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Weekend Edition March 13-15, 201<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>A New Fanonian Moment?</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">The Legacy of Frantz Fanon</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by HAMZA HAMOUCHENE</div>
<div class="main-text">
<p><em>London.</em></p>
<p>Frantz Fanon died a few months before Algeria’s independence in
July 1962. He did not live to see his adoptive country becoming
free from French colonial domination, something he believed had
become inevitable. This radical intellectual and revolutionary
devoted himself, body and soul to the Algerian National
liberation and was a prism, through which many revolutionaries
abroad understood Algeria and one of the reasons the country
became synonymous with Third World revolution.</p>
<p>With the weight of its recent past and in particular its long
struggle for independence that served as a model for several
liberation fronts across the globe and given its assertive
diplomacy and audacious foreign policy in the 60s and 70s, the
Algerian capital was to become a Mecca for all revolutionaries.
As Amilcar Cabral announced at a press conference at the margins
of the first Pan-African Festival held in Algiers on 1969: “Pick
a pen and take note: the Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca,
the Christians to the Vatican and the national liberation
movements to Algiers!” Fanon would have been surely proud of
that moment of Algeria’s and Africa’s history. The festival was
impregnated with a revolutionary fervour and with his ideas
around a combative culture that is fuelled by people’s daily
struggles. The radical atmosphere of a few days in July was
captured in an important and powerful film by William Klein: <a
href="http://www.redpepper.org.uk/culture-and-revolution-the-pan-african-festival-of-algiers/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.redpepper.org.uk']);">The
Pan-African Festival of Algiers, 1969</a>, which attests that
this Pan-African gathering was not only a slogan or a generous
utopia but also a genuine meeting of African cultures in unison
in their denunciations of colonialism and fight for freedom.</p>
<p>Political leaders like António Agostinho Neto and Cabral saw
culture at the heart of their concerns because they associated
it with liberation which they theorised as a form of political
action. They strongly echo Fanon’s words in <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802141323/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);"><em>The
Wretched of the Earth</em></a>: “A national culture is not a
folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover
the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs
of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and
less attached to the ever-present reality of the people….It is
around the people’s struggles that African-Negro culture takes
on substance and not around songs, poems or folklore.” <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn1"
name="_ednref1">[i]</a></p>
<p>It is worth bearing this in mind when we think about the role
and the conception of culture today. Is it simply a culture that
entertains people and diverts them from the real issues? Or is
it a culture that speaks to the people and advances their
resistance and struggles? Is it an independent and free culture
that fosters dissent and criticism or is it a folkloric one that
comes under the suffocating patronage of some authoritarian
elites?</p>
<p>Fanon had high hopes and strongly believed in revolutionary
Algeria and his illuminating book “<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802150276/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);"><em>Studies
in a Dying Colonialism</em></a>” (or as it is known in
French <em>L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne</em>) attests
to that and shows how liberation does not come as a gift . It is
seized by the masses with their own hands and by seizing it they
themselves are transformed. He strongly argued that for the
masses, the most elevated form of culture, that is to say, of
progress, is to resist imperialist domination and penetration.
For Fanon, revolution is a transformative process that will
create ‘new souls’. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn2"
name="_ednref2">[ii]</a> For this reason Fanon closes his 1959
book with the words: ‘The revolution in depth, the true one,
precisely because it changes man and renews society, has reached
an advanced stage. This oxygen which creates and shapes a new
humanity – this, too, is the Algerian revolution.’ <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn3"
name="_ednref3">[iii]</a></p>
<p>Fanon’s concern with what the masses do and say and think and
his belief that it is the masses, and not leaders nor systems,
who make and determine history, is at the centre stage in his
books. It is crucial to analyse Fanon’s testimony because it
illustrates how, in the midst of the worst disasters, the masses
find the means of reorganising themselves and continuing their
existence when they have a common objective. In that respect,
Fanon’s descriptions of the conduct of the masses is of great
importance as they show how the masses go on living and how they
go forward. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn4"
name="_ednref4">[iv]</a></p>
<p>This focus and vivid attachment to the wretched of the earth,
their lives and their struggle is put in opposition to an
instinctive aversion to a national bourgeoisie that will betray
the masses, halt liberation and set-up a national system of
tyranny and exploitation, reminiscent of the colonial
counterpart. Fanon rightly observed how nationalist
consciousness can very easily lead to ‘frozen rigidity’, merely
replacing the departed white masters with coloured equivalents.</p>
<p><strong>Understanding Africa: Fanon today</strong></p>
<p>More than five decades after his death, the question seems to
be: why Fanon is relevant now? Rather than, is he relevant at
all? It would be instructive to explore how this revolutionary
would think and act in the face of contemporary issues in Africa
and the world.</p>
<p>Fanon’s work, written five decades ago still bears a prophetic
power as an accurate description of what happened in Algeria and
beyond. Reading Fanon’s words and especially ‘The Pitfalls of
National Consciousness’ his famous chapter in <em>The Wretched
of the Earth</em> (based on his reflections on his West
African experiences as well as his concerns about the Algerian
revolution),<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn5"
name="_ednref5">[v]</a> one cannot help being absorbed and
shaken by their truth and foresight on the bankruptcy and
sterility of national bourgeoisies in Africa and the Middle East
today; bourgeoisies that tended to replace the colonial force
with a new class-based system replicating the old colonial
structures of exploitation and oppression. Today we can see
states across the formerly colonised world that have ‘bred
pathologies of power’ as Eqbal Ahmad has called them, giving
rise to national security states, to dictatorships, oligarchies
and one-party systems. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn6"
name="_ednref6">[vi]</a></p>
<p>What has become of Algeria today with oil money playing an
enormously important role in pacifying the population and paying
for a bloated and ubiquitous security force corresponds to what
Fanon feared. His vision and politics were and are not to the
taste of the ruling class and that’s why he is marginalised
today and reduced to just another anti-colonial figure, stripped
of his incandescent attack on the stupidity and on the
intellectual and spiritual poverty of the national bourgeoisies.</p>
<p>As Edward Said argued, the true prophetic genius of <em>The
Wretched of the Earth</em> is when Fanon senses the divide
between the nationalist bourgeoisie in Algeria and the FLN’s
liberationist tendencies. He was the first major theorist of
anti-imperialism to realise that orthodox nationalism followed
the same track hewn out by imperialism, which while it appeared
to concede authority to the nationalist bourgeoisie was really
extending its hegemony.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn7"
name="_ednref7">[vii]</a> Fanon put it to us bluntly: ‘History
teaches clearly that the battle against colonialism does not run
straight away along the lines of nationalism.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn8"
name="_ednref8">[viii]</a> He then warns us that we must take
a rapid step from national consciousness to political and social
consciousness if we really wish our countries to avoid
regression and uncertainties.</p>
<p>In this state of affairs the national bourgeoisie dispense with
popular legitimacy and turns its back more and more on the
interior and the realities of uneven development and is only
interested in exporting the enormous profits it derives from the
exploitation of people to foreign countries. Today’s events
confirm this assertion as we can see a scandalous and endemic
corruption and ‘legalised’ robbery in Algeria, Nigeria, Egypt,
Ben Ali’s Tunisia and South Africa, only to mention a few.</p>
<p>In Algeria for example, an anti-national, sterile and
unproductive bourgeoisie is getting the upper-hand in running
state affairs and in directing its economic choices. This
comprador elite is the biggest threat to the sovereignty of the
nation as it is selling off the economy to foreign capitals and
multinationals and cooperating with imperialism in its ‘war on
terror’, another pretext for expanding the domination and
scrambling for resources.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn9"
name="_ednref9">[ix]</a> It is a bourgeoisie that renounced
the autonomous development project initiated in the 1960s and
1970s, and as Fanon eloquently put it is ‘incapable of great
ideas and inventiveness and does not even succeed in extracting
spectacular concessions from the West, such as investments which
would be of value for the country’s economy.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn10"
name="_ednref10">[x]</a> In the contrary, it now offers one
concession after another for blind privatisations and projects
that will undermine the country’s sovereignty and will endanger
its population and environment – the exploitation of shale gas
for example.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn11"
name="_ednref11">[xi]</a> Today, Algeria – but also Tunisia,
Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Gabon, Angola and South Africa
among others – follows the dictates of the new instruments of
imperialism such as the IMF, the World Bank and negotiates entry
into the World Trade Organisation. Other African countries are
still using the CFA franc, a currency inherited from the times
of colonialism and still under the control of the French
Treasury. Fanon would have been revolted at this <em>bêtise</em>
and sheer mindlessness. How can we go on being submissive to
imperialism bowing to every folly to satisfy foreign capital?</p>
<p>Fanon had predicted this ominous situation and the shocking
behaviour of the national bourgeoisie when he noted that its
mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation but
rather consists of ‘being the transmission line between the
nation and capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today
puts on the masque of neo-colonialism.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn12"
name="_ednref12">[xii]</a> This is where we can appreciate the
lasting value of employing Fanon’s critical insights when he
describes for us the contemporary postcolonial reality, a
reality shaped by a national bourgeoisie
‘unabashedly…anti-national,’ opting he adds, for an abhorrent
path of a conventional bourgeoisie, ‘a bourgeoisie which is
stupidly, contemptibly and cynically bourgeois.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn13"
name="_ednref13">[xiii]</a></p>
<p>That is exactly what happened in Algeria and other countries in
Africa. These regimes are content with the role as the Western
capitals’ business agent and are only preoccupied with filling
their pockets as rapidly as possible, ignoring the deplorable
stagnation into which their countries sink further and deeper.
Fanon would have been shocked by the ongoing international
division of labour where we Africans ‘still export raw materials
and continue ‘being Europe’s small farmers who specialise in
unfinished products.’ <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn14"
name="_ednref14">[xiv]</a></p>
<p>Fanon’s critique of tourism, which he regarded as a
quintessential post-colonial industry, must be revisited and
pondered over. He condemns the fact that nationalist elites have
become ‘the organisers of parties’ for their Western
counterparts in the midst of overwhelming poverty for their
populations. Bereft of ideas and cut off the people, these
elites he argues, will in practice set up their countries as
‘the brothel of Europe.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn15"
name="_ednref15">[xv]</a> This is not just a Caribbean
experience; it has become the experience of many countries in
Africa such as post-apartheid South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt and
Morocco.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In these poor, under-developed countries, where the rule is
that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest
poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the
regime; an army and a police force (another rule which must
not be forgotten) which are advised by foreign experts. The
strength of the police and the power of the army are
proportionate to the stagnation in which the rest of the
nation is sunk. By dint of yearly loans, concessions are
snatched up by foreigners; scandals are numerous, ministers
grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of
parliament feather their nests and there is not a soul down to
the simple policeman or the customs officer who does not join
in the great procession of corruption.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn16"
name="_ednref16">[xvi]</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This raging passage from The Wretched is a fairly accurate
portrayal of the situation in many African countries where
repression and suppression of freedoms are the rule – helped of
course by foreign expertise – and where greedy elites
institutionalise corruption and serve foreign interests.</p>
<p>Fanon was one of only a few radical intellectuals to point out
the dangers of a ‘carefully nurtured’ nativism, to borrow Edward
Said’s words, on a socio-political movement like decolonisation.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn17"
name="_ednref17">[xvii]</a> From nationalism, we pass to
ultra-nationalism, then to chauvinism and finally to racism and
tribalism. This is seen in several exclusionary and dogmatic
ideologies like Arabism, Senghor’s Négritude, and the appeals to
pure or authentic Islam, which had disastrous consequences on
the populations. Again take the example of Algeria, where
cultural diversity was ignored for a narrower culturalist
conception of Algerian identity, when the Berber dimension of
the Algerian cultural heritage was marginalised and reduced to
folkloric manifestations, when the elite engaged in a sclerotic
arabisation policy, when it developed a conservative
interpretation of religion and a reactionary vision of the role
of women in society by adopting Islamist-appeasing social
measures such as the notorious and retrograde Family Code of
1984.</p>
<p>Edward Said noted that more effort seemed to be spent in
bolstering the idea that to be Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, or Saudi
is a sufficient end, rather than in thinking critically, even
audaciously about the national program itself.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn18"
name="_ednref18">[xviii]</a> Identity politics assumes the
primary place, and ‘African unity takes off the mask and
crumbles into regionalism inside the hollow shell of nationalism
itself.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn19"
name="_ednref19">[xix]</a> Fanon argued for going beyond the
first steps of nativist assertive identity towards true
liberation that involves a transformation of social
consciousness beyond national consciousness.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn20"
name="_ednref20">[xx]</a></p>
<p>Fanon’s vision of the future Algeria, which he shared with his
mentor Abane Ramdane, the architect of the revolution, was a
secular democratic society with the primacy of citizenship over
identities (Arab, Amazigh, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, European,
White, Black, etc): ‘in the new society that is being built,’
Fanon wrote in <em>Studies in a Dying Colonialism</em>, ‘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.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn21"
name="_ednref21">[xxi]</a> He did not forget the role of women
in the new society when he said that every effort has to be made
to mobilise men and women as quickly as possible and admonished
against ‘the danger of perpetuating the feudal tradition which
holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element over the
feminine.’ <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn22"
name="_ednref22">[xxii]</a> Fanon demonstrated in an essay he
wrote in his 1959 book entitled ‘<em>Algeria Unveiled’</em> how
women were essential elements in the Algerian revolution and how
the necessities of combat gave rise to new attitudes and new
modes; ‘the virtually taboo character assumed by the veil in the
colonial situation disappeared almost entirely in the course of
the liberating struggle.’ <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn23"
name="_ednref23">[xxiii]</a></p>
<p><strong>Alternatives: A second Fanonian moment?</strong></p>
<p>Alas, such a generous vision of a pluralist society is yet to
be achieved and this is the second Fanonian moment of
decolonisation, a moment that breaks away with the hierarchies,
divisions and regionalisms constituted by imperialism by
embracing a universal humanism (that will include men and
women), and by building regional and international solidarities.</p>
<p>The sad contemporary reality that Fanon described and warned
against five decades ago gives little doubt that were he alive
today, Fanon would be hugely disappointed at the result of his
efforts and those of other revolutionaries. He turned out to be
right about the rapacity and divisiveness of national
bourgeoisies and the limits of conventional nationalism but he
did not offer us a prescription for making the transition after
decolonisation to a new liberating political order. Perhaps,
there is no such thing as a detailed plan or solution. Perhaps
he viewed it as a protracted process that will be informed by
praxis and above all by confidence in the masses and their
revolutionary potential in figuring out the liberating
alternative.</p>
<p>However, Fanon alerts us that the scandalous enrichment of this
profiteering caste will be accompanied by ‘a decisive awakening
on the part of the people and a growing awareness that promised
stormy days to come.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn24"
name="_ednref24">[xxiv]</a> So we can see Fanon’s rationality
of revolt and rebellion, suddenly made absolutely clear by the
Arab uprisings in 2011. What has started in Tunisia and then
Egypt’s Tahrir Square has become a new global revolt, spreading
to Spain and the Indignados movement, to Athens against the
vicious austerity measures, to the urban revolt in the UK, to
the massive student mobilisation to end education for profit in
Chile, to the Occupy movement against the 1%, to the revolt in
Turkey, Brazil and so on. The popular masses in all these
countries rebelled against the violence of the contemporary
world offering them only growing pauperisation, marginalisation
and the enrichment of the few at the expense and damnation of
the majority.</p>
<p>Countries like Egypt and Tunisia were long praised for the
‘wonderful’ achievements of their economies with high economic
growths that do not reflect at all the abject poverty and the
deep inequalities entrenched in those countries. The masses
erupted into the political scene, discovered their political
will and power and beginning again to make history. As the
Egyptians said of January 25<sup>th</sup>, the start of their
revolution, ‘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.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn25"
name="_ednref25">[xxv]</a> Egyptians and Tunisians did not
only revolt to demand democracy and freedom but they rebelled
for bread and dignity, against the oppressive socio-economic
conditions under which they lived for decades. They rose up to
challenge the Manichean geographies of oppressor and oppressed
(so well described by Fanon in <em>The Wretched</em>),
geographies imposed on them by the globalised
capitalist-imperialist system.</p>
<p>What can Fanon tells us about what happened in Egypt since 2011
with the military coup and the undergoing counter-revolution?
Fanon would probably say: ‘The bourgeoisie should not be allowed
to find the conditions necessary for its existence and its
growth. In other words, the combined effort of the masses led by
a party and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed
with revolutionary principles ought to bar the way to this
useless and harmful middle class.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn26"
name="_ednref26">[xxvi]</a> Liberals, Islamists or military
Generals, what’s the difference? All of them belong to a sterile
bourgeoisie aligned with the demand of global neoliberal
capitalism.</p>
<p>Fanon would also repeat to us an important observation he made
on some African revolutions (including the Algerian one), which
is their unifying character sidelining any thinking of a
socio-political ideology on how to radically transform society.
This is a great weakness that we witnessed yet again with the
Egyptian revolution. ‘Nationalism is not a political doctrine,
nor a programme’, says Fanon.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn27"
name="_ednref27">[xxvii]</a> He insists on the necessity of a
revolutionary political party that can take the demands of the
masses forward, a political party that will educate the people
politically, that will be ‘a tool in the hands of the people’
and that will be the energetic spokesman and the ‘incorruptible
defender of the masses.’ For Fanon, reaching such a conception
of a party necessitates first of all ridding ourselves of the
bourgeois notion of elitism and ‘the contemptuous attitude that
the masses are incapable of governing themselves.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn28"
name="_ednref28">[xxviii]</a></p>
<p>For Fanon, the “we” was always a creative “we”, a “we” of
political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn29"
name="_ednref29">[xxix]</a> For him, the nation does not exist
except in a socio-political and economic program ‘worked out by
revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and
enthusiasm by the masses.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn30"
name="_ednref30">[xxx]</a> Unfortunately, what we see today is
the antithesis of what Fanon strongly argued for. We see the
stupidity of the anti-democratic bourgeoisies embodied in their
tribal and family dictatorships, banning the people, often with
crude force from participating in their country’s development
and fostering a climate of immense hostility between rulers and
ruled. Fanon, in his conclusion of <em>The Wretched</em>,
argues that we have to work out new concepts through an ongoing
political education that gets enriched through mass struggle.
Political education for him is not merely about political
speeches but rather about ‘opening the minds’ of the people,
‘awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn31"
name="_ednref31">[xxxi]</a></p>
<p>This is perhaps one of the greatest legacies of Fanon. His
radical and generous vision is so refreshing and rooted in the
people’s daily struggles that open up spaces for new ideas and
imaginings. For him, everything depends on the masses, hence his
idea of radical intellectuals engaged in and with people’s
movements and capable of coming up with new concepts in a
non-technical and non-professional language. Just as for Fanon,
culture has to become a fighting culture, education has to
become about total liberation too. He says, ‘If nationalism is
not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very
rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and
political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads up a
blind alley.’ <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn32"
name="_ednref32">[xxxii]</a> And that’s what we need to bear
in mind when we talk about education in schools and
universities. Decolonial education in the Fanonian sense is an
education that helps create a social consciousness and a social
individual.</p>
<p>For Fanon, the militant or the intellectual must not take
shortcuts in the name of getting things done as this is inhuman
and sterile. It is all about coming and thinking together, which
is the foundation of the liberated society. And this is not only
abstraction as he gives us concrete examples from the Algerian
revolution, writing of how the creation of
production/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN
gave rise to theoretical questions about the accumulation of
capital: ‘In those regions where we have been able to carry out
successfully these interesting experiments, where we have
watched man being created by revolutionary beginnings’, because
people began to realise that one works more with one’s brain and
one’s heart than with one’s muscles and sweat. <a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn33"
name="_ednref33">[xxxiii]</a> He also tells us about another
experience in <em>Studies in a Dying Colonialism</em> in an
essay on the radio, ‘the voice of Algeria.’<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn34"
name="_ednref34">[xxxiv]</a> He describes a meeting in a room
where people are listening to the radio with the militant
(teacher) in their midst. This form of the classroom he wrote
about is a democratic space where the teacher is an informed
discussant, not a director and where the purpose of political
education is self-empowerment.</p>
<p>An intellectual or a militant cannot be truly productive in
their mission of serving the people without being committed to
radical change, without giving up the position of privilege
(careerism) and without challenging the divisions that prevail
under capitalism: leader vs. the masses, mental vs. manual
labour, urban vs. rural, centre vs. periphery and so on. For
Fanon, the centre (capital city, official culture, appointed
leader) must be deconsecrated and demystified. He argues for a
new system of mobile relationships that must replace the
hierarchies inherited from imperialism.<a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_edn35"
name="_ednref35">[xxxv]</a> In order to achieve liberation,
the consciousness of self, a never-ending process of discovery,
empathy, encouragement and communication with the other must be
unleashed. That is one of the fundamental lessons that we must
heed when we build grass root social movements that are diverse,
non-hierarchical and intersectional.</p>
<p>Fanon was not a Marxist but he strongly believed that
capitalism with imperialism and its divisions enslave people.
Moreover, his precocious diagnosis of the incapability of the
nationalist elites in fulfilling their historical mission
demonstrates the continuing relevance of Fanon’s thought today.
In spite of his own failure -his early death at the age of 36
might be to blame here- to put forward a detailed ideology of
how to go beyond imperialism and orthodox nationalism and
achieve liberation and universalism, he surely managed to
provide us with crucial tools to work it out for ourselves: his
illuminating conception of education always influenced by
practice and also transformative, striving to liberate all
mankind from imperialism. This is the living legacy of a
revolutionary and a great thinker.</p>
<p><em><strong>Hamza Hamouchene</strong> is an activist and
President of the Algerian Solidarity Campaign based in London.</em></p>
<p><strong><em>Notes.</em></strong></p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref1"
name="_edn1">[i]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Frantz Fanon,
Penguin, 1967, p188-189.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref2"
name="_edn2">[ii]</a> The phrase ‘new souls’ was borrowed from
Aimé Césaire.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref3"
name="_edn3">[iii]</a> A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon,
Grove Press, 1967, p181.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref4"
name="_edn4">[iv]</a> A deeper analysis is provided in “A
Dying Colonialism”.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref5"
name="_edn5">[v]</a> The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,
Chapter in <em>The Wretched of the Earth, </em>p119-165</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref6"
name="_edn6">[vi]</a> The Neo-Fascist State: Notes on the
Pathology of Power in the Third World, Eqbal Ahmad, Arab Studies
Quarterly 3, No.2 (Spring 1981), p170-180.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref7"
name="_edn7">[vii]</a> Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism,
Vintage, 1994, p328.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref8"
name="_edn8">[viii]</a> The Wreteched of The Earth, Fanon,
p119.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref9"
name="_edn9">[ix]</a> Is Algeria an Anti-Imperialist State,
Hamza Hamouchene, Jadaliyya, October 2013.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref10"
name="_edn10">[x]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon, p141.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref11"
name="_edn11">[xi]</a> Algeria, an Immense Bazaar: The
Politics and Economic Consequences of Infitah, Hamza Hamouchene,
Jadaliyya, January 2013.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref12"
name="_edn12">[xii]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon,
p122.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref13"
name="_edn13">[xiii]</a> Ibid, p121.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref14"
name="_edn14">[xiv]</a> Ibid, p122.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref15"
name="_edn15">[xv]</a> Ibid, p123.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref16"
name="_edn16">[xvi]</a> Ibid, p138.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref17"
name="_edn17">[xvii]</a> Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said,
p371.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref18"
name="_edn18">[xviii]</a> Ibid, p361-362.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref19"
name="_edn19">[xix]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon,
p128.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref20"
name="_edn20">[xx]</a> Ibid, p165.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref21"
name="_edn21">[xxi]</a> A Dying Colonialism, p32 and p152.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref22"
name="_edn22">[xxii]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, p163.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref23"
name="_edn23">[xxiii]</a> A Dying Colonialism, Frantz Fanon,
1967, p61.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref24"
name="_edn24">[xxiv]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, p134.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref25"
name="_edn25">[xxv]</a> A quote by Ahmad Mahmoud in an article
by the Guardian, “Mubarak is still here, but there’s been a
revolution in our minds, say protesters”, Chris McGreal, 5<sup>th</sup>
Feb 2011.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref26"
name="_edn26">[xxvi]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon,
p140.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref27"
name="_edn27">[xxvii]</a> Ibid, p163.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref28"
name="_edn28">[xxviii]</a> Ibid, p151.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref29"
name="_edn29">[xxix]</a> 50 Years Later: Fanon’s Legacy, Nigel
C Gibson, Keynote address at the Caribbean Symposium Series “50
Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the
Bahamas, December 2011.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref30"
name="_edn30">[xxx]</a> The Wretched of The Earth, Fanon,
p164.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref31"
name="_edn31">[xxxi]</a> Ibid, p159.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref32"
name="_edn32">[xxxii]</a> Ibid, p165.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref33"
name="_edn33">[xxxiii]</a> The Wretched Of The Earth, Fanon,
p154.</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref34"
name="_edn34">[xxxiv]</a> A Dying Colonialism, Fanon, p69-97</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/the-legacy-of-frantz-fanon/#_ednref35"
name="_edn35">[xxxv]</a> Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said,
p330.</p>
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