Frantz Fanon and the African Revolution
Author(s): G. K. Grohs
Source: The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Dec., 1968), pp. 543-556
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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The Journal of ModernAfricanStudies,6, 4 (1968), pp. 543-556
Frantz
African
and
Fanon
the
Revolution
by G. K. GROHS*
THE theory of the African revolution, which is still in many respects
only in its initial stage, found a most powerful inspiration in the West
Indian psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. His writings were at first confined to
the French-speaking public, and even after their initial translation into
English (published by Presenceafricaine) they remained almost unknown.
But the growing race tensions in Africa and the United States are drawing more and more attention to this original thinker.
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the old capital of
Martinique. He studied medicine in France, specialised in psychiatry,
fought in the French army during World War II, and went as a doctor
to Algeria, working first in the hospital at Blida, until he became a
member of the F.L.N., the Algerian freedom movement. At the age of
27 he wrote Peau noire, masquesblancs, published in I952. In I959 there
followed his second book, L'An V de la revolutionalgerienne.His most
important work, Les Damnes de la terre, appeared one year before his
death. Fanon became in 1960 ambassador of the Algerian Republic in
Accra, but died in Washington the following year at the age of 37.
His short but intensive life was influenced by very disparate environments and experiences. His origins in the French colony of Martinique,
his studies in the I950S in Paris, his qualifications as a doctor and a
psychiatrist, and his constant fight, up to the last day of his life, for the
Algerian revolution: these four periods indicate the important phases of
his intellectual development.
MARTINIQUE
Fanon's
first book,
Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris,
i952),1
is an
analysis and appraisal of Martinique as the author saw it before he
went to France. Since 1635 this island, today numbering 270,000
* Senior Lecturer in
Sociology, The University College, Dar es Salaam. An earlier version
of this article was published under the title, 'Frantz Fanon, ein Theoretiker der afrikanischen
Revolution', in Kolner Zeitschriftfiir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie.
(Cologne), xvi, 3, I964,
PP. 457-79.
1 In this article, the
English translation by Charles Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks
(New York, 1967), will be quoted.
544
G. K. GROHS
inhabitants, had belonged to the French colonial empire. It showed all
the characteristics of a colonialised society, which had forgotten its own
culture after centuries of contact with France and had become more
and more alienated from itself. The upper class consisted of the white
colonial officials, some French settlers and traders, and some evolues.
Skin colour became the sign of social status, so that 'whiteness', as
Fanon puts it, encircled the whites as 'blackness' encircled the blacks.
The relations between black and white as a problem of alienation is the
theme of the book, in which Fanon uses a method of investigation which
he calls ' psychoanalytic', but which in reality is a mixture of sociological,
psychological, and Marxist elements and notions.
Fanon analyses the problem of self-alienation on different levels, first
that of language. Here he shows that good French, especially if perfectly
pronounced, was in Martinique the criterion for a high social position.
Therefore to study in France guaranteed not only a certain education
but also the most important opening to social mobilisation. To speak
like the French, to look like the French, became an obsession; and some
Frenchmen's bad habit of speaking petit-negre,a kind of pidgin French,
to all foreigners, even those who could speak a more elegant French
than they could themselves, became a hurtful offence.
In this situation the poetry of Aime Cesaire, who published in I939
Cahierd'un retourau pays natal, an early expression of negritude,came as
a cultural liberating force. He used the language of the oppressor not
only with superb skill but also as a weapon against cultural oppression.
His name became widely known when Andre Breton, the founder of
French literary surrealism, detained in Martinique by the Vichy regime,
discovered the tiny review, Tropiques,edited by Aime Cesaire and his
wife Suzanne. In the first numbers they tried to rediscover African
history before the slave trade and thus to trace the history of their own
people who had been brought as slaves to the islands. They referred in
their investigations to the writings of the German Africanist and
historian Leo Frobenius.1
But on this point Fanon differs from Cesaire and the later negritude
movement: he thinks it is useless to study the African past and to
romanticise it. He does not believe that this helps to solve present-day
problems. He suspects that all the endeavours to elucidate African
history and to compare it with European history are only the outcome
of a deep inferiority complex. For him this seems to be only a reactionto
1 See Jahnheinz Jahn, Muntu: an outlineof the new African culture(New York, I96I), and
L. Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs de langue franfaise: naissance d'une litterature (Brussels,
I963).
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
545
this
from
viewand
actions
only
European challenges; but he demands
point is he interested in the writings of Aime Cesaire.
The inferiority complex is for Fanon not an inborn complex, as
D. Mannoni describes it in La Psychologie de la colonisation.l It is the
result of a colonised society. He makes this clear with two novels as
examples, one by a woman writer from Martinique, Mayotte Capecia,
Je suis martiniquaise,and one by a Senegalese, Abdoulaye Sadji, Nini.
The first shows a girl from Martinique whose complexion is not quite
so black as the skin of others and who dreams of marrying a white man.
The second shows a coloured girl who fears to lose her social status by
marrying an African. Fanon describes white racialism as a parallel to
European anti-Semitism. Like Sartre, who describes the Jew as the
creation of the non-Jew, the Christian, he thinks that colonised Africa
with its inferiority complexes is the product of the prejudices of the white
man and his superiority complex.
In a chapter on 'The Negro and Psychopathology', Fanon compares
the situation of the negro with that of the Jews:
On the phenomenological level there would be a double reality to be
observed. The Jew is feared because of his potential for acquisitiveness.
'They' are everywhere. The banks, the stock exchanges, the government
are infested with 'them'.. .'They' control everything. Soon the whole
country will belong to 'them'... As for the Negroes, they have tremendous
sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their
jungles!...They have so many children that they can't count them...
Things are indeed going to hell. The government and the civil service are at
the mercy of the Jews. Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes.2
This neurotic attitude of Europeans towards black people is borne out
by an empirical study. Fanon asked 500 Europeans which notions and
words they associated with the word, 'negro'. Sixty per cent of the
answers gave such terms as: biological, sexual, strong, athletic, boxer,
wild animal, devil, sin, and so on. The validity of Fanon's methods of
selection and interrogation are rather doubtful, but it shows that he
tried to examine the evidence for his thesis.
He was very much influenced by the German psychologist Alfred
Adler, a heretical pupil of Sigmund Freud. Adler stated that inferiority
complexes are often compensated by superiority complexes.3 This
applied also to the colonial inhabitants of Martinique, in the opinion of
Fanon, although their superiority complex was related not to the whites
but to the Senegalese who had been brought to the island as soldiers
1 D. Mannoni,
Prosperoand Caliban: a studyin thepsychologyof colonisation(New York, 1956).
2 Black Skin, White
Masks, p. 157.
3 Alfred Adler, {iber des nervisenCharakter(Miinchen, I928).
G. K. GROHS
546
and happened to be even blacker than the Martinique people. So Fanon
asks whether all the French teachers and school inspectors know what
they have done. They have inculcated, by their books, teaching methods
and curricula, a strong inferiority complex in their pupils.
Fanon refers to Hegel's view that self-consciousness constitutes itself
only through acknowledgement by others. The African in Martinique
has to free himself and not to wait for acknowledgement by the whites
alone; the African has to find his identity in the fight against suppression
and prejudice. This last part of Fanon's book leads on to his later
attempts to develop a theory of revolution. The phrase of Marx which
he quoted at the beginning of the last chapter of Peau noire, masques
blancs became the Leitmotivof his later works:
The social revolution... cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from
the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its
superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out
of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In
order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century
have to let the dead bury the dead. Before, the expression exceeded the
content; now, the content exceeds the expression.
ALGERIA
The social revolution of the twentieth century, the revolution of the
developing countries, is experienced by Fanon as both observer and
participant in the Algerian revolution. He left the realm of theory and
entered the political praxis. The first results of his observations he
published as L'An V de la revolutionalgerienne'-a title whose similarity to
Marx's The 18th Brumaireof Louis Bonaparteis not accidental. The books
resemble each other in offering not a historical account but an analysis
of a social situation which has produced a historical event and which
has been changed by this event. But they are different in that the hero
of Fanon's book is the people, a hero marching to victory. The hero of
Marx's book is the proletariat, and it is losing the battle against the
reactionary forces. Fanon's book is sociological. The doctor and psychologist becomes a sociologist without forgetting his training. His
method is participant observation. It is the account of a revolutionary,
of a man who says of himself: 'sleeping on the bare earth with the men
and women of the mechtas,he lives the drama of a people and he becomes
a piece of the flesh of Algeria'.
This book contains the phenomenology of the revolution, not its
L'An V de la rivolutionalgdrienne(Paris, 1959). The English translation quoted is by Haakon
Chevalier, Studiesin a Dying Colonialim (New York, I965).
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
547
theory. Fanon starts with a seemingly superficial aspect, clothing. 'The
way of clothing, the traditions of costume are the most obvious, that
means the immediately recognisable forms of the particularity of a
society.' This is the first sentence of the first chapter, which bears the
ambiguous title, 'Algeria Unveils Herself'. The colonial government,
the employers, the churches, all worked together to abrogate the
traditional veil of Muslim women. But just this attack on a traditional
requisite made of it a symbol around which the resistance of the people
was crystallising. 'We find here a law of colonisation', Fanon writes.
'In the first phase the actions and plans of the occupation power
determine the centres of resistance around which the will of survival of
a people is organised. The white creates the black. But the black
creates the negritude.Against the colonialist attack on the veil he puts
up the cult of the veil.'
But the development went further. The women had to join the ranks
of the resistance movement, had to take off the veil, to wear European
clothes, to work as spies in the European quarters of the Algerian towns.
The war changed completely the traditional role of Algerian girls and
women, who had to fight side by side with their fathers and brothers.
The revolution brought the emancipation of Algerian women. It forced
the patriarchal father to tolerate and to acknowledge a daughter who
as a soldier of the revolutionary army obeyed her superiors and not her
father, who led a life unknown to him and showed him her open face,
which had been unthinkable only a few years previously. But the veil
became a political instrument again in I957, when the police started
to prohibit the carrying of luggage and parcels in the streets by women.
They then returned to their traditional clothing, especially their veils,
to smuggle weapons and other important consignments needed for the
revolution. So the meaning of the veil changed from a traditional
symbol to an instrument of resistance.
Fanon analyses the many consequences of the Algerian war for the
traditional family pattern. The elder brother loses his predominant
position because his younger brothers are soldiers like him, perhaps
even his superiors in the army. The husband loses his prerogatives
because his wives are fighting beside him in the army; and special
courts have to be instituted to deal with divorce cases between members
of the army, giving women more rights than the traditional Mohammedan law provided. The radio, previously held in contempt as a
European device, becomes a centre of family life because it provides
information on the war, on the fighting members of the family, on
instructions for the future. This change in the functions of many
G. K. GROHS
548
institutions is also illustrated in the social role of medical men. Instead
of being seen as representatives of the colonial power, controlling diseases
and caring for Europeans distrusted by the population, doctors now
appear as F.L.N. fighters, caring for the wounded men and helping
their brothers to resist European measures by using exactly the same
European inventions as had been seen before as another means to
destroy the traditional culture.
I will not comment further in detail on his second book. It is, in its
heterogeneous, essayistic form, a preparatory venture for his major
theoretical work, Les Damnes de la terre. But it makes it clear that the
Algerian war brought about many revolutionary changes, even in the
most traditional sections of society and in the most personal aspects of
life, which have much more difficulty breaking through in Africa south
of the Sahara, because such a revolutionary purgatory did not take
place. This slow process of modernisation may also lead to a loss of
solidarity and an increasing fragmentation of society, without that basic
consensus which was created in Algeria by the violent attacks of the
French settlers, French soldiers, and French police.
COLONIAL
LIBERATION
AND
THE
FUTURE
Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence was apparent even in Fanon's first
book, writes the introduction to his last work, Les Damnes de la terre.1
He feared, like many Frenchmen of that time, that the Algerian war
was starting to demoralise the soldiers and officers of France, and to
destroy the last remnants of humanism, thus leading to a moral
catastrophe in France itself. Sartre asks himself if this catastrophic
process can be stopped, and if so, how. He answers:
Yes. For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted ... This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not
dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters .. Then,
perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last the new
violence which is raised up in you by old, often-repeated crimes. But, as they
say, that's another story: the history of mankind. The time is drawing near,
I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.2
I think it is not necessary to direct the reader's attention to another
version of Sartre's challenge, with only one word changed: 'You
condemn this war but do not dare to declare yourselves to be on the
1 Les Damnes de la terre (Paris, I96I). The English translation quoted is by Constance
Farrington, The Wretchedof the Earth (London, I967).
2 Ibid.
p. 26.
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
549
side of the Vietnamese fighters.' This would mean the acceptance of
violence. 'Concerning Violence' is the title of Fanon's first chapter.
Only by violence can colonialism be destroyed. Only by violence can
colonialised countries liberate themselves. Fanon analyses the situation
first on the national then on the international level, to see the global
consequences of the Algerian situation.
The colonial society is for Fanon a divided world, in which the whites
live in their own town quarters, with their own schools and hospitals.
The white despises the Algerian, the Algerian envies and hates the
white. Between these two worlds there is no intermediary; the soldier
and the policeman represent naked violence. The church has the task
of destroying the indigenous culture:
The church in the colonies is the white people's church, the foreigner's
church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the
white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter
many are called but few are chosen...
All those Saints who have turned the other cheek, who have forgiven
trespasses against them, who have been spat on and insulted without
shrinking are studied and held up as examples.l
The first instruction given to those under colonial rule is to stay
where they are and not to overstep the borders. No wonder that aggressive feelings develop, that dreams refer to flight and the overcoming of
frontiers, and that these aggressions must find an outlet. Fanon sees
two such outlets. In traditional society there is a criminal reaction
against one's own tribesmen and the flight into dances and the wild
mythology of indigenous religions. The reactions of the bourgeoisie are
different. They also suffer humiliations, they also are prevented from
developing their capacities, but their economic and cultural interests
do not allow them to enter into open revolution as long as they can
hope to save their privileges and goods. Therefore they proclaim nonviolence. 'In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the
intellectual and economic elite of the colonised country that the
bourgeoisie has the same interest as them and that it is therefore urgent
and indispensable to come to terms for the public good.' The bourgeoisie is caught within its own immobilism. 'When they are told
"action must be taken", they see bombs raining down on them,
armoured cars coming at them on every path, machine-gunning and
police-action...And
they sit quiet.'2
Fanon thinks that this reasoning is historically wrong. Even Napoleon
1 The Wretchedof the Earth, pp. 32 and 52.
Ibid. pp. 48-9.
2
G. K. GROHS
550
had to retreat with his superior army from Portugal in I8IO when the
population led a guerrilla warfare against him. Capitalists are not in the
long run interested in a war that only costs money and brings no hope
of success: 'the monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not
support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What
the factory-owners and financial magnates of the mother country
expect from their government is not that it should decimate the
colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic
conventions their own "legitimate interests".'1 Also, the economic
competition between East and West does not allow colonial wars to be
protracted for too long. If one considers these arguments of Fanon in the
light of the experience of the Vietnamese war one may come to different
conclusions, but this cannot be discussed here.
The consequence for Fanon is that not compromise but fight will
force colonialism to retreat. But this fight can only be initiated-and
this is a very important point in his theory-when the leading elite in
the cities, with ideas but no base for action, turn to the countryside,
where they find people ready for action but without sufficient intellectual leadership. The error of the political parties in colonial countries
consists in the fact that they do not establish contact with the masses,
but restrict their interest to the workers, craftsmen, and civil servants
in the cities, who are a tiny portion of the population.
Fanon believes that at this point the Marxist theory does not work.
The proletariat in the colonial countries is not the suppressed mass of
poor industrial workers, but a small privileged group of wage-earners,
who have, in contrast to the poor peasants, far more to lose than their
chains. Also, the bourgeoisieis not the inventive, productive, entrepreneurial class of the Communist Manifesto, but a parasitical bourgeoisie
profiting from the colonial economy. Neither the parties nor the
proletariat can promote the revolution; but there are three other
groups which can: the peasants, the intellectuals, and the outcasts and
rootless fringe groups living unemployed and destitute in the outskirts
of the great cities. The revolutionary process works, according to
Fanon, in the following way.
The radical members of the political parties in the city discover that
they are unable to change the bourgeois apathy of their party structure,
and they find themselves isolated within the parties. They have to
emigrate to the countryside, where they suddenly meet a group of men
and women asking, 'When can we start to fight?' The radicals accept
the challenge, and give the peasants the leadership they need and the
1 The Wretchedof the Earth, p.
51.
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
55I
and
colonial
technical
lack.
The
political
power,
knowledge they
becoming aware of this new development, tries to counter-attack-the
so-called contre-subversion-with the help of two groups, the religious
leaders and the Lumpenproletariat.This leads to a certain amount of
confusion; but soon the leaders realise that they have to give up the
fiction of a united nation on the one side and a united white front on
the other side. They take into account the different economic groups
and interests of their people, and the existence of a group of whites who
sympathise with their cause and condemn colonialism just as they do
themselves. It is not the whites who have to be fought, but colonialism.
Fanon is not, however, content simply to analyse the Algerian situation and to describe the violent methods which are necessary to win
the battle against colonialism. In a chapter, 'Mesaventuresde la conscience
nationale', he tries to predict developments after the victory. He bases
these predictions on his observations of those African and South
American countries which had won their independence. Ghana
especially seems to have inspired some of his conclusions, which deal
with four aspects: the function of the national bourgeoisie, the role of
the national leader, the position of the party, and the organisation of
the army.
The national bourgeoisie has, as Fanon observes, the psychology of
traders and not of entrepreneurs. It takes over the vacated positions of
the colonialists, and uses three or four slogans to demand enormous
endeavours from the industrial and agricultural workers in the name of
national reconstruction. This attitude is taken up also by the petitbourgeoisie, the artisans, and the craftsmen.
'The artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans...
From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism and
finally to racism.' Fanon's conception of nationalism is quite different; he
warns: 'If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened
by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political
needs, in other words into humanism, it leads to a blind alley.'l
Fanon believes that the vague formula of African unity is falling to
pieces, considering the regional differences within nations, the fight
between Christianity and Islam, the differences between Arab and
black Africa. 'The racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie
is a racism of defence, based on fear.'2 This fear, this feeling of insecurity
vis-d-vis not only colonialism but also mass illiteracy and tribal life in the
old traditions, drives the bourgeoisie to seek its security in a single
party. 'The single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the
Ibid. pp. I25 and I65.
2 Ibid.
p. 13.
552
G. K. GROHS
bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical.' It is a
shield for private profit ambitions, a defence against the mounting
dissatisfaction of a people who hoped for real betterment of their living
conditions. To fulfil this function more efficiently, a charismatic leader
is necessary:
Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the
people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon
as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs
of the people for bread, land and the restoration of the country to their
sacred hands, the leader will reveal his purpose: to become the general
president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which
constitutes the national bourgeoisie. In spite of his frequently honest conduct
and his sincere declarations, the leader is seen objectively as the fierce
defender of these interests, today combined, of the national bourgeoisie and
the ex-colonial companies.1
The leader is the more necessary as the old revolutionary party has
ceased to exist, only preserving the name, the emblem, the slogan. But
behind these remarks of Fanon there stands the ideal of a party as it
should be: an organic party, characterised by a dynamic movement of
ideas and people, an animated discussion at every level. But this
organic party, which existed during the war against colonialism, is no
more. Fanon proposes four ways of overcoming the impasse:
(a) The people must be politicised. They must have the chance to
participate in the decision-making process.
the administra(b) The tertiary sector of the economy-especially
tion-must be nationalised; trade must be controlled by the state.
(c) The party must be completely separated from government and
administration. It must become a means of discovering and formulating
the needs and demands of the people. It must cease to be a means for
individuals to get jobs within the administration.
(d) State and party must be decentralised. The regions should have
their own representatives, to counteract the process of'macrocephalisation'. Fanon declares: 'In an underdeveloped country the leading
members of the party ought to avoid the capital as if it had the plague.
They ought, with some few exceptions, to live in the country districts.
The centralisation of all activity in the city ought to be avoided.. The
party should be decentralised in the extreme. It is the only way to
bring life to regions which are dead, those regions which are not yet
awakened to life.'2
Fanon derived from his experiences in the Algerian war a principle
1 The Wretchedof the Earth, pp. 132 and 133-4.
2
Ibid. p. I49.
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
553
of 'fundamental democratisation', in Karl Mannheim's sense, to avoid
conflicts between bourgeoisie and proletariat, city and countryside,
party and population. He is convinced that it is useful to slow down the
speed of development in order to explain to the people every measure
which is introduced to modernise the society and the economy. It is not
authoritarian measures which guarantee development, but patient
collaboration and education.
Fanon also considers the army from this point of view. The army
should be-as in Israel-the school of the nation. Its function is to
further a sense of solidarity between the different regional groups, to
teach reading and writing, and the basic notions of technical knowledge, so that men may contribute to the national development tasks.
Fanon is against a professional army and in favour of a militia. He
is, like all members of resistance movements, opposed to an organised
military profession. He learnt to know professional soldiers in the form
of French parachutists and the Foreign Legion.
Fanon knows, however, that all his proposals cannot solve the basic
problems of developing countries. He knows also that the introduction
he strongly supports-does not achieve
of a socialist economy-which
from
foreign aid, from the help of the industrialised
independence
countries. But this aid he sees as a kind of compensation, not charity
but an international obligation, a moral duty of the developed nations.
He hopes-and here some doubts may arise-that the masses of industrial workers will acknowledge one day their solidarity with the
masses of the third world.' But, disregarding this hope, he is realistic
enough to admit that the help of the industrialised nations is needed.
Fanon takes a similar attitude towards all efforts to rediscover
African history and culture. He does not believe in an African culture,
but in a national culture, which has to be created with the help of the
people. The organised and conscious battle led by a colonised people
which hopes to regain its sovereignty is for him the most perfect
cultural manifestation that exists. 'To hold a responsible position in an
under-developed country is to know that in the end everything depends
on the education of the masses, on the raising of the level of thought,
and what we are too quick to call "political teaching".'2
1
Stokely Carmichael expressed similar hopes, that the white American workers would
join forces with Afro-Americans, in a talk to university students in Dar es Salaam, I967. On
the influence of Fanon on the Black Power movement generally, cf. Locksley Edmondson,
"Black Power" Africa and the Caribbean' (Makerere University College, Kampala, 1968,
mimeo).
2 The Wretched the
Earth, p. I59.
of
G. K. GROHS
554
FANON
AS THEORETICIAN
If after this quick review of the work of Frantz Fanon we try to
assess the originality of his thinking, it becomes obvious that he is
neither an existentialist, as some have assumed because of his close
relations with Sartre, nor a dogmatic Marxist, in spite of his wide
reading of the works of Marx, Engels, and Hegel.
His nationalism is ambivalent, because he sees it as a means of
liberation, but also hopes that it will transcend its borders so that all
people may co-operate in a new humanism. He is not racialist, as shown
by his strong reaction to Sartre's dialectical description of nigritude as
a kind of 'anti-racialist racialism'. For Fanon, race was no category;
he knew only human beings as an entity transcending all races. In one
sense his theory is populist, because for him 'the people' has the ultimate
authority, not the government, the party, or the leader.1 But this people,
the nation, could itself be pluralist, and it was not difficult for him to
imagine the solidarity of all oppressed men and women, whether white,
yellow, or black. Here also lies the difference between Fanon and
Stokely Carmichael, for example. They agree on the use of violence as
a means of liberation, on the black man's demand for self-assertion
vis-a-vis the white man. But Fanon refuses to base his resistance, his
concept of culture, on racialism. There are nations and individuals,
oppressors and oppressed, but not an oppressor race and an oppressed
race. This division is too simple for Fanon.
The shortcomings of this theory lie in Fanon's proposals for the
development of an independent Africa. He opts for a socialist economy
against a bureaucratised and centralised dictatorship. He aims at a
moderate federal state which does not break up in regionalism. But he
does not show how a socialist economy can avoid bureaucracy, how the
federation can avoid breaking up into its component units, or how a
party which is separated from the administration can avoid being taken
over by it. He does not explain how the parasitical bourgeoisie can be
changed into a productive bourgeoisie; he only demands its 'liquidation'. But how can a class be abolished without being immediately
succeeded by a substitute? He wants to protect minorities, but he does
not explain how to destroy the prejudices of the majority against the
minority.
Finally, one may question the general applicability of his concept
of violence. There is much evidence that violence may be necessary in
1 Cf. John S. Saul, 'On African Populism', in E. Gellner and G. Ionescu (eds.), Populism
(London, 1968).
FRANTZ
FANON
AND
THE
AFRICAN
REVOLUTION
555
African countries which are or were dominated by white settler
groups, as in Algeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese
territories. But in other countries-Ghana,
Tanzania, Sierra Leonewhere such groups were lacking, no violence was necessary to achieve
independence and to transform the colonial economy into something
approaching a 'socialist economy'. The outcome of much violent
action in Europe and the U.S.A. in recent years has shown that violence
as a means of revolution has to be viewed far more discriminately. It is
time to think afresh about the roots, the efficiency, and the controllability
of violence. This means going beyond the ideas of Frantz Fanon, which
were derived to a great extent from his experiences in the Algerian
war.
But, in spite of these and other shortcomings, his analysis has proved
useful in the following ways:
(a) His proposal to relate the urbanised elites to the masses in the
countryside was put into practice in Cuba, and to a certain extent also
in the struggle for independence in Southern and Northern Rhodesia,
and remains a strategic problem of the first order.
(b) His warning that the existing bourgeoisie has a strong tendency
to become parasitical, and that something must be done to encourage
it to become productive, has been acknowledged by many African
leaders, from Senghor to Sekou Toure.1
(c) The strong interest of capitalist countries, especially the former
colonial powers, in influencing and, if possible, dominating the economy
of the newly independent countries is seen clearly by Fanon, with all its
international consequences.
(d) His observation that peasants and unemployed town-dwellers
have to play the role of the proletariat because the workers belong to
the privileged class in developing countries, at least in the initial period,
offers a useful correction to orthodox Marxist views.
(e) His conclusion that only violence is able to force settlers-and
other groups with strong economic interests to defend-to give up their
privileges was taken over specifically by the Cuban revolutionaries, by
representatives of'Black Power', and even by some European left-wing
groups.
It is therefore not surprising that the books of Frantz Fanon have
had a growing influence on the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, not least in Africa, where many leading
politicians and political thinkers have paid tribute to him and his
1 This
problem has been discussed in many speeches by responsible African politicians,
including Leopold Senghor, Sekou TourS, and Julius Nyerere.
36
556
G. K. GROHS
work.l Fanon can only be adequately interpreted, however, if his
arguments are critically assessed and the consequences are examined
in the light of his ultimate goal: the liberation of man from exploitation by other men.
1 See
'Homage to Frantz Fanon', in Prdsenceafricaine(Paris, English edition), xii, 40,
pp. 130-52, and the special issue of Partisans (Paris), II, I962. The number of reviews is
steadily increasing: see, for example, A. Zolberg in Encounter(London), xxvII, November
I966, pp. 56-63; R.S. in Africa Report(Washington), xi, May 1966, pp. 69-77; I. L. Gedzier
in The Middle East Journal (Washington), xx, I966, pp. 534-44; and F. Ansprenger in The
Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), I, 3, pp. 403-5. A posthumous collection
of the shorter political writings of Fanon was published under the title, Pour la revolution
africaine (Paris, I964).