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<h2><b>50 years later: Fanon's legacy<br><br>
</b></h2><h4><b>Nigel C Gibson<br><br>
2011-12-21, Issue
<a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/564">564<br>
</a><a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78860">
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/78860</a></b></h4><font size=3>
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.<br><br>
‘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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
CONTEXTS AND GEOGRAPHIES<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
This was part of Fanon’s context.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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’.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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’.<br><br>
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).<br><br>
THE REALITY OF THE NATION<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.’<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
‘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).<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.’<br><br>
This type of shift in cognition represents a shift in
epistemology.<br><br>
EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS<br><br>
* 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
<a href="http://thinkingafricarhodesuniversity.blogspot.com/2011/12/50-years-later-fanons-legacy.html">
Thinking Africa</a>.<br>
* Please send comments to
<a href="mailto:editor@pambazuka.org">editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org</a> or
comment online at <a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/">Pambazuka
News</a>.<br><br>
BIBLIOGRAPHY<br><br>
1. Abane, Beläid. 2011 in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Living Fanon. New
York: Palgrave<br>
2. Cherki, Alice. 2006. Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press<br>
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<br>
3. Dunayevskaya. Raya. 1988. Marxism and Freedom. New York: Columbia
University Press<br>
4. Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte,
2002.<br>
5. __________. 1967a. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Lars Markman.
New York: Grove.<br>
6. __________. 1967b. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon
Chevalier. New York: Grove.<br>
7. __________. 1967c. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon
Chevalier. New York: Grove.<br>
8. __________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance
Farrington. New York: Grove.<br>
9. __________. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard
Philcox. New York: Grove.<br>
10. Glissant, E 1999. Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.<br>
11. James, C.L.R. 1980. Notes on Dialectics London: Allison and
Busby.<br>
Reverend Mavuso. 2011.
<a href="http://www.abahlali.org/node/8495">“Climate Change and Global
Warming are perpetuated by the capitalists to oppress the poor to make
profit”</a>.<br>
12. Wright, Richard. 1956. “The Neuroses of Conquest,” The Nation,
October 20. pp. 33-331<br>
13. Wright, Richard. 1995. White Man Listen. New York: Harper
Collins.<br>
Zikode, S’bu. 2011. “Upgrades v Evictions,” September 29 at
<a href="http://www.abahlali.org/node/8374">abalhali.org</a>.<br><br>
END NOTES<br><br>
[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.<br>
[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).<br>
[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.”<br><br>
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