Fanon’s Century and Decolonization
Dr. Frantz Fanon’s span of years on this earth was relatively brief, yet he marked his time-space with a boundless intensity and revolutionary determination that continues to reverberate throughout the present with a surety that it will continue to ripple through the river of times to come.
Fanon, a student of the arts and sciences of social transformation learned his lessons well, and applied them to the moving, swirling tableau before him, and did the hardest work imaginable: he applied it to the future, and thereby found that African national bourgeoisie’s would fail unless they heeded his dire warnings (Fanon/_BSWM_ 63). What were these warnings? They stand as some of the most remarkable political predictions ever written. They predicted that African nations, if they didn’t decolonize their political leaderships, would succumb to a false bourgeois nationalism, and instead of caring for the needs of the people, they would fall to the weight of greed, graft and meaningless symbolisms like changing the names of streets, rather than changing the lived conditions of the peoples of the nation. How did Fanon come to his withering conclusions? Simple. He studied Latin America’s postcolonial nation-states, saw the defects in these states and understood that this same phenomenon would erupt in postcolonial Africa, unless a true, deep decolonization movement took place in the former European colonies that strictly limited the nation’s leaders (political and/or military) from impinging on the needs, rights and dignities of the Peoples. Fanon would dismiss as ridiculous the notion of him being a prophet, yet it is clear that he engaged in a secular prophecy, underpinned by his Latin America’s studies.
In his masterwork, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon examines how the postcolonial state uses its army and police against the masses. Consider the following passage from The Wretched of the Earth (actually, the literal and more correct translation of the title would be The Damned of the Earth [Les damnés de la terre]:
“We have seen in the preceding pages that very often simplistic minds, belonging, moreover, to the emerging bourgeoisie, repeatedly argue the need for an underdeveloped country to have a strong authority, even a dictatorship, to head its affairs. With this in mind the party is put in charge of monitoring the masses. The party doubles the administration and the police force, and controls the masses not with the aim of ensuring their actual participation in the affairs of the nation, [NM5] but to remind them constantly that the authorities expect them to be obedient and disciplined. This dictatorship, which believes itself carried by history, which considers itself indispensable in the aftermath of independence, in fact symbolizes the decision of the bourgeoise caste to lead the underdeveloped country, at first with the support of the people but very soon against them. The gradual transformation of the party into an intelligence agency is indicative that the authorities are increasingly on the defensive. The shapeless mass of the people is seen as a blind force that must be constantly held on a leash either by mystification or fear instilled by police presence. …. Opposition candidates see their houses go up in flames. The police are increasingly provocative. Under these circumstances, there is, of course, but as a single party and the government candidate receives 99 percent of the votes. We have to acknowledge that a certain number of governments in Africa operate along these lines” (Fanon_ 124-125).
Fanon’s searing intellect, his strong, intrepidity, his iron will was dedicated to the emergence of decolonization as a program designed to bring true independence to the African peoples, not what he called ‘flag independence’ (a form of fake independence).
Fanon, studying its historical antecedents in Latin America, spoke with and wrote about the tomorrows he would not share with Ben M’Hidi, Prime Minister K. N’krumah, Felix Moumiè, Patrice Lumumba and other leaders and militants. He fought as if there was no tomorrow—just this moment before us—-and yet he left this precious map of directions, steering us homeward to true, authentic independence, free from the tightening grasp of neo/postcolonialisms. He knew that the struggle had to be waged on many levels, for colonialism and imperialism was, in his world, « polydimensional » (Fanon/_Toward the African Revolution_ 35).
And while he doesn’t state it baldly, the implications of his observations are no less clear, meaning, to paraphrase: ‘If colonialism/imperialism is polydimensional, so too must the anticolonial struggle be so.’ In this sense, Fanon drew few lines that the decolonial struggle(s) must not cross; for in the struggle for All, all must be done, to remove this pathogen from the body politic.
Such was/is Fanon’s way of waging the decolonial movement not merely in Algeria, but throughout the African continent entire. We are all in his debt.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, political prisoner, Ph.D. candidate.