[News] 50 years later: Fanon's legacy

[Anti-Imperialist News]

50 years later: Fanon's legacy



Nigel C Gibson

2011-12-21, Issue <http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/564>564
<http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78860>http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78860

When I was asked by Dr. Keithley Woolward to 
address the question of Fanon’s contemporary 
relevance, I was reminded of a blurb on the back 
of my recent book Fanonian Practices in South 
Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo 
which reads, ‘This is not another meditation on 
Fanon’s continued relevance. Instead, it is an 
inquiry into how Fanon, the revolutionary, might 
think and act in the face of contemporary social 
crisis.’ My comments today should be considered in that spirit.

‘Relevance’ ­ from a Latin word ‘relevare’, to 
lift, from ‘lavare’, to raise, levitate ­ to 
levitate a living Fanon who died in the USA 
nearly 50 years ago this coming Tuesday in 
cognizance of his own injunction articulated in 
the opening sentence from his essay ‘On national 
culture’: ‘Each generation must out of relative 
obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or 
betray it’ (1968 206). The challenge was laid 
down at the opening of this year of Fanon’s 50th 
(as well as the 50th anniversary of his ‘The 
Wretched of the Earth’) which began with 
revolution ­ or at least a series of revolts and 
resistance across the region, known as the Arab Spring.

Fanon begins ‘The Wretched’, as you know, 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 change 
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 25 
January: ‘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.’ 
What started with Tunisia and then Tahrir Square 
has become a new global revolt, spreading to 
Spain and the Indignados (indignants) movement, 
to Athens and the massive and continuous 
demonstrations against vicious structural 
adjustment, to the urban revolt in England, to 
the massive student mobilisation to end education 
for profit in Chile, to the ‘occupy’ movement of the 99 percent.

And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new 
repression, elite compromises and political 
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?) Surely the question is not whether Fanon 
is relevant, but why is Fanon relevant now?

CONTEXTS AND GEOGRAPHIES

In the penultimate chapter of ‘Frantz Fanon: A 
Portrait’, Alice Cherki notes that Blida 
Psychiatric Hospital in Algiers still bears his 
name, that Fanon has a boulevard and a high 
school for girls named after him, though young 
people have no idea who he is. After independence 
in Algeria, Fanon was quite quickly marginalised. 
A new constitution identified the nation with 
Islam and that women were actively dissuaded from 
playing any part in public life did not jibe with Fanon’s vision of politics.

Fanon was dead before Algeria gained its 
independence, yet ‘The Pitfalls of National 
Consciousness’ chapter of ‘The Wretched’ (based 
on his reflections on his West African 
experiences as well as his concerns about the 
Algerian revolution) is a fairly accurate 
portrayal of what Algeria became with oil money 
playing an enormously important role in pacifying 
the population and paying for a bloated and ubiquitous security force.

To speak about relevance, then, is also to speak 
about historic context. Fanon was recruited into 
the FLN during the battle of Algiers. Although a 
committed anti-colonialist he had not moved to 
Algeria to join a revolution but to take up the 
job as director of psychiatry at Blida-Joinville 
Hospital. It was a job he wanted and he put 
enormous energy into fighting to reform how 
psychiatry was practiced in the hospital. He 
created space ­ both practical and intellectual 
(reading groups) for himself and his colleagues ­ 
to institute a kind of Tosquellean [1] inspired 
institutional sociotherapy to humanise the asylum 
where the patient would become ‘a subject in his 
or her liberation’ and the doctor an ‘equal 
partner in the fight for freedom’ (Cherki 36). In 
a sense, that would become Fanon’s political 
philosophy. The Algerian war of national 
liberation ­ declared a year after he arrived ­ 
politicised him and radicalised him, as he began 
to see and treat its effects in the hospital and 
in his work. He was asked by the FLN to use his 
skills as a therapist to treat those who had been 
tortured. He began to clandestinely treat the 
tortured while treating the torturer as part of 
his hospital work. Indeed his comments in ‘L’An 
cinq de la revolution Algérienne’ (‘Year Five of 
the Algerian revolution’ published as ‘A Dying 
Colonialism’ in English) bear this experience out 
not only on his withering critique of the medical 
profession involved in torture but also in his 
desire to find the human being behind the 
coloniser, believing that liberation would put an 
end to the colonised and the coloniser (1967c, 
24) and his condemnation (though understanding) 
of those who have thrown themselves into 
revolutionary action with ‘physiological 
brutality that centuries of oppression give rise 
to and feed’ (1967c, 25). At Blida the situation 
became untenable and he simply couldn’t continue. 
As he wrote in his letter of resignation, how 
could he treat mental illness in a society that 
drives people to a desperate solution? Such a 
society, he added, needs to be replaced (1967b, 
53). With the authorities closing in on the 
hospital, which was suspected as a hotbed of 
support for the FLN, he resigned before he was 
picked up and began to work full time for the revolution.

This was part of Fanon’s context.

At the same time it was not surprising that, when 
the opportunity arose, Fanon would join a 
revolutionary movement, or as Glissant put it 
(1999 25), to act on his ideas. [2] And yet, at 
the same time it was not only acting on ideas but 
that for Fanon ideas were always influenced by 
practice and also transformative. One can see in 
‘Black Skin White Masks’ that he was in a sense 
already a revolutionary, and given the chance he 
would ‘take part in a revolution’, as Jean Ayme 
put it (quoted in Cherki 2006:94). But at the 
time Fanon was a revolutionary who was not deeply 
political. Fanon had been introduced to Ayme, a 
psychiatrist, anti-colonist activist and 
Trotskyist, in September 1956 when he had given 
his paper at the first Congress of Black Writers 
and Artists. And in Ayme’s Paris apartment, in 
early 1957 ­ where he stayed before leaving to 
join the FLN in Tunis ­ he spent his time reading about revolutionary politics.

He had been recruited into the FLN by Ramdane 
Abane, the Kabylian leader of the FLN who became 
Fanon’s mentor. Abane, who has an airport named 
after him in Kabylia, had been a key figure in 
the 1956 FLN conference Soummam which had 
criticised the militarisation of the revolution, 
insisting on a collective political control, and 
put forward a vision of a future Algeria that 
remained Fanon’s. They both believed in the 
‘revolutionary dismantling of the colonial state’ 
(Cherki 105). The principle adopted as the 
Soummam platform was a vision of the future 
Algeria as a secular democratic society with the 
‘primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab, 
Amazigh, Muslim, [Jewish] Christian, European, 
etc.)’ (Abane 2011): ‘in the new society that is 
being built,’ Fanon wrote in italics in Year 5, 
‘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’ (Fanon, 1967c 152, 32).

Abane was liquidated by the FLN at the turn of 
1958. Fanon died before Algeria gained its 
independence in 1962 and was quickly 
marginalized, then dismissed as irrelevant and 
out of touch for not understanding the power of 
Islam (a charge that has been repeated for 50 
years). In France, the story was similar. ‘Les 
damnés de la terre’ was criticised as romantic 
and Fanon dismissed as an interloper to the 
Algerian revolution. The book only sold a few thousand copies.

Translated into English in 1963 by an 
African-American poet, Constance Farrington, ‘The 
Wretched of the Earth’ was published in 1965 in 
the United States, going through innumerable 
printings and becoming a best seller in the 
revolutionary year of 1968 when it was subtitled 
‘a handbook for the Black revolution’.

As Kathleen Cleaver puts it in ‘The Black Panther 
Party Reconsidered’, ‘The Wretched of the Earth 
became essential reading for Black 
revolutionaries in America and profoundly 
influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis 
seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous 
violence ravaging across the country, and linked 
the incipient insurrections to the rise of a 
revolutionary movement’ (1998: 214). The colonial 
world that Fanon wrote about ‘bore a striking 
resemblance,’ she added, ‘to the world that 
American blacks lived’ (1998: 215). Of course the 
influence had been mutual since the descriptions 
of Black American life by writers such as Richard 
Wright played an important role in the 
development of Fanon’s ‘Black Skin White Masks’. 
For Cleaver, what was especially relevant to the 
Black Panthers ‘was Fanon’s analysis of 
colonialism and the necessity of violence’ (1998 
216). And associating Algeria with Fanon, some 
Panthers fled to Algeria in the late 1960s. Thus 
it was through the Panthers that Fanon returned 
momentarily to Algeria, but noticeably shorn of 
his internal critique of the liberation movements 
and post-independence and thereby reduced to just 
another anti-colonial figure. Yet just as 
Eldridge Cleaver was opening the First Pan 
African Cultural Festival in 1969, Fanon had made 
his way across the Limpopo into the heart of 
settler colonial Africa ­ apartheid South Africa. 
As well as Black Power, Black theology writers 
provided an importantly link between Fanon and 
Biko and Fanon became essential for the 
development of Black Consciousness in South 
Africa; a movement that was explicitly a praxis 
oriented philosophy in outlook which became a 
crucial turning point in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.

My recent work on Fanonian Practices in South 
Africa can be understood in terms of thinking 
about Fanon’s relevance. It begins with Biko’s 
engagement with Fanon. Biko, who has a hospital 
named after him in Pretoria, was murdered in 1977 
and argued in a Fanonian vein in the early 1970s 
that it was possible to create a ‘capitalist 
black society, black middle class,’ in South 
Africa, and ‘succeed in putting across to the 
world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, 
with still 70 percent of the population being 
underdogs.’ You see, hospitals, airports, roads 
and so on, can be renamed after revolutionaries, 
yet it turns out that not much changes for the 
bulk of the people. Now nearly 40 years after 
Biko’s statement, Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of 
National Consciousness’ ­ an essay written from 
within the Algerian revolution ­ which provides a 
forecast for the post-independent nation, a keen 
analysis of the dreadful cost of its failure, is 
an uncanny portrait of post-apartheid South Africa.

So the second moment of Fanonian practice is a 
critique of contemporary postcolonial reality. In 
other words, the lasting value of employing 
Fanon’s critical insights and method. The source 
is not only ‘The Wretched’ where he calls the 
national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly 
 
antinational,’ opting, he adds, for an ‘abhorrent 
path of a conventional bourgeoisie, a bourgeois 
that is dismally, inanely and cynically 
bourgeois,’ but also ‘Black Skin White Masks’, 
which concludes with a critique of bourgeois life 
as sterile and suffocating. In the Antilles there 
have been struggles for freedom, he argues, but 
too often they have been conducted in terms and 
values given by the white master and creating 
profoundly ambivalent situations and neurotic 
symptoms described in ‘Black Skin’.

Fanon left the Antilles to study in France, but 
after his World War Two experiences he already no 
longer believed in the French mission and 
profoundly disapproved of Césaire’s support for 
assimilation. Just recently I was reading Richard 
Wright’s collection, ‘White Man Listen’, 
published in 1957, specifically an essay ‘The 
psychological reactions of oppressed people’ as 
it articulates with ‘Black Skin White Masks’, 
specifically Fanon and Wright’s critique of 
Mannoni. [3] The book is interestingly dedicated 
to Eric Williams and to ‘the Westernised and 
tragic elite of Asia, Africa and the West Indies 
­ men who are distrusted, misunderstood, maligned 
by left and right.’ Fanon wrote about these 
elites in ‘Black Skin’ and in ‘The Wretched’. 
Indeed they remain crucial to the 
post-independence situation, but in a review of 
the book in El Moudjahid in 1959 he was critical 
of Wright’s book because of its singular focus on 
the tragedy of these elites while real life and 
death struggles were taking place across the continent (see Cherki 159).

THE REALITY OF THE NATION

The damnation of the world’s majority inscribed 
in the Manichean geographies so well described by 
Fanon in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ does not end 
with the negotiated settlement and the withdrawal 
of formal colonial rule. The violence that orders 
colonialism, the violence that follows the 
colonised home and enters every pore of their 
body, is reconfigured in the contemporary world 
of razor wire transit camps and detention zones, 
in rural pauperisation and in the shanty towns 
and shack settlements. It is the silent scream of 
much of the world’s population, who appear most 
of the time without solidarity, without agency, 
without speech. Beyond the gated citadels, beyond 
the zones of tourism, in the zone of often bare 
existence, there seems no way out. And yet, at a 
moment like ours in 2011, there is all of a 
sudden made absolutely clear the rationality of 
rebellion. So, the shocking relevance of a Fanonian political will.

Yet more than a simple us-and-them, the ‘we’ for 
Fanon was always a creative ‘we,’ a ‘we’ of 
political action and praxis, thinking and 
reasoning. Indeed this was not only his critique 
of colonialism but also of the neo-colonial 
afterlife. ‘Colonialism is not a thinking 
machine,’ Fanon argues, but all too often its 
aftermath, the new nation, is mired in the same 
mindlessness, indeed a stupidity created by the 
national bourgeoisie’s will to power often 
mediated by crude force against the very people 
who made liberation possible. In contrast, 
Fanon’s ‘we,’ for example, is wonderfully 
articulated in Walcott’s poem, ‘the Schooner 
Flight’: ‘Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.’ It 
is the nobodies, the damned, the impoverished and 
landless who for Fanon become the source, the 
basis, the truth of the ‘reality of the nation’ 
(the first title of ‘A Dying Colonialism’). As 
anti-eviction activists in South Africa say, ‘we 
are poor but not poor in mind’ and collectively ‘we think our own struggles.’

The articulation of these movements with Fanon, 
is the third element of Fanonian practices. Since 
this notion of truth has created some concern 
among scholars, let me try to explain it, for it 
can’t be understood without a notion of how 
social change creates a radical mutation in consciousness, as Fanon puts it.

In other words, in a period of social change what 
is now obvious seemed just a few months ago 
outrageous. Who could have imagined great 
political changes such as the fall of the Berlin 
Wall or the end of apartheid? Below these rather 
grand events are the local and grassroots 
movements that open up space for thinking that 
seem not only outside the realm of the possible 
but that also include voices that are often unheard.

This week a UN conference on climate change is 
taking place in Durban, South Africa. The poor, 
who experience the full force of extreme weather 
and have to spend their time dealing with its 
effects, are not invited. A couple of days ago I 
received an article by Reverend Mavuso of the 
Rural Network in South Africa, an organisation of 
poor and landless rural people and part of the 
poor people’s alliance, that reminded me of 
Fanon’s critique of tourism, which he viewed as a 
quintessential postcolonial industry with the 
nationalist elites becoming the ‘organizers of 
parties.’ This is not just a Caribbean 
experience; it has become the experience of 
post-apartheid South Africa with private game 
parks and Safaris taking over land.

Presented to the world as ‘eco-tourism’, Mavuso 
(2011) writes, ‘game farming and the tourism 
industry are evicting the poor, ‘rob[ing us of 
our] 
 land 
 and replac[ing us] 
 with animals’ 
(my emphasis). In post-apartheid South Africa, 
thousands are evicted with the promise of jobs 
but the jobs turn out to be few poorly paid 
domestic workers or security guards.

In short, in contrast to exclusive global 
conferences, a truly humanist environmentalism 
begins with the needs and experiences of the 
poor. It is an epistemological challenge, a shift in the geography of reason.

Fanon argues in the conclusion to ‘The Wretched’ 
that we have to work out new concepts. Where will 
those new concepts come from? How is political 
education developed? What is it for? Fifty years 
after ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ I am suggesting 
that we consider the maturity of the struggle 
that is expressed in the rationality of the 
rebellions. For Fanon, to engage this reason is 
not synonymous with systematising ‘indigenous 
knowledge’ or culture. It is the rebellion ­ 
which is at the same time always for Fanon a 
mental liberation ­ that encourages nuance and 
encourages radical intellectuals engaged in and 
with these movements to work out new concepts in 
a non-technical and non-professional language. 
Often in defiance to those (intellectuals and 
militants) who consider thinking a hindrance to 
action, the ‘opening of minds’ and imagination is encouraged.

‘We imagine cities where politicians, policy 
makers, engineers and urban planners think with 
us and not for us,’ argues S’bu Zikode, the 
former president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, 
expressing the right to the city in the most 
concrete terms. Abahlali baseMjondolo ­ part of 
the subtitle of ‘Fanonian Practices’, which 
translates as people who live in shacks, is an 
organisation of about 30,000 shack dwellers in 
South Africa that was created six years ago after 
the residents of one shack community realised 
that land that had been promised was being 
cleared for other buildings. The organization is 
decentralized, autonomous, self-reliant and 
deeply democratic. What is interesting about 
Abahlali now six years after its 
self-organization is its thinking born of 
experience and discussion in what they call the 
‘university of the shacks.’ They call it living 
learning. Press statements are written 
collectively; and 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. So 
when Zikode speaks of imagination, it is one 
produced collectively by long discussions in the 
shack settlements. ‘We imagine cities where the 
social value of land is put before its commercial 
value,’ he continues. ‘We imagine cities where 
shack settlements are all offered the option of 
participatory upgrades and where people will only 
move elsewhere when that is their free choice. We 
imagine the quick improvement of local living 
conditions by the provision of water, 
electricity, paths, stairs and roads while 
housing is being discussed, planned and built. We 
imagine cities without evictions, without state 
violence being used to disconnect people from 
electricity and water and without any repression 
of organisations and movements. We imagine cities 
without the transit camps that have become the 
permanent alternative housing solution for many 
poor people since the declaration of the 
Millennium Development Goals by the United 
Nations. We reject, completely, the way in which 
the Millennium Development Goals have reduced the 
measure of progress to the numbers of 'housing 
opportunities delivered' when in fact progress 
should be measured in terms of people's dignity 
as this is understood by the people themselves’ (Zikode 2011).

Such imaginings come from thinking and 
discussions that jibe with Fanon’s notion of 
political education. He presents what he calls 
the militant who wants to take shortcuts in the 
name of getting things done not only as 
anti-intellectual but atrocious, inhuman and 
sterile. Instead, he insists the search for truth 
is the ‘responsibility of the community’ (2004, 
139). In ‘The Wretched’, Fanon speaks of the 
meeting, of this coming together, as the 
practical and ethical foundation of the liberated 
society, as ‘a liturgical act’ (un acte 
liturgique [2002, 185]); liturgical acts which 
‘are privileged occasions given to a human being 
to listen and to speak 
 and put forward new ideas 
’ (1968 195).

Again at the local level, in ‘The Wretched’ Fanon 
gives the seemingly banal example of lentil 
production during the liberation struggle, 
writing of the creation of production/consumption 
committees among the peasants and FLN which he 
says encouraged theoretical questions about the 
accumulation of capital: ‘In the regions where we 
were able to conduct these enlightening 
experiments,’ he argues, ‘we witnessed the 
edification of man through revolutionary 
beginnings’ because people began to realize that 
‘one works more with one’s brain and ones heart 
than with one’s muscles’ (2004, 133; see 1968, 292).

Talking of the political economy of food he adds: 
‘We did not have any technicians or planners 
coming from big Western universities; but in 
these liberated regions the daily ration went up 
to the hitherto unheard-of figure of 3,200 
calories. [But t]he people were not content with 
[this] 
. They started asking themselves 
theoretical questions: for example, why did 
certain districts never see an orange before the 
war of liberation, while thousands of tons are 
exported every year abroad? Why were grapes 
unknown to a great many Algerians whereas the 
European peoples enjoyed them by the million? 
Today, the people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them.’

This type of shift in cognition represents a shift in epistemology.

EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION?

The mandate for the College of the Bahamas is to 
‘foster the intellectual development of students 
and the wider community by encouraging critical 
analysis and independent thought’ and the meeting 
today is considered part of the project to attain 
university through contributing to that 
discussion. Yet critical and independent thought 
can never be guaranteed and certainly can’t be 
assured by a university. In this final section of 
my presentation I want to consider the 
problematic of a university in the post-colony as 
it articulates with movements and thinking outside of it.

Real grassroots social movements open up new 
spaces for thinking. Yet on the other hand the 
global university of the 21st century not only 
often looks elsewhere but actively seeks to 
suppress these spaces. The quest to be ‘world 
class,’ such as that which the University of 
Kwa-Zulu Natal announces, is couched by the term 
excellence seen through a neo-colonial prism of 
donors and global elites. At best the new 
movements become researched ­ the paradigms often 
developed by the World Bank or other funding 
agencies ­ they are never allowed to ask 
theoretical questions. It is a neo-colonial arrangement.

Recognising that the colonised intellectual 
committed to social change is fundamentally 
alienated from the people, Fanon suggests a 
methodology that fundamentally challenges the 
elitism, internalised values and ways of thinking 
they have imbibed. Perhaps the same, often 
depending on context, can be said of the 
postcolonial intellectual. In ‘Black Skin White 
Masks’, for example, Fanon argues that this 
alienation and neurosis is quite normal; that is 
to say a product of books, newspapers, schools, 
and their texts, advertisements, films, radio ­ 
what we might call hegemonic culture. How then do 
we go about creating space for a critical 
humanities as a consciously decolonizing project 
(by decolonizing I do not simply mean the formal 
end of colonialism but, following Fanon, the form 
and content of pedagogies and practices devoted 
to the decolonization of the mind)? Since such a 
conception runs counter to the university in the 
global market place that judges itself in those 
terms, what is to be done within the situation 
and places we find ourselves? Also on what 
philosophic ground and from what principle do we 
ask the question? Certainly, we cannot take the 
existence of a public sphere, of public 
intellectuals, and any claim of intellectual 
autonomy as either guaranteed or unproblematic.

For Fanon education is always political 
education. In practice all education is political 
and education is political in all its forms of 
socialization and in its disciplines. In other 
words education helps us organize our lives, 
helps us think and act, help us think and create 
images of justice. Fanon means something 
different by political education. Just as for 
Fanon culture has to become a fighting culture, 
education has to become about total liberation. 
De-colonial education has to be a total critique 
and a transformative experiential process. Indeed 
this notion of education as transformative is 
often recognized on the private level in the 
rhetoric of individual entrepreneurship that 
often powers the discourse of the university’s 
value, but the issue for a de-colonial national 
education is an education that helps create a 
social consciousness and a social individual. 
Fanon is not concerned with educating the power 
elites to lead but to promote self-confidence 
among the mass of people, to teach the masses, as 
he puts it, that everything depends on them. This 
is not simply a version of community or adult 
education and certainly not of a hyperdermic 
notion of conscientization. Let me give an 
example that focuses less on content than form. 
In ‘Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution’ (‘A Dying 
Colonialism’) Fanon has an essay on the radio, 
‘the voice of Algeria.’ What becomes clear is the 
importance of the form of the meeting. He 
describes a room of people listening to the 
radio, and the militant ­ namely the teacher ­ is 
among them, but (jammed by the French) there is 
only white noise on the radio. After a long 
discussion the participants agree about what has 
taken place; the teacher becomes an informed 
discussant, not a director. The form of the 
classroom is a democratic space, and the result 
is in a sense the point that political education 
is about self-empowerment as social individuals. 
It is a new collectivity, a new solidarity. The 
reference to the voice of Algeria is simply an 
example that helps to emphasize the processes at 
stake. The wider issue of the politics of 
pedagogy and curriculum must include the 
geography of the postcolonial university, its 
buildings, its gates, its barriers, its 
classrooms and all its spatial set ups. 
Colonialism, Fanon argues, is totalitarian. It 
inhabits every relationship and every space. The 
university produces and reproduces reification 
and thus has to be thoroughly reconsidered. But 
that reconsideration doesn’t come in one fell 
swoop; it is a process and a praxis, but one that 
also must include its philosophy and its raison d’être.

This is not a call to the barricades even if it 
is a call to ideological combat to have one’s 
ears open, to not confine new development in a 
priori categories. In other words, a de-colonial 
praxis would have to begin from the movement from 
practice not simply where the people dwell in 
those thousands of revolts taking place across 
the country but in their self-organization. 
Ideological combat, or a fighting culture, as 
Fanon explains in ‘The Wretched’, is quite simply 
engaged intellectual work. In other words, and 
this is obvious, it is not about intellectuals 
going to the rural areas to pick up a scythe and 
be with the people. I am not saying that that 
can’t be done, but that is not intellectual work, 
and it certainly does not challenge the division 
between mental and manual labour. So to conclude, 
what makes possible the intellectual capacity to 
see into the reasons for popular action, or in 
short, the rationality of revolt?

In the revolutionary moment of the anti-colonial 
struggle Fanon writes of the ‘honest 
intellectual,’ who, committed to social change, 
enters what he calls an ‘occult zone,’ engaging 
the notion of the transformation of reality with 
a real sense of uncertainty while also coming to 
understand what is humanly possible. This zone is 
a space that is being shaped by a movement which, 
he says, in ‘On National Culture,’ is beginning 
to call everything into question (1968, 227). 
‘The zone of hidden fluctuation’ (2004, 163) or 
‘occult instability’ (1968, 227) [C’est dans ce 
lieu de déséquilibre occulte 2002 215] ‘where the 
people dwell’ is not a ghostly movement but 
corporeally alive. If honest intellectuals feel 
the instability of it, it is because they cannot 
really take a living role, that is to say a 
disalienated role, in this movement unless they 
recognise the extent of their alienation from it 
(1968, 226). But the intellectual’s role need not 
be a mysterious one. Rather it can be quite 
practical, grounded in a sharing of reason where 
trust is implicit. This of course means that the 
intellectual must give up the position of 
privilege and begin to comprehend that the 
‘workless,’ ‘less than human’ and ‘useless’ 
people do think concretely in terms of social 
transformation (see 1968 127). After all this new 
zone of movement and self-movement ­ what one 
might also call a radical zone of dialectical 
leaps in thought and activity (see James 1980) ­ 
is a space where souls ‘are crystallized and 
perceptions and lives transfigured’ (translation 
altered 227; 2004,163). Fanon’s language is 
almost transcendental here, and one may argue 
that such heavenly ‘authenticity’ born of this 
revolutionary moment seems as impossible as the 
idea of the excluded, the uncounted and 
unaccountable, the damned of the earth, upsetting 
the household arrangements of the here and now, 
creating a genuine moment (and zone) or community 
where trust and the sharing of reason is 
implicit. Fanon is not speaking of some heavenly 
space of some future afterlife; he locates the 
space very much in the contingent now and that is 
being lived, quite practically and unstably, in 
the present. This ramshackle movement from 
practice as a form of theory (see Dunayevskaya 
1988), that is to say as both force and reason, 
is inherently uncertain and also, at the same 
time, unexceptional. It challenges reason as it 
is commonly accepted (instrumental, technical or 
even the professionally ‘critical’) and decenters 
it, moving it closer to the reason or reasoning 
of so many of those who have been considered 
unreasonable, but who in a dialectical logic are 
implicitly proposing a new humanism.

One of the challenges of Fanonian Practices in 
South Africa, from Biko to Abahlali is 
epistemological; it is to think of thinking from 
the underside, if you will. The struggle school 
is a struggle, as Richard Pithouse puts it. And 
let’s be clear sometimes that school comes into 
contradiction with the university system and can 
have dire costs both in terms of employment and 
in terms of threats of violence. Fanon talks 
about ‘snatching’ knowledge from the colonial 
universities; he is also aware of the great 
sacrifices that this can entail. In ‘The 
Wretched’ he makes a point to distinguish between 
the hobnobbing postcolonial intelligentsia and 
the honest intellectual who abhors careerism, 
distrusts the race for positions, and who is 
still committed to fundamental change even if he 
or she presently does not see its possibility.

What if the vaunted position of ‘intellectual’ 
does not require a degree from a ‘world class’ 
institution? The public intellectual without a 
university accreditation is becoming almost 
unthinkable. But to be relevant the national 
university has to be transformative, 
self-critical and also open to the experiences 
and minds of the common people who have been 
often excluded; not simply an accrediting agency 
for service industries, the university instead 
must be dedicated to the growth of every kind of genius.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This was a keynote address delivered at the 
Critical Caribbean Symposium Series ‘50 Years 
Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and 
the Bahamas,’ Friday 2, December 2011 at The 
College of the Bahamas. It was first published in 
<http://thinkingafricarhodesuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/12/50-years-later-fanons-legacy.html>Thinking 
Africa.
* Please send comments to 
<mailto:editor at pambazuka.org>editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org 
or comment online at <http://www.pambazuka.org/>Pambazuka News.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Abane, Beläid. 2011 in Nigel C. Gibson, 
editor, Living Fanon. New York: Palgrave
2. Cherki, Alice. 2006. Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Cleaver, Kathleen, Neal. 1998. “Back to Africa: 
The Evolution of the International Section of the 
Black Panther Party” in Charles E. Jones eds. The 
Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore MD: Black Classic Press
3. Dunayevskaya. Raya. 1988. Marxism and Freedom. 
New York: Columbia University Press
4. Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte, 2002.
5. __________. 1967a. Black Skin White Masks. 
Translated by Lars Markman. New York: Grove.
6. __________. 1967b. Toward the African 
Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
7. __________. 1967c. A Dying Colonialism. 
Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
8. __________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. 
Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove.
9. __________. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. 
Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove.
10. Glissant, E 1999. Caribbean Discourses: 
Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
11. James, C.L.R. 1980. Notes on Dialectics London: Allison and Busby.
Reverend Mavuso. 2011. 
<http://www.abahlali.org/node/8495>“Climate 
Change and Global Warming are perpetuated by the 
capitalists to oppress the poor to make profit”.
12. Wright, Richard. 1956. “The Neuroses of 
Conquest,” The Nation, October 20. pp. 33-331
13. Wright, Richard. 1995. White Man Listen. New York: Harper Collins.
Zikode, S’bu. 2011. “Upgrades v Evictions,” 
September 29 at <http://www.abahlali.org/node/8374>abalhali.org.

END NOTES

[1] Fanon studied and practiced with Tosquelles 
before leaving France for Algiers. Tosquelles who 
was carrying out a revolution in psychiatry at 
Saint Alban and was an anticolonialist grew up in 
Catalonia and had been an active anti-stalinist during the Spanish civil war.
[2] Glissant writes that “it is difficult for a 
French Caribbean individual to be the brother, 
friend, or quite simply the associate or fellow 
countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French 
Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to 
have acted on his ideas, through his involvement 
in the Algerian struggle” (1999 25). Fanon made a 
“complete break” and yet Martinican intellectuals 
have failed to recognize him almost at all. He 
adds that they could not find in Fanon a figure 
who “awakened (in the deepest sense of the word) 
the peoples of the contemporary world” (1999 69).
[3] Wright’s review of the English translation of 
Mannoni’s book (which was published in 1956) in 
The Nation (Oct 20, 1956) was similar to Fanon’s 
critique in Black Skin White Masks. Titled “The 
Neuroses of Conquest,” Wright praised Mannoni’s 
book for focusing on the psychology of the 
“restless” Europeans who set out for world “that 
would permit free play for their repressed 
instincts” but he criticized Mannoni for creating 
the impression that the Madagascar “natives are 
somehow the White man’s Burden.” Like Fanon’s 
alienated Black, the native, Wright argues, 
vainly attempts “to embrace the world of white 
faces that rejects it” and in reaction to this 
rejection ”seeks refuge in tradition. But he 
concludes “but it is too late” there is “haven in neither.”




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