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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

The question in the title of my paperseems absurd, one and a half days into atwo-day conference subtitled “Conversa-tions with Fanon on the meaning of humanemancipation.” The very title, “Conversa-tions,” presupposes a Fanon alive, discuss-ing the issues of relevance to humanemancipation. What else, in other words,would Fanon be talking about and who ishe talking to?

Perhaps we should also keep in mindFanon’s now famous opening lines to “OnNational Culture”: “Each generation mustdiscover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”

Since “la trahir” could also be translated astreason,

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a much more political term thanbetrayal—a term that perhaps betraysFanon’s own concern while reflecting onthe anti-colonial revolutions—we mightconsider the betraying of Fanon.

“Is Fanon relevant?” also depends notonly on what is indeed translated as rele-vant but on other perspectives such as rele-vant to what, for what and for whom? Andin these conversations with Fanon what is

Nigel Gibson is the director of the Honors Program and teaches at the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdis-ciplinary Studies at Emerson College. He is also an Associate in Research at African-American Studies atHarvard University and the editor of the Journal of Asian and African Studies. His many published worksinclude Fanon and the Postcolonial Imagination and the anthologies Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue,Adorno: A Critical Reader and Contested Terrains and Constructed Categories: Contemporary Africa in Focus. Hismost recent work is Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and The Quest for a New Humanism in SouthAfrica and he is currently co-editing a volume on Steve Biko.

Is Fanon Relevant? Toward an Alternative Foreword to

“The Damned of the Earth”

Nigel C. Gibson

Emerson College––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: By investigating Fanon’s relevance for whom and for what this article examines aquestion that concerns Homi Bhabha in his new foreword to The Wretched of the Earth. It reviewsthe history of The Wretched in English and subjects Bhabha’s foreword to critical review. Thereader is reminded that Fanon challenges radical intellectuals to ground their work in the strug-gles of the damned of the earth. Aware of the physical and often existential gulf between intellec-tuals and those damned, Fanon proposes a living relationship that requires ongoing theoreticlabor to work out new humanist concepts. If this was difficult during the anti-colonial period ofFanon’s time, how much more difficult is it in our current period of retrogression and whatwould Fanon possibly say today at a moment when his revolutionary presuppositions areapparently off the table?

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Reminiscent of Julian Benda’s “Treason ofthe Intellectuals” (the Clerics).

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relevant to him? Let me backtrack a bit since the conver-

sations in English with Fanon have alwaysbeen translated and since we have a newtranslation, by Richard Philcox, of his

Wretched of the Earth.

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Let us begin with aretrospective.

1. O

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PPEARANCES

Undergoing numerous printings total-ing over one million copies, Constance Far-rington’s translation of

Les Damnés de laTerre

remained in print for over 40 yearsand has appeared in many formats in theU.S.

The original English translation of

LesDamnés

(1961) along with Jean-Paul Sartre’spreface was published by

Présence Africaine

in 1963. It had an orange cover with blackand white text and was called

The Damned

.On the back cover was the following quotefrom Sartre:

We have sown the wind; he is thewhirlwind … We were men at hisexpense, he makes himself man atours: a different man; of higherquality.

In 1965, Grove Press repaginated thisedition as

The Wretched of the Earth

. On thecover, beneath Fanon’s name, the book wasmistakenly labeled, “A Negro Psychoana-lyst’s study of the problem of racism andcolonialism in the world today.” The backcover had three quotes that would remainon the book for 30 years: the first from Sar-tre, “Have the courage to read this book,”the second from Emile Capouya (

SaturdayReview

), “


is an ex-plosion. Readers owe it to their education

to study the whole of it”—advice rarely fol-lowed given the penchant for denigratingFanon as a “philosopher of violence”—andthe third from Alex Quaison-Sackey, thePresident of the U.N. General Assembly,“This is a book which must be read by allwho wish to understand what it means tofight for freedom, equality and dignity.”These powerful endorsements about thebook’s relevance remained until 2000.

The blurb on the back, which remainedthe basis for future publicity emphasizingFanon’s anger and his threat, read:

This is a book written in anger, thisbook by a leading spokesman ofthe revolution which won inde-pendence in Algeria a few yearsago. But it is no mere diatribeagainst the white man or the West:Fanon’s is a cold anger, his intelli-gence is uncompromising, and as adoctor and a psychiatrist who hastreated the bodies and minds of hisfellow men, his compassion isgreat.


is awork that will shock many … Hiswork is a manifesto which is beingread and studied throughout theemerging nations of the ThirdWorld.

Probably the most widely read versionof the Farrington translation came out inthe U.S. in the earth-shattering year of 1968when Grove replaced the “Evergreen” withthe “Black Cat” edition. The blurb was re-vised with the following added, whichwould remain unchanged for over thirtyyears:

It is a brilliant examination of therole of violence in effecting histori-cal change which has served lead-ers of emerging nations as averitable handbook of revolution-ary practice and social organiza-tion.

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The Philcox translation (Boston: GrovePress, 2005) will be cited in-text as RP, and theConstance Farrington translation (Boston:Grove Press, 1968) as CF.

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Certainly there is a passion to

TheWretched

, which was written at breakneckspeed as he was weakened by leukemia;but Fanon did not write

The Wretched

“inanger,” even though this is a view echoedin the new foreword and afterword of the2005 edition. In fact a close reading of thetext would have noted Fanon’s insistencethat anger cannot sustain a political move-ment or a political argument. Instead heemphasized the importance of thinking,the “the force of intellect” in the develop-ment of political agency (CF 146), and “thepower of ideology” (RP 95) that are neededbecause

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“if this pure, total brutality is notimmediately contained it will, without fail,bring down the movement” (RP 95).

Perhaps the blurb was simply a mar-keting ploy but it had the effect of reinforc-ing the idea that all Fanon was about wasviolence. Additionally, the claim thatFanon’s ideas had served the leaders of“emerging nations” in Africa was not irrel-evant but still far from true. On the Africancontinent, Cabral in Guinea Bissau andBiko in South Africa, perhaps Fanon’s mostimportant interlocutors, didn’t focus on vi-olence. Of course, blurbs tend to be over-blown but it might be said that the bookfrightened rather than served leaders of“emerging nations,” many of whom fol-lowed the path of degeneration and neoco-lonialism predicted in the book.

The 1968 Black Cat edition was a mass-market printing published at the height ofthe Black revolution in the U.S. It was cheapand widely available, going through count-less printings and selling a million copies.

The cover, which remained unchangedfrom 1968 to 2000, displayed a turbulent or-ange and black image of the masses withFanon’s name in green. Under his name ap-peared the words, “The handbook for theBlack revolution that is changing the shapeof the world.”

The cover was replaced in 2000 with anew design. It was now yellow with a pur-ple and red title at the top and Fanon’sname in black type at the bottom. The mod-ernist font was replaced by a more ethnic,”third world”-looking type. Gone was thefront-page blurb labeling it a “handbookfor revolution.”

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Gone were the quotes, andin the place of the old blurb about the bookbeing “written in anger” was a more soberdescription that emphasized Fanon’s un-derstanding of the people’s anger and hisworldly impact as a revolutionary theorist.His historical influence on the U.S. BlackPower movement was marked by a quotefrom the

Boston Globe

. Thus the way the book now appears

tells us something about Fanon’s [ir]rele-vance.

In

The Wretched’s

movement from“handbook of the Black revolution” to the-oretical ground for Africana intellectuals,Fanon is positioned as a thinker who had amajor impact on civil rights, anticolonial-ism, and black consciousness movements.Is Fanon simply a historical personage, atheorist of colonialism and racism, as An-gela Davis is quoted as saying on the newedition? Is the book merely an artifact of the1950s and 1960s anti-colonial and BlackU.S. revolts, or does it also continue to havea concrete resonance among the contempo-rary “damned of the earth”? Indeed theblurb for the 2005 edition finally acknowl-edges that Fanon has something to say

3

Because “ideology” is almost considered aswear word, rather than connected to ideation, Iprefer Farrington’s less literal translation whichnuances the power of the mind. Certainly by theterm ideology he had in mind a critique whichinvolved thought, clarification, enlightenmentand consciousness. On Fanon’s notion of ideolo-gy see Nigel Gibson, “Beyond Manicheanism:Dialectics in the thought of Frantz Fanon,”

Journal of Political Ideologies

4.3 (1999): pp. 337-364.

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Ballantine Books (in an arrangement withGrove) put out an edition in 1973 calling

TheWretched

“The Handbook of the Third WorldRevolution.” I don’t know if there were any oth-er editions; I am working with what I have in myown library.

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about the postcolonial world, remarkingthat the book predicts “postindependencedisenfranchisement of the masses by theelite.” This postcolonial sensibility whichnames Fanon’s work a “classic” also has aprice. For Fanon is now situated as a“founding father” of academic postcolonialtheory, a relic from a previous age ratherthan a living thinker, revered and impor-tant but somewhat naïve. Consequently,the 2005 blurb does not mention revolutionor any such totalizing terms used in theprevious edition’s blurb, but speaks in amuch quieter way of “historical change.” Inshort, the blurb reflects an ideological shift,which is also articulated in mainstreampostcolonial studies.

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Fifty years after Nkrumah sought firstthe political kingdom and Ghana gainedpolitical independence Africa is considereda basket case. Poor, suffering and congeni-tally backward, Africa’s existence in theworld has become naturalized—a sufferinghumanity long separated from the trans-forming processes of the anti-colonialstruggles; its poverty is ontological, itsriches are an opportunity for neocolonialexploitation. In this changed world, inwhat sense can Fanon’s

Wretched of the Earth

be relevant? After all the foreword to the2005 translation written by Harvard Profes-sor Homi Bhabha was first excerpted in

TheChronicle of Higher Education

under the title“Is Frantz Fanon Still Relevant?”

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Why does

The Wretched

need a new in-troductory text? Not to mention that whenadded to Sartre’s preface it takes up morethan 50 pages before we even get to Fanon’stext?

Even though Fanon reportedly saidnothing after reading Sartre’s piece, at least

Fanon had asked Sartre to write a preface to

The Wretched

. Why now bog down andframe

The Wretched

with more prologues?Could it be that just as Sartre’s introductionwas a kind of guarantor of authenticity,Bhabha’s 2005 foreword is a guarantor ofcontinuing relevance? And thus we askagain, relevance for whom?

Fanon’s relevance is invoked, main-tains Bhabha, “by liberal students, radicalactivists, human rights workers, culturalhistorians [and] international civil society

in the making

.”(B xvii) He speaks criticallyof the IMF and the World Bank and sug-gests that globalization has created a “glo-bal duality” that can be understood interms of Fanon’s description of the Man-ichean structure of colonial society. Ofcourse this is all fair enough, but it is not farenough, as it positions Fanon all too neatlyin the discourses of development and hu-man rights. Bhabha contends that Fanonputs a critical value on “economic and tech-nological support for ‘underdeveloped re-gions’” (B xxvii), without questioning theissue of “development” and the technicistassumptions that lie under the profession-alization of these discourses financiallysupported if not by the World Bank then byNGOs based in or funded from the North.The result is that more often than not liberalstudents and human rights organizationsreproduce discourses of development (andelitism) which aid if not build upon the de-activation of grass-roots political agency.Allied to the liberal presumptions of “inter-national civil society

in the making

,” whichFanon would consider cosmopolitan andelite, Fanon is no longer threatening.

However Bhabha has little interest inthis kind of discussion since his project isthe transformation of “development” and“economic terms of reference” into “thoseforceful and fragile ‘psycho-affective’ moti-vations and mutilations that drive our col-lective instinct for survival, nurture ourethical affiliations and ambivalences, andnourish our political desire for freedom” (B

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Bhabha’s foreword is cited in-text as “B.”

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HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, V, SPECIAL DOUBLE-ISSUE, SUMMER 2007

xvii).6 This is not surprising given Bhabha’sreading of Black Skin, White Masks but is it“relevant”?

For Bhabha the exploration of the psy-cho-affective “insistently frames [Fanon’s]reflections on violence, decolonization, na-tional consciousness, and humanism” (Bxix). Thus channeling Fanon’s relevanceinto “the psycho-affective realm” meansthat not only concrete political analyses aresubverted, but that Fanon’s politics is rele-gated to “nervous conditions and … agita-tions of psycho-affectivity” (B xix)7—thereby debilitating and demobilizing po-litical action.

Bhabha’s reductive reading collapsesFanon’s political analysis of the “phases” ofcolonialism and “timing” of decoloniza-tion, and moreover flattens Fanon’s discus-sion of resistances to colonialism, forms ofnationalist organization and their relation-ships to the urban and rural folk as well asthe problematic of the middle class intellec-tuals: their unpreparedness, lack of intellec-tual clarity and detachment from themasses. Bhabha, in short, seems obliviousto the movement of The Wretched whichheralds the “truth” of the unemployed andthe damned, the revolutionary potential ofthe peasantry, the radicalism of lumpen-proletariat and the work of the militants. Itis a “truth” that Bhabha finds so absolutelyoutrageous that he cannot entertainFanon’s critique of the Manichean logic ofcolonialism and the reaction against it, andskips over Fanon’s warnings about thebreakdown of apparent truths, the betray-als, treason and the brutality of certainties.

When Fanon does mention “psycho-af-fective mutilations” in the Wretched he is

speaking of the colonized intellectual’slong circuitous road from colonial productto anti-colonial oracle. But rather than fol-low this trajectory, Bhabha finally dismissesThe Wretched as a poem on the “the vicissi-tudes of violence.” And Fanon as a “poet-politician,” a mythmaker rather than a par-ticipant-theoretician of the revolution,hemmed in by a trail of violence.

If things were different I would havesimply left Bhabha’s forward to the gnaw-ing criticism of the mice. But since we are toconfront it every time we open Fanon’sWretched, it does frame Fanon. It is a frame-up. You can read it yourself and you canread my critique in Social Identities.8 Butsince the question of the role of the intellectand the relevance and irrelevance of the in-tellectual has been raised, I would like toconsider an alternative to Bhabha’s fore-word.

3. WHO ARE INTELLECTUALS AND WHAT SHOULD THEY TO DO?

In the fourth chapter of The Wretched,“On National Culture,” Fanon maps outthe intellectual’s experience as a dialectic ofestrangement, collaboration, return or per-haps pseudo-return, and his/her role in themaking of a national culture. He writes,“seeking to cling to the people,” the intel-lectual tends to miss the point and instead“cling[s] to a veneer, a reflection.” Philcoxtranslates this action as “reification” (RP160). The intellectual who has rejected colo-nialism fails to understand the motion ofthe anti-colonial struggle. In grasping onlyat externals of his/her culture, “the Sari be-comes sacred” (CF 221) and in seeking toconnect to the people’s culture, the people6 Later Bhabha speaks quite differently, not

of the “transformation” of economic terms butof Fanon’s “extension” of “Marxism toward agreater emphasis on the importance of psycho-logical and cultural liberation” (B xxix).

7 It is not far from here to colonial ethno-psychology which considered anti-colonial re-volts and the struggles of millions of people aspathologies.

8 Nigel C. Gibson, “Relative Opacity: ANew Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of theEarth—Mission Betrayed or Fulfilled,” SocialIdentities 13.1 (Jan 2007): pp. 69-95. The first twosections of this paper are based on the SocialIdentities article.

38 NIGEL C. GIBSON


are reified. Turning Georg Lukács9 aroundthe issue here is false consciousness of theintellectuals mesmerized by “mummifiedfragments” and out of step with actual lifeof the struggle. Thus it is not surprising thatthe nationalist intellectual tends to behavelike a common opportunist, trumpetingthis or that aspect of a culture without re-ally engaging its contradictions and the cre-ative mutations of culture mutating in thestruggle against colonialism. Schooled incolonialism but never having completelybroken with its elite notions, never reallyconnecting to the actual struggles of peopleon the ground, the intellectual swings fromcelebration of the people to a celebration ofleaders, the African personality and the re-discovery of authentic ethnic culture.

Fanon develops his warning about thepitfalls of the intellectuals throughout TheWretched. The “Misadventures of NationalConsciousness” result not from an “objec-tive dialectic” but are caused partly by theunpreparedness—indeed Fanon calls it thecowardice and ideological backwardness—of the nationalist intelligentsia and middleclass. Schooled in bourgeois values, the na-tionalist intellectual often lives in an illu-sion that one could remain committed as anoutside observer. In the colonial world,Fanon insists that there is no such privi-leged position. In fact do attempts to re-main untouched by actual struggleproduce in the intellectual a psycho-affec-tive mutilation—the wish in other words,to be stateless, borderless, colorless, and an-gelic—a scholar in an elite academy?

In the second chapter of The Wretched,“The Grandeur and Weaknesses of Sponta-neity,” Fanon writes of another group whohas totally broken with colonialism. This

breaking is painful and potentially suicidalbut it is made in a social rather than indi-vidual context. Militants on the run, theyare expelled from the nationalist partiesand trade unions, and increasingly realizethe importance of developing a liberatoryideology, they receive their political educa-tion in prisons and in the underground andthey find protection in the shantytownsand marginal spaces outside the colonialcity. It so happens that these militants areessential to the formation of a new relation-ship as local revolts become organizedagainst colonialism. The growth of thegrass roots radical local organizationsemerges from the long discussions of thehandful of militants inside what Fanoncalls, “the structure of the people.” It is anembryonic political body of insurrection.

This group of intellectuals representsthe truth of the Manichean situation. Theycannot go back to their old lives but find anew community among the damned. Theirrole is to clarify and enlighten, to interpretthe situation and moreover “nuance” theformally Manichean understanding thathad so powerfully mobilized the people(RP 93). First the necessity of nuancing is aproduct of the colonizers’ change of tacticsbut moreover nuancing means confrontingthe brutality of thought that is created byyears of colonial rule.

Thus the problematic of the intellectualis central to Fanon’s understanding of na-tional liberation but at the same time, theconceptualization necessitates a completerethinking of the role of the intellectualboth as critic and as pedagogue (literarythinking while walking with another). AsMarx put it in one of the other theses onFeuerbach, the educators need to be edu-cated, and the militant intellectual’s educa-tion emanates from, in part, the truths thatthe damned of the earth know. The struggleover land, bread, water and freedom insum necessitate the destruction of the colo-nial regime.

Thus to put oneself in the school of the

9 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Con-sciousness of the Proletariat,” in History andClass Consciousness (London: Merlin Press,1971). On the relationship between Lukács andFanon see Edward W. Said, “Travelling TheoryRevisited,” in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gib-son (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999).

IS FANON RELEVANT? 39


people is to break with the bourgeois, eliteand individualistic conception of intellec-tual. Such rethinking has to get beyond theManichean. The point is to shift the groundof reason: to join the people is not a Gue-varist celebration about breaking groundwith the peasants, it is the discovery thatthe landless think and are interested inworking things out.

The radical intellectual who “comesdown” as Fanon writes of Césaire in BlackSkin White Masks,10 experiences the unset-tling and frightening realization that join-ing the revolutionary movement bringsenlightenment: upsetting the arrangementsof the here and now and prefiguring newsocial relations. For such intellectuals,Fanon writes, “Gone are the cafes [and] thediscussions about the coming elections.”Gone are the politics of intrigue and posi-tioning. Instead, the militant intellectuals’“ears hear the true voice of the country andtheir eyes see the great infinite misery of thepeople” (RP 78-79). They discover a “coher-ent people” and discussions about thepower of ideology and the limitations of apolitics based on reaction become a routine.This nuancing of political position “consti-tutes a danger and threatens popular soli-darity” that has been built on a Manicheanreaction. But, says Fanon, “disgusted bypolitics, the militant discovers a new fieldof politics. Just as resentment cannot sus-tain a war of liberation, the struggle itselfuncovers unknown facts, brings to lightnew meanings and underlines contradic-tions that were camouflaged by this reality”(RP96). Without this praxis, he argues, in-dependence is nothing but a carnival pa-rade and a lot of hot air.

But it turns out that much of what istouted as national consciousness, as Pan-Africanism and African socialism, is a car-nival with a lot of hot air. It turns out that

the demands for nationhood, for democ-racy and human rights become farce. WhenFanon opens the third chapter of TheWretched, “The Trials and Tribulations ofNational Consciousness,” he parades theutter uselessness of the nationalist elite, thenationalist organization and its intelligen-tsia, including the more socialist and Pan-African minded. All the slogans and rheto-ric of national unity, liberation and freedomfalls away to reveal that the political king-dom is nothing other than a means to getrich.

But The Wretched also describes a cycle.Fanon’s dialectic of The Wretched is a deep-ening circle, always coming back to thesame problem as the “thing” becomes “hu-man,” becomes an historical protagonistthrough the very same process that it liber-ates itself. From a celebration of decoloni-zation on its first page, to a critique of itsmisadventures and warnings, from an ap-parent praise of anti-colonial violence thathas shaken up everything solid in theworld, to the tragedies described in “Colo-nial Wars and Mental Disorders,” the issueis agency, its flaws and the reflection on itsfailures.

From the revolutionism of chapter twowe thus face the misadventures of chapterthree. The mass movement is sidelined andcrushed. The militants from the anti-colo-nial struggle are co-opted or silenced. Butwhatever the power of Fanon’s prescientcritique of the mimicry, huckstery andcrude materialism of the national pseudobourgeoisie, the degeneration of the nation-alist party—increasingly authoritarian, un-scrupulous and cynical (RP 111, CF 165)—“the transformation of the militant into an in-former” (my emphasis, RP 125) and the con-temptuous attitude toward the masses—the damned—it is not the end of TheWretched’s dialectic. Little by little there isrealization by the people that the promisesare threadbare and shell game is an “un-speakable” social “treason” (RP 94, CF 145).Little by little the “small number of up-

10 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,(Peau Noire, Masque Blanc, 1952), trans. CharlesLam Markman (Grove Press : Boston, 1967)p.195.

40 NIGEL C. GIBSON


standing [or honest11] intellectuals” (RP121, CF 177), who distrust the race for jobsand handouts reappear. New struggles re-surface and explode and are beaten back.The honest intellectuals are imprisoned, themilitary takes over and demonstrations arecrushed. It is the story of the postcolonialperiod.

In the conclusion to Black Skin, WhiteMasks Fanon had taken a long quote fromthe Eighteenth Brumaire about the social rev-olution stripping itself of superstitions andfinding its own content. In the EighteenthBrumaire Marx had written about the differ-ence between the speed of bourgeois revo-lution and the painstaking critical work ofthe proletarian revolution unmercifully de-risive of the inadequacies, weaknesses andpaltriness of the first attempts.

In the same sense we can consider theconclusion to The Wretched less as a call toarms than a call to Fanon’s comrades, thatsmall group of those he calls honest or com-mitted intellectuals, to work out new con-cepts. The painstaking analysis of theweaknesses and inadequacies of “indepen-dence” begins not only with a critique ofelitism of the nationalist intelligentsia butalso the technological obsessions amongprogressives (namely the latter’s belief inthe administration of a technical solution tohuman problems) have in common patron-izing and depoliticizing poor people: colo-nial and capitalist attitudes of time and“development” that are out of time andplace but sadly remain in the dominantparadigms. On this note Homi Bhabha con-cludes his foreword with a quote from TheWretched (RP 135, mistakenly noted asp.122 in Bhabha’s foreword): “[T]ime mustno longer be that of the moment or the nextharvest but rather of the rest of the world.”On the same page Fanon articulates hisidea of independence and nation buildingas a process that is quite in contrast to any

technicist solution. The process is long andpainstaking but it is a wonderful articula-tion of Fanon’s challenge to intellectualsand it is worth quoting in full. He writes:

In an undeveloped country experi-ence proves that the importantpoint is not that three hundredpeople understand and decide butthat all understand and decide,even if it takes twice or three timesas long. In fact the time it takes toexplain, the time ‘lost’ humanizingthe worker, will be made up in exe-cution. People must know wherethey are going and why … [T]hislucidity must remain deeply dia-lectical. The awakening of the peo-ple will not be achieved overnight;their rational commitment to thetask of building the nation will besimple and straightforward; first ofall, because the methods and chan-nels of communication are still inthe development stages; secondly,because the sense of time must nolonger be that of the moment or thenext harvest but rather the rest ofthe world; and finally, because thedemoralization buried deep withinthe mind by colonization is stillvery much alive.

So.

4. WHAT’S RELEVANT TO FANON?

We were ready here for big and beautifulthings, but what we had was our ownblack men hugging new paunches,scrambling to ask the white man to wel-come them onto our backs. … They camelike men already grown fat and cynicalwith the eating of centuries of power.

—Armah, The Beautyful Ones areNot Yet Born 11 Farrington translates honnêtre as “hon-

est.”



To speak of Fanon’s relevancy andtimeliness, perhaps we should be cognizantthat our moment seems so far past Fanon’spresuppositions, let alone his dialectic ofrevolution. What could Frantz Fanon possi-bly say to Africa at this moment when therevolutionary presuppositions are appar-ently off the table? So the question is notwhat can be “saved” in Fanon, but whatcan be saved in Africa that a revolutionarytheoretician like Fanon could possiblyspeak to and that is so out of place withboth the dominant World Bank “pro-poor”rhetoric and the postcolonial discoursesconcerned with hybrid émigré and cosmo-politan identities. The issue of readingFanon today, then, is perhaps not aboutfinding the moment of relevance in Fanon’stext that corresponds with the world, but insearching for the moments where Fanon’stext and the world do not correspond, andasking how Fanon, the revolutionary,would think and act in this period of retro-gression. The issue is not so much about de-centering Fanon but decentering the world.But even if The Wretched is out of place, orperhaps moreover out of joint with the he-gemonic world, the point is to find, in aFanonian sense, the truth in movements ofthe damned, the excluded and dehuman-ized.

For me, one place that Fanon’s analysishas taken on a new concreteness is in post-apartheid South Africa. On one hand, itseems that the “reality” of neoliberal post-apartheid South Africa has simply been fol-lowing Fanon’s text after Mandela andMbeki sought the political kingdom. Bymany accounts the South African economyis booming. The luxury car showrooms arebuzzing and Aston Martins and Porschesare on back order. Alongside the white rich,Black Economic Empowerment has createdrecord numbers of Black millionaires withstrong political connections to the AfricanNational Congress. Yet despite all thehoopla, things have not improved for thebulk of the population. Alongside the

promises of housing, electricity, clean waterand sanitation are evictions, cut-offs, andbroken promises. Patience has run out andspontaneous revolts of the poor haveerupted.

The depth of “Fanonian” critique is ar-ticulated, for example, in a remarkable andvibrant shackdwellers movement in Dur-ban, propelled by those who have abso-lutely nothing, whose lives are a daily stateof emergency and, in the most Fanoniansense, represent the truth, judging wealthnot only by indoor plumbing, taps and toi-lets but also human dignity. The movementin the shacks calls itself a university be-cause its members say that though theymight be poor they “think their own strug-gles” and “are not poor in mind.”12

When Fanon wrote in The Wretched thatintellectuals needed to put themselves inthe school of the people, he had in mind agrounding of new concepts in what theshack dweller intellectuals call the thinkingthat is done in the shack communities. Thisthinking, which emerges from reflectingabout experience, is both pragmatic andcritical. In the case of the shackdwellers’movement [Abahlali baseMjondolo], itsleaders and intellectuals are truly organicto it. They live in the settlements, and thispartly answers the problematic of separa-tion of the intellectuals from the massesthat preoccupied Fanon. But what of the ac-tivists at the other university which has be-come increasingly corporatized andexclusionary?

It is when activist academics make acommitment to work with the shackdwell-ers that they run directly into that univer-sity’s administrators who first cautionthem about their career trajectory, thenthreaten them with legal proceedings andone way or another to dismiss them. This isexactly what has happened at the local Uni-versity of Kwa-Zulu Natal where academ-

12 S’bu Zikode, “The Third Force,” Journal ofAsian and African Studies 41.1-2 (2006).

42 NIGEL C. GIBSON


ics who have worked closely with Abahlalihave come under enormous pressure, re-sulting in two of them leaving and a thirdfired from his job. This should not come asa surprise since the university’s mission isgrounded in the idea of becoming an exclu-sive world-class public institution, whichmeans, of course, looking to the liberalNorthern donors for legitimation. Thethinking and presence of the shackdwellersare most definitely excluded from suchlofty plans. In this situation it becomes dif-ficult to work with both universities—theuniversity of the shacks and the Universityof Kwa-Zulu Natal. One makes a choice ora choice is made for you.

These activist academics have been im-portant in aiding the shackdwellers move-ment but it is crucial to avoid the pitfalls ofsocial movement “resource mobilization”literature that overstates the role of “outsid-ers.”13

For Fanon, the intellectual who enrollsin the “school of the people”—marvelouslyarticulated on the banners at shackdwellersmarches, as the “University Of KennedyRoad” or the “University of Abahlali”—does not come empty handed. Fanon’spoint is that to appreciate the thinking ofdamned of the earth does not mean givingup the responsibility for the working out ofideas. Indeed to have the ears to hear, asFanon puts it, intellectuals from outsidemust come to the school having clearedtheir heads of conceptions of “backward-ness.” But this does not mean that theymust come with empty heads. Conscious oftheir own thinking, they bring ideas, con-cepts, and learning that can aid the people’sown self-understanding and thereby in asense work to make themselves redundant.

This is exactly where the problematic be-gins. By reacting against their importance,the other danger is underestimating therole of the outside activists, who can puttheir expertise to the service of the people.

The activist academics in Durban in-sisted on this Fanonian14 position that themilitant’s work was to destroy the spirit ofdiscouragement marginal people feel andto help them build their confidence in theirown right to resist through discussions thatexplore viable modes of resistance. Havingworked with and written about socialmovements in post-apartheid South Africathese activist academics brought a practicalknowledge of the kind of movements thathad been successful and those which hadnot. Turning the anthropological gaze on itshead they became informants on how to en-gage with the state, how to express opposi-tion, and helped to explain theproblematics of donor funding and theNGO terrain.15 Rather than coming withpreconceived agendas or research pro-grams the activist academics were willingto spend time becoming active participantsin the discussions that gave rise to and sus-tained the development of the movement.Their actions exemplify those of Fanon’scommitted intellectual, who uses knowl-edge snatched from the elite university orthe technical college to help the self-under-standing of the damned. From the perspec-tive of the institutional elite university likethe University of Kwa-Zulu Natal this is re-ally incendiary, since universities (accred-ited through technical language anddesigned in Fanon’s terms to “cheat the

13 Such a position is exemplified by the van-guardist Left but also among paternalistic liber-als exemplified in the NGO community andleads (especially in the South African situation)to racist and classist thinking that poor and mar-ginalized people can’t organize and think forthemselves. This is the clearing of the head ofpreconceived ideas that Fanon insists on.

14 On Fanon’s challenge to intellectuals andhis conception of political education see FrantzFanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press:New York, 1968) pp. 185-205 and Nigel Gibson,Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination (Oxford: Poli-ty Press, 2003), chapter 8, especially pp. 192-200.

15 Before his involvement, Pithouse hadwritten the important piece “Solidarity, Coop-tion and Assimilation,” in Nigel C. Gibson (ed.)Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements and theQuest for a New Humanism in Post-ApartheidSouth Africa, (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006).



people”16) consider this knowledge part oftheir intellectual property not to be sharedwith poor people who will use it to chal-lenge the establishment, which includes theuniversity itself. For these universities, inother words, knowledge, and thereforepower, flow the other way. As Abahlali’sdeputy President, Philani Zungu, under-stands:

Why are we not allowed to workwith academics at the university?Why are academics at the universi-ty not allowed to work with thepoor? The answer is clear. This de-mocracy is not for us. We must staysilent so that this truth can be kepthidden. This democracy is for therich.17

Thus the challenge to take the thinkingof the damned seriously is about takingthought seriously. It is not simply Cabral’spoint, echoing Lenin, that without revolu-tionary theory there can be no revolution.For Fanon, it is far more dialectical. It is thestarting point to working out—as Fanonputs it in the conclusion to the Wretched ofthe Earth—“new concepts.”

5. TOWARD A CONCLUSION

Fanon’s relevance? Perhaps a moral imperative as he puts

it in his resignation from Blida hospital,“there comes a time when silence is dishon-esty.”

“Come comrades … let us re-examinethe question of humanity.” He concludesThe Wretched.

Always a man of action, the time is al-ways now because it is always getting toolate. The world is teetering between atomic

destruction and spiritual disintegration. “Now let us leave this Europe and this

America [which] has become a monsterwhere the flaws, sickness, and inhumanityof Europe have reached frightening pro-portion.”

Can we say he’s wrong?

Now to take the step,

Now to stand up

Now to speak out

Now to change sides

Now to abandon old ways ofthinking

Now to “start a new”

Now to “develop new ways think-ing,” new understandings.

Now, toward a new humanism

For Fanon does not come withtimeless truths.

16 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p.189.17 Philani Zungu, “From Party Politics to

Service Delivery to the Politics of the Poor” (ht-tp://www.abahlali.org/node/304).

06 - gibson - is fanon relevant - toward an alternative foreword to 'the d

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