One Hundred Years of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm: Concerning Non-Violence

100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence.  In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon used the drama of Aimee Cesaire to demonstrate the use of revolutionary literature with the dialogue between the guitar and the kora music, representing the dialogue between modern and traditional instruments in national culture. He stated as follows:

“Combat literature, revolutionary literature, national literature emerges. During this phase a great many men and women who previously would never have thought of writing, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances, in prison, in the resistance or on the eve of their execution, feel the need to proclaim their nation, to portray their people and become the spokesperson of a new reality in action.”^[1]

Franz Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness, and he explained revolutionary literature as a tool to awaken the masses. Malcolm X also debated that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP. While Patrice Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers in Colonie Belge - as illustrated in the cover design of my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology. The African Union yearns for the guns to be silenced across Africa as insurgencies rage across the wretched continent; and lumpen bourgeois politicians spend hundreds of millions of dollars on weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans in genocidal proportions. I advance the innovative interpretation that Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm were all adherents of the philosophy of Ubuntu as the Pan African path for the development of revolutionary democracy in Africa. Both Edwin Madunagu and Joe Slovo have written to support the strategy of social democratic peoples revolutions rather than wait for the Armageddon of armed struggles as the only means necessary. From the perspective of organic intellectuals, books are mightier than bombs!

Teachable Lessons:

"Contrary to the Malcolm myth, violence was not a major part of Malcolm's program for building revolutionary politics in the West....Malcolm was not advocating violence but completely rejecting nonviolence because of his radical understanding of the real world"^[2]       

Fanon, the psychiatrist, analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside, lest the 'phantom bourgeoisie' seize control of the new nation states and continue the oppressive exploitation of the masses. Malcolm advocated that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP and progressive religious organizations that preach liberation theology. Yes, Malcolm did criticize the NAACP, just as even Du Bois did while working as their editor, but that does not mean total repudiation of their methods of community organizing. According to Malcolm:

“Our gospel is black nationalism. We're not trying to threaten the existence of any organization, but we're spreading the gospel of black nationalism. Anywhere there's a church that is also preaching and practicing the gospel of black nationalism, join that church. If the NAACP is preaching and practicing the gospel of black nationalism, join the NAACP. If CORE is spreading and practicing the gospel of black nationalism, join CORE. Join any organization that has a gospel that's for the uplift of the black man. And when you get into it and see them pussyfooting or compromising, pull out of it because that's not black nationalism. We'll find another one.”^[3] 

Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers and privileged the call for reparations rather than retaliation. To     emphasize the method of armed struggle today in the neocolonial situation across Africa means to kill fellow Africans with weapons that cause mass destruction and that are supplied by former colonizers to facilitate the extraction of African mineral wealth.   

When I posted this lesson that all three African icons practiced non-violent means of struggle, to a radical Black sociology discussion group and to an African Discourse group online in the United States (US), I received strong opposition that convinced me that the thesis needs to be tested in an extensive research project for a possible book monograph. A response quickly followed from a graduate student at a flagship state university in the US, telling me that he was an admirer of all three brothers and therefore could not stomach my revisionism to suggest that they were advocates of nonviolence. He said that my revision of their work to prioritize non-violence could only be true “… if one exempts defensive violence (self-defense, overthrow of colonialism and Jim Crow) from "violence.” He went on to assert that Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth is a magnificently argued call for killing the colonizer, both mentally and physically.’ He added that Malcolm had no problem with violent self-defense - “by any means necessary” - including violent defense. He credited Lumumba with being a founding member of FRELIMO (without citing the source), “an organization dedicated to armed struggle to achieve Mozambique national independence.” Then he alluded to the claim by Malcolm that only the Black revolution claims to be a non-violent revolution whereas the American, French and Russian revolutions were very bloody. “The perpetrators of these revolutions are considered national and international heroes” he claimed, and added that “Fanon, Malcolm, and Lumumba asserted that Africans in America and in Africa had the same rights as white people.” In conclusion, he stated as follows: “Surely, it alters their contributions to say they were non-violent.” Ironically, he signed off with the greeting: ‘peace’ before his name. 

Another brother quoted Malcolm, in the African Dialogue Series, from his 1963 ‘Message to the Grassroots’ in Detroit to argue that:

"There’s nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you, his meal.!" 

But Malcolm did not take any life (that we know of) in revenge for the lynching of his father, he did not drive anyone crazy the way his mother was institutionalized, he did not burn any home in retaliation for the fire-bombing of his home, and he did not burn any church in retaliation for the 50 bombing explosions between 1947 and 1965, including the killing of three black girls in church in 'Bombingham', Alabama. He said that he loved a white man to the amazement of Manning Marable.^[4] By this analysis, Malcom is said to have evolved through his pilgrimage to Mecca and international travels to speak of friendship and brotherhood across all colors and races - including black, brown, red, yellow, and white. He had stopped believing that all white people were blond blue-eyed devils as Elijah Mohamed taught him – all white people are not blond, all blond people do not have blue eyes, and not all blond blue-eyed people are evil.

Frederick Douglass also said “I loved all mankind, slaveholders not excepted, though I abhorred slavery more than ever.”^[5]Malcolm apparently forgave his enemies, in my humble opinion, perhaps so that the All Merciful may forgive him his own sins! 

While self-defense is no offense by any means necessary, I propose to read the Africana classics more strategically. Reading The Wretched of the Earth strategically, I propose to test the hypothesis that Fanon emphasized that the frequency of the violence of the colonizers had a causal relation to the violence of the colonized against their own brothers and sisters; if x then y; if you do not wish to see y, then prevent x. 

It was the violence of the colonizers that drove Africans nuts and also drove the violent colonizers insane. It is still happening today all-over neocolonial Africa and in the inner cities of internal colonies in the Diaspora. As Gabbidon shows, the internal colonial model was developed by the Black Panthers from the work of Fanon to theorize the conditions in inner cities that continue to be policed as colonial locations in the metropole. ‘Inner cities’ were also seen as internal colonies by Stuart Hall, et al (1978)^[6] who warned that all working-class people, Black, Asian, and White would pay the price for authoritarian populism under Thatcherism. Similarly, even working-class Europeans also paid the price when colonial violence drove Europeans insane enough to embark on their tribal world wars over the greed for colonies in Africa; killing an estimated 80 million people, mostly European workers and not just the six million Jews^[7] . The genocidal wars took place despite the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois against imperialism and its reckless greed for resources. 

When Fanon joined the national liberation movement after quitting his impossible job as a colonial psychiatrist, he dedicated himself to diplomacy, intellectual and moral leadership as a theorist and not as a suicide bomber. The same can be said about the rest of us intellectuals who write books rather than throw bombs. Antonio Gramsci concluded that even the bourgeoisie rules by coerced consent mostly (though not without threat of force) whereas when imperialists resort to violence, it is proof that they had lost the hegemonic struggle.

When asked if it was true that the Nation of Islam calls for violence as a means for achieving freedom in America, Malcolm X replied that “we are not a violent group, we are taught to obey the law, but we are also taught that we reserve the right to defend ourselves against violence...we have never bombed white churches” unlike the white supremacist groups, and yet the propaganda of violence is attributed to the Nation of Islam but not to whites, he said.

We can analyze his speeches to explain why he answered the provocative question (By the Ballot or By the Bullet?) that agents provocateurs may have posed to him. Malcolm chose the ballot even while defending the right to self-defense in a country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the liberal Constitution. Self-defense is not always violent. The Black Panthers frequently used free legal aid for self-defense when falsely accused. Lumumba used the ballot to defend the right to the restoration of independence, Fanon wrote books and essays for the self-defense of the colonized, and Malcolm gave speeches and interviews in self-defense. Yes, self-defense can also turn violent when violently attacked, but more often than not, self-defense tends to be non-violent through strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and the refusal to pay taxes, for instance in the nationalist struggles of Ghana and Nigeria and in the anti-Apartheid Coalition for a Democratic South Africa.

There is no principle of armed violence in the 10-point program of the Black Panthers, yet another case where self-defense was interpreted as violence. Instead, they emphasized the principle of arming the people with knowledge, according to its former President, Elaine Brown, who gave this retort to a white woman who asked her why the Panthers fetishized the carrying of guns at a conference in the Schomberg Center, New York Public Library: carrying a gun did not make you a revolutionary or police officers will be the biggest revolutionaries, she said. Rather, the Panthers preferred to watch cops to make sure they did not abuse their enormous powers, they organized free breakfast programs for poor students, and organized free medical care for the poor while encouraging people to register to vote. To them, self-defense included legal defense in courts, marches, and rallies. Often, the protests of the Panthers were nonviolent until the cops and the FBI started rioting.

The same goes for Lumumba who called on the United Nations to send troops to defend the restoration of independence in the Congo. During the struggle for the restoration of independence, he campaigned against the violence of the colonizers and demanded reparative justice, just like Fanon, without calling for violence as a principle in the struggle. In his Independence Day speech, he stated as follows: "We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on concord and goodwill."^[8]

In his 'Address to Congolese Youth', August, 1960, Lumumba stated clearly: "Young people who have been inactive and exploited for a long time have now become aware of their role as standard-bearers of the peaceful revolution."^[9] And in his Address to the All-African Congress in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960 Lumumba emphasized his message of peace as follows:

"We are acutely in need of peace and concord, and our foreign policy is directed towards co-operation, loyalty and friendship among nations. We want to be a force of peaceful progress, a force of conciliation. An independent and united Africa will make a large and positive contribution to world peace. But torn into zones of hostile influence, she will only intensify world antagonism and increase tension."^[10]

Both FRELIMO and the ANC started as non-violent organizations before the violence of the colonizers drove them to adopt armed struggles which were suspended to allow for negotiations. Those African liberation movements forced to adopt the armed struggle as a tactic do not compare more favorably with those that adopted the non-violent positive action of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his mentee, Kwame Nkrumah; though Nkrumah later wrote the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare after being overthrown by the same neocolonial army of occupation that he commanded. 

What the brothers were teaching us can be inferred today - wherever Africana people are armed, they tend to use the arms to kill one another in genocidal proportions while western arms companies laugh at us all the way to their banks with huge profits. That is probably why the hip hop generation spell it as mass ‘homycide’ and define it as the killing of homies. 

"I lost so many peers

I shed so many tears!

Too many of my homies

In the cemeteries

I shed so many tears!"^[11]  

The point about the obsolescence of armed struggles in neocolonial Africa and in the internal colonial diasporas today is not exclusively historical but also contemporary. Wherever people of African descent are armed today, at home and in the diaspora, they tend to use those arms against fellow people of African descent more frequently than not. This is not peculiar to people of African descent; it is a tendency found among all groups of people caught in systems of exploitation and oppression. The African Union seeks to silence the guns in Africa to reduce the internecine genocidal wars raging across Africa. The Africana philosophy of non-violence is not exclusive to people of African descent. 

On the other hand, those who have adopted the Ubuntu philosophy or what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable have reaped some benefits. Tutu and Tutu responded to Derrida by stating that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu. Along this line, the African National Congress (ANC) Charter 1955 declared that “there shall be peace and friendship!” and that "South Africa shall strive to maintain world peace and the settlement of all international disputes by negotiation – not war." The country also established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address past injustices from the apartheid regime and its beneficiaries that had the potential for retributive justice across generations. Colombia established the Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition to help end the bloody civil war from 1958-2016,^[12] and Northern Ireland adopted parliamentary means of struggle after the troubles. They have reaped greater dividends than those who continued fratricidal violence with western weapons of mass destruction in places like Biafra, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Algeria, Western Sahara, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Uganda, Ukraine, Russia, etc.

The Abrahamic religions of the Book may claim to be the genesis of non-violence and forgiveness, but Derrida demonstrated that each of them also made exceptions for that which is unforgivable and each holy book is full of violent scenes. But the Africana tradition, according to him, tends to forgive the unforgivable. Tutu and Tutu retorted that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu. The Igbo symbolize it with Mbari ritual architecture, according to Achebe, Martin Luther King Jr analogized it with the Great World House (preferring a beloved community to chaos).  Africans and modern architects and engineers use the system of African Fractals to integrate chaos into their designs for improved public safety. Yet, sometimes, it is better to deconstruct the old house and rebuild on a new foundation, according to Ron Eglash. Deconstruction is an architectural method of tearing down an old building and rebuilding on a new foundation just as the Igbo let their symbolic Mbari structures that represent every race, species, and spirits to decay before reconstructing it, according to Achebe. Rasta dubs the Africana tradition as One Love, and Rwanda calls it Gacaca. Gandhi admitted that he learned the experiments with truth from the warlike Zulu who taught him about non-violent resistance.

 Non-violence is both a philosophy and a tactic. As explained above, self-defense is not always violent. Often, it takes the form of peaceful marches and protests, strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, voting, and legal battles in court. All acts of self-defense are not violent. I propose that philosophies of non-violence, are one of the greatest contributions of Africans to world civilization. African languages have no word for violence but they all have expressions for peace! I have asked knowledgeable Africans to translate violence into their mother-tongues. They came up with nothing. If you know of an indigenous African word for violence, please share.

Kassala Kamara attributed the origin of relatively non-violent culture to classical African civilization when the rulers of Kemet granted independence to the rebellious principality of Damascus rather than seek to crush their rebellion. The Egyptian Kingdom grew more through hegemony than warfare. People wanted to affiliate with them for intellectual and moral leadership. The Upper and the Lower kingdoms united peacefully to form the kingdom. Greek philosophers went there to study for decades at a time. None of the monuments was a fort for defense. Of course, they must have fought wars to defend the kingdom from invaders, but what they are known for are arts, science, culture, and agriculture. There is no record of a genocidal war by Kemet. Maulana Karenga illustrated it with the case of the eloquent peasant who used logic to seek the recovery of his stolen property rather than take up arms against the government officials that robbed him. Chinua Achebe illustrated this with the case of Ezulu, the Chief Priest in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and a hunger strike to resist being forced to become a colonial chief among the democratic Igbo who brag that they know no kings. Indigenous cultures around the world have also emphasized nonviolence, it is not peculiar to African cultures. As Du Bois told the US Supreme Court, peace does not belong to any one country, and so he did not need to apply for approval as an agent of a foreign country simply because he ran an organization for peace. Peace and non-violence are tendencies that are more common in some cultures than others.

Walter Rodney’s, Groundings With My Brothers, stated that we must avoid studying African history exclusively from the perspective of a few monarchs because such kingdoms and empires covered a minority of the African landmass. He encouraged us to also study direct democracies or what colonial anthropologists called headless societies since they are more relevant to the yearning for democracy by people of African descent today. As he stated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, there was no record of genocidal violence in Africa before the raids for enslavement and colonial/neocolonial eras. Prior to that, there were quarrels or conflicts which tended to be resolved through dialogue and the battle of wits more than through genocidal violence. Such peaceful cultures were documented by Cheikh Anta Diop in Precolonial Black Africa.

Even Karl Marx, according to Friedrich Engles' preface to the first English edition of Capital, observed that a non-violent revolution, such as the abolition of slavery, was possible in England, provided that the enslavers did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion as they did in the US. I propose to test the original hypothesis about the centrality of non-violence in Africana civilizations. Rasta philosophy of One Love will back me up with the example of how Bob Marley refused to call ‘Babylonian’ forces to arrest the youth who came to ask for forgiveness for having tried to assassinate him. One Love for All! Peace and Love! Can this philosophy be extended to resolve the insurgencies ravaging Africa today from state violence to Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and Al-Shabab militants? 

Conclusion

Steve Biko denied instigating violence as alleged by the apartheid prosecutor in court. He was accused of calling for the people to confront apartheid. Biko answered that he was being confronted by the prosecutor but there was no violence in the court room. Anyone who wishes to ‘waste … time in sterile litanies and the nauseating mimicry’ of the European tradition of genocidal violence will need to re-read more carefully the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth, which precisely and unambiguously explained that we should shun violence: 

"Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today, swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration."^[13] 

What Fanon, Lumumba, and Malcom preferred were war against illiteracy and diseases in Africa. They preferred the erasure of the colonial boundaries that divided and weakened Africans enough to incite xenophobic violence against fellow Africans. They called for psychological healing of the slow-healing wounds of hundreds of years of terrible violence against Africans. They would support party building for social democracy, and agrarian revolution to feed the people with adequate funding for infrastructure. Walter Rodney stated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that when the colonizers pretended that there was no money for education, the Africans tasked themselves to build schools. C.L.R. James emphasized in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution that the most important achievement by Nkrumah was the National School Movement.  Ngugi called for the decolonization of the African mind. These are the wars the three Pan African heroes encourage peoples of African descent to fight in order to secure the dignity and wellbeing of the African.

Down with Militarism!

Happy 100 Years Birthdays to Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcom! Peace and Love!

Onwubiko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061

A version of the article was published on the MassLiteracy blog on April 9, 2026.

Endnotes