Horace Campbell on Fanon and National Liberation

Tonight, we want to reflect on the life of Frantz Fanon, who was born in the Caribbean Island of Martinique in 1925. Next Friday, on December 6, 1991, it will be thirty years since Fanon passed away. Fanon died in 1961, and in the period of his short life he made an important contribution to the question of liberation. We want to discuss Fanon and the question of national liberation.

I would like us to go back and forth between two aspects of Fanon’s life and work, and how that life and work was part of a process of his own liberation and transformation. We want to see that the liberation of the individual is only possible in the context of participation in a political movement. We also want to see the significance of his ideas. When I was coming here, my attention was drawn to an article on the impact of Fanon’s ideas on the Iranian revolution, and the impact of Fanon’s ideas on the Palestinian movement. As you know, in the 1960s Fanon’s writings had a very important impact on the movement for Black liberation in North America, and they had an impact on the liberation of the African continent.

So tonight, in 1991, thirty years afterward, we want to be able to reflect on what liberation meant at the time that Fanon was maturing as a person, and what liberation means to us—those of us who have to carry on, those of us who still have to deal with the Babylon system as it manifests itself today. Do we today carry forward the traditions of liberation that Fanon aspired toward, or are we in a phase of retreat? What are the new conditions of struggle before us? I would like us to look at Fanon’s work in the context of the Algerian revolution, in the context of the Pan-African revolution, and in the context of the struggle for independence in the Caribbean, because the country in which Fanon was born is still not yet politically independent.

While in Africa they have gone through the phase of formal political independence, in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne they are called departments of France. Because they are departments of France, it is claimed that they do not need independence, because they are part of France and part of French culture. Of course, we cannot speak about independence in Martinique, Cayenne, and Guadeloupe without speaking about the independence of Puerto Rico, because the whole question of Puerto Rico’s independence has been manipulated—whether it is through referendums for statehood—so that it is no longer even on the agenda.

Fanon’s Early Years

So, our discussion tonight about Fanon and the work for liberation must address his own intellectual heritage and his joining of the national liberation struggle. Having been born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon volunteered to fight against the French government that was allied with fascism and went to Dominica to volunteer to fight with those who were then called the Allies. We use that term advisedly now, because they later sought to reconstitute that image in carrying out the illegal destruction of the people of Iraq.

Fanon went to Europe and saw action in North Africa. While he was in North Africa at the end of the war, he became more sensitive to the conditions of colonialism. Fanon came from that section of the Caribbean that is called the Caribbean middle class, that section whose parents understood that education would be a vehicle for their children to avoid working in the plantation sector, carrying out the backbreaking tasks of the kind of Martinique in which Fanon and Aimé Césaire were growing up. Some of you may have seen the film Black Shack Alley or heard of the novel about life in the Caribbean.

Fanon studied medicine, especially psychiatry, in France. While working in the hospital in southern France with new theories of psychiatry, he began to see that, when one dealt with those theories in relation to Africans or Arabs, one had to develop completely new theories—a new understanding of the relationship between science and the world—because race had constrained our understanding of the relations between human beings. So Fanon, very early on in his writings, began to see the problems created by racial constraints and the consequences of racism for consciousness.

By any standard, Fanon was an educated person. He read all the major theorists of his time. He was a contemporary of Jean Paul Sartre. He read Marx and all of the leading thinkers of his generation. It was a time when Fanon would have been considered among the humanist Marxists in France. But he left France, and between 1953 and 1957 he worked in Algeria in a hospital. There he saw concretely the impact of racism. When he was only twenty-eight years old, he wrote the book Black Skin, White Masks, which some of you should read, especially when thinking about the problem of racism.

Working in this hospital in Algeria, Fanon lived in one of the oldest colonies of France, where French settlers lived a segregated colonial life in North Africa. The segregation of colonial society was clear. It was not simply based on social differences; it was based on real material exploitation of the people of Algeria. While working in this hospital, Fanon joined the underground of the Algerian liberation movement, the FLN, fighting for independence. As a psychiatrist in the hospital, he trained nurses and developed training courses.

Fanon the Revolutionary

In 1956, he went to a conference in Rome and spoke out openly on the need for liberation and independence. To speak in 1956 about independence in Algeria was radical, if not revolutionary. It became clear that Fanon could not continue in that job, working in a hospital as a paid French expatriate in Algeria. He left in January 1957 to become a full-time activist in the FLN, an organization dedicated to the independence and liberation of Algeria. He worked in Tunisia and elsewhere in Africa as a diplomat representing the FLN in newly independent African states, and as a journalist on the editorial board of the FLN newspaper.

Those of you who want to do work on Fanon later on will find, as I found in 1986 at a conference on Fanon in Africa, that a lot of Fanon’s writings done in the context of the FLN newspaper are still not available. There is still a lot of work to be done on what Fanon actually did. In this period, we speak of Fanon as a journalist, a psychiatrist, a freedom fighter, and a diplomat. Today we can also speak of him as an ideologue of African liberation and, I would dare say, of human liberation.

Less than six months before he passed away in 1961, Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth. This book dealt with concepts of culture, national consciousness, and liberation. His work continues to be a source of contention for some and a source of inspiration for others. We have to grapple with what Fanon was saying. I would like you to bear with me while I try to explore some of Fanon’s ideas and to reflect on the contribution of his thinking in the period in which we live today.

Fanon on Liberation

What did Fanon mean by liberation? How did he see the questions of political independence being tied to political freedom? We now see that in Africa and in the Caribbean, we have countries that achieved independence without political freedom for the vast majority. There is also the question of ideological freedom—the freedom to think, to choose, to develop as healthy human beings—free of the deformities of racism and free of the mystification of science and technology, which is often mobilized on the side of those who produce weapons instead of mobilizing science on the side of humanizing the environment and liberating us from the constraints of capitalist destruction and underdevelopment.

The core of Fanon’s thought is how to fight for national culture. The fight for national culture is at the same time the fight for the freedom of the nation. Fanon makes it very clear in his writings in The Wretched of the Earth that no culture can develop outside of the popular culture of the people. We can go further and say that we have to explore popular culture to see to what extent it is being mobilized on the side of the oppressed, and not manipulated by those who control and shape Hollywood and the mass media.

The stress on the popular component of the struggle can only bear fruit through organized and conscious activity. I want to underline and emphasize the word “organized,” because to be organized is to rise above the idea of the isolated individual. In our commemoration of Fanon tonight, we are not simply commemorating a single human being born in the Caribbean; we are also commemorating representatives of a generation that engaged in the formal task of removing colonialism from Africa and the Caribbean. The organized and conscious activities of these individuals are what we want to stress tonight. It is only through participating in such activities that we can speak about changing the individual, and the individual can only be transformed in the context of a struggle that is itself moving from one stage of development to the next—what we call the process of emancipation and self-emancipation.

Another aspect of Fanon’s life that we must examine is his statements about the party form. Although he was a member of the FLN, he saw some of the problems of this party. He saw some of the problems in Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, and he made very strong critical comments about parties in Africa. When we speak tonight about the importance of organization in his work, we should ask: what kind of organization can go out and make itself a “success”? Fanon says that success must be measured against the level of development of the people. When we look at Fanon’s writing, we see how his experience links theory and practice. What he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth was a culmination of his experiences as a diplomat and a freedom fighter, organizing the FLN against the violence of French colonialism, organizing with African intellectuals, and grappling with the concept of Negritude as it was presented in the 1950s.

Fanon was grappling with a profound question: how to deal with the dehumanization of the colonized person. That is a challenge before us today, because dehumanization has deepened even in the era of political independence. Fanon says that, in order to deal with this dehumanization, we must break with the alienation of colonial society.

On Alienation

Walter Rodney, in commenting on Fanon, helps us understand this alienation. Alienation, as many of you know, is used in contemporary societies to describe the condition in which the product of workers’ labor is alienated from them, and the surplus they produce is appropriated by another class. In colonized societies there is also the alienation of all the resources of that society, which are taken to another society. This is the export of the surplus of one society to another, as in the case of Algeria, or British colonies such as India and Nigeria, or the colonies exploited by the Dutch East India Company.

We must also consider alienation based on race: the ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, and how this system of ideas is interconnected with the whole system of capitalist exploitation. We must further examine the alienation that is based on the relationship between men and women in the family and in society, what is sometimes called sexism—the way in which the domination inherent in capitalist society is reproduced within the family.

Fanon is saying that the national liberation struggle must transcend all these levels of alienation. The alienation of the colonized person is not a simple alienation based only on exploitation of labor; it is a profound exploitation that affects every dimension of life. Therefore, when we speak of liberation, we speak about very deep transformation in the context of the colonized person, who is dehumanized. Fanon observed this dehumanization in the mental illness he saw in the hospital. That mental illness itself was a product of alienation. Whether a person was in the psychiatric ward or in the fields of a plantation, that person was in a dehumanizing situation. A colonized person, Fanon argued, cannot become healthy simply through the work of a psychiatrist. The colonized person can only be healthy in the context of ending colonial domination.

The war of national liberation is, therefore, part and parcel of the process of overcoming alienation. One of the ways Fanon spoke about this was through participation in the armed struggle. Using a medical term, he spoke of the “therapeutic” value of violence in the context of organized armed struggle. This has been very contentious. Walter Rodney summarized Fanon’s view by stressing that the violence Fanon spoke about presupposed organized revolutionary violence, not the work of an individual seeking vengeance, but the act of confronting oneself in the context of an organization committed to a collective assault against colonial domination. This kind of violence is necessary to counter the structural violence of the colonial society.

Colonialism is not a tea party; it is not about educating and civilizing you. Colonialism is a violent phenomenon. In colonial society we have physical violence, economic violence, forced labor, whipping, and the absence of legal forms of mediation or democratic rights such as collective bargaining and the right to organize. Some of us used to condemn these rights as merely “bourgeois,” but we no longer say that because we see how even these limited rights, once won, can be taken away.

Liberation and the question of Armed Struggles

We must also see how the Algerian war of liberation organized society to the point where Algerians could take up arms against France—a metropolitan imperialist country integrated into the industrial structure of Europe, with all the weapons at its disposal. The question of taking up arms was not simple. The people needed a movement capable of carrying forward the war. The society needed the capacity to train guerrilla fighters, acquire weapons, and transport them across long distances from the Moroccan and Tunisian borders to liberated zones in Algeria. Fanon had experience in both areas.

When we speak of violence against the colonial state and colonial domination, there are many people who now say they are pacifists and against all forms of violence. But we have to distinguish between the violence of the imperial order and the violence of liberation movements that used armed struggle to gain their independence. We now know that violence and armed struggle by themselves are not equal to liberation; they require an ideology capable of carrying the movement forward even after independence. We know this from the actual experiences of Algeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa.

We also know that, in dominating Third World peoples, imperial powers have learned the language of guerrilla warfare and turned it against us. They speak of “freedom fighters” when they refer to reactionary forces such as the Contras or Jonas Savimbi in Angola, while branding genuine liberation movements as “terrorist.” This is why, when we speak about armed struggle, we must see what ideology stands behind it and to what extent it seeks to overcome the alienation we have spoken about.

All of this is used against us every day. We hear of “black-on-black violence” in South Africa as if it were simply Africans fighting Africans, without understanding the role of the apartheid state and its Bantustan strategy. Mangosuthu Buthelezi and his Inkatha movement represent South African capital, not the interests of Black people. The violence we see is far more complex than the media suggests.

This tells us that those of us who have the ability and the time to come into institutions such as this have a big task in our community. That task is education—the formation of consciousness. Education can either be a component of alienation or a component of emancipation. Fanon was very concerned about education. Any society that is dealing with liberation must deal with education: how education can help society rise above alienation, and how it can help citizens become healthy human beings. Fanon said we must assume that society is unhealthy, and our role in education must not only be to reproduce knowledge but to reproduce healthy human beings. Education cannot be separated from political and social processes.

Fanon acted as an educator in the camps. He was a teacher and a trainer. He could have gone to Algeria as a Caribbean expatriate, earned his salary, and remained distant, but he chose instead to involve himself in educating his African and Arab brothers and sisters in Algeria. In this sense, he broke with the path laid out for many in the Caribbean middle class, whose children were trained to become the inheritors and administrators of the colonial system.

We have seen in the Caribbean how many well-educated individuals have become transmission belts for those who dominate our societies. The experience of Eric Williams in Trinidad and Tobago is a good example. As a scholar, Williams made a major contribution with his work Capitalism and Slavery, but as a political leader he came to preside over a neocolonial order and attempted to repress the reproduction of radical ideas—even, it was said, his own. We must learn to distinguish between the contributions of the scholar and the actions of the political leader, and we must understand how separation from the struggles of the people leads to degeneration.

Liberation and African women

Fanon was very concerned with issues of consciousness and participation. He wrote quite a bit, and those of you who pursue scholarship, especially in French or Arabic, will have much to study. One of his important essays was “Algeria Unveiled,” in which he examined the mobilization and participation of Algerian women in the struggle for national independence. He showed how the direct participation of women in the struggle helped to break taboos and mystifications that separated men from women. Today, because of degeneration in Algeria, the society is “veiled” again, and much of the revolutionary content of that period has been lost, but the questions Fanon raised remain vital.

The struggle for the liberation of African women—and women everywhere—cannot be trivialized. It is not simply a matter of images or fashion, but of health, housing, childcare, access to water, and the reorganization of social priorities. In many African and Third World societies, women still spend four or five hours a day fetching water, while those who hold power build large dams whose electricity serves urban centers or even foreign countries but not the villages from which that water flows. The centrality of women’s leadership and organization is crucial to transforming such priorities.

When we speak about women today, we must also speak about the problems they face in this part of the world—rape, violence, harassment—and how we define and confront these issues in ways that link individual freedom to the reconstruction of society. Fanon understood dialectics. He studied Hegel and Marx and sought to understand both the consciousness of the oppressed and the consciousness of the oppressor. To rise above slavery and racism, we must understand the mind of the slave master and the racist, not to imitate it, but to defeat it and liberate ourselves from the idea of race.

Struggles against Racism

In Black Skin, White Masks Fanon dealt at length with how racism destroys people’s capacity to think and function as human beings, and he argued that the national liberation movement is a struggle to break with racism. This is a profound lesson, especially today, when racism appears in new forms and when the principles of apartheid and racial separation are being globalized. The national liberation struggle is a struggle to break with both racial superiority and racial inferiority and to break with the ideology of Eurocentrism and individualism.

In Fanon’s time, one popular response to racism was Negritude, associated with figures like Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. While we must respect their contributions in the struggle against colonialism, we can now see that Negritude sometimes responded to racism by creating other ideas based on race and by romanticizing an African essence, instead of fully breaking with the unscientific notion of race itself. Fanon was critical of such tendencies, arguing that they could become a new cover for exploitation if they did not address the material relations of power in society.

We have seen similar romanticism in later forms of “authenticity” in Africa and in certain uses of Afrocentrism in North America, where symbols of an idealized African past are emphasized without sufficient attention to the present-day struggles of African peoples in places like Mozambique, Angola, or South Africa. It is important to study Egypt and the great African civilizations, but it is also important to understand the lives of ordinary working people, peasants, and hunters, and to connect our knowledge of the past with the requirements of present-day transformation beyond colonial and neocolonial domination.

In Fanon’s work, confronting racism requires going beyond opposing one race to another. It requires recognizing that the very category of “race” was historically constructed in the process of exploitation and is part of an unscientific superstructure. We must move from an ideology of resistance to an ideology of liberation. In the process of liberating themselves and their societies from racism and colonialism, Fanon believed Africans would also be liberating some Europeans from the prison of racist ideology, and that this would be a profound contribution to humanity.

Fanon made the link between racial consciousness and national consciousness. He saw the nationalist struggle as necessary to recover national independence and cleanse the society, but he was also critical of nationalism when it became an end in itself. In The Wretched of the Earth he wrote about the pitfalls of national consciousness. He saw how nationalism in Africa and the Caribbean could become a vehicle for a new ruling class to supervise exploitation, while talking about flags, anthems, and national dress. We see today how some leaders trivialize culture, while remaining unable or unwilling to take independent positions in international forums.

Decades after Fanon, we can say that the nationalist leaders suffered from alienation, but that workers and peasants suffered even more profound alienation. The only way to confront all the forms of alienation we have discussed is to struggle for a completely new social system, because the present organization of society stands in the way of further human development. This requires social transformation and new ideas about how to mobilize human creativity to end war, exploitation, and the destruction of the environment.

We see these tasks very clearly in Southern Africa, in the Caribbean, and across the African continent. In South Africa, for example, the struggle is not only about replacing white political leaders with Black political leaders; it is about transforming a society built on mining and agriculture into one that meets the needs of the people—housing, education, health care, and democratic participation. The question is what kind of political vehicle can carry this forward and whether the emerging nonracial democracy will be merely a new form of bourgeois democracy or something more profound.

We have learned from Fanon not to romanticize violence, and we have learned from the experiences of the past years that independence without social transformation is not enough. The dignity of African and Third World peoples is incompatible with a capitalist system that produces permanent crisis, unemployment, economic restructuring, and militarization while leaving basic human needs unmet.

Social Reconstruction and Independence Struggles

These are the questions that face your generation. Fanon has helped give us one window onto how our education fits into the process of social reconstruction. Our own freedom, the quality of life we lead, will depend on the extent to which society moves toward new freedoms or toward new forms of barbarism.

I want to again thank you for inviting me to share my reflections on Fanon, his life, and his work. As students in universities and colleges, we must keep abreast of what is going on in Africa and the Caribbean. Many African students do not have the luxury to attend lectures like this, nor the freedom to think and write as you do. We must pay attention to academic freedom, human rights, and the conditions of writers, poets, and artists who are persecuted or imprisoned.

We also cannot commemorate Fanon without recognizing that his birthplace, Martinique, is still colonial. Martinique does not yet have formal independence. We should send a message of solidarity to the independence movements in Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne, and say that there are people here who support their independence and who do not accept the idea that Martinique is simply a department of France. Martinique is part of the Caribbean.

We should also speak about Puerto Rico and its right to independence, and about Cuba, which continues to hold out against great pressures and attempts at isolation. Cuba insists that a new kind of society is possible, and despite its limitations it has advanced beyond many of its neighbors in the Caribbean in areas such as health and education. We must champion the cause of the Cuban people and call for an end to the economic blockade against Cuba.

Finally, I implore you to pay attention to the democracy movement in Africa and the call for freedom in Africa and South Africa. The struggle for liberation is ongoing, and the best way we can honor Frantz Fanon is to study, to organize, and to participate in the movements that seek to end alienation and build a new human society.

Horace G. Campbell is a peace and social Justice activist. He is also Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University and Chairperson of the Global Pan African Movement, North American Chapter.  He is the author of Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, 2013. 

Acknowledgements

Transcript of presentation of Horace Campbell on Fanon and National Liberation.

Thanks to David Austin for unearthing the tape.

Thanks to Michael Agbo for the transcription