Frantz Fanon's "Toward the African Revolution" is a collection of political texts, logbooks, and letters that spans the time from his youth when he wrote "Black Skin, White Masks" in 1952 until he penned "The Wretched of the Earth" in 1961, the year he died. First published by Maspero, it is a synthesis of the anti-imperialist and class struggles and speaks of the colonial evolution and the hidden traps inherent in decolonisation.
On my way by plane to the pan-African Congress being held in Munich, I re-read ‘Toward the African Revolution’ to fire myself up and reassure myself that this was still the right path. ‘Toward the African Revolution’ will be the theme of our round table on 6 December this year as we mark the 50th anniversary of Fanon’s death. This round table will follow the film we are showing in his honour.
As a writer he demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images. This powerful collection of articles, essays, and letters spans the period between Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon’s landmark manifestos on the psychology of the colonized and the means of empowerment necessary for their liberation.
As a synthesis of the anti-imperialist and class struggles, this work speaks of the colonial evolution and the hidden traps inherent in decolonisation. In it Fanon illustrated the necessity for those colonised to consider their psyche and prepare their retort. It gave Fanon an opportunity for introspection, an understanding of alienation, of the depersonalisation of the colonised and of racism in all its forms.
The essays in the book were written from 1952 to 1961, between the publication of his two most famous works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. The essays in Toward the African Revolution are split into five sections, roughly grouped by topic and manner of original publication. They help to trace the evolution of Fanon's thought over time, from his years working as a psychiatrist through the period when he actively worked for the FLN and his exile from Algeria in Tunisia.
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Frantz Fanon
Key Themes and Analysis
The first section of the book (French: Le colonisé en question) deals with the views that outsiders hold of North Africans. The second section, Racism and Culture (French: Racisme et culture), is a single speech given by Fanon in 1956 at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and it was originally published in a special edition of Présence Africaine. His central point is that racism "is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people." His target is the attempts by many European colonial governments (notably the French) to prove that they do not hold racist prejudices while they continued to colonize foreign lands and export their own cultures as the superior choice.
Colonialism and its Impact
This brief section (French: Pour l'Algérie) consists of a pair of letters that Fanon wrote to French residents of Algeria detailing the problems of how they viewed the country. The first, "Letter to a Frenchman," explains the "essential ignorance" that the French had of native Algerians, whom they generally dismissed as helpless beasts and never formed close relationships with. This was likely sent to R. The second half of this section is the letter of resignation that Fanon sent in 1956 to announce that he could no longer practice psychiatry for the French colonial government in good faith.
The central problem he faced was, as one scholar put it, "the futility of practicing psychiatry in such a colonial situation." Fanon did not see any practical benefit to helping individual Algerians when the colonial system he worked in was harming the mental health of the entire population.
Liberation and Revolution
Twenty of Fanon's essays that explain the movement from opposing colonialism to actively working to end it, in Algeria and elsewhere, are collected in a section titled Toward the Liberation of Africa (French: Vers la libération de l'Afrique) that takes up most of Toward the African Revolution. Especially troubling to Fanon in this portion of the book is the use of torture by French colonial authorities against Algerians. He argued that torture was not an exceptional flaw of the war, but "an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship." Torture was an extreme feature of the colonial relationship, but there was no way to justify colonialism without tacitly accepting the use of torture, according to Fanon.
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African Unity
The final section, African Unity (French: Unité africaine), includes two works about the ways that African nations could work together militarily during and after the end of formal European colonialism. The first part is a log of Fanon's travels around Africa while working as a diplomat for the FLN during the Algerian War.
Africa, which contributes so much to global growth, is nevertheless, still very much locked in the cash economy of the old international division of labour. This order is increasingly synonymous with the resources sold off by transnational corporations and local business people unconcerned about the condition and fate of the Africans. Fanon gave us a clear warning of this: ‘Africa will be free. Yes, but she must get down to work and not lose sight of her own unity. It was in this spirit that, among others, one of the most important points of the first meeting of All-African Peoples' Conference at Accra in 1958 was adopted.
More than ever, the revolutionary imperative seems appropriate and the progress enabled by the fall of apartheid, and the recent upset of senile autocracies in North Africa must be followed through.
Pan-Africanism
Pan-Africentrage: A New Vision
Inspired by the revolutionary insights of Fanon, Aziz Salmone Fall proposes ‘pan-Africentrage’: A process of acquiring political and historic awareness of the collective autonomy of the continent by breaking away from dominant capitalism and revaluing our traditions and ways of being in solidarity.
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During the 25 years of the Group for Research and Initiative for the Liberation of Africa (GRILA’s) existence, we have advocated the total liberation of Africa as seen by Fanon whose analysis is still relevant and current for pan-Africanism. In the 21st century, pan-Africanism is at a crossroads while our continent is being attacked by new and complex forms of imperialism. I am giving the name ‘supraimperialism’ to the particular form of hegemon that neoliberali financialised oligopolies has imposed through globalisation during the past 30 years . Its contradictions impel it to intensify the capitalist mode of production and predatory consumption although this is bound to be a blind alley.
Today, Fanon would be deploring the fact that Africa still does not have a continental developing plan and that is why we are encouraging a move in this direction by offering the alternative of pan-African self-reliance (panafricentrage).
Pan-Africanism would gain in fact by being geared towards two requirements suggested by pan-Africentrage: the reconstruction of what it is to be African and a forward-looking renewal to control accumulation and develop our productive capacity. Both need to return to the question of progress and modernity and, therefore, development and decide on other homeomorphic imperatives (that is, those that challenge their local equivalent). ‘Africanity’ and the pan-African renewal could both be based on a balance between maat and internationalism - in other words, the fertile roots that provide for a harmonious future for Africa and its diaspora.
The reconstruction of revolutionary pan-Africanism offers us not only a critique of Eurocentric Africanism, but also a rigorous and above all objective and historical review of Africa and its contribution to the arrival of globalisation. We must first fully recognise humanity’s monocentric origin that refuses all forms of racism and eugenics; the anteriority of the ancient negro-african civilisations needs to be re-established as does their contribution, like those of subsequent traditional periods, to the building up of global systems. There is also the need to understand how Africa was of service to Europe’s periphery, that is the Americas, before herself moving onto the fringes of capitalism. This is where she still is, in an unjust and outdated division of labour that is perpetuated by internal, predatory dynamics.
The need for renewal involves the struggle against the almost collective amnesia relating to the real history of Africa and its diaspora, but above all it involves the need to start learning lessons from the anti-imperialist struggles and decolonisation; independence that had to be negotiated, struggles for national liberation and, most of all, the failure of institutional Panafricanism. This requires a bold reorganisation of the forces of change, especially our youth who, despite their capacity for outrage and reaction, have lived through more than two decades of depoliticisation and political disaffection.
In doing this, while many would wish to label ‘panafricentrage’ as one of the African doctrines, I want to make it clear that ‘afrocenticity is preferable to ‘afrocentrism’. Afrocentrism, like eurocentrism, is precisely a form of culturalism and other integrisms, blind alleys that need to be critiqued and surpassed. ‘Panafricentrage’, rather, is a doctrine that draws on its reactivated roots. It can be expressed on the one hand in terms of a philosophy that stresses maa’t (in its sense of cosmic, terrestrial and personal balances and of truth and social justice) and the rediscovery of our historic, socio-cultural and political programmes for regulation.
It is up to working people and the organic intellectuals of Africa and the diaspora to build this alternative against the predatory phases of globalisation that only allow comprador options and their chimeric efforts at continental integration. ‘Panafricentrage’ is a process of acquiring a political and historic awareness of the collective autonomy of the continent. By breaking away discerningly from the dominant capitalism, it favours the control of accumulation and equitable redistribution.
Moreover, the conditions for the revolutionary awakening are becoming clearer: the global financial crisis; the closure of islands of prosperity to our disillusioned youth wishing to emigrate; the combination of the exasperation that is now affecting not only the poorest classes with the despair that narrows horizons that are clouded by the autumn of senile, predatory capitalist models.
Revolutions and Their Discontents
In Toward the African Revolution, Frantz Fanon poses a peculiar but thought-provoking question: “[w]ho are they, in truth, those creatures, who hide, who are hidden by social truth beneath the attributes of bicot, bounioule, arabe, raton, sidi, mon z’ami?” Fanon’s question on the nature of dissidents and revolutionaries brings one to consider the nature of revolution itself. One can argue that revolutions are never obsolete. Indeed, revolutions are always “spectered” as they seem to haunt human history. The word haunting unveils questions on legacy, history and memory. Fanon’s writings on revolutions spark an engagement with other texts, times and possibilities of resistance.
Revolutions in Fanon’s writings are “in the making”; they reveal the multiple jeopardy that Africans face as they attempt to reclaim their voices and identities. Accordingly, revolutions are constructed and deconstructed in experiences and narratives about the self and the other; they become sites for negotiating other possibilities of becoming African, Arab, and militant. Like Fanon’s inquiries into the nature of revolutions, Arab writers appear to engage in parallel explorations as they examine the complexities of identity, the struggles for liberation, and the socio-political landscapes that shape their narratives.
Fanon warns the reader against dreaming dangerously about revolutions. Revolutions, he prophesies, may betray the wretched who made them. A revolution might become an “empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty” at the hands of the unprepared. At the heart of Fanon’s thinking on revolution in Africa and elsewhere, as we infer from his words in The Wretched of the Earth, is a venture into reading moments of “national consciousness” otherwise.
Fanon’s work reveals his examination of history and memory, which are forces of cultural, economic, and political change, to say the least. In effect, one can look more closely at his dissident writing and voice as he confronts historical injustices and false narratives. Fanon’s reading of history is loaded with encounters with the trauma of pre-colonial and post-colonial tragedies. It is from this perspective that this article asks: What is a revolution for Fanon? What does it mean for a revolution to be a travesty? Do revolutions breed new species or monsters? Do they make the wretched more wretched?
Fanon observes that genuine revolutions must be creative; otherwise, they die and take away revolutionaries. Revolutions, accordingly, must unite people to understand the truth, here referring to a new state of mind. It signals people’s transition from ignorance to knowledge and their ongoing struggle to change political, cultural, and socio-economic realities that impede change and hold people back. Fanon posits that to think (of) revolution, one must think truth. What is more, revolution is defined as a journey towards self-liberation.
Fanon warns against conflating people’s longing for socio-economic changes with the falsified discourses of the pernicious national bourgeoisie. Fanon remains skeptical of new governments that could falsify facts and seize power to create a new form of domination. Fanon holds that revolution is often betrayed by “new species of men” who carry the seeds of more destruction and corruption. In other words, the new leaders become the new enemies to resist and rebel against.
From this perspective, revolutionaries have to adapt themselves to the new struggle for liberation. Breaking the chains of illusion and disillusionment is necessary if people want to be treated as human beings. The people, Fanon reveals, rebel when they are deprived of truth; if they know truth, they can know themselves, which can change their experiences of the world. A similar bottom-up reading of revolutions and their histories can elucidate details about national and social articulations of pain, hope, memory, illusion, trauma, and dangerous dreams.
Fanon is aware that ‘History’ profanes revolutions because revolution is sacred like truth. In other words, he is aware that only the ‘brave’ can be revolutionary, and only the truth is revolutionary, and truth always falls outside history. Truth could only rise from the ashes of others’ memories and histories.
Adopting Fanon’s logic can help understand other moments of failed uprisings. The texts become dissident representations of historical conditions and people’s attitudes toward these conditions. They are outspoken activists and intellectuals who seek to speak truth to power.
Al Aswani’s statement “only the revolution is true” in the Republic of False Truths is a locus where two antagonistic movements are at work: the revolutionaries and the nonrevolutionaries. By the same token, Fanon warns against those who seem to be manipulated by a new state power.
Indeed, social and political changes require a new understanding because revolutions create new realities and articulations. Fanon seems to have some sympathy for people who cannot fathom a different reality.
The instrumentalisation of multilateral forums is even more pronounced than in the last century. The IMF, the World Bank and WTO have been preserved, despite their obsolescence and their obvious failure, as instruments reproducing the international order. However, the latter has been slowly overtaken by a transnational order where the role of the large corporations, as well as major culturalist ditch and civilisational gaps, cannot be regulated by the G20. This means a gradual world governance by a G20 that has no democratic mandate to do so.
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The African Union and Its Challenges
The African Union - that replaced the Organisation for African Unity - is for many of our fellow citizens an institution that is distant from their real concerns; it resembles a union of heads of state that cannot afford its own policies. Libya was the only African country without debt. The assassination of Gaddafi is bringing about a loss of finances for the African Union that was so unfortunately dependent on Libyan funds.
In fact, with Libya, Algeria, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt each contribute a little less than 15 percent of the expenses. Apart from this embarrassing quirk, surely we must deplore the fact that these African countries only contribute on average eight percent of the AU budget, while 92 percent comes from foreign partners and donors. Jean Ping would say that finance from outside Africa amounts to more like 77 percent. (Officially, the AU budget for 2011 was predicted to be US$256,754,447 of which $122602.045 would come from member states and $134.152.402 from international donors).
The debate about the sort of pan-Africanism we want to construct has not started yet. There is a patent lack of political will and the Monrovia group, which has symbolically taken over from the Casablanca group, is dominating thinking. The most important aspects of this thinking - which may by chance be progressive - turn out to be unworkable. The members of the organisation still believe in the feasibility of NEPAD, a scarcely viable project left to the discretion of the West and whose futility for the continent we had already demonstrated at its launch at the Kananaskis G8 summit.
African Union
What Fanon said about the sequestration of Congo still resonates: ‘Lumumba’s mistake was firstly to believe in the good-natured impartiality of the UN. He strangely forgot that the UN currently is no more than a reserve assembly set up by the powerful to continue between two armed conflicts the ‘peaceful struggle’ over how to share out the world’… ‘Our mistake as Africans is to have forgotten that the enemy’s retreat is never trustworthy. He never understands. He capitulates, but does not change’.
Instead, after a 20th century full of brutal imperialist interventions, our people, paralysed and divided, are participating in a 21st century that looks as though it will continue in the same way. This year, 2011, we have been presented with some 14,000 incidents of NATO combat aircraft bombing targets, often civilian, in Libya. ‘It may be that the colonial expeditions conform to a given, known pattern - the need to impose order among the barbarians, the protection of the concessions and interests of European countries, the generous gift of western civilisation - but we have not publicised sufficiently the stereotypical ways that the founding cities use to remain attached to their colonies.’
In reality the barbarity is fostered by the unyielding expansion of a capitalism in crisis that replies with counter-revolution every time we make advances in our struggles. Everywhere, it leads to compromises to which the social democratic and even radical left forces succumb, afraid of putting up opposition on an uneven playing field. However, there is nothing left to reform.
UNICEF seems powerless to prevent the death of about 29,000 children under five every day - 21 a minute - chiefly from preventable causes. One child in eight in Africa dies before reaching the age of five. ‘We Africans have been saying that for more than 100 years the life of 200,000,000 Africans has been life on the cheap, life that is put in question and perpetually haunted by death. We have been saying that we should not put our trust in the good faith of the colonialists but that we should arm ourselves with fortitude and a fighting spirit. Nobody will save our people; we must do it ourselves and soon we will number one billion of whom three quarters still live as described above.
