revolutionary would think and act in the face
of contemporary issues in Africa and the world.
Fanon’s work, written five decades ago still bears a
prophetic power as an accurate description of what happened in Algeria and
beyond. Reading Fanon’s words and especially ‘The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness’ his famous chapter in The Wretched of the Earth (based on his
reflections on his West African experiences as well as his concerns about the
Algerian revolution),[v] one cannot help being absorbed and shaken by their
truth and foresight on the bankruptcy and sterility of national bourgeoisies in
Africa and the Middle East today; bourgeoisies that tended to replace the
colonial force with a new class-based system replicating the old colonial
structures of exploitation and oppression. Today we can see states across the
formerly colonised world that have ‘bred pathologies of power’ as Eqbal Ahmad
has called them, giving rise to national security states, to dictatorships,
oligarchies and one-party systems. [vi]
What has become of Algeria today with oil money playing an
enormously important role in pacifying the population and paying for a bloated
and ubiquitous security force corresponds to what Fanon feared. His vision and
politics were and are not to the taste of the ruling class and that’s why he is
marginalised today and reduced to just another anti-colonial figure, stripped
of his incandescent attack on the stupidity and on the intellectual and
spiritual poverty of the national bourgeoisies.
As Edward Said argued, the true prophetic genius of The
Wretched of the Earth is when Fanon senses the divide between the nationalist
bourgeoisie in Algeria and the FLN’s liberationist tendencies. He was the first
major theorist of anti-imperialism to realise that orthodox nationalism
followed the same track hewn out by imperialism, which while it appeared to concede
authority to the nationalist bourgeoisie was really extending its
hegemony.[vii] Fanon put it to us bluntly: ‘History teaches clearly that the
battle against colonialism does not run straight away along the lines of
nationalism.’[viii] He then warns us that we must take a rapid step from
national consciousness to political and social consciousness if we really wish
our countries to avoid regression and uncertainties.
In this state of affairs the national bourgeoisie dispense
with popular legitimacy and turns its back more and more on the interior and
the realities of uneven development and is only interested in exporting the
enormous profits it derives from the exploitation of people to foreign
countries. Today’s events confirm this assertion as we can see a scandalous and
endemic corruption and ‘legalised’ robbery in Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt, Ben
Ali’s Tunisia and South Africa, only to mention a few.
In Algeria for example, an anti-national, sterile and
unproductive bourgeoisie is getting the upper-hand in running state affairs and
in directing its economic choices. This comprador elite is the biggest threat
to the sovereignty of the nation as it is selling off the economy to foreign
capitals and multinationals and cooperating with imperialism in its ‘war on
terror’, another pretext for expanding the domination and scrambling for
resources.[ix] It is a bourgeoisie that renounced the autonomous development
project initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, and as Fanon eloquently put it is
‘incapable of great ideas and inventiveness and does not even succeed in
extracting spectacular concessions from the West, such as investments which
would be of value for the country’s economy.’[x] In the contrary, it now offers
one concession after another for blind privatisations and projects that will
undermine the country’s sovereignty and will endanger its population and
environment – the exploitation of shale gas for example.[xi] Today, Algeria –
but also Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Gabon, Angola and South Africa
among others – follows the dictates of the new instruments of imperialism such
as the IMF, the World Bank and negotiates entry into the World Trade
Organisation. Other African countries are still using the CFA franc, a currency
inherited from the times of colonialism and still under the control of the
French Treasury. Fanon would have been revolted at this bêtise and sheer
mindlessness. How can we go on being submissive to imperialism bowing to every
folly to satisfy foreign capital?
Fanon had predicted this ominous situation and the shocking
behaviour of the national bourgeoisie when he noted that its mission has
nothing to do with transforming the nation but rather consists of ‘being the
transmission line between the nation and capitalism, rampant though
camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism.’[xii] This is
where we can appreciate the lasting value of employing Fanon’s critical
insights when he describes for us the contemporary postcolonial reality, a
reality shaped by a national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly…anti-national,’ opting he
adds, for an abhorrent path of a conventional bourgeoisie, ‘a bourgeoisie which
is stupidly, contemptibly and cynically bourgeois.’[xiii]
That is exactly what happened in Algeria and other countries
in Africa. These regimes are content with the role as the Western capitals’
business agent and are only preoccupied with filling their pockets as rapidly
as possible, ignoring the deplorable stagnation into which their countries sink
further and deeper. Fanon would have been shocked by the ongoing international
division of labour where we Africans ‘still export raw materials and continue
‘being Europe’s small farmers who specialise in unfinished products.’ [xiv]
Fanon’s critique of tourism, which he regarded as a
quintessential post-colonial industry, must be revisited and pondered over. He
condemns the fact that nationalist elites have become ‘the organisers of
parties’ for their Western counterparts in the midst of overwhelming poverty
for their populations. Bereft of ideas and cut off the people, these elites he
argues, will in practice set up their countries as ‘the brothel of Europe.’[xv]
This is not just a Caribbean experience; it has become the experience of many
countries in Africa such as post-apartheid South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt and
Morocco.
In these poor, under-developed countries, where the rule is
that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and
the police constitute the pillars of the regime; an army and a police force (another
rule which must not be forgotten) which are advised by foreign experts. The
strength of the police and the power of the army are proportionate to the
stagnation in which the rest of the nation is sunk. By dint of yearly loans,
concessions are snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers
grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather
their nests and there is not a soul down to the simple policeman or the customs
officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption.[xvi]
This raging passage from The Wretched is a fairly accurate
portrayal of the situation in many African countries where repression and
suppression of freedoms are the rule – helped of course by foreign expertise –
and where greedy elites institutionalise corruption and serve foreign
interests.
Fanon was one of only a few radical intellectuals to point
out the dangers of a ‘carefully nurtured’ nativism, to borrow Edward Said’s
words, on a socio-political movement like decolonisation.[xvii] From
nationalism, we pass to ultra-nationalism, then to chauvinism and finally to
racism and tribalism. This is seen in several exclusionary and dogmatic
ideologies like Arabism, Senghor’s Négritude, and the appeals to pure or
authentic Islam, which had disastrous consequences on the populations. Again
take the example of Algeria, where cultural diversity was ignored for a
narrower culturalist conception of Algerian identity, when the Berber dimension
of the Algerian cultural heritage was marginalised and reduced to folkloric
manifestations, when the elite engaged in a sclerotic arabisation policy, when
it developed a conservative interpretation of religion and a reactionary vision
of the role of women in society by adopting Islamist-appeasing social measures
such as the notorious and retrograde Family Code of 1984.
Edward Said noted that more effort seemed to be spent in
bolstering the idea that to be Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, or Saudi is a
sufficient end, rather than in thinking critically, even audaciously about the
national program itself.[xviii] Identity politics assumes the primary place,
and ‘African unity takes off the mask and crumbles into regionalism inside the
hollow shell of nationalism itself.’[xix] Fanon argued for going beyond the first
steps of nativist assertive identity towards true liberation that involves a
transformation of social consciousness beyond national consciousness.[xx]
Fanon’s vision of the future Algeria, which he shared with
his mentor Abane Ramdane, the architect of the revolution, was a secular
democratic society with the primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab,
Amazigh, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, European, White, Black, etc): ‘in the new
society that is being built,’ Fanon wrote in Studies in a Dying Colonialism,
‘there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living
in Algeria is an Algerian…We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind
of genius can grow.’[xxi] He did not forget the role of women in the new
society when he said that every effort has to be made to mobilise men and women
as quickly as possible and admonished against ‘the danger of perpetuating the
feudal tradition which holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element
over the feminine.’ [xxii] Fanon demonstrated in an essay he wrote in his 1959
book entitled ‘Algeria Unveiled’ how women were essential elements in the
Algerian revolution and how the necessities of combat gave rise to new
attitudes and new modes; ‘the virtually taboo character assumed by the veil in
the colonial situation disappeared almost entirely in the course of the
liberating struggle.’ [xxiii]
Alternatives: A second Fanonian moment?
Alas, such a generous vision of a pluralist society is yet to
be achieved and this is the second Fanonian moment of decolonisation, a moment
that breaks away with the hierarchies, divisions and regionalisms constituted
by imperialism by embracing a universal humanism (that will include men and
women), and by building regional and international solidarities.
The sad contemporary reality that Fanon described and warned
against five decades ago gives little doubt that were he alive today, Fanon
would be hugely disappointed at the result of his efforts and those of other
revolutionaries. He turned out to be right about the rapacity and divisiveness
of national bourgeoisies and the limits of conventional nationalism but he did
not offer us a prescription for making the transition after decolonisation to a
new liberating political order. Perhaps, there is no such thing as a detailed
plan or solution. Perhaps he viewed it as a protracted process that will be
informed by praxis and above all by confidence in the masses and their
revolutionary potential in figuring out the liberating alternative.
However, Fanon alerts us that the scandalous enrichment of
this profiteering caste will be accompanied by ‘a decisive awakening on the
part of the people and a growing awareness that promised stormy days to
come.’[xxiv] So we can see Fanon’s rationality of revolt and rebellion,
suddenly made absolutely clear by the Arab uprisings in 2011. What has started
in Tunisia and then Egypt’s Tahrir Square has become a new global revolt,
spreading to Spain and the Indignados movement, to Athens against the vicious
austerity measures, to the urban revolt in the UK, to the massive student
mobilisation to end education for profit in Chile, to the Occupy movement
against the 1%, to the revolt in Turkey, Brazil and so on. The popular masses
in all these countries rebelled against the violence of the contemporary world
offering them only growing pauperisation, marginalisation and the enrichment of
the few at the expense and damnation of the majority.
Countries like Egypt and Tunisia were long praised for the
‘wonderful’ achievements of their economies with high economic growths that do
not reflect at all the abject poverty and the deep inequalities entrenched in
those countries. The masses erupted into the political scene, discovered their
political will and power and beginning again to make history. As the Egyptians
said of January 25th, the start of their revolution, ‘When we stopped being
afraid, we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of
a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’[xxv]
Egyptians and Tunisians did not only revolt to demand democracy and freedom but
they rebelled for bread and dignity, against the oppressive socio-economic
conditions under which they lived for decades. They rose up to challenge the
Manichean geographies of oppressor and oppressed (so well described by Fanon in
The Wretched), geographies imposed on them by the globalised
capitalist-imperialist system.
What can Fanon tells us about what happened in Egypt since
2011 with the military coup and the undergoing counter-revolution? Fanon would
probably say: ‘The bourgeoisie should not be allowed to find the conditions
necessary for its existence and its growth. In other words, the combined effort
of the masses led by a party and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and
armed with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this useless and
harmful middle class.’[xxvi] Liberals, Islamists or military Generals, what’s
the difference? All of them belong to a sterile bourgeoisie aligned with the demand
of global neoliberal capitalism.
Fanon would also repeat to us an important observation he
made on some African revolutions (including the Algerian one), which is their
unifying character sidelining any thinking of a socio-political ideology on how
to radically transform society. This is a great weakness that we witnessed yet
again with the Egyptian revolution. ‘Nationalism is not a political doctrine,
nor a programme’, says Fanon.[xxvii] He insists on the necessity of a
revolutionary political party that can take the demands of the masses forward,
a political party that will educate the people politically, that will be ‘a
tool in the hands of the people’ and that will be the energetic spokesman and
the ‘incorruptible defender of the masses.’ For Fanon, reaching such a
conception of a party necessitates first of all ridding ourselves of the
bourgeois notion of elitism and ‘the contemptuous attitude that the masses are
incapable of governing themselves.’[xxviii]
For Fanon, the “we” was always a creative “we”, a “we” of
political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning. [xxix] For him, the nation
does not exist except in a socio-political and economic program ‘worked out by
revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and enthusiasm by
the masses.’[xxx] Unfortunately, what we see today is the antithesis of what
Fanon strongly argued for. We see the stupidity of the anti-democratic
bourgeoisies embodied in their tribal and family dictatorships, banning the
people, often with crude force from participating in their country’s
development and fostering a climate of immense hostility between rulers and
ruled. Fanon, in his conclusion of The Wretched, argues that we have to work
out new concepts through an ongoing political education that gets enriched
through mass struggle. Political education for him is not merely about
political speeches but rather about ‘opening the minds’ of the people,
‘awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence.’[xxxi]
This is perhaps one of the greatest legacies of Fanon. His
radical and generous vision is so refreshing and rooted in the people’s daily
struggles that open up spaces for new ideas and imaginings. For him, everything
depends on the masses, hence his idea of radical intellectuals engaged in and with
people’s movements and capable of coming up with new concepts in a
non-technical and non-professional language. Just as for Fanon, culture has to
become a fighting culture, education has to become about total liberation too.
He says, ‘If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and
deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and
political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a blind alley.’
[xxxii] And that’s what we need to bear in mind when we talk about education in
schools and universities. Decolonial education in the Fanonian sense is an
education that helps create a social consciousness and a social individual.
For Fanon, the militant or the intellectual must not take
shortcuts in the name of getting things done as this is inhuman and sterile. It
is all about coming and thinking together, which is the foundation of the
liberated society. And this is not only abstraction as he gives us concrete
examples from the Algerian revolution, writing of how the creation of
production/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN gave rise to
theoretical questions about the accumulation of capital: ‘In those regions
where we have been able to carry out successfully these interesting
experiments, where we have watched man being created by revolutionary
beginnings’, because people began to realise that one works more with one’s
brain and one’s heart than with one’s muscles and sweat. [xxxiii] He also tells
us about another experience in Studies in a Dying Colonialism in an essay on
the radio, ‘the voice of Algeria.’[xxxiv] He describes a meeting in a room
where people are listening to the radio with the militant (teacher) in their
midst. This form of the classroom he wrote about is a democratic space where the
teacher is an informed discussant, not a director and where the purpose of
political education is self-empowerment.
An intellectual or a militant cannot be truly productive in
their mission of serving the people without being committed to radical change,
without giving up the position of privilege (careerism) and without challenging
the divisions that prevail under capitalism: leader vs. the masses, mental vs.
manual labour, urban vs. rural, centre vs. periphery and so on. For Fanon, the
centre (capital city, official culture, appointed leader) must be deconsecrated
and demystified. He argues for a new system of mobile relationships that must
replace the hierarchies inherited from imperialism.[xxxv] In order to achieve
liberation, the consciousness of self, a never-ending process of discovery,
empathy, encouragement and communication with the other must be unleashed. That
is one of the fundamental lessons that we must heed when we build grass root
social movements that are diverse, non-hierarchical and intersectional.
Fanon was not a Marxist but he strongly believed that
capitalism with imperialism and its divisions enslave people. Moreover, his
precocious diagnosis of the incapability of the nationalist elites in
fulfilling their historical mission demonstrates the continuing relevance of
Fanon’s thought today. In spite of his own failure -his early death at the age
of 36 might be to blame here- to put forward a detailed ideology of how to go
beyond imperialism and orthodox nationalism and achieve liberation and
universalism, he surely managed to provide us with crucial tools to work it out
for ourselves: his illuminating conception of education always influenced by
practice and also transformative, striving to liberate all mankind from
imperialism. This is the living legacy of a revolutionary and a great thinker.
Hamza Hamouchene is an activist and President of the Algerian
Solidarity Campaign based in London.
Notes.
[i] The Wretched of The Earth, Frantz Fanon, Penguin, 1967,
p188-189.
[ii] The phrase ‘new souls’ was borrowed from Aimé Césaire.
[iii] A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 1967,
p181.
[iv] A deeper analysis is provided in “A Dying Colonialism”.
[v] The Pitfalls of National Consciousness, Chapter in The
Wretched of the Earth, p119-165
[vi] The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power
in the Third World, Eqbal Ahmad, Arab Studies Quarterly 3, No.2 (Spring 1981),
p170-180.
[vii] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage, 1994,
p328.
[viii] The Wreteched of The Earth, Fanon, p119.
[ix] Is Algeria an Anti-Imperialist State, Hamza Hamouchene,
Jadaliyya, October 2013.
[x] The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p141.
[xi] Algeria, an Immense Bazaar: The Politics and Economic
Consequences of Infitah, Hamza Hamouchene, Jadaliyya, January 2013.
[xii] The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p122.
[xiii] Ibid, p121.
[xiv] Ibid, p122.
[xv] Ibid, p123.
[xvi] Ibid, p138.
[xvii] Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, p371.
[xviii] Ibid, p361-362.
[xix] The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p128.
[xx] Ibid, p165.
[xxi] A Dying Colonialism, p32 and p152.
[xxii] The Wretched of The Earth, p163.
[xxiii] A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon, 1967, p61.
[xxiv] The Wretched of The Earth, p134.
[xxv] A quote by Ahmad Mahmoud in an article by the Guardian,
“Mubarak is still here, but there’s been a revolution in our minds, say
protesters”, Chris McGreal, 5th Feb 2011.
[xxvi] The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p140.
[xxvii] Ibid, p163.
[xxviii] Ibid, p151.
[xxix] 50 Years Later: Fanon’s Legacy, Nigel C Gibson,
Keynote address at the Caribbean Symposium Series “50 Years Later: Frantz
Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, December 2011.
[xxx] The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p164.
[xxxi] Ibid, p159.
[xxxii] Ibid, p165.
[xxxiii] The Wretched Of The Earth, Fanon, p154.
[xxxiv] A Dying Colonialism, Fanon, p69-97
[xxxv] Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, p330.
