There is presently a hearty debate in Britain on the timetable for a referendum on Scottish independence or, more correctly, the restoration of Scottish independence. Prime Minister David Cameron prefers an early vote, presumably in the next 18 months, with two ‘straightforward’ questions on whether the Scots want independence or wish to continue to be part of Britain as it has been in the past 300 years. Cameron also wishes that the outcome of the referendum is ‘legally binding’, quite an unprecedented position to take as referendums in Britain in the past have had an ‘advisory’ or ‘consultative’ status. Finally, he wants the minimum age of 18 for participants. In contrast, Alex Salmond, the leader of the pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party and Scotland’s first minister, insists that, thanks to SNP’s majority victory in last May’s elections to the Edinburgh Holyrood assembly, his party has the ‘mandate for the Scottish parliament to organise the referendum [on its own]… It must be a referendum built in Scotland and decided by Scottish people…’ Salmond adds that he will schedule the poll in the autumn of 2014 and besides the ‘yes’/‘no’ choices favoured by Cameron, he wouldn’t rule out a third, more nuanced proto-independence choice for voters (the so-called dev-max or ‘devolution-maximum’) which calls for enhanced financial powers for Scotland, derived from existing devolved provisions – that is, just short of total sovereignty as these new powers won’t affect defence and foreign affairs! For poll participation, Salmond prefers an age limit of 16 rather than Cameron’s 18.
Quite clearly, the differences between both leaders on this important subject are merely procedural and not on the substantive issue of the rights of Scots, as a people, to decide their future. Despite the oft-quoted, if irreverent lines from Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet, alluding to the deteriorating Scottish economic situation at the time (caused by the so-called Darién scheme) which contributed to its parliamentarians voting for union with England, formally inaugurated in 1707 (‘We are bought and sold for English gold. Such a parcel of rogues in a nation’), Scotland has not been ‘worse off’ in the United Kingdom enterprise. On the contrary, Scots and their country were enriched exponentially by this union. Some scholars have dubbed the vast lands of the world that Britain conquered during its 350 years march across the globe the ‘Scottish empire’, rather than ‘British empire’, to underscore this Scottish unprecedented triumph.
And they are not so far off the mark in that characterisation! Scottish financiers and merchants, enslavers, enslaved-plantation owners, tobacco, sugar and cotton growers and the like (in the Americas), along with their English counterparts, were already immersed in reaping the gargantuan fortune wreaked from the hegemonic control of African enslavement they now shared with England. This was occasioned by the two states’ previous century’s dramatic displacement of the central role played hitherto in this holocaust by Portugal and Spain. Huge profits from African enslavement were ploughed back into Scottish sociocultural and financial institutions and cities to power the gestating industrial revolution (especially in the Glasgow conurbation) and the Scottish age of enlightenment, that very much revered heritage in the country’s national narrative. Such was the staggering outcome of this Scottish (and English) transformation that Christopher Hill, the distinguished specialist on this epoch of British history, has observed that, prior to the mid-17th century, these states were still ‘cultural and scientific backwater’ but soon, into the following century, they had become ‘centre of world science’.
POUNCING ON OPPORTUNITIES
Buoyed by these phenomenal strides in societal fortunes and outlook, the one million Scots, a sixth of the population of the new merger-state relation, pounced on the opportunities thrown up by union with England with much aplomb: Scottish military forces with their specialised fighting units, who in the past fought for English global expansionism, henceforth had a greater stake to defend and conquer ever new seas and lands in continent after continent for the union; Scottish emigration, especially to north America, soared; Scottish conquest administrators prominently policed the union’s empire – from the east’s Asian frontiers through Africa to the west’s outstretches of the Americas and, lastly, its leading intellectuals (philosophers, scientists, political-economists, writers) simultaneously valorised the thrust and goals of union and conquest. Not a few of the latter would join counterparts in England and elsewhere to particularly offer the ‘requisite’ cultural/scientific/literary rationalisation for African enslavement/holocaust and map out the presumed hermeneutical canvass of the cardinal codifiers of European world racism as an ideology.
When pro-independence ‘colonists’ in north America in the later part of the 18th century revolted against the union crown, significant sectors of Scottish émigrés (including their Ulster-Scot cousins) and institutions strongly supported freedom for the United States – a position that would obviously have appeared paradoxical for obvious reasons. One-third of delegates who signed the US independence document were of Scottish descent and 75 per cent of all US presidents since the founding of the republic are of Scottish ancestry.
STATE IS TRANSIENT; PEOPLE ENDURE
Given the trajectory of what many would feel is an illustrious history sketched above, it could appear that Scots are perhaps the most unlikely people to wish to break from Britain. Interestingly, most opinion polls conducted in Scotland show that majority of Scots do not currently want a restoration of their country’s independence. Ironically, a most recent of these polls shows that more English and Welsh respondents (from two of the four constituent nations in the union) than the Scots themselves want the Scots to ‘go’! So, a principal reason that Alex Salmond is working towards a ‘delayed’ referendum date (last quarter of 2014) is to have more time to campaign to garner a majority vote outcome from across a Scottish population still sceptical of the restoration-of-independence for their country. Salmond wants to appeal to younger Scots (hence his intention to lower the minimum deciding voting age to 16), where disposition for independence is much greater than the older population. 2014 also presents Salmond with three ‘opportunity chords’ to play for in the independence drive: commemorating the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn in which the Scots defeated England, Scottish hosting of the Commonwealth games, and Scottish hosting of the Ryder Cup (golf).
Prime Minister Cameron is very much aware of the Scottish success story in the UK-union and also that a majority of Scots would vote for continuing stay in the union if a referendum on the subject were held presently. The latter particularly explains Cameron’s desire for an early poll. Yet despite being first minister of the union who undoubtedly wishes to preserve the union, Cameron accepts the rights of Scots to decide freely on this subject. It is their right. But this right is not only restricted to the Scots or to the English or to the Welsh or to only peoples in Europe… It is, in fact, a universal right that every people enjoy. Every people.
This right to self-determination for every people is inalienable and is guaranteed by the United Nations. No people is exempt from exercising this right. As everyone expects, Cameron has not come out demonising Scots for ‘daring’ to wish to leave the union; no, Cameron wouldn’t do this because he respects the rights of Scots to exercise their right to self-determination. As everyone expects, surely, Cameron has not come out with the dreadful thoughts of wishing any harm to Scots for wanting to exercise their inalienable rights to self-determination as one James Harold Wilson, who once lived and worked from the same London address that Cameron inhabits today, declared when the Igbo of south-west-central Africa exercised this right between 29 May 1966 and 12 January 1970.
The Igbo had exercised their right to independence from the Nigeria-union (created by UK-union in 1914!) when this Nigeria-union unleashed the genocide against them with the active participation of key constituent nations (in the union) such as the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Kanuri. 3.1 million Igbo or a quarter of their population were murdered. UK-union supported the genocide politically, diplomatically and militarily – London’s calculated ‘punishment’ for the Igbo-lead role (in the 1940s-1960) to terminate the UK-union-occupation of its Nigeria-union lucre. As the slaughtering of the Igbo intensified especially in those catastrophic months of 1968/1969, James Harold Wilson was totally unfazed when he informed Clyde Ferguson (United States State Department special coordinator for relief to Biafra) that he, James Harold Wilson, ‘would accept half a million dead Biafrans if that was what it took’ the Nigeria-union to destroy the Igbo resistance to the genocide. Such is the grotesquely expressed diminution of African life made by a supposedly leading politician of the world of the 1960s – barely 20 years after the deplorable perpetration of the Jewish genocide.
As the final tally of the murder of the Igbo demonstrates, James Harold Wilson probably had the perverted satisfaction of having his Nigeria-union genocidists perform far in excess of his grim target. Unlike the Igbo, the Scots, pointedly, never faced any pogrom or genocide by the UK-union or organised by any of the other constituent nations of the union (English, Welsh, Irish) during these past 300 years. Finally, as everyone expects, unfailingly, Cameron has not dabbled into some nonsense of the assumed ‘inviolability’ or ‘indivisibility’ of the UK-union in respect to the rights of Scots to self-determination, two oft-repeated vulgarities with reference to the Nigeria-union that the same James Harold Wilson trumpeted with much relish as the Nigeria-union genocidists slaughtered and slaughtered the Igbo during those 44 months of certain death.
What the debate on the 5 million Scots and Scotland has clearly demonstrated is that the people, the nation, is deemed superior to the state. This is the case of any people in the world vis-à-vis the state. This position is correct for all peoples and nations irrespective of race, continent, region, religion/belief system, etc. The people, the nation is enduring; the state is transient. The state is therefore not some ‘gift’ from someone else; definitely not from any conquerors, nor even from gods, but relationships painstakingly formulated and constructed by a discernible group of human beings that inhabit an ascertainable geo-historical territorial expanse on Earth to pursue worldviews and interests envisioned and formulated by these same human beings.
In Africa, where the contemporary state was created and imposed by the European conquest over decades/centuries as instruments to expropriate and despoil Africa in perpetuity, the goal of organically articulated African-created and owned states to radically transform depressing African fortunes is imperative. In the aggressively genocidist-states such as the Nigeria-union, the Sudan-union and Democratic Republic of the Congo-union, this task is even more pressing.
EVEN 1000 STATES…
The Igbo, with a population of 50 million and whose homeland has been under occupation by the Nigeria-union since 13 January 1970, are arguably the world’s most brutally targeted and most viciously murdered of peoples presently. Nigeria is now firmly the obligatory haematophagous monster in Africa whose raison d’être appears to be to murder the Igbo most routinely and ritualistically. Since losing 3.1 million during the genocide, tens of thousands of Igbo have been murdered by this monster during the course of the following years, signposted here by the eerie columns that chart the contours of the killing fields: 1980 … 1982 … 1985 … 1991 … 1993 … 1994 … 1999 … 2000 … 2001 … 2002 … 2004 … 2005 … 2006 … 2007 … 2008 … 2009 … 2010 … 2011 … 2012.
According to the recently published research (December 2011) by the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule Of Law, a human rights organisation based in Onicha, 90 per cent of the 54,000 people murdered in Nigeria-union by the state/quasi-state operatives and agents since 1999 are Igbo. Since last Christmas Day, the Boko Haram islamist insurgent group spearheads these murders. At least 90 per cent of people murdered by the Boko Haram across swathes of lands in north/northcentral Nigeria in the past 23 days are Igbo.
The Boko Haram now issues its threats to murder Igbo people almost habitually, on a daily basis, and, true to its words, executes its mission most ruthlessly, most remorselessly. After each of its outrages, Boko Haram acknowledges responsibility and does this most dispassionately… The regime in Abuja appears cruelly powerless to protect Igbo people emplaced within the jurisdiction of the supposedly sovereign state it controls with the well-known consequences in international law that this shocking relegation of responsibility entails. Regime-head Goodluck Jonathan says as much in a recent astonishing radio and television broadcast to his country and the world: ‘Boko Haram is everywhere in the executive arm of [my] government, in the legislative arm of [my] government and even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security and in the judiciary. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house’.
The Nigeria-union has, since 1945, gained considerable notoriety for consistently evolving new levers and institutions and processes within itself to murder the Igbo. Following from Jonathan’s proclamation, it is conceivable that right there closeted in his regime, there are operatives deeply complicit in the ongoing murder of the Igbo. No doubt, Jonathan cannot but elaborate further on this broadcast to a restless, eagerly awaiting world. Not since 29 May 1966-12 January 1970 (Phase-I and Phase-II of the Igbo genocide) has Igbo life in the Nigeria-union Malebogle acquired such a gripping existential emergency…
The right of Africans to form their own state, away from the extant, murderous European-created state, is the corpus of my ‘The Biafra War, Nigeria and the Aftermath’, the second of the two books on the Igbo genocide I published in 1990. In the concluding pages of this book I note the following:
‘Either in peace, or war, the existence of the European post-colonial state is inimical to the interests of African peoples. It is a state that cannot provide the fundamental needs of Africans … The African humanity is presently gripped in a grave crisis for survival. It is now time that it abandoned the contrived post-colonial state in order to survive … African nations, [namely] Igbo, Wolof, Yoruba, Asante, Baganda, Bakongo, Bambara, etc., etc … remain the basis for the regeneration of Africa’s development … [and] the sites of the continent’s intellectual and other cultural creativity … What is being stressed here is that African peoples, themselves, must decide on the … issue of sovereignty … even if the outcome were to lead to 1000 states … For the future survival of the African humanity, let no more Africans have to die for the defence of, or for upholding the territorial frontier of any post-colonial state. No precious life should be wasted for its preservation.’
Twenty-two years on, these words remain crucially pivotal in focusing our minds on the very survival of the Igbo and all other African peoples. The Igbo and all others who have lived through the terror of the post-(European)conquest state must abandon it at once to survive and advance towards the construction of higher levels of civilisation. They have no other choice. Each and every constituent African people or nation can build this civilisation outside the existing genocide state of enthralled and degenerative union. Let Africa’s constituent peoples or nations unleash a dazzling contest of creativity and progress, a continuing mutual bombardment and sharing of ideas and streams of possibilities, akin to what the world has seen in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in the past 40 years – not mass murdering … mass murdering … mass murdering … pillaging … pillaging … pillaging … nihilism … nihilism … nihilism … Most surely, now is the time to embark on this beginning.
Read more on Rights for Scots, rights for Igbos By Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe…
WELT-SICHTEN: You wrote that the aid effectiveness journey since the Paris Declaration in 2005 was misguided right from the beginning. Why that?
YASH TANDON: Because it was conceptualized by the donors, and not by the people that were supposed to be assisted. It was not a participatory project. When it became clear that aid had failed, instead of looking at the issue in a fundamental manner, the donor countries put the blame of ineffectiveness on the recipient countries.
WELT-SICHTEN: But the Paris Declaration also calls on the donors to harmonize their aid policies, to align them to recipient-country systems, among other things.
YASH TANDON: Those words are deceptive. The five principles of the Paris Declaration are ideological, one-sided and not enforceable on the donors. They looked good in a conceptual sense, but the implementation was enforced only on the recipient countries.
WELT-SICHTEN: You have said that after the High Level Forum in Busan, the aid industry in itself is finally dead. Why?
YASH TANDON: Well, this industry was nurtured by countries that have used aid to serve their own political and economic agendas in the south. In fact, the so-called development aid never did promote development. Since 2005, the OECD countries and the World Bank have tried very hard to sell the idea of “aid effectiveness”. But the Outcome Document of the Busan Forum does not mention the word "aid effectiveness". It’s gone. Finally, the architects of the aid industry, namely the OECD countries and the World Bank, have recognized that they cannot use that word anymore. Aid has become a dirty word, like colonialism. The result is that the aid industry has no longer any legitimacy.
WELT-SICHTEN: By contrast, the Minister of Development in Germany sees a new beginning: He said that Busan was a basis to “bundle” old and new actors in development cooperation and to steer them in the same direction.
YASH TANDON: Well, the minister better read the Outcome Document again. It calls on the Working Party on Aid Effectiveness to dissolve by June 2012. The words are clear. There is no “rebundling” of aid.
WELT-SICHTEN: But the Outcome Document says that a new Global Partnership for Development should be established.
YASH TANDON: This new development partnership will not take off the ground because the ruling classes of Europe and the West have a distorted, an upside-down, understanding of “development”. Let Europe first show that their “partnership“ with the people of Greece takes off the ground before they offer the same failed strategies to the poor indebted countries of Africa and the third world.
WELT-SICHTEN: NGOs have said Busan was a compromise: the Outcome Document left much to be desired, but it was a success that civil society was recognized as a development partner.
YASH TANDON: The NGOs that came to Busan were not representative of the global civil society. The overwhelming bulk of them were financed by the OECD. For the last six years, these guys have been saying the same thing, namely, that the OECD has compromised but there is a still a lot to be desired. This is an admission that they have failed to change the “aid effectiveness” agenda. The NGOs have a self-serving delusion about themselves: they live in a fool’s paradise.
WELT-SICHTEN: So in your view the only purpose of the aid effectiveness process was to legitimate the apparently ineffective and self-serving aid industry of the West?
YASH TANDON: That is correct. Of course this industry will not disappear overnight. There are at least a million people in the Western countries that live off the aid industry. They have a vested interest in perpetuating it. It will disintegrate over time and die slowly. When the aid industry started 50 years ago with multilateral and governmental agencies that were providing financial support to countries that were emerging out of the colonial period, it was already corrupted. For example, when the World Bank came to provide the so-called assistance to my country Uganda at its independence in 1962, it came with its own strategy of development. It was not people-oriented, it was top-down, it was aimed at continuing to serve essentially the interests of the former colonial powers – namely to export our primary commodities to them. The whole economic agenda was flawed right from the beginning. And that agenda was bought into later on by the charity organisations and the NGOs.
WELT-SICHTEN: But many development NGOs have been strongly criticising the official aid agenda and the World Bank policy for many years.
YASH TANDON: Yes, but many of them got corrupted over time. For example, Oxfam started out as a well meaning, well intentioned organisation by people who wanted to give money as charity to people who were less fortunate than them. But look at how Oxfam has evolved: it has become a party of the development strategies pushed by the Western countries. Gradually charity organisations like Oxfam got sucked into that strategy. They criticised the effects of it, but at the same time continued pouring money into the same strategy. And when the OECD worked out this thing about “effective aid”, the NGOs jumped on this agenda as well. Instead of examining this question in its fundamentals and looking at the root causes of aid ineffectiveness, the NGOs simply called for even more aid and “better aid”.
WELT-SICHTEN: You say that aid has failed. But what’s wrong with, for example, the German development bank KfW financing water supply systems in Kampala?
WELT-SICHTEN: Why do you call it aid? Just call it business, like the Chinese and the Indians do in Africa. The Chinese go to Kampala to do business. They go to the government or the private sector and talk about investments. Aid, by contrast, is humiliating.
WELT-SICHTEN: So it’s better to do it like China?
YASH TANDON: Absolutely. Why hide your commercial and political interests? Be transparent, just call it what it is. Call it business.
WELT-SICHTEN: Another example: What’s wrong with a German Church-based development organisation working with grassroots partner organisations in rural Uganda to empower women or poor farmers? That’s aid, isn’t it?
WELT-SICHTEN: There is a particular kind of relationship I accept: that is a relationship based on solidarity. But solidarity is a very difficult concept. If the goal is to help the Ugandan women to empower themselves, by their own projects, then I would call this solidarity. But the people from Germany must not impose their values on the Ugandan women. In other words, if the communities of these women have certain cultural practices, then solidarity organisations from the West should respect that.
WELT-SICHTEN: Even if such practices conflict with universal human rights? Should we not encourage women who raise their voices against practices that violate their human rights?
YASH TANDON: No, this is not your business. The women don’t require outside agencies to “encourage” them, as you put it. My experience from 20 years of grassroots work in Africa is that the initiatives of rural women in Africa against oppression are very strong and very strategic. They know what will work and what will not. If in such a situation a foreign organisation comes to provide assistance based on the women’s own initiatives, then it will work. By contrast, if an outside agency comes to solve the problem, then you might create conflicts which the outside organisations cannot manage. All development is self-development.
Read more on ‘Aid is a dirty word, like colonialism’ Interview by Welt-Sichten (World-Views)…
The League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria is in an administratively critical time with the Observer Mission members from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates leaving the Mission on Tuesday 24, January. This represents 52 persons of an estimated 160, already badly understaffed.
Elections galore and more revolutions pending, 2012 will be an exhilarating year.
Governments may fall and leaders may change in China, France, Russia, the United States, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria.
Read more on A new world order on hold By Patrick Smith…
South Sudan was born as an independent nation on July 9, 2011, with good will and a bounty. Three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of oil per day provided the government with $1,000 per year for each of its 8 million citizens.
Read more on South Sudan’s Doomsday Machine By ALEX DE WAAL…
ON DECEMBER 7, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to consider the Philadelphia district attorney’s final avenue of appeal, current DA Seth Williams announced that he would no longer be seeking a death sentence for the world-renowned death row journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal–on death row following his conviction at a 1982 trial deemed unfair by Amnesty International, the European parliament, the Japanese diet, Nelson Mandela and many others.
Read more on The torture of Mumia Abu-Jamal By Hans Bennett…
South Africa is home to African political refugees and migrants seeking work from all over the African continent and, as in Europe and North America, immigrants are targets of xenophobia, harassment, intimidation, immigrant police sweeps and even geopolitically motivated attacks. On Friday, Dec. 20, members of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s immigrant community in Johannesburg contacted KPFA Radio to say that South Africa’s African National Congress government had instructed their police to arrest Congolese immigrants in Yeoville and other Johannesburg suburbs.
Sources in the UDF and RDF reported to this reporter that the four generals in Rwanda that have been arrested was falsely reported as being arrested for questionable dealings in the DRC but in reality they were arrested due to the fleeing of 600-800 soldiers in December 2011
Read more on Arrested Rwandan Generals are being tortured…
In 2010 the world watched in horror as the Gulf of Mexico filled with 5m barrels of oil from an undersea leak caused by the careless handling of equipment on the part of BP and its partner Halliburton. Shocking images of uncontrolled spillage erupting from the ocean floor travelled around the world for weeks, sparking a media frenzy, a range of stern governmental responses and a huge amount of public outrage. BP has spent millions on the clean-up and millions more on a public relations campaign, all in an effort to repair thedamage it caused to the Gulf but also to its image and, perhaps more importantly for BP,to its share price.
Read more on Nigeria’s oil disasters are met by silence by Michael Keating…
When famed poet Ingrid Jonker left her apartment in Cape Town in July 1965, walked pass the candy-striped red and white lighthouse near Three Anchor Bay, and drowned herself in the sea, she couldn’t have guessed what would happen next. She probably didn’t think her work as an Afrikaans poet would go on to guide a nation away from the apartheid she despised. She wouldn’t have thought a prisoner named Nelson Mandela would become president some three decades later and step up to the podium at the opening of the first democratic parliament in that very city to read her poem, Die Kind.
Read more on The black professional is not dead By VERASHNI PILLAY…
On the front page of the New York Times today is an article by Adam Nossiter: “For Congo Children, Food Today Means None Tomorrow.” While the article tells the heartbreaking story of Congolese children struggling to eat, there is an important story of Western (especially American) responsibility that is predictably missing. On some days the bigger children eat, and on other days the smaller children eat. Some days the adults eat, and on those days the children go without. This is explained as “a Kinshasa family ritual.” As if Congolese people have a cultural preference for starvation.
Read more on The Times and the Congo: A Nightmare of Epic Proportions by Michael McGehee…
World Citizens welcomed the upholding of the total ban on cluster weapons as a significant step in the development of world law. In a 28 November 2011 message to Dr Jakob Kellenberger, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Association of World Citizens (AWC) welcomed the strong leadership of the ICRC to prevent a weakening of the international treaty imposing a comprehensive ban on the use, production, stockpiling, and sale of cluster munitions. The treaty, often called the Oslo Convention as negotiations began in Oslo in February 2007, was reviewed in November 2011 at the United Nations in Geneva as part of the review of the Convention on Prohibition on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects — the “1980 Inhumane Weapons Convention” to its friends.
Read more on Ban on Cluster Weapons Upheld: World Law Significantly Strengthened By Rene Wadlow…
In 2009 I screened the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell in Monrovia, Liberia, with a group of Liberian women — young and old — and found myself buoyed by an unconventional story portraying unconventional women in very unconventional circumstances. Two years I am now revisiting the film after it catapulted onto the world stage the life and times of Leymah Gbowee, a 2011 Liberian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who galvanized hundreds of Liberian women in 2003 to bring an end to the civil war. Some would argue that if not for the film, Gbowee and her fellow peace activists would not have been given the recognition they deserved.
The Niger Delta has been at the centre of Nigeria’s post‑independence military project from the first coup in 1966 through to the present. To the outside world it remained a forgotten outpost, however, until the 1990s and the rise of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Since then, unequivocal evidence has emerged of how the region and its commerce – primarily the oil industry – has been systematically militarised, with violence by the state, multinationals and local militias deployed as an instrument of governance and intimidation to force the people into total submission.
Read more on Niger Delta: a quiet resistance By Sokari Ekine…
When I was asked by Dr. Keithley Woolward to address the question of Fanon’s contemporary relevance, I was reminded of a blurb on the back of my recent book Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo which reads, ‘This is not another meditation on Fanon’s continued relevance. Instead, it is an inquiry into how Fanon, the revolutionary, might think and act in the face of contemporary social crisis.’ My comments today should be considered in that spirit. ‘Relevance’ — from a Latin word ‘relevare’, to lift, from ‘lavare’, to raise, levitate — to levitate a living Fanon who died in the USA nearly 50 years ago this coming Tuesday in cognizance of his own injunction articulated in the opening sentence from his essay ‘On national culture’: ‘Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’ (1968 206). The challenge was laid down at the opening of this year of Fanon’s 50th (as well as the 50th anniversary of his ‘The Wretched of the Earth’) which began with revolution — or at least a series of revolts and resistance across the region, known as the Arab Spring.
Fanon begins ‘The Wretched’, as you know, writing of decolonisation as a program of complete disorder, an overturning of order — often against the odds — willed collectively from the bottom up. Without time or space for a transition, there is an absolute replacement of one ‘species’ by another (1968: 35). In a period of radical change such absolutes appear quite normal, when, in spite of everything thrown against it, ideas jump across frontiers and people begin again ‘to make history’ (1968: 69-71). In short, once the mind of the oppressed experiences freedom in and through collective actions, its reason becomes a force of revolution. As the Egyptians said of 25 January: ‘When we stopped being afraid we knew we would win. We will not again allow ourselves to be scared of a government. This is the revolution in our country, the revolution in our minds.’ What started with Tunisia and then Tahrir Square has become a new global revolt, spreading to Spain and the Indignados (indignants) movement, to Athens and the massive and continuous demonstrations against vicious structural adjustment, to the urban revolt in England, to the massive student mobilisation to end education for profit in Chile, to the ‘occupy’ movement of the 99 percent.
And yet, as the revolts inevitably face new repression, elite compromises and political manoeuvrings, Fanonian questions — echoed across the postcolonial world — become more and more timely. (How can the revolution hold onto its epistemological moment, the rationality of revolt?) Surely the question is not whether Fanon is relevant, but why is Fanon relevant now?
CONTEXTS AND GEOGRAPHIES
In the penultimate chapter of ‘Frantz Fanon: A Portrait’, Alice Cherki notes that Blida Psychiatric Hospital in Algiers still bears his name, that Fanon has a boulevard and a high school for girls named after him, though young people have no idea who he is. After independence in Algeria, Fanon was quite quickly marginalised. A new constitution identified the nation with Islam and that women were actively dissuaded from playing any part in public life did not jibe with Fanon’s vision of politics.
Fanon was dead before Algeria gained its independence, yet ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ chapter of ‘The Wretched’ (based on his reflections on his West African experiences as well as his concerns about the Algerian revolution) is a fairly accurate portrayal of what Algeria became with oil money playing an enormously important role in pacifying the population and paying for a bloated and ubiquitous security force.
To speak about relevance, then, is also to speak about historic context. Fanon was recruited into the FLN during the battle of Algiers. Although a committed anti-colonialist he had not moved to Algeria to join a revolution but to take up the job as director of psychiatry at Blida-Joinville Hospital. It was a job he wanted and he put enormous energy into fighting to reform how psychiatry was practiced in the hospital. He created space — both practical and intellectual (reading groups) for himself and his colleagues — to institute a kind of Tosquellean [1] inspired institutional sociotherapy to humanise the asylum where the patient would become ‘a subject in his or her liberation’ and the doctor an ‘equal partner in the fight for freedom’ (Cherki 36). In a sense, that would become Fanon’s political philosophy. The Algerian war of national liberation — declared a year after he arrived — politicised him and radicalised him, as he began to see and treat its effects in the hospital and in his work. He was asked by the FLN to use his skills as a therapist to treat those who had been tortured. He began to clandestinely treat the tortured while treating the torturer as part of his hospital work. Indeed his comments in ‘L’An cinq de la revolution Algérienne’ (‘Year Five of the Algerian revolution’ published as ‘A Dying Colonialism’ in English) bear this experience out not only on his withering critique of the medical profession involved in torture but also in his desire to find the human being behind the coloniser, believing that liberation would put an end to the colonised and the coloniser (1967c, 24) and his condemnation (though understanding) of those who have thrown themselves into revolutionary action with ‘physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed’ (1967c, 25). At Blida the situation became untenable and he simply couldn’t continue. As he wrote in his letter of resignation, how could he treat mental illness in a society that drives people to a desperate solution? Such a society, he added, needs to be replaced (1967b, 53). With the authorities closing in on the hospital, which was suspected as a hotbed of support for the FLN, he resigned before he was picked up and began to work full time for the revolution.
This was part of Fanon’s context.
At the same time it was not surprising that, when the opportunity arose, Fanon would join a revolutionary movement, or as Glissant put it (1999 25), to act on his ideas. [2] And yet, at the same time it was not only acting on ideas but that for Fanon ideas were always influenced by practice and also transformative. One can see in ‘Black Skin White Masks’ that he was in a sense already a revolutionary, and given the chance he would ‘take part in a revolution’, as Jean Ayme put it (quoted in Cherki 2006:94). But at the time Fanon was a revolutionary who was not deeply political. Fanon had been introduced to Ayme, a psychiatrist, anti-colonist activist and Trotskyist, in September 1956 when he had given his paper at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists. And in Ayme’s Paris apartment, in early 1957 — where he stayed before leaving to join the FLN in Tunis — he spent his time reading about revolutionary politics.
He had been recruited into the FLN by Ramdane Abane, the Kabylian leader of the FLN who became Fanon’s mentor. Abane, who has an airport named after him in Kabylia, had been a key figure in the 1956 FLN conference Soummam which had criticised the militarisation of the revolution, insisting on a collective political control, and put forward a vision of a future Algeria that remained Fanon’s. They both believed in the ‘revolutionary dismantling of the colonial state’ (Cherki 105). The principle adopted as the Soummam platform was a vision of the future Algeria as a secular democratic society with the ‘primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab, Amazigh, Muslim, [Jewish] Christian, European, etc.)’ (Abane 2011): ‘in the new society that is being built,’ Fanon wrote in italics in Year 5, ‘there are only Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in Algeria is an Algerian … We want an Algeria open to all, in which every kind of genius can grow’ (Fanon, 1967c 152, 32).
Abane was liquidated by the FLN at the turn of 1958. Fanon died before Algeria gained its independence in 1962 and was quickly marginalized, then dismissed as irrelevant and out of touch for not understanding the power of Islam (a charge that has been repeated for 50 years). In France, the story was similar. ‘Les damnés de la terre’ was criticised as romantic and Fanon dismissed as an interloper to the Algerian revolution. The book only sold a few thousand copies.
Translated into English in 1963 by an African-American poet, Constance Farrington, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ was published in 1965 in the United States, going through innumerable printings and becoming a best seller in the revolutionary year of 1968 when it was subtitled ‘a handbook for the Black revolution’.
As Kathleen Cleaver puts it in ‘The Black Panther Party Reconsidered’, ‘The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement’ (1998: 214). The colonial world that Fanon wrote about ‘bore a striking resemblance,’ she added, ‘to the world that American blacks lived’ (1998: 215). Of course the influence had been mutual since the descriptions of Black American life by writers such as Richard Wright played an important role in the development of Fanon’s ‘Black Skin White Masks’. For Cleaver, what was especially relevant to the Black Panthers ‘was Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and the necessity of violence’ (1998 216). And associating Algeria with Fanon, some Panthers fled to Algeria in the late 1960s. Thus it was through the Panthers that Fanon returned momentarily to Algeria, but noticeably shorn of his internal critique of the liberation movements and post-independence and thereby reduced to just another anti-colonial figure. Yet just as Eldridge Cleaver was opening the First Pan African Cultural Festival in 1969, Fanon had made his way across the Limpopo into the heart of settler colonial Africa — apartheid South Africa. As well as Black Power, Black theology writers provided an importantly link between Fanon and Biko and Fanon became essential for the development of Black Consciousness in South Africa; a movement that was explicitly a praxis oriented philosophy in outlook which became a crucial turning point in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.
My recent work on Fanonian Practices in South Africa can be understood in terms of thinking about Fanon’s relevance. It begins with Biko’s engagement with Fanon. Biko, who has a hospital named after him in Pretoria, was murdered in 1977 and argued in a Fanonian vein in the early 1970s that it was possible to create a ‘capitalist black society, black middle class,’ in South Africa, and ‘succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.’ You see, hospitals, airports, roads and so on, can be renamed after revolutionaries, yet it turns out that not much changes for the bulk of the people. Now nearly 40 years after Biko’s statement, Fanon’s ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ — an essay written from within the Algerian revolution — which provides a forecast for the post-independent nation, a keen analysis of the dreadful cost of its failure, is an uncanny portrait of post-apartheid South Africa.
So the second moment of Fanonian practice is a critique of contemporary postcolonial reality. In other words, the lasting value of employing Fanon’s critical insights and method. The source is not only ‘The Wretched’ where he calls the national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly … antinational,’ opting, he adds, for an ‘abhorrent path of a conventional bourgeoisie, a bourgeois that is dismally, inanely and cynically bourgeois,’ but also ‘Black Skin White Masks’, which concludes with a critique of bourgeois life as sterile and suffocating. In the Antilles there have been struggles for freedom, he argues, but too often they have been conducted in terms and values given by the white master and creating profoundly ambivalent situations and neurotic symptoms described in ‘Black Skin’.
Fanon left the Antilles to study in France, but after his World War Two experiences he already no longer believed in the French mission and profoundly disapproved of Césaire’s support for assimilation. Just recently I was reading Richard Wright’s collection, ‘White Man Listen’, published in 1957, specifically an essay ‘The psychological reactions of oppressed people’ as it articulates with ‘Black Skin White Masks’, specifically Fanon and Wright’s critique of Mannoni. [3] The book is interestingly dedicated to Eric Williams and to ‘the Westernised and tragic elite of Asia, Africa and the West Indies — men who are distrusted, misunderstood, maligned by left and right.’ Fanon wrote about these elites in ‘Black Skin’ and in ‘The Wretched’. Indeed they remain crucial to the post-independence situation, but in a review of the book in El Moudjahid in 1959 he was critical of Wright’s book because of its singular focus on the tragedy of these elites while real life and death struggles were taking place across the continent (see Cherki 159).
THE REALITY OF THE NATION
The damnation of the world’s majority inscribed in the Manichean geographies so well described by Fanon in ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ does not end with the negotiated settlement and the withdrawal of formal colonial rule. The violence that orders colonialism, the violence that follows the colonised home and enters every pore of their body, is reconfigured in the contemporary world of razor wire transit camps and detention zones, in rural pauperisation and in the shanty towns and shack settlements. It is the silent scream of much of the world’s population, who appear most of the time without solidarity, without agency, without speech. Beyond the gated citadels, beyond the zones of tourism, in the zone of often bare existence, there seems no way out. And yet, at a moment like ours in 2011, there is all of a sudden made absolutely clear the rationality of rebellion. So, the shocking relevance of a Fanonian political will.
Yet more than a simple us-and-them, the ‘we’ for Fanon was always a creative ‘we,’ a ‘we’ of political action and praxis, thinking and reasoning. Indeed this was not only his critique of colonialism but also of the neo-colonial afterlife. ‘Colonialism is not a thinking machine,’ Fanon argues, but all too often its aftermath, the new nation, is mired in the same mindlessness, indeed a stupidity created by the national bourgeoisie’s will to power often mediated by crude force against the very people who made liberation possible. In contrast, Fanon’s ‘we,’ for example, is wonderfully articulated in Walcott’s poem, ‘the Schooner Flight’: ‘Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.’ It is the nobodies, the damned, the impoverished and landless who for Fanon become the source, the basis, the truth of the ‘reality of the nation’ (the first title of ‘A Dying Colonialism’). As anti-eviction activists in South Africa say, ‘we are poor but not poor in mind’ and collectively ‘we think our own struggles.’
The articulation of these movements with Fanon, is the third element of Fanonian practices. Since this notion of truth has created some concern among scholars, let me try to explain it, for it can’t be understood without a notion of how social change creates a radical mutation in consciousness, as Fanon puts it.
In other words, in a period of social change what is now obvious seemed just a few months ago outrageous. Who could have imagined great political changes such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of apartheid? Below these rather grand events are the local and grassroots movements that open up space for thinking that seem not only outside the realm of the possible but that also include voices that are often unheard.
This week a UN conference on climate change is taking place in Durban, South Africa. The poor, who experience the full force of extreme weather and have to spend their time dealing with its effects, are not invited. A couple of days ago I received an article by Reverend Mavuso of the Rural Network in South Africa, an organisation of poor and landless rural people and part of the poor people’s alliance, that reminded me of Fanon’s critique of tourism, which he viewed as a quintessential postcolonial industry with the nationalist elites becoming the ‘organizers of parties.’ This is not just a Caribbean experience; it has become the experience of post-apartheid South Africa with private game parks and Safaris taking over land.
Presented to the world as ‘eco-tourism’, Mavuso (2011) writes, ‘game farming and the tourism industry are evicting the poor, ‘rob[ing us of our] … land … and replac[ing us] … with animals’ (my emphasis). In post-apartheid South Africa, thousands are evicted with the promise of jobs but the jobs turn out to be few poorly paid domestic workers or security guards.
In short, in contrast to exclusive global conferences, a truly humanist environmentalism begins with the needs and experiences of the poor. It is an epistemological challenge, a shift in the geography of reason.
Fanon argues in the conclusion to ‘The Wretched’ that we have to work out new concepts. Where will those new concepts come from? How is political education developed? What is it for? Fifty years after ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ I am suggesting that we consider the maturity of the struggle that is expressed in the rationality of the rebellions. For Fanon, to engage this reason is not synonymous with systematising ‘indigenous knowledge’ or culture. It is the rebellion — which is at the same time always for Fanon a mental liberation — that encourages nuance and encourages radical intellectuals engaged in and with these movements to work out new concepts in a non-technical and non-professional language. Often in defiance to those (intellectuals and militants) who consider thinking a hindrance to action, the ‘opening of minds’ and imagination is encouraged.
‘We imagine cities where politicians, policy makers, engineers and urban planners think with us and not for us,’ argues S’bu Zikode, the former president of Abahlali baseMjondolo, expressing the right to the city in the most concrete terms. Abahlali baseMjondolo — part of the subtitle of ‘Fanonian Practices’, which translates as people who live in shacks, is an organisation of about 30,000 shack dwellers in South Africa that was created six years ago after the residents of one shack community realised that land that had been promised was being cleared for other buildings. The organization is decentralized, autonomous, self-reliant and deeply democratic. What is interesting about Abahlali now six years after its self-organization is its thinking born of experience and discussion in what they call the ‘university of the shacks.’ They call it living learning. Press statements are written collectively; and quite in contrast to technical education, learning is a collective and living thing that always needs to be nurtured. Their idea of ‘citizenship’ (including all who live in the shacks in democratic decision making regardless of ancestry, ethnicity, gender, age, etc.) connects with Fanon’s political notion of citizenship formed in the social struggle. So when Zikode speaks of imagination, it is one produced collectively by long discussions in the shack settlements. ‘We imagine cities where the social value of land is put before its commercial value,’ he continues. ‘We imagine cities where shack settlements are all offered the option of participatory upgrades and where people will only move elsewhere when that is their free choice. We imagine the quick improvement of local living conditions by the provision of water, electricity, paths, stairs and roads while housing is being discussed, planned and built. We imagine cities without evictions, without state violence being used to disconnect people from electricity and water and without any repression of organisations and movements. We imagine cities without the transit camps that have become the permanent alternative housing solution for many poor people since the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals by the United Nations. We reject, completely, the way in which the Millennium Development Goals have reduced the measure of progress to the numbers of ‘housing opportunities delivered’ when in fact progress should be measured in terms of people’s dignity as this is understood by the people themselves’ (Zikode 2011).
Such imaginings come from thinking and discussions that jibe with Fanon’s notion of political education. He presents what he calls the militant who wants to take shortcuts in the name of getting things done not only as anti-intellectual but atrocious, inhuman and sterile. Instead, he insists the search for truth is the ‘responsibility of the community’ (2004, 139). In ‘The Wretched’, Fanon speaks of the meeting, of this coming together, as the practical and ethical foundation of the liberated society, as ‘a liturgical act’ (un acte liturgique [2002, 185]); liturgical acts which ‘are privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak … and put forward new ideas …’ (1968 195).
Again at the local level, in ‘The Wretched’ Fanon gives the seemingly banal example of lentil production during the liberation struggle, writing of the creation of production/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN which he says encouraged theoretical questions about the accumulation of capital: ‘In the regions where we were able to conduct these enlightening experiments,’ he argues, ‘we witnessed the edification of man through revolutionary beginnings’ because people began to realize that ‘one works more with one’s brain and ones heart than with one’s muscles’ (2004, 133; see 1968, 292).
Talking of the political economy of food he adds: ‘We did not have any technicians or planners coming from big Western universities; but in these liberated regions the daily ration went up to the hitherto unheard-of figure of 3,200 calories. [But t]he people were not content with [this] …. They started asking themselves theoretical questions: for example, why did certain districts never see an orange before the war of liberation, while thousands of tons are exported every year abroad? Why were grapes unknown to a great many Algerians whereas the European peoples enjoyed them by the million? Today, the people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them.’
This type of shift in cognition represents a shift in epistemology.
EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION?
The mandate for the College of the Bahamas is to ‘foster the intellectual development of students and the wider community by encouraging critical analysis and independent thought’ and the meeting today is considered part of the project to attain university through contributing to that discussion. Yet critical and independent thought can never be guaranteed and certainly can’t be assured by a university. In this final section of my presentation I want to consider the problematic of a university in the post-colony as it articulates with movements and thinking outside of it.
Real grassroots social movements open up new spaces for thinking. Yet on the other hand the global university of the 21st century not only often looks elsewhere but actively seeks to suppress these spaces. The quest to be ‘world class,’ such as that which the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal announces, is couched by the term excellence seen through a neo-colonial prism of donors and global elites. At best the new movements become researched — the paradigms often developed by the World Bank or other funding agencies — they are never allowed to ask theoretical questions. It is a neo-colonial arrangement.
Recognising that the colonised intellectual committed to social change is fundamentally alienated from the people, Fanon suggests a methodology that fundamentally challenges the elitism, internalised values and ways of thinking they have imbibed. Perhaps the same, often depending on context, can be said of the postcolonial intellectual. In ‘Black Skin White Masks’, for example, Fanon argues that this alienation and neurosis is quite normal; that is to say a product of books, newspapers, schools, and their texts, advertisements, films, radio — what we might call hegemonic culture. How then do we go about creating space for a critical humanities as a consciously decolonizing project (by decolonizing I do not simply mean the formal end of colonialism but, following Fanon, the form and content of pedagogies and practices devoted to the decolonization of the mind)? Since such a conception runs counter to the university in the global market place that judges itself in those terms, what is to be done within the situation and places we find ourselves? Also on what philosophic ground and from what principle do we ask the question? Certainly, we cannot take the existence of a public sphere, of public intellectuals, and any claim of intellectual autonomy as either guaranteed or unproblematic.
For Fanon education is always political education. In practice all education is political and education is political in all its forms of socialization and in its disciplines. In other words education helps us organize our lives, helps us think and act, help us think and create images of justice. Fanon means something different by political education. Just as for Fanon culture has to become a fighting culture, education has to become about total liberation. De-colonial education has to be a total critique and a transformative experiential process. Indeed this notion of education as transformative is often recognized on the private level in the rhetoric of individual entrepreneurship that often powers the discourse of the university’s value, but the issue for a de-colonial national education is an education that helps create a social consciousness and a social individual. Fanon is not concerned with educating the power elites to lead but to promote self-confidence among the mass of people, to teach the masses, as he puts it, that everything depends on them. This is not simply a version of community or adult education and certainly not of a hyperdermic notion of conscientization. Let me give an example that focuses less on content than form. In ‘Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution’ (‘A Dying Colonialism’) Fanon has an essay on the radio, ‘the voice of Algeria.’ What becomes clear is the importance of the form of the meeting. He describes a room of people listening to the radio, and the militant — namely the teacher — is among them, but (jammed by the French) there is only white noise on the radio. After a long discussion the participants agree about what has taken place; the teacher becomes an informed discussant, not a director. The form of the classroom is a democratic space, and the result is in a sense the point that political education is about self-empowerment as social individuals. It is a new collectivity, a new solidarity. The reference to the voice of Algeria is simply an example that helps to emphasize the processes at stake. The wider issue of the politics of pedagogy and curriculum must include the geography of the postcolonial university, its buildings, its gates, its barriers, its classrooms and all its spatial set ups. Colonialism, Fanon argues, is totalitarian. It inhabits every relationship and every space. The university produces and reproduces reification and thus has to be thoroughly reconsidered. But that reconsideration doesn’t come in one fell swoop; it is a process and a praxis, but one that also must include its philosophy and its raison d’être.
This is not a call to the barricades even if it is a call to ideological combat to have one’s ears open, to not confine new development in a priori categories. In other words, a de-colonial praxis would have to begin from the movement from practice not simply where the people dwell in those thousands of revolts taking place across the country but in their self-organization. Ideological combat, or a fighting culture, as Fanon explains in ‘The Wretched’, is quite simply engaged intellectual work. In other words, and this is obvious, it is not about intellectuals going to the rural areas to pick up a scythe and be with the people. I am not saying that that can’t be done, but that is not intellectual work, and it certainly does not challenge the division between mental and manual labour. So to conclude, what makes possible the intellectual capacity to see into the reasons for popular action, or in short, the rationality of revolt?
In the revolutionary moment of the anti-colonial struggle Fanon writes of the ‘honest intellectual,’ who, committed to social change, enters what he calls an ‘occult zone,’ engaging the notion of the transformation of reality with a real sense of uncertainty while also coming to understand what is humanly possible. This zone is a space that is being shaped by a movement which, he says, in ‘On National Culture,’ is beginning to call everything into question (1968, 227). ‘The zone of hidden fluctuation’ (2004, 163) or ‘occult instability’ (1968, 227) [C’est dans ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte 2002 215] ‘where the people dwell’ is not a ghostly movement but corporeally alive. If honest intellectuals feel the instability of it, it is because they cannot really take a living role, that is to say a disalienated role, in this movement unless they recognise the extent of their alienation from it (1968, 226). But the intellectual’s role need not be a mysterious one. Rather it can be quite practical, grounded in a sharing of reason where trust is implicit. This of course means that the intellectual must give up the position of privilege and begin to comprehend that the ‘workless,’ ‘less than human’ and ‘useless’ people do think concretely in terms of social transformation (see 1968 127). After all this new zone of movement and self-movement — what one might also call a radical zone of dialectical leaps in thought and activity (see James 1980) — is a space where souls ‘are crystallized and perceptions and lives transfigured’ (translation altered 227; 2004,163). Fanon’s language is almost transcendental here, and one may argue that such heavenly ‘authenticity’ born of this revolutionary moment seems as impossible as the idea of the excluded, the uncounted and unaccountable, the damned of the earth, upsetting the household arrangements of the here and now, creating a genuine moment (and zone) or community where trust and the sharing of reason is implicit. Fanon is not speaking of some heavenly space of some future afterlife; he locates the space very much in the contingent now and that is being lived, quite practically and unstably, in the present. This ramshackle movement from practice as a form of theory (see Dunayevskaya 1988), that is to say as both force and reason, is inherently uncertain and also, at the same time, unexceptional. It challenges reason as it is commonly accepted (instrumental, technical or even the professionally ‘critical’) and decenters it, moving it closer to the reason or reasoning of so many of those who have been considered unreasonable, but who in a dialectical logic are implicitly proposing a new humanism.
One of the challenges of Fanonian Practices in South Africa, from Biko to Abahlali is epistemological; it is to think of thinking from the underside, if you will. The struggle school is a struggle, as Richard Pithouse puts it. And let’s be clear sometimes that school comes into contradiction with the university system and can have dire costs both in terms of employment and in terms of threats of violence. Fanon talks about ‘snatching’ knowledge from the colonial universities; he is also aware of the great sacrifices that this can entail. In ‘The Wretched’ he makes a point to distinguish between the hobnobbing postcolonial intelligentsia and the honest intellectual who abhors careerism, distrusts the race for positions, and who is still committed to fundamental change even if he or she presently does not see its possibility.
What if the vaunted position of ‘intellectual’ does not require a degree from a ‘world class’ institution? The public intellectual without a university accreditation is becoming almost unthinkable. But to be relevant the national university has to be transformative, self-critical and also open to the experiences and minds of the common people who have been often excluded; not simply an accrediting agency for service industries, the university instead must be dedicated to the growth of every kind of genius.
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* This was a keynote address delivered at the Critical Caribbean Symposium Series ‘50 Years Later: Frantz Fanon’s Legacy to the Caribbean and the Bahamas,’ Friday 2, December 2011 at The College of the Bahamas. It was first published in Thinking Africa.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Abane, Beläid. 2011 in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Living Fanon. New York: Palgrave
2. Cherki, Alice. 2006. Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
Cleaver, Kathleen, Neal. 1998. “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party” in Charles E. Jones eds. The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore MD: Black Classic Press
3. Dunayevskaya. Raya. 1988. Marxism and Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press
4. Fanon, Frantz. 2002. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte, 2002.
5. __________. 1967a. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Lars Markman. New York: Grove.
6. __________. 1967b. Toward the African Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
7. __________. 1967c. A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove.
8. __________. 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove.
9. __________. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove.
10. Glissant, E 1999. Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.
11. James, C.L.R. 1980. Notes on Dialectics London: Allison and Busby.
Reverend Mavuso. 2011. “Climate Change and Global Warming are perpetuated by the capitalists to oppress the poor to make profit”.
12. Wright, Richard. 1956. “The Neuroses of Conquest,” The Nation, October 20. pp. 33-331
13. Wright, Richard. 1995. White Man Listen. New York: Harper Collins.
Zikode, S’bu. 2011. “Upgrades v Evictions,” September 29 at abalhali.org.
END NOTES
[1] Fanon studied and practiced with Tosquelles before leaving France for Algiers. Tosquelles who was carrying out a revolution in psychiatry at Saint Alban and was an anticolonialist grew up in Catalonia and had been an active anti-stalinist during the Spanish civil war.
[2] Glissant writes that “it is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, friend, or quite simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas, through his involvement in the Algerian struggle” (1999 25). Fanon made a “complete break” and yet Martinican intellectuals have failed to recognize him almost at all. He adds that they could not find in Fanon a figure who “awakened (in the deepest sense of the word) the peoples of the contemporary world” (1999 69).
[3] Wright’s review of the English translation of Mannoni’s book (which was published in 1956) in The Nation (Oct 20, 1956) was similar to Fanon’s critique in Black Skin White Masks. Titled “The Neuroses of Conquest,” Wright praised Mannoni’s book for focusing on the psychology of the “restless” Europeans who set out for world “that would permit free play for their repressed instincts” but he criticized Mannoni for creating the impression that the Madagascar “natives are somehow the White man’s Burden.” Like Fanon’s alienated Black, the native, Wright argues, vainly attempts “to embrace the world of white faces that rejects it” and in reaction to this rejection ”seeks refuge in tradition. But he concludes “but it is too late” there is “haven in neither.”
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