Aziz Salmone Fall, Pambazuka
On my way by plane to the pan-African Congress being held in Munich [1],
I re-read ‘Toward the African Revolution’ to fire myself up and
reassure myself that this was still the right path. ‘Toward the African
Revolution’ will be the theme of our round table on 6 December this year
as we mark the 50th anniversary of Fanon’s death. This round table will
follow the film we are showing in his honour.
The revolutionary outbreaks in North Africa are like a boomerang of
history and the springtime that has spread has a tang of optimism. ‘The
optimism that reigns in Africa today is not born of spectacular natural
forces that are at last turning in favour of Africans. Nor is this
optimism due to the discovery that the attitudes of the former oppressor
are now less inhuman and more benevolent. The optimism in Africa is the
direct result of revolutionary action by the African masses, whether
political or martial – and sometimes both.’ [2]
Returning recently from Tunisia and Egypt, I realised that, behind this
optimism, there certainly lies a long road and that these advances may
well not give birth to revolution, so affected are they by culturalism,
integrism and imperialism. I noted, too, how fragile these progressive
forces still are and incapable of steering this historic movement. The
same applies to the Congo which remains, as Fanon had predicted, the
trigger of Africa, and which, instead of turning the violence against
imperialism, turns it on itself. This Congo is a geological horror
story that has experienced what Fanon feared most. Its millions of dead,
sacrificed at the altar of our post-modern consumerism and our disputes
that are maintained by a truncated capitalism implore Africa, through
their tragedy, to become united. Fanon is right again: we need to
complete the progress begun in North Africa and push Africa towards
total emancipation.
It is not only the people of the Maghreb and the Congolese that need to
read or re-read ‘Toward the African Revolution’, but all Africans. It
is a collection of political texts, logbooks and letters by Frantz Fanon
first published by Maspero. It spans the time from his youth when he
wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1952 until he penned The Wretched of
the Earth in 1961, the year he died. As a synthesis of the
anti-imperialist and class struggles, this work speaks of the colonial
evolution and the hidden traps inherent in decolonisation. It gave
Fanon an opportunity for introspection, an understanding of alienation,
of the depersonalisation of the colonised and of racism in all its
forms. In it Fanon illustrated the necessity for those colonised to
consider their psyche and prepare their retort. The universe he depicts
shows that the world of the colonised is a mirror broken at every level
by the oppression and alienation of the coloniser and that national
liberation has to be preceded by individual liberation.
Combining his experience as a psychiatrist with that of a man caught up
in the Algerian war, he calls upon his left wing comrades and urges
those from the continent to join forces in a revolutionary, Panafrican
movement.
During the 25 years of the Group for Research and Initiative for the
Liberation of Africa (GRILA’s) existence [3], we have we have advocated
the total liberation of Africa as seen by Fanon whose analysis is still
relevant and current for pan-Africanism. In other words, he still
challenges us to consider what form social transformation in the
post-colonial era should take.
In the 21st century, pan-Africanism is at a crossroads while our
continent is being attacked by new and complex forms of imperialism. I
am giving the name ‘supraimperialism’ to the particular form of hegemon
that neoliberali financialised oligopolies has imposed through
globalisation during the past 30 years . Its contradictions impel it to
intensify the capitalist mode of production and predatory consumption
although this is bound to be a blind alley. The most critical tension
in the system will be played out between three declining centres – the
US, Japan and Europe – and the emerging countries whose leading runners
BRICS, - Brazil, Russia, India and China South Africa - are as much
capable of reinvigorating capitalism as of speeding up its chances of
being steered in another direction. The latter can only happen if they
opt to start in a self-centred surge within a more multi-centred world.
In this regard, the class interests of their leaders and of their people
will be decisive; the case of South Africa is a microcosm of the whole.
Africa, which contributes so much to global growth, is nevertheless,
still very much locked in the cash economy of the old international
division of labour. This order is increasingly synonymous with the
resources sold off by transnational corporations and local business
people unconcerned about the condition and fate of the Africans. The
strategy of imperialistic forces to control our resources and our
resistance by military power will not fade.
Fanon gave us a clear warning of this: ‘Africa will be free. Yes, but
she must get down to work and not lose sight of her own unity. It was in
this spirit that, among others, one of the most important points of the
first meeting of All-African Peoples' Conference at Accra in 1958 was
adopted. The African peoples, it was said in this resolution, commit
themselves to forming a militia that will be responsible for supporting
the African peoples in their struggle for independence.’ [4]
Instead, after a 20th century full of brutal imperialist interventions,
our people, paralysed and divided, are participating in a 21st century
that looks as though it will continue in the same way. This year, 2011,
we have been presented with some 14,000 incidents of NATO combat
aircraft bombing targets, often civilian, in Libya. We also saw the
neo-colonial recolonisation of the Ivory Coast, and the creeping
extension of AFRICOM, for various pretexts, in the ranks of our armies
and territories.
‘It may be that the colonial expeditions conform to a given, known
pattern – the need to impose order among the barbarians, the protection
of the concessions and interests of European countries, the generous
gift of western civilisation – but we have not publicised sufficiently
the stereotypical ways that the founding cities use to remain attached
to their colonies.’ [5] In reality the barbarity is fostered by the
unyielding expansion of a capitalism in crisis that replies with
counter-revolution every time we make advances in our struggles.
Everywhere, it leads to compromises to which the social democratic and
even radical left forces succumb, afraid of putting up opposition on an
uneven playing field. However, there is nothing left to reform. The
international cooperation, the declaration of Paris with its ‘aid’
effectiveness and the apologetic bilateral enthusiasms no longer deceive
people.
The instrumentalisation of multilateral forums is even more pronounced
than in the last century. The IMF, the World Bank and WTO have been
preserved, despite their obsolescence and their obvious failure, as
instruments reproducing the international order. However, the latter
has been slowly overtaken by a transnational order where the role of the
large corporations, as well as major culturalist ditch and
civilisational gaps, cannot be regulated by the G20. This means a
gradual world governance by a G20 that has no democratic mandate to do
so. The UN had the regulatory mandate but has been transformed into a
chamber for recording the wishes of NATO, and new tools such as the
right to interfere at a humanitarian level and the responsibility to
protect have torn to pieces the international right to some of the most
powerful strategic benefits.
What Fanon said about the sequestration of Congo still resonates:
‘Lumumba’s mistake was firstly to believe in the good-natured
impartiality of the UN. He strangely forgot that the UN currently is no
more than a reserve assembly set up by the powerful to continue between
two armed conflicts the ‘peaceful struggle’ over how to share out the
world’… ‘Our mistake as Africans is to have forgotten that the enemy’s
retreat is never trustworthy. He never understands. He capitulates, but
does not change’. [6]
More than ever, the revolutionary imperative seems appropriate and the
progress enabled by the fall of apartheid, and the recent upset of
senile autocracies in North Africa must be followed through. Along the
same lines, the colonial struggle of Fanon’s days has been substituted
by the struggle against neocolonialism and the retrogressive influences
that are as ‘comprador’ as those vast sections of our societies that
have been alienated and confused by the mirages of capitalism.
‘The inter-African solidarity must be real, a solidarity in action, a concrete solidarity of people, resources and money.’ [7]
The African Union - that replaced the Organisation for African Unity -
is for many of our fellow citizens an institution that is distant from
their real concerns; it resembles a union of heads of state that cannot
afford its own policies. Libya was the only African country without
debt. The assassination of Gaddafi is bringing about a loss of finances
for the African Union that was so unfortunately dependent on Libyan
funds. Libya had ended up paying a third of the operational costs of the
organisation as numerous countries were no longer contributing. In
fact, with Libya, Algeria, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt each
contribute a little less than 15 percent of the expenses. Apart from
this embarrassing quirk, surely we must deplore the fact that these
African countries only contribute on average eight percent of the AU
budget, while 92 percent comes from foreign partners and donors. Jean
Ping would say that finance from outside Africa amounts to more like 77
percent. (Officially, the AU budget for 2011 was predicted to be
US$256,754,447 of which $122602.045 would come from member states and
$134.152.402 from international donors).
It is not only the funding that is problematic. The debate about the
sort of pan-Africanism we want to construct has not started yet. There
is a patent lack of political will and the Monrovia group, which has
symbolically taken over from the Casablanca group, is dominating
thinking. The most important aspects of this thinking – which may by
chance be progressive – turn out to be unworkable. The members of the
organisation still believe in the feasibility of NEPAD, a scarcely
viable project left to the discretion of the West and whose futility for
the continent we had already demonstrated at its launch at the
Kananaskis G8 summit. [8] Today, Fanon would be deploring the fact that
Africa still does not have a continental developing plan and that is why
we are encouraging a move in this direction by offering the alternative
of pan-African self-reliance (panafricentrage). [9]
Pan-Africanism would gain in fact by being geared towards two
requirements suggested by pan-Africentrage: the reconstruction of what
it is to be African and a forward-looking renewal to control
accumulation and develop our productive capacity. Both need to return to
the question of progress and modernity and, therefore, development and
decide on other homeomorphic imperatives (that is, those that challenge
their local equivalent). ‘Africanity’ and the pan-African renewal could
both be based on a balance between maat and internationalism – in other
words, the fertile roots that provide for a harmonious future for Africa
and its diaspora. To reconnect, without narcissistic attachment to the
past, with our common roots; to regenerate them scientifically after all
the assaults in our history that have led to amnesia and apathy. The
revitalisation of pan-Africanism rely on many urgent needs.
Among them, the fact that the moment has come to set up an international
and pan-African conference on the grabbing of land and resources in
Africa, especially agricultural land, following the example of
Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams who launched a similar event
in 1900 thereby inspiring the pan-African movement. The work of WEB
Dubois, de Marcus Garvey, Lamine Senghor, Garan Kouyate, Price Mars CLR
James, Casely Hayford, Alioune Diop and Présence africaine since 1947
were to fire the pan-African congresses and projects. Their legacy is
perpetuated by their successors such as Lumumba, Ben Barka, Fanon,
Nkrumah, Cabral, Sankara, Rosa Parks, Makonnen, Malcom X, Booker T
Washington, Kenyatta, Diop, Rodney, Mandela… These future ancestors are
still a shining light for us.
The reconstruction of revolutionary pan-Africanism offers us not only a
critique of Eurocentric Africanism, but also a rigorous and above all
objective and historical review of Africa and its contribution to the
arrival of globalisation. We must first fully recognise humanity’s
monocentric origin that refuses all forms of racism and eugenics; the
anteriority of the ancient negro-african civilisations needs to be
re-established as does their contribution, like those of subsequent
traditional periods, to the building up of global systems. There is also
the need to understand how Africa was of service to Europe’s periphery,
that is the Americas, before herself moving onto the fringes of
capitalism. This is where she still is, in an unjust and outdated
division of labour that is perpetuated by internal, predatory dynamics.
UNICEF seems powerless to prevent the death of about 29,000 children
under five every day – 21 a minute – chiefly from preventable causes.
One child in eight in Africa dies before reaching the age of five. [10]
‘We Africans have been saying that for more than 100 years the life of
200,000,000 Africans has been life on the cheap, life that is put in
question and perpetually haunted by death. We have been saying that we
should not put our trust in the good faith of the colonialists but that
we should arm ourselves with fortitude and a fighting spirit. Africa
will not be liberated by the mechanical development of material assets;
it will be the hand and brain of the African that inspire and
successfully complete the dialectic of the continent’s liberation.’ [11]
Nobody will save our people; we must do it ourselves and soon we will
number one billion of whom three quarters still live as described above.
The need for renewal involves the struggle against the almost
collective amnesia relating to the real history of Africa and its
diaspora, but above all it involves the need to start learning lessons
from the anti-imperialist struggles and decolonisation; independence
that had to be negotiated, struggles for national liberation and, most
of all, the failure of institutional Panafricanism. It entails
admitting that the complete liberation of Africa and its diaspora has
yet to be achieved.
This requires a bold reorganisation of the forces of change, especially
our youth who, despite their capacity for outrage and reaction, have
lived through more than two decades of depoliticisation and political
disaffection. This phenomenon was maintained as much by our states being
disengaged from the economy and functioning as puppets of the
Bretton-Woods institutions and other donors as by the diminishing field
of vision of many of our political parties mired in scenarios of
artificial pluralist democracies and co-opted civil society. We have to
make an essential and immense effort to create strategies and unity,
but we also need a certain introspection in order to have respect for
ourselves and others. In doing this, while many would wish to label
‘panafricentrage’ as one of the African doctrines, I want to make it
clear that ‘afrocenticity is preferable to ‘afrocentrism’.
Afrocentrism, like eurocentrism, is precisely a form of culturalism and
other integrisms, blind alleys that need to be critiqued and surpassed.
‘Panafricentrage’, rather, is a doctrine that draws on its reactivated
roots. It can be expressed on the one hand in terms of a philosophy that
stresses maa’t (in its sense of cosmic, terrestrial and personal
balances and of truth and social justice) and the rediscovery of our
historic, socio-cultural and political programmes for regulation. On the
other hand, it also depends on a practice of integrity that leads to
pan-African and internationalist autocentred progress which is
ecological and not sexist and which can contribute to a multi-centred
world.
This is a historic maaterialism, which begins with the historic
conditions of material existence of Africans and understands their
process of transformation and reproduction in order to achieve a
revolutionary praxis. It is up to working people and the organic
intellectuals of Africa and the diaspora to build this alternative
against the predatory phases of globalisation that only allow comprador
options and their chimeric efforts at continental integration. We have
to learn to endure and counter oppression by multiplying and channeling
thousands of networks and ramifications that are moving in the same
direction as this panafrican impetus.
‘Panafricentrage’ is a process of acquiring a political and historic
awareness of the collective autonomy of the continent. By breaking away
discerningly from the dominant capitalism, it favours the control of
accumulation and equitable redistribution. It promotes the revaluing of
our traditions and ways of being in solidarity and is a socio-cultural
renewal that enables Africa to make an active contribution to our age.
Moreover, the conditions for the revolutionary awakening are becoming
clearer: the global financial crisis; the closure of islands of
prosperity to our disillusioned youth wishing to emigrate; the
combination of the exasperation that is now affecting not only the
poorest classes with the despair that narrows horizons that are clouded
by the autumn of senile, predatory capitalist models. Finally, there is a
ray of hope, glimpses of dawn that enable us to see the revolutionary
advances that have started, timidly, here and there on the continent.
Space is short, but let us illustrate one dimension of it.
TOWARDS AN URGENT, AUTOCENTRED STRATEGY FOR AGRICULTURE
The devices of neoliberal recolonisation must be tirelessly combatted,
as much with land grabbing as with rapacious commercial crops or the
introduction of GMOs. [12] One of the battle fields is the issue of
world food and for Africa this is an issue of prime importance as more
and more of its land is being sold off while the food problem remains
chronic. The world’s current food production could feed the planet, but
much of the cereals – 40 percent - is used as concentrated fodder for
cattle to provide meat for the most affluent. Moreover, the FAO – the UN
organisation for food and agriculture – advocates a second green
revolution, doubling food production between now and 2050. In the
meantime, the rise in food prices is putting more than a billion people
at risk of famine and is triggering the cycle of hunger riots.
Autocentred development requires agrarian reform and self-sufficiency in
food. We need organic farming methods and appropriate technology. It
means production and processing, throughout an agricultural system that
is as organic as possible, conforms to a different law of value, with
more balance of income between town and country, a strategy for full
employment, the fair cost of production and processing, etc. This
project takes the form of collective self-reliance, in other words it
enables the exchange of products between areas and cross-subsidies
between regions of surplus and deficit. The productivity in all types of
activities can be spectacular while at the same time generating full
employment in the preparation and processing stages of production.
A bio-organic approach to agriculture refuses to use chemical inputs and
recycles all its rubbish. It is easy to envisage production of biogas
that can be used both to clean the villages and towns and to provide
energy. This could be coupled with solar energy to meet the energy needs
of the communities. The jobs in growing and processing the crops
encourage the people to stay local as their improved incomes and quality
of life make the rural exodus less interesting. Biological farming
(biomass, rotation, percolation, green pesticides, etc.) is falsely said
to be less productive by the industrial producers of pesticides and
chemical fertilisers and biotechnologies. An improved concentration per
hectare is possible with this integrated, intensive model that preserves
the adjoining environment as well as the sustainability of the arable
ecosystems. We advocate, therefore, not sustainable, but endurable
development. This is at the heart of the construction of an internal
market of goods for consumption by the people, based on our products and
selective imports that respond to our essential needs. But here, as
elsewhere, there are several obstacles in the way of Panafricentrage.
Let us briefly identify the immediate strategic horizons that condition
the future struggles of Africa and its diaspora and that are likely to
help them triumph with the help of internationalists from the North:
• Self-sufficiency in food, agrarian reform, modernisation of
agriculture to the rhythm of each society; arrival of markets with goods
for mass consumption, to satisfy basic needs.
• Nationalisation of resources conditional to popular, patriotic participation
• Light industrialisation that complements the agriculture and the rebalancing of urban/rural income.
• Regional and continental integration accelerated by complementarity and levelling out.
• Backing patents and technology that are within our grasp and our means.
• A central bank, continental currency; bi- or tri-continental
parliament for the main issues regarding development and security.
• A continental army and a civil brigade for prevention of conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction.
• Tricontinental cooperation against speculation, with internationalists
from the North who share with us the fight against impunity, illicit
amassment of wealth and the violation of human rights.
• Collective fight against paying the debt; disengage from programmes
capping poverty-prsp etc.. and weigh up how to reform the international
institutions in favour of internationalist cooperation with a
0.7%,untied ODA.
• Full emancipation of women and change of male mentalities.
• Democratic repolitisation of the people and their own organised
efforts to counter imperialism, comprador regimes and anti-progressive
behaviours. Active participation of young people in socio-political
mechanisms for the making and implementation of decisions.
• Decipher the irresponsible, ostentatious consumerist behaviour and rediscover ways of living solidarity.
• Safeguard natural and environmental resources, by living ecologically and with a social conscience.
Steer the energy of the progressive diaspora and the life forces of the continent towards Panafricentrage.
Arrange the return to Africa from the Americas and elsewhere of the African diaspora
• Work for a progressive, humanist, multi-centred world and for the
preservation of common ‘goods’ via development that is both responsible
and of the people.
Nobody can predict the outcome of these struggles; the immediate future
will rise out of the disruption of the balances of power – the
socio-political, economo-cultural, gender and generational. In the
meantime, it is a question of consolidating the gains, broadening the
scope of a social, humanist and progressive (and, if possible,
socialist) response to the unilateral market model with its global
apartheid. We must advance into our future, eyes open, uncompromisingly
and without nostalgic attachment to the past.
However, for this future to be realised, we need concrete projects, on
the scale of social formations, that is state-nations, major social
reforms, indeed viable social projects. This does not seem possible to
me without attempting selective disengagement and anti-capitalist
self-centering and, above all, mutual support by integrating
collectively those who opt for such an alternative.
The option for a people’s national and democratic movement for Africa
(states and peoples) -within a dynamic of Panafrican self-reliance that
opposes the logic of compradorisation - would be able to form, through
consultation and consistency, a response to defend such a project, even
the birth of another world.
‘Africa must be free,’ said Dr N’Krumah in his inaugural speech. We have
nothing to lose but our chains and we have a huge continent to conquer.
In Accra, Africans swore loyalty and support to each other.’ [13]
A luta continua. Amandla Ngawethu ! UHURU !
