Frantz Fanon: My hope and hero

It is impossible to do justice to this remarkable work in the short space I have at my disposal.

Fanon’s The Damned is one of those rare books which stands out not only through the brilliance of its penetrating social and psychological insights, or through the sheer vigour and originality of its style, but derives its greatest importance from the fact of being the key work which embodies the zeitgeist of a revolutionary social movement. That same relationship which the works of Voltaire and Rousseau bore to the French Revolution, which the Communist Manifesto to the revolutionary labour movements of the 19th century, is to be found in the relationship between The Damned and the movement of the colonised peoples of the world in overthrowing their oppressors.

For The Damned is not only a reflection, not just another run‐of‐the‐mill analysis of colonialism and the process of decolonisation. This it certainly does better than any other work on the subject I have yet read. However, it goes far beyond this and not to realise it is to miss the whole significance of the work. And this is the fact that The Damned is itself a part of the revolution which, on one level, it is analysing. It is the heart and soul of a movement, written, as it could only have been written, by one who fully participated in it. The Damned goes beyond the normal relationship of a writer and his material. It is art which transcends the reality of the separation of the creator from the thing created. It is the synthesis which emerges from the dialectical confrontation between Fanon, the colonial; Fanon, the rebel: Fanon, the child and agent of Violence; and the institutionalized violence against which he fought – the colonial situation.

ROLE OF VIOLENCE

The work begins with an exploration of the role of violence in the fight for national liberation and unity. The theme is stark, simple and direct – the process of decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon. This, it must be understood, is not only a statement concerning what is the case, but of what ought to be the case. Colonialism is seen not just as a system of material exploitation, but worse, one of spiritual impoverishment. To the European coloniser: “Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil.”

Thus the native is dehumanised; he becomes an animal, and through the processes of colonial mystification he sometimes comes to accept this degrading conception of himself. In this process of mystification the native Elite, nurtured by the colonialists, plays a vital role; and Fanon is as critical and as violent toward them as he is toward the colonialists. The people however – and it is the people who stand at the centre of Fanon’s thought – the people are never to him an abstract intellectual concept to be played about with, but the beginning and the end of the revolution, its creative force, the living, vital entity who in their simple, crude cry for more bread and more land, take up the most revolutionary of all positions – it is the people who on finally deciding that they can take no more, that their liberty must be won, and won now, instinctively take the right path.

And that is the path of violence. There can be no other way. Certainly not the pathetic farce of constitutional transfer from foreign exploiters to a local born elite who have betrayed both themselves and their people into the economic chains of neo‐colonialism.

What the people want is their land, their bread and their dignity. And they know that they can only achieve this through the exercise of their “muscular prowess”, through action and aggression. It is “the intuition of the colonised masses that their liberation must, and can only, be achieved by force.” On the collective level the people have to be mobilised in the armed struggle for liberation:

"The mobilisation of the masses, when it arises out of the war of liberation, introduces into each man's consciousnesss the ideas of the common cause, of a national destiny and of a collective history. In the same way the second phase, that of the building up of the nation, is helped on by the exsitence of this cement which has been mixed with blood and anger. This we come to a fuller appreciation of the originality of the words used in these under-developed countries. During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy and undr-development. The struggle, they say, goes on. The people realise that life is an unending struggle..."

And on the individual level we find that “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction: it makes him fearless and restores his self‐respect. . . .”

Fanon then places the role of violence in its international context. He demonstrates the usefulness of constitutional independence and the fact that “the national liberation of colonised countries unveils their true economic state and makes it seem even more unbearable . . . . what counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon is the need for a re‐ distribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it . . . . .”

SPONTANEITY

Next comes a brilliant analysis of the “strength and weaknesses or spontaneity”. It is here that Fanon exhibits most strikingly his total commitment to the people, the masses, and particularly to the rural masses of the Third World. The great mistake, he points out, of political parties in the Third World is their tendency to concentrate on the more politically conscious urban proletariat and middle‐classes. Indeed, he suggests that there is a positive suspicion of the peasantry on the part of most of the new leaders who tend to take the view that the rural population constitute the most backward, least progressive and most in the way of economic development. However, while the peasantry may well be, in normal situations, too individualistic, too ill ‐disciplined and uncontrollable, it remains a basic truth that a thorough‐ going social and political revolution is impossible without them. It is not just that they are expected to play a passive role. Rather, that the initiative must always come from them, must spring from the age which is built up during centuries of suffering and which, when it finally explodes, has the power to mould an entirely new national consciousness.

The trouble with this sort of violence, however, is that it is likely to subside just as spontaneously and as unexpectedly as it erupted. The revolutionary leader must therefore take care to anticipate this and, instead of being shocked at what may appear to be the betrayal of their own cause on the part of the peasants, be prepared to exploit the revolutionary fervour while it lasts, to channel it in the right path, and, if possible, to seize the opportunity to increase the consciousness of the masses, making them less liable to spontaneously forces. The leader in a Third World society, then, if he wishes to be truly revolutionary, must abandon the limelight of the town and the pseudo‐refinements of the coffee‐bars and university circles and move to the countryside where he must live and work among his people, especially the lumpen‐proletariat,

"that horde of starving men, uprooted from their tribe and from their clan (who) constitute one of the most spontaneous and most radically revolutionary forces of a colonised people".

By doing so the potential leader will soon come to feel the needs, the desires and the power of his people. He will also inevitably come to realise that:

"Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organised and edicated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there's nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of trumpets. There's nothing save a minimum of re-adaptation,a few reforms at the top, a flag waving: and down there at the bottom an undivided mass, still living in the middle ages, endlessly marking time."

THE PITFALLS OF NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The argument is further elaborated in a discussion of the “pitfalls of national consciousness”. Fanon goes beyond mere analysis and prescribes the right path for leaders in the Third World. The nation must not be identified with the state, or, still worse, with the political party. The level of consciousness of all sectors of the society must be increased, especially among the youth of the country, whose labour, he suggests, should be recruited on a voluntary basis for work in the national interest. Where there is an army it must be properly educated, “nationalised”, so to speak, and not allowed to drift in a vacuum, for there is nothing more dangerous than a pack of idle officers who inevitably will get ideas into their heads concerning how the country ought to be run.

Further:

"...if you really wish your country to avoid regression, for at best halts and uncertaintoes, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consiousness. The nation does not exist except in a programme which has been worked out bu revolutionary leaders and taken up with full understanding and enthusiasm by the masses..."

The argument then proceeds to an analysis of national culture. This section I found to be the most penetrating and rewarding part of the book for me, personally. Here, it is the artist, the intellectual generally, and his role in the new nation that Fanon is concerned with. How does a country legitimize its claim to nationhood? It is the task of the men of “culture” to provide an answer. One of the most common methods they have employed is that of history. The local historian ploughs back into his past to rediscover the golden era which was not only shattered by the impact of colonialism but completely denied or derided by the European masters. Thus, the “claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture”, but it performs a useful psychological function in restoring national dignity and self‐respect.

But Fanon is far too subtle and penetrating a thinker to leave the matter at that. This use of history may be all well and good in the early stages of creating a national culture, but it has its pitfalls. The dialectics of colonialism compels a counter‐attack on its own terms. Since the colonialists never bother to distinguish between different African cultures, or Arab cultures, in their condemnation of the native civilization, so in like manner, in his intellectual retaliation the native feels obliged to assert the goodness and greatness, not of his own national culture, but that of the group to which he was ascribed by the former colonial propagandists. Thus the emphasis among Africans, not on Ashanti, or Congo, or Ugandan cultures, but on African civilization; likewise among the Arabs not so long ago. Negritude went even further, for here an attempt was made to counter‐attack on a racial level:

"...The negro, never so much a negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realise that history points out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a negro culture exists..."

But of course, to pursue the demands of history in this way is to be led “up a blind alley”. For the truth is that there is no such thing as a universal African culture, des pite what Senghor, in his metaphysical speculations, would care to say; nor can the uniformity of pre‐colonial Arab civilization between the 12th and 14th centuries be ever recaptured, for the economic and political realities of the modern world do not permit it. And as for the claim which Negritude makes of a universal negro culture, this, as I have recently argued, is pure atavistic absurdity.

The fundamental problems facing the African Negro differ radically from those facing the American Negro and both in turn differ greatly from those facing the West Indian Negro. There may be historical and racial ties; certainly, there is mutual sympathy for the peculiar plights of each group; but these are no bases for common action. Thus the West Indian artist or intellectual may be far better occupied in pursuing cultural and other links with his Latin American neighbours than waste his time tracing African elements in his culture back to their roots – roots which are essentially meaningless to the mass of the people.

The artist and intellectuals of the newly emerged nation must be careful not to return “to his people by way of cultural achievements” for he will soon discover that he is no better than a stranger among them. That is, he must be fully aware of the cult ural limitations of his educational experience at Oxford or the L.S.E. or Yale, or whatever other foreign institution of learning he acquired his training. Secondly, having returned home, he should not then proceed to take another journey, this time into the past, for he will find no answers there:

" ...The native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realise that the truths of a nation are, in the first place, its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge..."

And it is in the people, in their turmoil, their restlessness, their desires, their suffering, yes, let me add, their very ignorance, that the truth shall be found and from which a national art and a national culture will spring. I can do no better, than to give Fanon’s own poetic summary of his position with which, I may add, I am in complete agreement:

"...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 inner dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say, actions which are less and less attached to the ever=present reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. A national culture in under-developed countries should therefore take its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom which thesr countries are carrying on. Men of African cultures who are still fighting in the name of African negro cultures and who have called many congresses in the name of the unity of that culture should today realise that all their efforts amount to is to make comparisons between coins and sarcophagi..."

PSYCHOANALYTIC CASE STUDIES

The final section of the book is more specialized in nature, dealing with psychoanalytic case studies of mental disorder arising out of the setting of the Algerian war of liberation. I strongly suggest to the reader that he does not succumb to the temptation to skip these studies, for they contain some remarkable insights on personality‐types which may not be altogether irrelevant to the West Indies. Who knows? These may, one day, become dangerously apposite.

The work closes, properly, on an appeal to the people of the Third World not to make the mistakes which Europe has made – those in particular of bigotry, of national arrogance, of cruelty, of the very negation of all that humanity stands for. We must seek to live up to our own expectations and not to those of Europe (or for that matter the U.S.A.):

"...For Europe, for ourselves and for Humanity, comrades, we must turn over a newleaf, we must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man..."

In this work, as well as his other publications, and in his actions when he was alive, Fanon has pointed the way to the creation of the new man. Let us follow in his footsteps.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Copyright Orlando Patterson 1966
* This article first appeared in New World Quarterly, Volume 2, Nos. 3 & 4, 1966 (Guyana Independence Issue), edited by George Lamming.
* Orlando Patterson, who was born in Jamaica, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His books include The Sociology of Slavery, Slavery and Social Death and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. He is the also the author of The Children of Sisyphus and other novels.
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