by Richard Pithouse, South African Civil Society Information Service & CounterPunch
Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a
bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters.
- Frantz Fanon, Towards the African Revolution
Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean philosopher and revolutionary who joined
the Algerian Revolution, died of leukaemia at the age of 36 on the 6th
of December 1961. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, was
published soon after his death and so we are fifty years on from both
Fanon and the first major attempt to think through the limits of newly
independent Africa.
Fanon was committed to a radical humanism that insisted on the
recognition of “the open door of every consciousness”, on the same right
of every person to be a person amongst other people, to come into a
shared world and to “help to build it together”, and the need to always
question and to affirm a “refusal to accept the present as definitive”.
In 1952 Fanon, dictating his words to his lover and comrade Josie
Duble as he paced up and down their room in Lyon, concluded his first
book, Black Skin, White Masks, with, amongst other declarations, the
assertion that he was willing “to face the possibility of annihilation
in order that two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over
the world”. Almost sixty years on the truths that he wrought from a
militant engagement with his world do illuminate ours. But Fanon aspired
to be more than a haunting presence in a future still structured in
domination. In 1961 when, rushing against his coming death, he concluded
The Wretched of the Earth, dictating his final statement from a
mattress on the floor of a flat in Tunis, he asserted that:
What we want to do is to go forward all the time, night and
day, in the company of Man, in the company of all men. The caravan
should not be stretched out, for in that case each line will hardly see
those who precede it; and men who no longer recognize each other meet
less and less together, and talk to each other less and less.
The language is of its time. Fanon celebrated the public assumption
of political female agency in the Algerian Revolution and affirmed, in
the plainest language that, the danger “of perpetuating the feudal
tradition which holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element
over the feminine”.
In the logbook that he kept while doing reconnaissance work in Mali
in 1960 Fanon recounted his arrival at the airport in Accra without, as
expected, his comrade, the Cameroonian militant, Félix Moumié. Moumié
had failed to keep an appointment in Rome before travelling on to Accra.
“His father”, Fanon wrote, “standing at the arrival in Accra saw me
coming, alone, and a great sadness settled on his face”. Two days later
they discovered that Moumié had been murdered, poisoned, by the French
secret service in Geneva.
Fifty years after Fanon’s death in Bethesda, Maryland, he continues
to arrive in Accra and in Dakar, in Johannesburg and in Paris and Sao
Paulo. New generations of young people encounter his books with electric
excitement. But the intellectual who proposed and then achieved real
collective action, who became “an element of that popular energy”
calling forth the freedom and progress of Africa, continues to arrive
alone.
Fanon arrives alone because while revolutionary nationalism defeated
colonialism it has failed to create a human prospect. The caravan has
been so stretched out that those in the front hardly recognise the
humanity of those at the back. New lines of force, many policed with
violence, separate those who count from those who don’t and those who
are in from those who are out. For many people the Africa still to come
is as far away as it was fifty years ago.
Fifty years after Fanon's death there are all kinds of ways in which
his work speaks directly and with tremendous illuminating power to the
current situation in South Africa. One of the many aspects of our
situation to which we can summon Fanon’s illumination is the need for us
to affirm a politics of ordinary women and men, against Thermidor.
Revolutionary upheavals are usually followed by a period of reaction
once the new elite has consolidated its power. It is not just new forms
of popular innovation challenging the revolution from the left – the
Diggers on St George’s Hill, the sans-culottes in the sections of Paris
or the sailors in Kronstadt – that are attacked. Often the very forms of
popular mobilisation that enabled the revolution in the first place are
rendered unacceptable. The contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou calls
this the moment of Thermidor after the constitution in the third year of
the French Revolution “in which it becomes apparent that virtue has
been replaced by a statist mechanism upholding the authority of the
wealthy, which amounts to reinstalling corruption in the heart of the
state”. He stresses that “the maxims of repression . . . expressly
targeted every kind of popular declaration that situates itself at
distance from the state”.
Fanon witnessed the first years of the African Thermidor, the moment
when the “liberating lava” of the great anti-colonial struggles was
diverted as the people were expelled from history, “sent back to their
caves” by leaders who “instead of welcoming the expression of popular
discontentment“ and the “free flow of ideas” proclaim that “the vocation
of their people is to obey and to going on obeying”. He posed a return
to struggle against this injunction to obedience.
Fanon insisted that praxis must be rooted in the temporal, that each
generation must confront the reality of its own situation. Our
situation, speaking very broadly, is constituted by three primary forms
of organised political force – party politics, civil society and popular
politics. Although they often intersect they remain qualitatively
different from each other. In the elite public sphere opposition to the
increasing authoritarianism of the ruling party is generally presented
as an intra-elite battle between contesting political parties and
between the ruling party and civil society. The rebellion of the poor
often appears as part of the background to this engagement, a phenomenon
lending it urgency, in the manner that warming temperatures lend some
urgency to the negotiations in Durban around climate change. The
rebellion of the poor often appears as, to borrow a phrase from Jacques
Rancière, another contemporary philosopher, a space from which “only
groans or cries expressing suffering, hunger or anger could emerge, but
not actual speech”.
The hope that these scattered struggles tender is uneven, delicate
and altogether uncertain. But in a world in which, from Tunis, to Cairo
to Damascus and on to Athens, Madrid and New York, people, ordinary
people, are constituting themselves as a political force outside of the
contesting elites organised through the professionalised domains of
electoral politics and civil society what else is there to do, really,
other than to keep going, to keep the free flow of ideas circulating
amongst all of us, to keep on singing against the riot police, squinting
into the hard red?
