The Contribution ofFrantz Fanon to the Process

of the Liberation of the Peopleby Mireille Fanon-Mends France, translated by Donato Fhunsu

FANON, whether the issue is insanity, racism, or"universalism" hijacked by the powerful, doesnot, really, cease to posit the possibility of a "liv-ing together" in the form of a translation intotangible acts of the situation in which both thosewho dominate and those who are dominated haveaU to lose if the current orders and disorders con-tinue. Fanon, that indomitable spirit, that rebelwho stubbornly and without respite struggledagainst the domination exercised by the powerfulon the powerless, enlightens us today concerningthe fundamental articulation between the right torebellion against a social, political, and economicsystem that sinks the world into disorder and anew type of colonization. Thus, colonial violenceseems to have given way to an indirect violence,the colonial order has contaminated the land ofthe colonizers. Through a paradox of which his-tory holds the secret, the "indigenous" is omni-present, not only in his place of origin, but alsoin what Fanon used to call the "forbidden cities"where the renewed forms of discrimination areimplemented. In The Wretched of the Earth, he re-marks that:

[T|he world of the colonized is a world divided in two(...). The area inhabited by the colonized is not com-plementary to the area inhabited by the colonizers.These two areas are opposed but not in the service of asuperior unity (...). This world, compartmentalized intwo is inhabited by two different species. The originali-ty of the colonial context is that the economic realities,the inequalities, the enormous difference in lifestyles,never manage to mask the human realities.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of hisdeath, which occurred on the 6th of Decemberof 1961, we should note that, despite the prog-

Symposium keynote speaker, Mireille Fanon-MendsFrance, the daughter of Fanon and president of the Fon-dation Frantz Fanon in Paris. (Photo by Rylanda Nick-erson)

ress that the world has thus far made. Fanon isastonishingly current, even though colonialismin its old forms has disappeared and many states,freed from colonial oppression, have come intoexistence.

DOES THIS mean that dispossession, alienation,and injustice have disappeared from theworld? On the contrary, in many respects, an im-partial observer could say, in light of the bloodyimperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya,and also the colonial war in Palestine, that thepolitics of the canon, on which the colonial em-pires are founded, has returned to active service.

Fanon's action and work took shape in theaftermath of World War II when the world wasmarked by an ideological struggle, with a cleardemarcation, between the Western bloc and the

Page 8 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

socialist bloc. It is in this context that a ThirdWorldwhich had affirmed its political exis-tence during the Bandung Conference in 1955emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and claimed itsplace in internadonal relations as well as its shareof the planet's resources by rejecting the bipolar-izadon of the world.

It is in this context that Fanon worked out hisreflection on the role of violence in the processof liberation and on the risks incurred by theformer colonized nations once they had becomeindependent.

Fanon's intellectual producdon has gready in-fluenced revolutionaries throughout the world, inAfrica but also in Asia and in the Americas. Hiswritings cannot be dissociated from the histori-cal circumstances in which they were produced,but their relevance is intact, and they condnue toinspire new generations of militants and intellec-tuals in the global south as well as in the north.The leading perspectives that Fanon developedremain effective tools for analyzing the currencyof a world in which domination and exploitationhave changed appearances but are stiU run bymechanisms that have remained, fundamentally,unchanged.

To give an account of Fanon's contribution tothe process of the liberation of the people con-sists in presenting the various stages of his ufe,the positions he took, and the development andformuladon of his thought. His work matches hisdensely short life, both being marked by a staunchrevolt against injustice, as well as the reality prin-ciple and the ethics of commitment.

Political Awakening

THE SECOND WORLD WAR was the event thattriggered the political awakening of theyoung Fanon. Spontaneously anti-fascist andalready transladng his rejecdon of Nazism intoa concrete commitment. Fanon left the familyhome and secredy went to join, as a volunteer,the Free French Forces who were fighting NaziGermany.

Decorated by the French colonial army, he re-ally never had the feeling of being part of the lib-erators. In a letter to his parents, written in 1944,he expressed the extent of his disillusionmentthis way: "I made a mistake. Nothing, absolutelynothing, justifies the hurried decision that I tookto defend the interests of the land lord: whether I

defend him or not, he doesn't give a damn."Fanon must have noticed that the forces mo-

bilized against Nazism were harboring their ownracist ideology and were semi-officially practicingracial and ethnic discrimination. The uniform,which was supposed to represent the equalityamong the soldiers, hardly masked the intolera-ble inequalities in the treatment between blacksand whites.

After he was discharged, he returned to Mard-nique and then went back to France where he en-rolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Lyon, where,besides his courses, he attended the lectures givenby the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, readSartre's magazine, Les Temps Modernes, and took aspecial interest in Freud and Hegel.

In his first book. Black Skin, White Maskswhichwas supposed to be his doctoral thesispublishedin 1952, Fanon invoked this inidal collision withEuropean racism that he discovered precisely inthe anti-fascist army of de Gaulle. His intellec-tual understanding of a racism that encompassesboth the body and the discourse is remarkablycurrent, especially in light of the "decomplexed"resurgence of racist discourse in Europe. Thisphenomenon has, today in France, reached thefootball schools for young children, all born in thesame country, but who, through a racist nodon of"pure stock," have provoked an undignified de-bate on quotas based on skin color, origins, andsupposed "specific" physical aptitudes.

Black Skin, White Masks is a fundamental mile-stone in the struggle against racism, in the de-coding of the mechanisms of segregation andracism's political stakes. Analyzing the innerworkings of racism and its impact on those whoare dominated. Fanon contested the concept ofNgritude developed by Senghor and Csaire inardculadng the struggle against racism into a uni-versal movement for the de-alienadon of both thevictims of racism as well as the racists themselves.

As a psychiatrist, he revisited the therapeuticmethods based on the coercion and violence builtinto tradidonal hospital psychiatry.

Algeria and theAfrican Liberation Struggles

IN 1953, at the age of twenty-nine, he arrived atthe Psychiatric Hospital of Blida and wasscandalized to observe that the psychiatric schoolof colonial Algeria classified the Algerian Arabs

Page 9 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

as "primitive," affirming that their cerebral de-velopment was "retarded." Thus, for the colo-nial psychiatrists, the pathological behaviors ofthe indigenous people were due to genetic causesand thtis were incurable. Fanon, being close to hispatients and their families, discovered then the rawmanifestation of a hierarchy of races and of a vio-lent segregation comparable to apartheid.

The start of the war of national liberation onthe first of November of 1954 naturally had animpact on the hospital, since the installation wascaring for those who were traumatized by the vi-olence, those who were tortured, as well as theperpetrators of those tortures (some case are men-tioned in The Wretched of the Earth).

Through the intermediary of the militants ofthe Algerian national cause, of the physicians andactivists who cared for the wounded muhajadin, heentered into direct contact with the National liber-ation Front (NLF). In 1956, when the governmentadopted a policy of generalized brutal military re-pression, he resigned his position at the hospital,stating that, as a psychiatrist, he could not releasehis patients into a society that fundamentally alien-ated and dehumanized them. Expelled from Alge-ria by the colonial authorities in January of 1957,he went to Tunis, the external headquarters of theAlgerian Revolution.

HE RESUMED his professional activities in Tuniswhile at the same time immersing himself inthe political actions of the NLF. He was a jour-nalist for El Moudjahid and was named itinerantambassador in Africa by the Algerian governmentin exile. He successively traveled to Ghana, wherehe met Kwame Nkrumah and studied the prob-lems posed by the constitution of an independentAfrican state; to the Congo, where he met PatriceLumumba, to Ethiopia, to Liberia, to Guinea, andto Mali. His goal was to popularize the struggle ofthe Algerian people through the consolidation ofaUiances With the peoples of Africa and the imple-mentation of the internationalism that character-ized his vision of the emancipation struggles.

Thus Fanon's talks with the leaders of MaJi ledto the opening, in 1960, of a new front in the southof Algeria and to which Guinea provided weapons.He even played an important role in the shipmentof Soviet weapons to the Western front, securedthanks to the solidarity of President Skou Tour.

In 1959, the French publisher Franois Mas-pero published Fanon's second book. Year 5 of

the Algerian Revolution. This book not only accusedFrance of mass crimes against the Algerian pop-ulation (nearly fifty years after the independenceof Algeria, France has difficulty acknowledgingits crimes, just as it has difficulty accepting itsheavy responsibility in the systematic plunderingof Africa and finds it impossibledespite a lawthat acknowledges slavery and the slave trade ascrimes against humanityto fully open the pagesof this dark chapter of French history), but it alsowas an analysis of the inner workings of the Al-gerian revolution and the transformation that therevolution triggered in a society that was domi-nated, humiliated and pauperized. Year 5 of the Al-gerian Revolution was banned in France, but the banonly made people in Africa and the Third Worldwant to talk more about Fanon. He was invited tointernational conferences, where people carefullylistened to what he had to say, and this made hima target of the French authorities.

In the spring of 1961, he was set to delivera manuscript to his publisher. It was the man-uscript of The Wretched of the Earth, which dealsnot only with Algeria, but also generally with theThird World in the process of decolonization. OnDecember 3, 1961, he received the book at theBethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland. Threedays later, he died of leukemia.

In 1962, Maspero published a tribute to Fanonin the literary magazine Prsence Afcaine; he alsosought to publish his complete works by lookingfor the texts that Fanon had published, usuallyanonymously, in the clandestine newspaper of theNLF, El Moudjahid. The book was Toward the Afri-can Revolution, finally published in 1964; ErnestoChe Guevara translated it into Spanish.

Fanon's Postcolonial Vision

IN 1961, WHEN FANON WROTE The Wretched of theEarth, he thought that the colonial era was ir-revocably left behind, and what was then at issuewas the evolution of the freed states. For Fanon,the construction of a just and prosperous societyrequired that its men and women undergo an in-tegral liberation from the colonial yoke, so it wasvital to identify the deficiencies and eliminate thesequels of the devastating colonial presence.

One of the chapters of The Wretched of theEarth, "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,"is a call to the peoples who had been freed fromthe colonial enterprise to promote productive

Page 10 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

elites, endowed with political conscience and mo-tivated by a sense of public interest. If the newlyindependent countries did not manage to edu-cate their eutes, then what would prevail wouldbe a culture of racketeers who would simply bethe caricature of their Western mentors, in theirbehavior and their patterns of consumption. Theliberation movements would become one-partyregimes, and we would see a "modern form ofbourgeois dictatorship, without mask, v\dthoutmake-up, without scruple and cynical." In the ab-sence of truly national perspectives, the path to"tribalist dictatorships" would open; in playing upthe ethnic divisions and the borders "inherited"from colonialism, these new powers, supportedby the masters of yesterday, would end up caus-ing the disintegration of the new states. Thesewarnings were pronounced at the dawn of theindependences, which had been celebrated withenthusiasm and fervor. The alarm that Fanon'sclearheaded analysis sounded was an astonishingpremonition of the abuses that could befall thepostcolonial states. He described, years in ad-vance, the neocolonial pathology, the dominationby submission to the interests of the former colo-nial mtropoles that the corrupt and anti-popularnational governments perpetuate. If the colonialstructures do not explain by themselves the failureof the African independences, this half a centuryhas seen a merciless demonstration of the timebombs handed down by the colonial powers. Theindependence of the colonized countries was, forFanon, a preliminary and necessary step, but wasin no way the end of the process of liberation.

FANON WAS one of the thinkers of the AlgerianRevolution, which existed beyond anydogmatic reduction or doctrinal interpretation.He was a progressive and anti-imperialist withoutany "theological" reference to Marxism, close,but without any allegiance to the socialist camp.As the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein notedin a lapidary but very accurate formula, "Fanonread Marx with the eyes of Freud, and read Freudwith the look of Marx."

The liberation and de-alienation of the hu-man being were for Fanon the ultimate goal ofpolitical struggle, without pathos, without rigidity,but without concession either.

He was an indivisible man who could not bereduced to any particular dimension of his strug-gles; he was an anti-racist in the name of univer-sality and an anti-colonialist in the name of jus-tice and liberties. In him there existed neither the

will for revenge nor for the stigmatization of thewhites, despite the way some would like to presenthim today, those mock theorists of existentialismand of the so-called clash of civilizations. His de-tractors, who emerge from the camp of neo-con-servative "intellectuals," have attempted to subjecthim to a watch hunt under a supposed apology ofviolence, thus demonstrating their ignorance ofFanon's work and their own racist fad faith. Theviolence that Fanon did defendas a last-resortmeans that those who have been negated, exploit-ed, and reduced to slavery have for reconqueringthe selfwas the violence of legitimate defense ofthe oppressed who are subjected to the still majorviolence of domination, dispossession and con-tempt.

This breadth of reach has survived him beyondgenerations. His analysis of social pathologies and

' racial politics is astonishingly current; his political,psychological, and social analysis reaches beyondthe context in which it was done, thus manifestingan outstanding freshness and relevancy.

HIS clear-headedness and his independence,far from isolating him, despite the challengefrom "orthodox" Marxists who were prisoners todogma, have allowed him to win the esteem andthe respect of fighters for freedom and indepen-dence. Fanon was a major reference for infiuentialmilitants, such as Commandant Che Guevara,Amilcar Cabrai, Agostinho Neto, Nelson Mande-la, Mehdi Ben Barka, and many others.

In Africa and in Europe, Fanon seems todaymore relevant than ever. He makes sense for theAfrican advocates of freedom and human rights;he makes sense also for all the Africans and Ar-abs against whom are expressed, in the media aswell as in the words of the elites of some states,a shameless racism, thus violently unleashing athoughtless racism also in the masses.

This makes sense because emancipation is al-ways the first goal of those generations who reachthe age of political maturity. Many Africans havelearned that this struggle for freedom, democ-racy, and human rights is carried out against lo-cal despots but also against the sponsors of theneocolonial orders who protect them, use themto plunder local resources and reject them whenthey have served their time.

Fanon's thought continues today to inspire thosewho fight for the progress of humanity everywhereon the planet. In a world where the system of op-pression and of annihilation of all that is human

Page 11 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

continues to adapt and renew itself, his thought isan antidote against giving up. That thought is theweapon of a clear passion for the unending fightfor freedom, justice, and dignity for all men andwomen. The liberation of peoples and individualsfrom enslavement and alienation is still a goal, andfuU emancipation still remains a future attainment.

If Fanon were stiU alive today, he certainlywould not have wanted to be considered acanonical authority outside the context of hisstruggle and his written testimony.

THE RESISTANCE CONTINUES, and fifty yearsafter his death. Fanon continues to exhort usnot to abandon the struggle in this social spacewhere ordinary men and women can still callthings into question and deploy the power andthe wisdom of a true political project.

ADVERTISE IT!!!!vn

THEBLACK

SCHOLAR

CLASSIFIEDS

Subscribe to

T H E B L C K S C H O L A R 'BUCK SCHOLAR CLASSICS:REMEMBERING THE 1970sA] mmortsm: fisMA t^Hett, ms-m2

Individuals - $35.00 yr.Institutions-$148.00 yr.

Enclosed is $.Start my sub today.

PREPAYMENT IS REQUIRED

Send check or money orderwith your order.

Name.Address _CityState/Zip Code-

Paradigm Publishersc/o Journals Office5589 Arapahoe Ave.

Suite 206ABoulder, CO 80303

journals@paradigmpublishers.comPh: 303-245-9054 Fax: 303-265-9051

Page 12 THE BLACK SCHOLAR VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

Copyright of Black Scholar is the property of Paradigm Publishers, on behalf of The Black Scholar and itscontent may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.