Richard Pithouse, The Conversation
Algeria marks its 53rd
year of independence from
France this month. The bitter struggle for freedom in the late 1950s and early
1960s became a central focus of the global movement against colonialism. It
also influenced the evolving forms of repression and resistance in apartheid
South Africa.
Independence followed a
hard-fought revolutionary war that began in late 1954 and ended six years
later. It cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Massacres were common, extending
in 1961 to the mass
killing of unarmed Algerian civilians in Paris. Torture and rape were
routine features of French military operations.
Alongside the revolution
in Cuba in 1959, the Algeria war for national liberation inspired struggles
against racism and colonialism around the world. After the war, grand figures
on the global stage – such as Malcolm
X and Che
Guevara – made their way to Algeria. Guevara declared Algiers “one of
the most heroic capitals of freedom”.
In 1961, Nelson Mandela,
in search of military training, was hosted by the Algerian army in exile in
Morocco. He went on to spend some time with guerrillas in the mountains of
Algeria. He declared the Algerian struggle to be:
… the closest model to
our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the
indigenous majority.
The apartheid state also
sought to learn from the war in Algeria. By 1963, activists in South Africa
were being subjected to methods of torture learnt from the French in Algeria.
Fanon’s enduring influence
Today, the most visible
legacy of the Algerian war in South Africa is the ubiquity of the name and,
arguably, to a lesser extent, ideas of one of the major intellectuals whose
thought was forged, in large part, in the crucible of that war.
Frantz Fanon’s name is
mobilised in the service of all kinds of political projects, some of which are
in obvious contradiction to both the books that he wrote as well as what we
know of his biography.
Fanon, born on the
Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925, published his first book, Black
Skin, White Masks,, in 1952 at the precociously young age of 27. The book
deals with the lived experience of racism in the Caribbean and France.
All these years on it
remains a foundational text in the growing body of literature in the field of
critical race studies. It had an explosive impact on South Africa in the late
1960s and early 1970s, when, along with thinkers like James Cone, Aimé
Césaire and Jean-Paul
Sartre, Fanon became an important part of the intellectual foundation of
the black
consciousness movement.
Contemporary readers
often continue to experience their first encounter with the book as electric
and transformative. In the parts of South African society that retain a
colonial character, such as some universities, it remains a book with a real
charge. Fanon’s name is frequently invoked in the new student
struggles for the decolonisation and deracialisation of the country’s
universities.
Fanon’s next two books
were written in Tunis where he worked for the Algerian national liberation
movement in exile. A
Dying Colonialism, published in 1959, is an account of the personal and
collective changes that become possible within a mass struggle. The Wretched of
the Earthwas published in December 1961, shortly after his death from
leukaemia at the age of 36. Six months after its publication Algeria finally
won independence from France.
The Wretched of the Earth
offers a brilliant illumination and critique of colonial society, the struggle
against colonialism and the pathologies of postcolony. What is often forgotten
is that it also addresses the damage wrought by the violence that structures
the colonial situation.
More than 50 years on, it
remains an essential text, one often understood in terms of prophecy rather
than critique, for understanding both the colonial and post-colonial situation.
In 2015 many South African students encountering it for the first time feel
that Fanon offers privileged insight into the grim realities of the country
under the increasingly
predatory regime headed by Jacob Zuma.
Fanon was given a hero’s
burial on Algerian soil in a forest just across the border from Tunisia. After
Algeria won its independence his
name was inscribed into the symbolic order of the new society. The avenue on
which the National Library of Algeria sits, a school and a hospital were all
named in his honour.
But as Algeria became
increasingly authoritarian and
distant from Fanon’s vision of “an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of
genius can grow”, his evidently resonant critique of the pathologies of
postcolony, and his exploration of the lines of continuity between the colony
and the postcolony, became increasingly embarrassing to the new order.
Fanon’s name remained in
the pantheon of the heroes of the revolution but his ideas were increasingly
considered heretical and dismissed as alien.
In October 1988, Josie
Fanon, his widow, was watching from the balcony of her flat in Algiers when
young men without jobs and homes began burning police cars in the streets. The
police responded with the sort of violence that had characterised French
colonialism and around 500 people were killed in a few
days. A few months later she carefully put her affairs in order and took
her own life.
