Race and Nation: Ideology in the Thought of Frantz Fanon

The Journal of ModernAfricanStudies, I8, I (1980), pp. 135-142

Race and Nation: Ideology in the Thought of Frantz Fanon by Paul Nursey-Bray, SeniorLecturerin Politics, The Universityof Adelaide, SouthAustralia An authentic national liberation exists only to the precise degree to which the individual has irreversibly begun his own liberation. It is not possible to take one's distance with respect to colonialism without at the same time taking it with respect to the idea that the colonized holds of himself through the filter of colonialist culture.1

Fanon's treatment of ideology has received less attention than other aspects of his work, and certainly less than it merits. In his approach to the problem of confronting and overcoming the ideological structures of colonialism, there are many keen insights into the nature of ideology in general. Indeed, many aspects of his analysis can, with great benefit, be applied to the general issues that arise from any consideration of the transition from one society to another. However, Fanon's position with respect to ideology has been frequently misinterpreted. Critics have asserted that his view of the relationship between ideology and social change is too simple and determinist in its ascription of a vital importance to the liberating effects of violence on the consciousness of the colonised.2 It is true that Fanon's strong emphasis on the role of violence provides some justification for such an interpretation. But it is an account that, in fact, does less than justice to the sophistication and complexity of his analysis. Fanon anticipates a number of contemporary positions in his recognition that a liberated consciousness is not an automatic response to social change. Indeed, he also asserts that being directly engaged in the struggle to achieve that change may, in itself, be insufficient. There must, in addition, be a process by which the ideological forms are directly confronted and overturned, a basic revision of 'the idea that the colonized holds of himself'. In his discussion of the issues associated with ideology, Fanon focuses our attention on two main areas, race and national culture. His answer to the problems these engender can ultimately be found in a revolutionary humanism that he shares with other theorists of the Third World. Racism: Base and Superstructure A prime focus of Fanon's analysis is the role of racism in the structuring of colonial social relations. Indeed, his emphasis on the status of the race factor, within the colonial social formation, gives rise to suspicions that he has overvalued its significance, and thereby undervalued the importance of class. Early in The Wretchedof the Earth the racial division appears to be

1 Frantz Fanon, Pour la revolutionafricaine (1964), a collection of essays, articles, and notes written between 1952 and i 96, translated as Towardthe AfricanRevolution(Harmondsworth edn. 1970), p. 114. 2 For instance, Henry Bienen, 'State and Revolution: the work of Amilcar Cabral', in The Journal of ModernAfricanStudies (Cambridge), xv, 4, December, 1977, pp. 555-68. 0022-278x/80/2828-4370

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claimed as the crucial determinative factor that shapes and conditions the nature of colonial society: The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.'

His analysis, at this stage, concentrates on the division between settler affluence and native poverty, between settler values and native values. Fanon portrays the colonial world as Manichaean in its structuresand values, a characteristic that makes the native use of violent rebellion the logical corollary of the violent oppression of the settler. In view of this strong emphasis on the race factor, and the seemingly determinative force that is ascribed to it, the question arises as to Fanon's conception of the relative status of race and class. As we shall see, however, there is ample evidence that he clearly regarded race as a dependent variable, and assigned prime importance to the economic base. In his article on 'West Indians and Africans' in Esprit (Paris) in February I955, Fanon offered proof that 'questions of race are but a superstructure, a mantle, an obscure ideological emanation concealing an economic reality '.2 The following year he addressed the First Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Paris on 'Racism and Culture' and declared: 'The apparition of racism is not fundamentally determining. Racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day and, not to mince matters, the crudest element of a given structure.'3 Racism is an ideology that justifies economic exploitation, oppression, and the domination of one country by another, of one race by another. The cruder the form of exploitation the cruder the accompanying ideology, as with the institution of slavery: 'It is not possible to enslave men without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization.'4 Here then, Fanon's treatment of racism corresponds with a more straightforward Marxist approach. In his criticism of 0. Mannoni in Black Skin, WhiteMasks, he advanced the same idea, repudiating any notion of inherited racial characteristics, and asserting the social origins of racism and racial domination.5 This in essence is Fanon's position. If it seems to be at variance with the stance he adopts in the first part of The Wretchedof the Earth it is because the emphasis he places on the racial divide is so strong. But it must be noted that even here Fanon is not arguing that race is the prime determinant, although his basic opposition of settler and native, and his 1 Frantz Fanon, Les Damne'sde la terre(1 96), translated as The Wretchedof the Earth (New York edn. I966), p. 32. 2 Towardthe AfricanRevolution,p. 28. 3 Ibid. p. 4 Ibid. p. 50. 41. 5 Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masquesblancs (1952), translated as Black Skin, White Masks (Harmondsworth edn. I963), passim.

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passionate language, might lead one to that conclusion. What precisely Fanon says is that in the colonial situation 'the economic substructure is also a superstructure' (my emphasis). He does not deny the ultimately determinative influence of the economic base, but in terms of the social relations of the settler-colonial situation he is asserting that economic relations are themselves conditioned by the existence of racism, and that the resultant ideological structures possess, in certain situations, an important degree of relative autonomy. Fanon, himself, does not make use of this term- indeed, his meaning is obscured by the crude division he draws between the material base and the superstructure. But it is clear, in his discussion of race and racism, that he is according them a relatively autonomous status. Like other thinkers and writers whose consciousness matured in societies where colour segregation was rife, Fanon wishes to emphasise the importance of racism within its own relatively autonomous sphere. He is at one with C. L. R. James: 'The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental."' The economic base is thus always determinative in the final instance, and questions of class remain of prime importance. Yet racial confrontation and the accompanying ideology of racism can, within their own sphere, have significant effects: they begin by masking the nakedness of the economic exploitation of the imperialist power but, gradually coming to have a quasi-independent existence, they can eventually exert an important, almost overwhelming, influence on the colonised peoples. Fanon's discussion of the Manichaean character of the settler/native relations of the colonial world must be seen in this light. He is seeking to capture the character of the colonial world at that precise historical moment when the ideology of racism is paramount. Ultimately, of course, crude racial divisions give way to a national struggle for liberation as the people take up arms, and then these issues are transcended, if not subsumed, by the class struggle. But an understanding of the Manichaeism of the value structure of the colonial world remains of importance. The ideology of racism has to be confronted because it imprisons the natives within a value system that construes their identity in the negative terms of inadequacy and impotence. It is to this fact that Fanon seeks to draw our attention. Once the spell of racism has been broken, once the relative autonomy of its ideological structures ceases to hold sway, only then can people assert their positive identity in a liberation struggle. National Culture The debasement of national culture and history is the other half of the ideology of domination that accompanies colonialism: When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to 1 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York, 1963), p. 283.

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lighten their darkness. The effort consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.1

In other words, the dependency and structural distortion of the colony's economy are paralleled by a psychological dependency and distorted consciousness that make the colonised the dominated subjects of another country. As Fanon notes, the colonised are sooner or later confronted by the fact that they are dominated and exploited by another people, by another country. Internal class antagonisms are, of course, of vital importance, but initially the focus of attention is on national liberation and national independence. Within a nation it is usual and commonplace to identify two antagonistic forces: the working class and bourgeois capitalism. In a colonial country this distinction proves totally inadequate. What defines the colonial situation is rather the undifferentiated character that foreign domination presents.2

The same feature of colonialism was noted by Amllcar Cabral, namely, 'the main contradiction... between, on the one hand, the Portuguese and international bourgeoisie which was exploiting our people and, -on the other hand, the interests of our people'.3 So it is that the broad imperialist nexus appears as the chief problem, precluding the natural process of class formation within the colonised country. Classes emerge, but their character and reproduction are shaped in relation to the forces of international capital, not to an endogenously developing mode of production. Mlore importantly still, inter-class relationships are mediated by this prime contradiction of foreign domination: the result may be inter-class solidarity rather than class struggle. Cabral emphasises that the history of his own country, Guinea-Bissau, has been appropriated by the colonial power, Portugal. The colonised, the oppressed, have been forced by the colonial situation out of their own history, and compelled to live within the history of the colonising power. This construction forcibly expresses both the oppression of the colonial situation and its conditioning, determining influence: We consider that when imperialism arrived in Guinea it made us leave history - our history. We agree that history in our country is the result of class struggle, but we have our own class struggles in our own country; the moment imperialism arrived and colonialism arrived, it made us leave our history and enter another history. Obviously, we agree that the class struggle has continued, but it has continued in a very different way: our whole people is struggling against the ruling class of the imperialist countries, and this gives a completely different aspect to the historical evolution of our country.4

Thus class formation and class relations must be viewed in terms specific to the colonial period, and here, according to Cabral, 'it is the colonial state which commands history'.5 1 The Wretchedof the Earth, p. 170. 2

Towardthe AfricanRevolution,pp. 90-X. 3 Amilcar Cabral, Revolutionin Guinea (Harmondsworth edn. 1973), p. 52. 4 Ibid. p. 5 Ibid. 56.

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In directing our attention to the same specific feature of the colonial situation, thereby explaining the national character of revolution in the Third World, Fanon uses terms that are strikingly similar to those of Cabral. In The Wretchedof the Earth he writes that the settler 'makes history and is conscious of making it'. The history of the colonised country is merely one aspect of the history of the metropolitan power, until it experiences the revivifying effects of decolonisation. The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called in question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonization - the history of pillage - and bring into existence the history of the nation - the history of decolonization.1

It is in these terms that the war of liberation must be conceived: the attempt by a colonised nation 'to rediscover its own genius, to reassume its history and assert its sovereignty'.2 But the defeat of the colonial power is not enough. There must, in addition, be a process whereby a new consciousness, embodied in a new national culture, is formed, and the old ideology of domination dispersed. Fanon recognised the importance of this process and devoted a large section in The Wretchedof the Earth to a consideration of how it might be best achieved. In so doing he distanced himself from those intellectuals whose search for culture took them back to the values of pre-colonial African or Arab traditional society. This endeavour to resurrect an African culture founded on the claimed glories of the past, although understandable as a response to the Eurocentric outlook of the colonisers, was seen as a fruitless exercise. 'This historical necessity', he wrote, 'in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialise their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley.'3 The basic limitation of approaches to culture such as that of the negritude writers lies, for Fanon, in the fact that those intellectuals who were searching in Africa's past for surrogates to replace a no-longer-acceptable colonial heritage were still operating within the parameters prescribed by colonial culture. They used the language, the techniques, the criteria, and the definition of culture given them by the colonisers. Thus, while assertions of an Afro-Negro or Arab-Muslim culture, continental in scope, express the dilemma of the native intellectual stranded by the receding waters of western culture, they achieve little by way of creating a genuine national culture. The treasures culled from Africa's past cannot, Fanon believes, measure up to achievements that are defined in western terms, and so the native intellectuals are left in a highly vulnerable position: they seek to confront an alien culture, but on the basis of criteria inherited from the West. It is a project doomed by its own definitions, because when the native intellectuals fail to confront the basic elements of colonial ideology, and when they limit the protest to the terms it allows, they fall its victims. A national culture is not to be found in the past, but must be forged by the people themselves in their day-to-day struggle as they confront and overcome the ideology of colonialism, and 'reassume their own history'. 1 The Wretchedof the Earth, p. 41. Towardthe AfricanRevolution,p. 94. 3 The Wretched of the Earth, p. 173. 2

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'A national cullture', Fanon asserted, 'is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence." Indeed, Fanon expressed the view, at one point, that the process by which the national culture is formed not only goes hand-in-hand with the struggle for liberation, but, in many instances, antedates that struggle. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement, an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigour and feel the approaching conflict... Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of defeat... His world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together.2

Fanon's view of the relationship between the ideology of dependence and the political and economic structures of colonialism thus parallels his views on the racial factor. The struggle against, and transformation of these structures must be accompanied by a struggle against the ideologies that sustain them. Indeed, the latter struggle may be a necessary prerequisite of the first. The revolutionary struggle is, for Fanon, comprehensive: it must aim not only to restructure society, but also to reshape consciousness. In this project he shares common ground with other theorists, notably Che Guevara: the creation of a new man and a new humanity. The 'New Humanity' A commentator on the Marxism of Guevara has noted that this is, above all, 'a revolutionaryhumanism which finds expression in his conception of the role of men in the revolution, in his communist ethics, and in his vision of the new man'.3 This South American activist worked for the creation of the new man, and for a society that would support the existence of this new species of humanity. Fanon's project can be expressed in similar terms, because he also believed that revolution is only authentic, only worthwhile, to the extent that it creates and supports this new humanity. Time and again this humanist emphasis breaks to the surface of Fanon's analysis. There must be, he insists, as well as an economic programme, 'an idea of man and of the future of humanity '.4 The first priority of the national liberation movement is to return dignity to 'all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign men dwell therein'.5 Indeed, it would seem that, for Fanon, the end product of revolutionary struggle is nothing less than the creation of a new set of human possibilities, not just for the colonised, but for all mankind. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others.6 It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built to the dimensions of the universe.' 2 Ibid. Ibid. p. i88. p. I96. 3 M. Lowy, The Marxism of Che Guevara(New York, I973), p. 17. 4 The Wretchedof the Earth, p. I62. 5 Ibid. p. I63. 1

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What Fanon is asserting is the rise of a new spirit and the creation of a new species of humanity in the course of the national liberation struggle. There is 'a new humanism, a new theory of man coming into being, which has its roots in man'.1 On the basis of Fanon's 'revolutionary humanism' he emphasises the need to break completely with the patterns of colonialism, the need for the colonised people to re-educate themselves in order to achieve revolutionary objectives, and to build a new revolutionary culture. In short, it is not enough to carry out decolonisation with its attendant social and economic changes. The ideology of the colonial world has to be totally expunged by the revolutionary raising of consciousness. 'After -the conflict', Fanon insists, 'there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.'2 Essentially, Fanon is making the same point as Guevara when the latter notes that the ideology of bourgeois society can outlive a process of socio-economic transformation. Social transformation is a necessary condition, but it may not be sufficient to create the basis for the new man. Therefore, direct intervention at the ideological level may be necessary. In Guevara's terms 'To build communism, a new man must be created simultaneously with the material base.'3 Fanon is explicit as to the way in which the revolutionary transformation of consciousness is to be achieved. In The Wretchedof the Earth he emphasises the absolute necessity of political education. The army, the militia, the party cadres, indeed, the whole population, must be the focus of an education programme specifically geared to raising the level of political consciousness. 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 on what we are too quick to call 'political teaching'... To educate the masses politically... is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward, it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge... but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.4

Moreover, if this process of education is to be successful in eradicating the domination of the colonial power, and in establishing a national culture based on revolutionary humanism, then it must go hand-in-hand with an integration of the mass of the people into the organisation of the new society. For this reason Fanon strongly emphasises the need to localise decisionmaking at all levels of society; the 'party should be decentralized in the extreme'. Only by accepting responsibility within such a transformed structure can the mass of the people experience their liberty, only on this basis can 'the new man' emerge. Any movement towards the establishment of elites, any exclusion of the masses from the experience of building the new society, will frustrate its achievement. There is, in this strong assertion by Fanon of the necessity for decentralisation, an echo of Mao Tse-tung's mass-line theory. Fanon, like Mao, in perceiving the necessity for intervening 1 Ibid. pp. 134-5. 2 The Wretched of the Earth, p. 197. 3 J. Gerassi (ed.), Venceremos (London, I969), p. 541. 4 The Wretchedof the Earth, p. 157.

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at the ideological level as well as transformingthe material base, also recognises that this, to be successful, implies the education, and the full participation of the mass of the people. For Fanon, then, a restructuring of consciousnesswas as vital as any other aspect of decolonisation. Nowhere is the importance he ascribes to this process more obvious than in his analysis of neo-colonialism. If we view his treatment of ideology as mechanistic, and a changed consciousness as an automatic response to the catharsis of violent struggle, then the neocolonial phase appears anomalous, and in need of explanation. But, if, as has been argued, we accept that he sees a change of consciousness not as an automatic response but rather as the result of an important struggle in its own right, then neo-colonialism becomes readily explainable on Fanon's terms. It occurs where, despite the military and political defeat of the coloniser, the colonised have not yet liberated themselves from a colonialist mentality. Thus neo-colonialism appears as one of the 'pitfalls of national consciousness' where national consciousness 'instead of being the allembracing crystallization of the innermost hopes of the whole people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been.'1 Fanon, like Guevara, was, clearly, too optimistic as to the possibilities of the liberation struggle in the Third World producing a 'new man' and a 'new humanity'. Such a view over-estimated the possibilities inherent in a liberation struggle, and miscalculated the extent to which political victory could pose as a final consummation. But his emphasis on the emergence of a restructured consciousness, as a necessary precondition for a genuinely 'new' society, shows the importance he ascribed to the ideological dimension. As he stressed, it 'is not possible to take one's distance with respect to colonialism without at the same time taking it with respect to the idea that the colonized holds of himself through the filter of colonialist culture'.2 His discussion of the associated problems not only demonstrates an emphasis on consciousness, viewed as an independent variable, that he shares with other Third-World theorists, but also illuminates the complexity of the transition from one society, or mode of production, to another. 1 Ibid. p. 121. 2 Towardthe.AfricanRevolution,p. II 4.