by Nigel Gibson, Pambazuka
What better way to celebrate, commemorate and critically reflect on the
fiftieth year of Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth’[1] than with a new
North African syndrome: revolution - or at least a series of revolts and
resistance across the region. Fanon begins The Wretched writing of
decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of
order - often against the odds - willed collectively from the bottom up.
Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute
replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968:35). In a period of
radical chance such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of
everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people
begin again ‘to make history (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of
the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its
reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of January
25th: ‘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.’[2]
And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new repression and
counter-revolution, elite compromises and imperial manoeuvrings,
Fanonian questions - echoed across the postcolonial world - become more
and more timely. How can the revolution hold onto its epistemological
moment, the rationality of revolt? And yet this is exactly what happened
on 20 November 2011 as thousands of Egyptians responded to the violent
eviction of demonstrators from Tahrir Square by taking it back, vowing
to stay until the military left politics and opening up a second act of
the Egyptian revolution: ‘We want freedom,’ they said. ‘We will not
allow the military to hijack the revolution.’
FANONIAN TIME AND DEEPENING CYCLES
What is Fanonian practice? In a word, revolvolution (using Aimé
Césaire’s neologism) or a cycle of cycles. On one hand, it is constant
return. ‘Black Skin White Masks’ (published in 1952) expresses this as a
frustration, a cry of weeping and petrification. The dialectic is
blocked and there seems to be no way out. But Fanon begins the
conclusion with a quote from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that the new
revolution - the decolonial revolution - will have to leave Europe to
let the dead bury the dead.
In ‘Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution’ published in 1959[3] the
anticolonial revolution, specifically the Algerian - to which Fanon had
committed - holds an answer. Fanon writes about a radical change in
consciousness that individuals undergo as they use all their collective
resources to transform society and themselves. Yet ‘The Wretched of the
Earth’ (published in 1961) tells another story. In contrast to the
opening up of space detailed in ‘Year 5’, the dialectic of ‘The
Wretched’ details the suffocation of politics. Reminding us of the
spatial experiences of oppression in ‘Black Skin’, now, after
independence, the spaces for politics are quickly closed down. The cycle
continues.
If the insurrectionary mobilisations of the rural and urban ‘damned of
the earth’ become the epistemological dividing line on which ‘The
Wretched’ is grounded, the second dividing line is described by Fanon as
a time lag between the leaders of the nationalist party and the mass of
the people (1968:107). This time lag is in effect an epistemological
division between what Fanon calls the ‘rationality of revolt’ (1968:146)
and the (lazy) instrumental or simply cunning rationalism of the
nationalist leaders and intellectuals.
It turns out that the maturity of the decolonising political struggle is
in stark contrast to the immaturity and premature senility of the
national bourgeoisie. The masses begin to ask ‘was independence worth
fighting for’ (1968:75) and the leaders, who simply appear at election
times to wave struggle flags, are truly surprised that the people are so
discontented. Fanon argues that the lack of practical links (1968:46),
the distance - temporal and especially spatial (and also in mindsets) -
between them and the mass of people means that they have no idea of what
the people think or feel. But the nationalist leaders and national
bourgeoisie who are often seduced by a ‘cosmopolitan’ mentality
(1968:149) do not adjust their thinking. Substituting themselves for the
nation, nationalism becomes defined by exclusion, often taking a
xenophobic, religious, or ethnic form, and by socially conservative
notions of culture - often heralding patriarchies and women’s submission
-as political means to control dissent. While the cynics and
opportunists see the neo-colonial state as a personal money bag, even
the honest politician still believes what the colonial system has
ingrained into their heads, that the mass of poor people are backward
and need ‘enlightened’ dictatorship. The party simply creates a screen
reinforcing its centralised hierarchical and authoritarian form and
practices, which Fanon argues creates a type of dictatorship, often in
military fatigues. It is the perfect form for an arrogant and
unscrupulous bourgeoisie (1968:165), Fanon says, which sees the state as
simply the prize to be taken and its oppressive apparatus to be wielded
against anyone who challenges it. The party aided by the police becomes
the means to hem in and immobilise the people. This is the story of
Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’, repeated across the African continent.
And yet the struggle continues. The masses implicitly understand what has happened because it is their daily reality.
At a seminar that I attended on Fanon with members of the shack dwellers
organisation Abahlali baseMjondolo and the rural network in
Pietmaritzburg, South Africa in May 2011, Ntombifuthi Shandu from the
latter organisation wondered whether ‘we are led by people who were
damaged by the struggle during apartheid’; that is by brutalised people
who act brutally against the people. I found this comment particularly
insightful. Concerned about brutality and the building up of another
system of exploitation at the very moment when we destroy the old one,
Fanon’s case notes in ‘The Wretched’ focussed on the traumas and
stresses on the psyche that the struggle for liberation creates. Indeed,
at one level the corruption and crude materialism can be understood as a
reaction formation to the internalisation of this brutality often
reduced to the standpoint of the gun. Shandu’s point was also concrete
and specific, perhaps referring to the violence in the rural areas of
Natal in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and was reminiscent of Fanon’s
thesis that hatred, resentment and revenge, feelings often encouraged
during the struggle to create action, cannot sustain liberation. In
contrast, he insists that the work of the rebellion is to uncover its
own thinking and reason in defiance of the brutality that is manifested
by those ‘who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute danger’.
Indeed he suggests that the logic of the militant’s voluntarism to get
thing done, to take short cuts and to force action, is shockingly
‘inhuman and in the long run sterile’ (199). In contrast, Fanon argues
that the search for truth in the locale is the responsibility of the
conscious and coordinated praxis of the local community.
Fanon warns in ‘The Wretched’ that all progressive organisations,
parties and social movements can degenerate. Just as organisations of
national liberation can become chauvinistic, democratic movements can
become professionalised and authoritarian. The transformation into its
opposite is, however, neither an iron law nor simply the result of
external pressure. In fact, inasmuch as Fanon believes that it is the
subjective powers - namely, the hands and brains - of Africans that will
create new beginnings on the continent, Fanon’s politics insists on
absolute vigilance and checking practice by principle. The achievements
of liberation movements become part of the struggle’s history; they are
never lost, even if the movements later degenerate.
Vigilance is made more difficult, Fanon argues, because there is no
independently truthful behaviour. Instead there is a veracity produced
by the situation: the poor, the unemployed, the excluded, in short the
damned of the earth, are ‘the truth’ (1968: 49-50) because they express
the truth of the ‘national cause’, namely promised land, promised bread
and promised freedom. This claim has been a cause of some concern among
some critics, dismissed as essentialist. Yet the problem is that moving
from substantive truth is never guaranteed and requires human action.
When Fanon adds, ‘we have every right to ask ourselves whether this
truth is reality’ (1968: 225), he demands political commitment.
Rather than as a directive, truth is a collective and open political
endeavour and like Fanon’s concept of political education, it emerges
with political subjectivity through careful relationships, trials, and
mishaps, aware as Marx put it in the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ of the
‘inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts’.
Fanon, the revolutionary, looks to continuing the work, the deepening
cycle - wary of the blind alleys, the intellectual laziness and
arrogance, and ideological failings of the first iterations; regional
and local threats, not only that politics and political organisation be
decentralised, but that radically different notions of time be
developed; time to deepen, democratise and make clear the relationships
between militants and the mass movements; time to discuss with the
people, who have long been told to be silent, as they become the
decision makers. Without that fundamental temporal change,
‘development’, whether called capitalist or socialist, is just technical
and hierarchical. The necessity to decentralise politics, to encourage
grassroots democracy and to make discussion and decision making
absolutely open is the task of being a protagonist and the intellectual
can only do so through a fundamental shift in hearing inside the ‘school
of the people’.
Thus when Fanon calls on those ‘comrades’ who have embraced
decolonisation to ‘work out new concepts’ (1968: 316) and take the
‘rationality of revolt’ (1968: 146) as the point of departure, a wholly
different attitude to praxis is required, one that begins from a new
conception of time: time is the yardstick, the space of human
development. Time must be found to explain and struggle against the
spirit of discouragement and against an uncritical developmentalism; he
insists that the time supposedly lost treating a worker like a human
being will be gained by rethinking everything from the ground up.
UNFREEDOM IN THE FACE OF FREEDOM
My focus on ‘Fanonian Practices’ in South Africa begins with Biko’s
engagement with Fanon. It is an engagement made possible by the two-way
road of revolutionary ideas between Black USA and the imminent Black
Consciousness movement in South Africa at a moment (1968) when ‘The
Wretched of the Earth’ had become the ‘bible of the Black revolution’
(and gestures to the importance of American Black struggle to Fanon’s
afterlife since it was through the Black Freedom movements in the United
States, not through France or Algeria, that Fanon’s stature as a
revolutionary thinker became internationally recognised[4]). James
Cone’s Black theology provided the first point of contact around the
same time that George Jackson was shot and killed in the hellhole of San
Quentin maximum security prison in California. In George Jackson, Fanon
found a militant intellectual. In Fanon, Jackson found a source of
revolutionary hope for ‘a new form of political activity which in no way
resembles the old’.[5]
New forms of political activity are becoming more apparent and concrete
expressions of the idea of freedom (just as we witness, the
self-organisation of Tahrir Square). And so too with the struggles
against unfreedom in post-apartheid South Africa. Fanon argues in ‘The
Wretched’ that at a certain moment the people realise that the new
nation has not brought freedom at all. Their lives have not improved,
land has not been redistributed, work has not become humanised, cities
have not become open to all and the despotism in the rural areas has not
ended. And they begin to understand the social treason of the huckster
politicians. Fanon provides the method to subject post-apartheid South
Africa to a test. One Fanonian praxis is the thinking of the shack
dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, which puts South Africa’s
‘Freedom Day’ (April 27) on trial by organising ‘Unfreedom Day’, asking
the concrete and philosophical question, ‘Are we free?’ and adding, in
contrast to the flattening discourse of ‘service delivery’, that
‘delivering houses will do away with the lack of houses but it won't
make us free’.
‘Fanon believed that everyone could think,’ S’bu Zikode, the former
president of Abahlali, wrote in his foreword to ‘Fanonian Practices’.[6]
‘He believed that the role of the university-trained intellectual was
to be inside the struggles of the people and to be inside the
discussions inside the struggles of the people.’ Abahlali did not know
of Fanon when they first organised, and why should they? The question
was: how would Fanon speak to their struggle? In ‘Fanonian Practices’
Zikode replies, ‘There is no doubt that Fanon would have recognised the
shack intellectuals in our movement. He would have discussed and debated
with us as equals. Fanon believed that democracy was the rule of the
people and not the rule of experts. He did not think that democracy was
just about voting every five years. He saw it as a daily practice of the
people.’
What is interesting about Abahlali now, six years after its
self-organisation, is its thinking born of experience and discussion.
They call it living learning. Press statements are written collectively;
quite in contrast to technical education, learning is a collective and
living thing that always needs to be nurtured. Their idea of
‘citizenship’ (including all who live in the shacks in democratic
decision making regardless of ancestry, ethnicity, gender, age etc.)
connects with Fanon’s political notion of citizenship formed in the
social struggle (of everyone who wants to play a part in the creation of
the new nation, as he puts it in ‘Year 5’), in which he includes
himself in that ‘we’ construction: ‘We want an Algeria open to all, in
which every kind of genius may grow.[7] The shack dwellers, in other
words, have given meaning and a new concreteness to Fanon’s critique of
national consciousness that remains important today, arguing that it is
either deepened into a humanism - a consciousness of political and
social awareness (from the needs of the people from the ground up) - or
it degenerates into a narrow nationalism based on claims of indigeneity
and chauvinism. The former is based on a politics structured by the
rationality of revolt, while the latter is encouraged by colonialism and
remains one of its enduring and destructive legacies.
