|
Preface to Frantz Fanon’s
“Wretched of the Earth” - Jean-Paul Sartre, 1961
 "...The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked
out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with
the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with
high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After
a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These
walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.
From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon!
Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon!
... therhood!’ It was the golden age. It came to an end; the mouths
opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our
humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. .."
Not so very long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million
inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million
natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. Between the
two there were hired kinglets, overlords and a bourgeoisie, sham from
beginning to end, which served as go-betweens. In the colonies the truth
stood naked, but the citizens of the mother country preferred it with
clothes on: the native had to love them, something in the way mothers are
loved.
The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked
out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with
the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with
high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After
a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These
walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.
From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon!
Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon!
... therhood!’ It was the golden age.
It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black
voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our
inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of
resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by
themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but
that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being
faithful to them. Then, indeed, Europe could believe in her mission; she had
hellenized the Asians; she had created a new breed, the Graeco-Latin
Negroes. We might add, quite between ourselves, as men of the world: ‘After
all, let them bawl their heads off, it relieves their feelings; dogs that
bark don’t bite.’
A new generation came on the scene, which changed the issue. With
unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our
values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that
they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them.
By and large, what they were saying was this: ‘You are making us into
monstrosities; your humanism claim we are at one with the rest of humanity
but your racist methods set us apart.’ Very much at our ease, we listened to
them all; colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and for that
matter they do not read much of him, but they do not need a philosopher to
tell them that uneasy consciences are caught up in their own contradictions.
They will not get anywhere; so, let us perpetuate their discomfort; nothing
will come of it but talk. If they were, the experts told us, asking for
anything at all precise in their wailing, it would be integration.
Of course, there is no question of granting that; the system, which
depends on over-exploitation, as you know, would be ruined. But it’s enough
to hold the carrot in front of their noses, they’ll gallop all right. As to
a revolt, we need not worry at all; what native in his senses would go off
to massacre the fair sons of Europe simply to become European as they are?
In short, we encouraged these disconsolate spirits and thought it not a bad
idea for once to award the Prix Goncourt to a Negro. That was before ’39.
1961. Listen: ‘Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating
mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet
murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their
own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have
stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual
experience.’ The tone is new. Who dares to speak thus? It is an African, a
man from the Third World, an ex-‘native’. He adds: ‘Europe now lives at such
a mad, reckless pace that she is running headlong into the abyss; we would
do well to keep away from it.’ In other words, she’s done for. A truth which
is not pleasant to state but of which we are all convinced, are we not,
fellow-Europeans, in the marrow of our bones?
We must however make one reservation. When a Frenchman, for example, says to
other Frenchmen ‘The country is done for’ — which has happened, I should
think, almost every day since 1930 — it is emotional talk; burning with love
and fury, the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then,
usually, he adds ‘Unless ...’ His meaning is clear; no more mistakes must be
made; if his instructions are not carried out to the letter, then and only
then will the country go to pieces. In short, it is a threat followed by a
piece of advice and these remarks are so much the less shocking in that they
spring from a national inter subjectivity.
But on the contrary when Fanon says of Europe that she is rushing to her
doom, far from sounding the alarm he is merely setting out a diagnosis. This
doctor neither claims that she is a hopeless case — miracles have been known
to exist — nor does he give her the means to cure herself. He certifies that
she is dying, on external evidence, founded on symptoms that he can observe.
As to curing her, no; he has other things to think about; he does not give a
damn whether she lives or dies. Because of this, his book is scandalous. And
if you murmur, jokingly embarrassed, ‘He has it in for us!’ the true nature
of the scandal escapes you; for Fanon has nothing in for you at all; his
work — red-hot for some — in what concerns you is as cold as ice; he speaks
of you often, never to you.
The black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels are finished; the days of
colonized laureats are over. An ex-native French-speaking, bends that
language to new requirements, makes use of it, and speaks to the colonized
only: ‘Natives of an under-developed countries, unite!’ What a downfall! For
the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us
as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches. Of course,
Fanon mentions in passing our well-known crimes: Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar:
but he does not waste his time in condemning them; he uses them. If he
demonstrates the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations which
unite and oppose the colonists to the people of the mother country, it is
for his brothers; his aim is to teach them to beat us at our own game.
In short, the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his
voice. We know that it is not a homogeneous world; we know too that enslaved
peoples are still to be found there, together with some who have achieved a
simulacrum of phoney independence, others who are still fighting to attain
sovereignty and others again who have obtained complete freedom but who live
under the constant menace of imperialist aggression.
These differences are born of colonial history, in other words of
oppression. Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers
in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie,
sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the
colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time.
Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned
classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every
means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonized
societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former
colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of
a whole. In the heat of battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet
bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is
always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns
— all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable
reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where
colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it
rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class.
For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the
workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less
than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph,
the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if
the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its
formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.
The example of Katanga illustrates this quite well. Thus the unity of the
Third World is not yet achieved. It is a work in progress, which begins by
the union, in each country, after independence as before, of the whole of
the colonized under the command of the peasant class. This is what Fanon
explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: we must achieve
revolutionary socialism all together everywhere, or else one by one we will
be defeated by our former masters. He hides nothing, neither weaknesses, nor
discords, nor mystification.
Here, the movement gets off to a bad start; then, after a striking
initial success it loses momentum; elsewhere it has come to a standstill,
and if it is to start again, the peasants must throw their bourgeoisie
overboard. The reader is sternly put on his guard against the most dangerous
will o’ the wisps: the cult of the leader and of personalities, Western
culture, and what is equally to be feared, the withdrawal into the twilight
of past African culture. For the only true culture is that of the
Revolution; that is to say, it is constantly in the making. Fanon speaks out
loud; we Europeans can hear him, as the fact that you hold this book in your
hand proves; is he not then afraid that the colonial powers may take
advantage of his sincerity?
No; he fears nothing. Our methods are out-of-date; they can sometimes delay
emancipation, but not stop it. And do not think that we can change our ways;
neo-colonialism, that idle dream of mother countries, is a lot of hot air;
the ‘Third Forces’ don’t exist, or if they do they are only the tin-pot
bourgeoisies that colonialism has already placed in the saddle. Our
Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run
our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse
to one thing: brute force, when he can command it; the native has only one
choice, between servitude or supremacy.
What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his
brothers that he denounces our old tricks, and he is sure we have no more up
our sleeves. It is to them he says: ‘Europe has laid her hands on our
continents, and we must slash at her fingers till she lets go. It’s a good
moment; nothing can happen at Bizerta, at Elizabethville or in the Algerian
bled that the whole world does not hear about. The rival blocks take
opposite sides, and hold each other in check; let us take advantage of this
paralysis, let us burst into history, forcing it by our invasion into
universality for the first time. Let us start fighting; and if we've no
other arms, the waiting knife’s enough.’
Europeans, you must open this book and enter into it. After a few steps in
the darkness you will see strangers gathered around a fire; come close, and
listen, for they are talking of the destiny they will mete out to your
trading-centres and to the hired soldiers who defend them. They will see
you, perhaps, but they will go on talking among themselves, without even
lowering their voices. This indifference strikes home: their fathers,
shadowy creatures, your creatures, were but dead souls; you it was who
allowed them glimpses of light, to you only did they dare speak, and you did
not bother to reply to such zombies. Their sons ignore you; a fire warms
them and sheds light around them, and you have not lit it. Now, at a
respectful distance, it is you who will feel furtive, nightbound and
perished with cold. Turn and turn about; in these shadows from whence a new
dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.
In this case, you will say, let’s throw away this book. Why read it if it is
not written for us? For two reasons; the first is that Fanon explains you to
his brothers and shows them the mechanism by which we are estranged from
ourselves; take advantage of this, and get to know yourselves seen in the
light of truth, objectively. Our victims know us by their scars and by their
chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough
that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have
made of ourselves. But is it any use? Yes, for Europe is at death’s door.
But, you will say, we live in the mother country, and we disapprove of
her excesses. It is true, you are not settlers, but you are no better. For
the pioneers belonged to you; you sent them overseas, and it was you they
enriched. You warned them that if they shed too much blood you would disown
them, or say you did, in something of the same way as any state maintains
abroad a mob of agitators, agents provocateurs and spies whom it disowns
when they are caught. You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such
an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you
pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred
in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades above all to some of them who
are rather too Westernized — the solidarity of the people of the mother
country and of their representatives in the colonies.
Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make
you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment. You see,
I, too, am incapable of ridding myself of subjective illusions; I, too, say
to you: ‘All is lost, unless ...’ As a European, I steal the enemy’s book,
and out of it I fashion a remedy for Europe. Make the most of it.
And here is the second reason: if you set aside Sorel’s fascist utterances,
you will find that Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of
history into the clear light of day. Moreover, you need not think that
hot-headedness or an unhappy childhood have given him some uncommon taste
for violence; he acts as the interpreter of the situation, that’s all. But
this is enough to enable him to constitute, step by step, the dialectic
which liberal hypocrisy hides from you and which is as much responsible for
our existence as for his.
During the last century, the middle classes looked on the workers as
covetous creatures, made lawless by their greedy desires; but they took care
to include these great brutes in our own species, or at least they
considered that they were free men — that is to say, free to sell their
labour. In France, as in England, humanism claimed to be universal.
In the case of forced labour, it is quite the contrary. There is no
contract; moreover, there must be intimidation and thus oppression grows.
Our soldiers overseas, rejecting the universalism of the mother country,
apply the ‘numerus clausus’ to the human race: since none may enslave, rob
or kill his fellowman without committing a crime, they lay down the
principle that the native is not one of our fellow-men. Our striking-power
has been given the mission of changing this abstract certainty into reality:
the order is given to reduce the inhabitants of the annexed country to the
level of superior monkeys in order to justify the settler’s treatment of
them as beasts of burden.
Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of
these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything
will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for
theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical
fatigue win stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left,
fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians come
to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for
them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives
in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear
will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces.
The business is conducted with flying colours and by experts: the
‘psychological services’ weren’t established yesterday; nor was
brain-washing. And yet, in spite of an these efforts, their ends are nowhere
achieved: neither in the Congo, where Negroes’ hands were cut off, nor in
Angola, where until very recently malcontents’ lips were pierced in order to
shut them with padlocks. I do not say that it is impossible to change a Man
into an animal I simply say that you won’t get there without weakening him
considerably. Blows will never suffice; you have to push the starvation
further, and that’s the trouble with slavery.
For when you domesticate a member of our own species, you reduce his output,
and however little you may give him, a farmyard man finishes by costing more
than he brings in. For this reason the settlers are obliged to stop the
breaking-in half-way; the result, neither man nor animal, is the native.
Beaten, under-nourished, ill, terrified — but only up to a certain point —
he has, whether he’s black, yellow or white, always the same traits of
character: he’s a sly-boots, a lazybones and a thief, who lives on nothing,
and who understands only violence.
Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He
ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not
possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can’t carry
massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses
control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on
to decolonization.
But it does not happen immediately. At first the European’s reign continues.
He has already lost the battle, but this is not obvious; he does not yet
know that the natives are only half-native; to hear him talk, it would seem
that he ill-treats them in order to destroy or to repress the evil that they
have rooted in them; and after three generations their pernicious instincts
will reappear no more. What instincts does he mean? The instincts that urge
slaves on to massacre their master? Can he not here recognize his own
cruelty turned against himself? In the savagery of these oppressed peasants,
does he not find his own settler’s savagery, which they have absorbed
through every pore and for which there is no cure?
The reason is simple; this imperious being, crazed by his absolute power
and by the fear of losing it, no longer remembers clearly that he was once a
man; he takes himself for a horsewhip or a gun; he has come to believe that
the domestication of the ‘inferior races’ will come about by the
conditioning of their reflexes. But in this he leaves out of account the
human memory and the ineffaceable marks left upon it; and then, above all
there is something which perhaps he has never known: we only become what we
are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of
us. Three generations did we say? Hardly has the second generation opened
their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In
psychiatric terms, they are ‘traumatized’, for life.
But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to
submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European
will pay for sooner or later. After that, when it is their turn to be broken
in, when they are taught what shame and hunger and pain are, all that is
stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is equal to that of the
pressure put upon them. You said they understand nothing but violence? Of
course; first, the only violence is the settlers; but soon they will make it
their own; that is to say, the same violence is thrown back upon us as when
our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.
Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen,
by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of
powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men
because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them — because
of him, and against him. Hatred, blind hatred which is as yet an
abstraction, is their only wealth; the Master calls it forth because he
seeks to reduce them to animals, but he fails to break it down because his
interests stop him half-way. Thus the ‘half-natives’ are still humans,
through the power and the weakness of the oppressor which is transformed
within them into a stubborn refusal of the animal condition. We realize what
follows; they’re lazy: of course — it’s a form of sabotage. they’re sly and
thieving; just imagine! But their petty thefts mark the beginning of a
resistance which is still unorganized. That is not enough; there are those
among them who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against
the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering
Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts
the terrified masses.
Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a
current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear
that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression
but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered
between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those
desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which
they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is
ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of
these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their
and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of
their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their
helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’
collective unconscious.
If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and
devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves
they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves
since they cannot face the real enemy — and you can count on colonial policy
to keep up their rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother
thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their
common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don’t quench their
thirst for blood.
They can only stop themselves from marching against the machine-guns by
doing our work for us; of their own accord they will speed up the
dehumanisation that they reject. Under the amused eye of the settler, they
will take the greatest precautions against their own kind by setting up
supernatural barriers, at times reviving old and terrible myths, at others
binding themselves by scrupulous rites. It is in this way that an obsessed
person flees from his deepest needs — by binding himself to certain
observances which require his attention at every turn.
They dance; that keeps them busy; it relaxes their painfully contracted
muscles; and then the dance mimes secretly, often without their knowing, the
refusal they cannot utter and the murders they dare not commit. In certain
districts they make use of that last resort — possession by spirits.
Formerly this was a religious experience in all its simplicity, a certain
communion of the faithful with sacred things; now they make of it a weapon
against humiliation and despair; Mumbo-Jumbo and all the idols of the tribe
come down among them, rule over their violence and waste it in trances until
it in exhausted.
At the same time these high-placed, personages protect them; in other
words the colonized people protect themselves against colonial estrangement
by going one better in religious estrangement, with the unique result that
finally they add the two estrangements together and each reinforces the
other. Thus in certain psychoses the hallucinated person, tired of always
being insulted by his demon, one fine day starts hearing the voice of an
angel who pays him compliments; but the jeers don’t stop for all that; only
from then on, they alternate with congratulations. This is a defence, but it
is also the end of the story; the self is disassociated, and the patient
heads for madness.
Let us add, for certain other carefully selected unfortunates, that other
witchery of which I have already spoken: Western culture. If I were them,
you may say, I'd prefer my mumbo-jumbo to their Acropolis. Very good: you’ve
grasped the situation. But not altogether, because you aren’t them — or not
yet. Otherwise you would know that they can’t choose; they must have both.
Two worlds: that makes two bewitchings; they dance all night and at dawn
they crowd into the churches to hear mass; each day the split widens. Our
enemy betrays his brothers and becomes our accomplice; his brothers do the
same thing. The status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and
maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.
Laying claim to and denying the human condition at the same time: the
contradiction is explosive. For that matter it does explode, you know as
well as I do; and we are living at the moment when the match is put to the
fuse. When the rising birthrate brings wider famine in its wake, when these
newcomers have life to fear rather more than death, the torrent of violence
sweeps away all barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at
sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence;
it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we
did the other times that it’s we that have launched it.
The ‘liberals’ are stupefied; they admit that we were not polite enough
to the natives, that it would have been wiser and fairer to allow them
certain rights in so far as this was possible; they ask nothing better than
to admit them in batches and without sponsors to that very exclusive club,
our species; and now this barbarous, mad outburst doesn’t spare them any
more than the bad settlers. The Left at home is embarrassed; they know the
true situation of the natives, the merciless oppression they are submitted
to; they do not condemn their revolt, knowing full well that we have done
everything to provoke it.
But, all the same, they think to themselves, there are limits; these
guerrillas should be bent on showing that they are chivalrous; that would be
the best way of showing they are men. Sometimes the Left scolds them ...
‘you’re going too far; we won’t support you any more.’ The natives don’t
give a damn about their support; for all the good it does them they might as
well stuff it up their backsides. Once their war began, they saw this hard
truth: that every single one of us has made his bit, has got something out
of them; they don’t need to call anyone to witness; they’ll grant favoured
treatment to no one.
There is one duty to be done, one end to achieve: to thrust out colonialism
by every means in their power. The more far-seeing among us will be, in the
last resort, ready to admit this duty and this end; but we cannot help
seeing in this ordeal by force the altogether inhuman means that these
less-than-men make use of to win the concession of a charter of humanity.
Accord it to them at once, then, and let them endeavour by peaceful
undertakings to deserve it. Our worthiest souls contain racial prejudice.
They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this
irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of
savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating
himself. I think we understood this truth at one time, but we have forgotten
it — that no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence
itself can destroy them.
The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the
settler through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his
lost innocence and he comes to know himself in that he himself creates his
self. Far removed from his war, we consider it as a triumph of barbarism;
but of its own volition it achieves, slowly but surely, the emancipation of
the rebel, for bit by bit it destroys in him and around him the colonial
gloom. Once begun, it is a war that gives no quarter. You may fear or be
feared; that is to say, abandon yourself to the disassociations of a sham
existence or conquer your birthright of unity. When the peasant takes a gun
in his hands, the old myths grow dim and the prohibitions are one by one
forgotten. The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.
For in the first days of the revolt you must kill: to shoot down a
European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and
the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free
man; the survivor, for the first time, feels a national soil under his foot.
At this moment the Nation does not shrink from him; wherever he goes,
wherever he may be, she is; she follows, and is never lost to view, for she
is one with his liberty. But, after the first surprise, the colonial army
strikes; and then all must unite or be slaughtered.
Tribal dissensions weaken and tend to disappear; in the first place
because they endanger the Revolution, but for the more profound reason that
they served no other purpose before than to divert violence against false
foes. When they remain — as in the Congo — it’s because they are kept up by
the agents of colonialism. The Nation marches forward; for each of her
children she is to be found wherever his brothers are fighting. Their
feeling for each other is the reverse of the hatred they feel for you; they
are brothers inasmuch as each of them has killed and may at any moment have
to kill again. Fanon shows his readers the limits of ‘spontaneity’ and the
need for and dangers of ‘organization’. But however great may be the task at
each turning of the way the revolutionary consciousness deepens. The last
complexes flee away; no one need come to us talking of the ‘dependency’
complex of an A.L.N. soldier.
With his blinkers off, the peasant takes account of his real needs; before
they were enough to kill him, but he tried to ignore them; now he sees them
as infinitely great requirements. In this violence which springs from the
people, which enables them to hold out for five years — for eight years as
the Algerians have done — the military, political and social necessities
cannot be separated. The war, by merely setting the question of command and
responsibility, institutes new structures which will become the first
institutions of peace.
Here, then, is man even now established in new traditions, the future
children of a horrible present; here then we see him legitimized by a law
which will be born or is born each day under fire: once the last settler a
killed, shipped home or assimilated, the minority breed disappears, to be
replaced by socialism. And that’s not enough; the rebel does not stop there;
for you can be quite sure that he is not risking his skin to find himself at
the level of a former inhabitant of the old mother country. Look how patient
he is! Perhaps he dreams of another Dien Bien Phu, but don’t think he’s
really counting on it; he’s a beggar fighting, in his poverty, against rich
men powerfully armed. While he is waiting for decisive victories, or even
without expecting them at all, he tires out his adversaries until they are
sick of him.
It will not be without fearful losses; the colonial army becomes ferocious;
the country is marked out, there are mopping-up operations, transfers of
population, reprisal expeditions, and they massacre women and children. He
knows this; this new man begins his life as a man at the end of it; he
considers himself as a potential corpse. He will be killed; not only does he
accept this risk, he’s sure of it. This potential dead man has lost his wife
and his children; he has seen so many dying men that he prefers victory to
survival; others, not he, will have the fruits of victory; he is too weary
of it all. But this weariness of the heart is the root of an unbelievable
courage. We find our humanity on this side of death and despair; he finds it
beyond torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the whirlwind. The
child of violence, at every moment he draws from it his humanity. We were
men at his expense, he makes himself man at ours: a different man; of higher
quality.
Here Fanon stops. He has shown the way forward: he is the spokesman of those
who are fighting and he has called for union, that is to say the unity of
the African continent against all dissensions and all particularisms. He has
gained his end. If he had wished to describe in all its details the
historical phenomenon of decolonization he would have to have spoken of us;
this is not at all his intention. But, when we have closed the book, the
argument continues within us, in spite of its author; for we feel the
strength of the peoples in revolt and we answer by force. Thus there is a
fresh moment of violence; and this time we ourselves are involved, for by
its nature this violence is changing us, accordingly as the ‘half-native’ is
changed. Everyone of us must think for himself — always provided that he
thinks at all; for in Europe today, stunned as she is by the blows received
by France, Belgium or England, even to allow your mind to be diverted,
however slightly, is as good as being the accomplice in crime of
colonialism. This book has not the slightest need of a preface, all the less
because it is not addressed to us. Yet I have written one, in order to bring
the argument to its conclusion; for we in Europe too are being decolonized:
that is to say that the settler which is in every one of us is being
savagely rooted out. Let us look at ourselves, if we can bear to, and see
what is becoming of us. First, we must face that unexpected revelation, the
strip-tease of our humanism. There you can see it, quite naked, and it’s not
a pretty sight. It was nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect
justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectation of sensibility
were only alibis for our aggressions. A fine sight they are too, the
believers in non-violence, saying that they are neither executioners nor
victims. Very well then; if you’re not victims when the government which
you’ve voted for, when the army in which your younger brothers are serving
without hesitation or remorse have undertaken race murder, you are, without
a shadow of doubt, executioners. And if you chose to be victims and to risk
being put in prison for a day or two, you are simply choosing to pull your
irons out of the fire. But you will not be able to pull them out; they’ll
have to stay there till the end. Try to understand this at any rate: if
violence began this _very evening and if exploitation and oppression had
never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end
the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are
conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to
place you in the ranks of the oppressors.
You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid
hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new
continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This
was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals
and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a
slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it.
Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its
inhabitants. With us, to be a man is to be an accomplice of colonialism,
since all of us without exception have profited by colonial exploitation.
This fat, pale continent ends by falling into what Fanon rightly calls
narcissism. Cocteau became irritated with Paris — ‘that city which talks
about itself the whole time’. Is Europe any different? And that
super-European monstrosity, North America? Chatter, chatter: liberty,
equality, fraternity, love, honour, patriotism and what have you. All this
did not prevent us from making anti-racial speeches about dirty niggers,
dirty Jews and dirty Arabs. High-minded people, liberal or just
soft-hearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they
were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more
consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to
become a man through creating slaves and monsters. While there was a native
population somewhere this imposture was not shown up; in the notion of the
human race we found an abstract assumption of universality which served as
cover for the most realistic practices. On the other side of the ocean there
was a race of less-than-humans who, thanks to us, might reach our status a
thousand years hence, perhaps; in short, we mistook the elite for the genus.
Today, the native populations reveal their true nature, and at the same time
our exclusive ‘club’ reveals its weakness — that it’s neither more nor less
than a minority. Worse than that: since the others become men in name
against us, it seems that we are the enemies of mankind; the élite shows
itself in its true colours — it is nothing more than a gang. Our precious
sets of values begin to moult; on closer scrutiny you won’t see one that
isn’t stained with blood. If you are looking for an example, remember these
fine words: ‘How generous France is!’ Us, generous? What about Sétif, then?
And those eight years of ferocious war which have cost the lives of over a
million Algerians? And the tortures?
But let it be understood that nobody reproaches us with having been false to
such-and-such a mission — for the very good reason that we had no mission at
all. It is generosity itself that’s in question; this fine melodious word
has only one meaning: the granting of a statutory charter. For the folk
across the water, new men, freed men, no one has the power nor the right to
give anything to anybody; for each of them has every right, and the right to
everything. And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not
define itself as the sum total of the whole world’s inhabitants, but as the
infinite unity of their mutual needs. Here I stop; you will have no trouble
in finishing the job; all you have to do is to look our aristocratic virtues
straight in the face, for the first and last time. They are cracking up; how
could they survive the aristocracy of underlings who brought them into
being? A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator found only this
to say in defence of the West: ‘We aren’t angels. But we, at least, feel
some remorse.’ What a confession! Formerly our continent was buoyed up by
other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man or the swastika. Now
we know what these are worth; and the only chance of our being saved from,
shipwreck is the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it’s the
end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply
is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The
ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our
hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion.
The old ‘mother countries’ have still to go the whole hog, still have to
engage their entire forces in a battle which is lost before it has begun. At
the end of the adventure we again find that colonial brutality which was
Bugeaud’s doubtful but though it has been multiplied ten-fold, it’s still
not enough. The national service units are sent to Algeria, and they remain
there seven years with no result. Violence has changed its direction. When
we were victorious we practised it without its seeming to alter us; it broke
down the others, but for us men our humanism remained intact.
United by their profits, the peoples of the mother countries baptized
their commonwealth of crimes, calling them fraternity and love; today
violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us through our soldiers, comes
inside and takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native re-creates
himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals we break up.
Rage and fear are already blatant; they show themselves openly in the
nigger-hunts in Algeria. Now, which side are the savages on? Where is
barbarism?
Nothing is missing, not even the tom-toms; the motor-horns beat out
‘Al-gér-ie fran-çaise’ while the Europeans burn Moslems alive. Fanon reminds
us that not so very long ago, a congress of psychiatrists was distressed by
the criminal propensities of the native population. ‘Those people kill each
other,’ they said, ‘that isn’t normal. The Algerian’s cortex must be
under-developed.’ In central Africa, others have established that ‘the
African makes very little use of his frontal lobes’. These learned men would
do well today to follow up their investigations in Europe, and particularly
with regard to the French.
For we, too, during the last few years, must be victims of ‘frontal
sluggishness’ since our patriots do quite a bit of assassinating of their
fellow-countrymen and if they’re not at home, they blow up their house and
their concierge. This is only a beginning; civil war is forecast for the
autumn, or for the spring of next year. Yet our lobes seem to be in perfect
condition; is it not rather the case that, since we cannot crush the
natives, violence comes back on its tracks, accumulates in the very depths
of our nature and seeks a way out?
The union of the Algerian people causes the disunion of the French
people; throughout the whole territory of the ex-mother-country, the tribes
are dancing their war-dances. The terror has left Africa, and is settling
here; for quite obviously there are certain furious beings who want to make
us Pay with our own blood for the shame of having been beaten by the native.
Then too, there are the others, all the others who are equally guilty (for
after Bizerta, after the lynchings of September, who among them came out
into the streets to shout ‘We've had enough'?) but less spectacular — the
liberals, and the toughs of the tender Left.
The fever is mounting amongst them too, and resentment at the same time. And
they certainly have the wind up! They hide their rage in myths and
complicated rites; in order to stave off the day of reckoning and the need
for decision they have put at the head of our affairs a Grand Magician whose
business it is to keep us all in the dark at all costs. Nothing is being
done; violence, proclaimed by some, disowned by others, turns in a vacuum;
one day it bursts out at Metz, the next at Bordeaux; it’s here, there and
everywhere, like in a game of hunt the slipper. It’s our turn to tread the
path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become natives
altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we
must starve of hunger. This won’t happen; for it’s a discredited colonialism
which is taking hold on us; this is the senile, arrogant master who will
straddle us; here he comes, our mumbo-jumbo.
And when you have read Fanon’s last chapter, you will be convinced that it
would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery
than to be a former settler. It is not right for a police official to be
obliged to torture for ten hours a day; at that rate, his nerves will fall
to bits, unless the torturers are forbidden in their own interests to work
overtime. When it is desirable that the morality of the Nation and the Army
should be protected by the rigours of the law, it is not right that the
former should systematically demoralize the latter, nor that a country with
a Republican tradition should confide hundreds and thousands of its young
folk to the care of putschist officers.
It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the
crimes committed in our name, it’s not at all right that you do not breathe
a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having
to stand in judgement on yourself. I am willing to believe that at the
beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether
such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your
tongues. Eight years of silence; what degradation! And your silence is all
of no avail; today, the blinding sun of torture is at its zenith; it lights
up the whole country. Under that merciless glare, there is not a laugh that
does not ring false, not a face that is not painted to hide fear or anger,
not a single action that does hot betray our disgust, and our complicity. It
is enough today for two French people to meet together for there to be a
dead man between them. One dead man did I say? In other days France was the
name of a country. We should take care that in 1961 it does not become the
name of a nervous disease.
Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the
wounds that it has inflicted. Today, we are bound hand and foot, humiliated
and sick with fear; we cannot fall lower. Happily this is not yet enough for
the colonialist aristocracy; it cannot complete its delaying mission in
Algeria until it has first finished colonizing the French. Every day we
retreat in front of the battle, but you may be sure that we will not avoid
it; the killers need it; they’ll go for us and hit out blindly to left and
right.
Thus the day of magicians and fetishes will end; you will have to fight, or
rot in concentration camps. This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn
this war but do not yet dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the
Algerian fighters; never fear, you can count on the settlers and the hired
soldiers; they’ll make you take the plunge. Then, perhaps, when your back is
to the wall, you will let loose at last that new violence which is raised up
in you by old, oft-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. 
|
Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon...
" Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon... Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the
world, is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder... In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the
official, instituted go-betweens...Non Violence is an attempt to settle the
colonial problem around a green baize table.. Compromise is very important in the phenomenon of decolonization,
for it is very far from being a simple one...
"
"National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood
to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas
introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
At whatever level we study it relationships between individuals, new names for sports
clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of
national or private banks - decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain
'species' of men by another ' species ' of men.
Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete and absolute substitution.
It is true that we could equally well stress the rise of a new nation, the setting up of a
new state, its diplomatic relations, and its economic and political trends. But we have
precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa which characterises at the outset
all decolonization. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the very first
day, the minimum demands of the colonised.
To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed
from the bottom up. The extraordinary importance of this change is that it is willed,
called for, demanded. The need for this change exists in its crude state, impetuous and
compelling, in the consciousness and in the lives of the men and women who are colonised.
But the possibility of this change is equally experienced in the form of a terrifying
future in the consciousness of another ' species ' of men and women: the colonisers.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order
of the world, is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder...
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a
programme of complete disorder. But it cannot come as a result of magical practices, nor
of a natural shock, nor of a friendly understanding. Decolonization, as we know, is a
historical process: that is to say that it cannot be understood, it cannot become
intelligible nor clear to itself except in the exact measure that we can discern the
movements which give it historical form and content. Decolonization is the meeting of two
forces, opposed to each other by their very nature, which in fact owe their originality to
that sort of substantification which results from and is nourished by the situation in the
colonies. ....
Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies
them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into
privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them. It brings
a natural rhythm into existence, introduced by new men, and with it a new language and a
new humanity. Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes
nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the 'thing' which has been colonised
becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.
In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the
colonial situation...The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets
and bloodstained knives which emanate from it. ...You do not turn any society, however
primitive it may be, upside-down with such a programme if you are not decided from the
very beginning, that is to say from the actual formulation of that programme, to overcome
all the obstacles that you will come across in so doing. The native who decides to put the
programme into practice, and to become its moving force, is ready for violence at all
times....
In the colonies it is the policeman and the
soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens...
The colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by
barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are
the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of
oppression.... In the colonial countries, .... the policeman and the soldier, by their
immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native
and advise him by means of rifle-butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that
the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not
lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them
into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer
of violence into the home and into the mind of the native….
….(the)exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and
that of force first and foremost. When in 1956, after the capitulation of Monsieur Guy
Mollet to the settlers in Algeria, the Front de Liberation Nationale, in a famous leaflet,
stated that colonialism only loosens its hold when the knife is at its throat, no Algerian
really found these terms too violent. The leaflet only expressed what every Algerian felt
at heart: colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning
faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted
with greater violence.
Non Violence is an attempt to settle the colonial
problem around a green baize table...
At the decisive moment, the colonialist bourgeoisie, which up till then has remained
inactive, comes into the field. It introduces that new idea which is in proper parlance a
creation of the colonial situation: non-violence. In its simplest form this non-violence
signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonised country that the
bourgeoisie has the same interests as them and that it is therefore urgent and
indispensable to come to terms for the public good.
Non-violence is an attempt to settle the colonial problem around a green baize table,
before any regrettable act has been performed or irreparable gesture made, before any
blood has been shed. But if the masses, without waiting for the chairs to be arranged
around the baize table, listen to their own voice and begin committing outrages and
setting fire to buildings, the elites and the nationalist bourgeois parties will be seen
rushing to the colonialists to exclaim ' This is very serious ! We do not know how it will
end; we must find a solution - some sort of compromise.'
Compromise is very important in the phenomenon of
decolonization, for it is very far from being a simple one...
This idea of compromise is very important in the phenomenon of decolonization, for it
is very far from being a simple one. Compromise involves the colonial system and the young
nationalist bourgeoisie at one and the same time.
The partisans of the colonial system discover that the masses may destroy everything.
Blown-up bridges, ravaged farms, repressions and fighting harshly disrupt the economy.
Compromise is equally attractive to the nationalist bourgeoisie, who since they are not
clearly aware of the possible consequences of the rising storm, are genuinely afraid of
being swept away by this huge hurricane and never stop saying to the settlers: ' we are
still capable of stopping the slaughter; the masses still have confidence in us; act
quickly if you do not want to put everything in jeopardy.'
One step more, and the leader of the nationalist party keeps his distance with regard
to that violence. He loudly proclaims that he has nothing to do with these Mau-Mau, these
terrorists, these throatslitters. At best, he shuts himself off in a no-man's-land between
the terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his services as go-between; that is
to say, that as the settlers cannot discuss terms with these Mau-Mau, he himself will be
quite willing to begin negotiations.
Thus it is that the rear-guard of the national struggle, that very party of
people who have never ceased to be on the other side in the fight, find themselves
somersaulted into the vanguard of negotiations and compromise - precisely because that
party has taken very good care never to break contact with colonialism.
Before negotiations have been set on foot, the majority of nationalist parties confine
themselves for the most part to explaining and excusing this 'savagery'. They do not
assert that the people have to use physical force, and it sometimes even happens that they
go so far as to condemn, in private, the spectacular deeds which are declared to be
hateful by the Press and public opinion in the mother country. The legitimate excuse for
this ultra-conservative policy is the desire to see things in an objective light; but this
traditional attitude of the native intellectual and of the leaders of the nationalist
parties is not, in reality, in the least objective.
For in fact they are not at all convinced that this impatient violence of the masses is
the most efficient means of defending their own interests. Moreover, there are some
individuals who are convinced of the ineffectiveness of violent methods; for them, there
is no doubt about it, every attempt to break colonial oppression by force is a hopeless
effort, an attempt at suicide, because in the innermost recesses of their brains the
settler's tanks and aeroplanes occupy a huge place.
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. They are beaten from the start. There is no need to demonstrate their
incapacity to triumph by violent methods; they take it for granted in their everyday life
and in their political manoeuvres...."
|
Reciprocal Bases
of National Culture and the Fight for Freedom
Speech by Frantz Fanon at the Congress of Black African Writers, 1959
"The nation is not only the
condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and
its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national
existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of
creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions
and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the
various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a
culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility,
validity, life and creative power. In the same way it is its
national character that will make such a culture open to other
cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other
cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have
bearing on reality, or to influence reality.
If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing
today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is
true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people ... then the building of a nation is of
necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising
values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national
liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history.
It is at the heart of national consciousness that international
consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the
source of all culture. "
Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to over-simplify, very
soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a
conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the
negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the
occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to
outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the
systematic enslaving of men and women.
Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial
situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the
attitudes of the colonising power. The area of culture is then marked off by
fences and signposts. These are in fact so many defence mechanisms of the
most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the simple
instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the
oppressor does not manage to convince himself of the objective non-existence
of the oppressed nation and its culture. Every effort is made to bring the
colonised person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been
transformed into instinctive patterns of behaviour, to recognise the
unreality of his 'nation', and, in the last extreme, the confused and
imperfect character of his own biological structure.
Vis-à-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous
While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are completely
different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisan style
solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the
intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition
of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of
unfavourably criticising his own national culture, or else takes refuge in
setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is
passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive.
The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both
lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist
the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial
situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial situation calls a
halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of
colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as
new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there
valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to
give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms and its tonalities. The
immediate, palpable and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if
we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are
being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness to question
oppression and to open up the struggle for freedom.
A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose
destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a
culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of clandestine culture is
immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets
attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as
a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of culture which
are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of
nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throw-back to the laws of
inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of
relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture
which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert and empty.
By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a
veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of
automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down
institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture;
there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the
people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the
same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which
is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture,
its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the
death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual
dependences. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution
of these relations during the struggle for national freedom.
The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation
of culture whether active or emotional and the placing outside the pale of
all specialised branches of organisation contribute to breed aggressive
patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the
reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic and ineffective.
Colonial exploitation, poverty and endemic famine drive the native more and
more to open, organised revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive
breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by
the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were
non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole
sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial
system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and
giving support to national consciousness.
These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature
of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In
literature, for example, there is relative over-production. From being a
reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by
natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism.
The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a
consuming public, now themselves become producers.
This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic
and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories and essays are
attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organisation or law of expression
existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in
proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation
become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less
and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent,
resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the
occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these
modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging
denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which
find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying
power in a cathartic process.
To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatisation
and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In
fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and
gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The
continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an
invitation to go farther than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the
indictment; then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words
of command are heard. The crystallisation of the national consciousness will
both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new
public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his
work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of
charming him or of denouncing him through ethnical or subjectivist means,
now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own
people.
It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here
there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification
of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a
literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to
fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because
it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and
flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of
combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to
liberty expressed in terms of time and space.
On another level, the oral tradition - stories, epics and songs of the
people - which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to
change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them
alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly
fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to
modernise the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the
names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and
more widely used. The formula 'This all happened long ago' is substituted by
that of 'What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might
well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow'. The example of
Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-3 on, the storytellers,
who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely
overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of
their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The
epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form
of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made
no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers
systematically.
The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm
of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination.
Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he
presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is
revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but
spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his
imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even
happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a
transformation - highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds - are
taken up and remodelled.
The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs
and epic stories of a colonised country is worth following. The storyteller
replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his
way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, towards the
seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and
farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As for dramatisation, it is no
longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented
conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama
becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in
preparation or already in progress.
Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were
the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out.
Woodwork, for .example, which formerly turned out certain faces and
attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The inexpressive or
overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body
as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three or five
figures appear. The traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by
the rising avalanche of amateurs or of critics. This new vigour in this
sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution
to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and
faces which are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on
the same pedestal, the artist invites participation in an organised
movement.
If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in
the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be
drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars and trays
are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colours, of
which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of
harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the
rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all
eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise
to scandal. In the same way the stylisation of the human face, which
according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions,
becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home
country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes.
On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of
artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the
colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognise these new
forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It
is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We
remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance
since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the
white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as
the be-bop took definite shape.
The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing,
broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of
whisky, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As
soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the
rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back
the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and
his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of
economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the
consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the
United States. And it is not utopian to suppose that in fifty years' time
the type of jazz howl hiccupped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld
only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of nigger-hood, and
who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship.
We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional
rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same
changes and the same impatience in this field. 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.
He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and
imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the
assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose.
Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to make
unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of
defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose
and dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music and of literature and
the oral tradition. His world comes to lose its accursed character. The
conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together.
We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have
seen that this movement and these new forms are linked to the state of
maturity of the national consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and
more to express itself objectively, in institutions. From thence comes the
need for a national existence, whatever the cost.
A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable is to try
to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture
within the framework of colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a
proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a
colonised country the most elementary, most savage and the most
undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of
defending national culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation,
the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is
at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values and
patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these
appraisals; it is the result of internal and external extensions exerted
over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the
colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the
nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its
existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state.
The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its
continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the
fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the
doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the
conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together
the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture,
those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life and
creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make
such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence
and permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected
to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is
the re-establishment of the nation in order to give life to national culture
in the strictly biological sense of the phrase.
Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a
shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on
the eve of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms
of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There remains one
essential question: what are the relations between the struggle - whether
political or military - and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during
the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of a culture? Finally,
ought one to say that the battle for freedom, however fertile a posteriori
with regard to culture, is in itself a negation of culture? In short is the
struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not?
We believe that the conscious and organised undertaking by a colonised
people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most
complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the
success of the struggle which afterwards gives validity and vigour to
culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The
struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends
culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it. The
struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former
value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set
of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content
of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the
disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonised
man.
This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for
itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the
conflict. A struggle which mobilises all classes of the people and which
expresses their aims and their impatience, which is not afraid to count
almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph. The
value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions
necessary for the development and aims of culture. After national freedom
has been obtained in these conditions, there is no such painful cultural
indecision which is found in certain countries which are newly independent,
because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in the terms of
its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A nation which is
born of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real
aspirations of the people while changing the state cannot exist save in the
expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture.
The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to
give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their
confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated
independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to
achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods
and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to me that the future
of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the
values which have ordained the struggle for freedom.
And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is
here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the
day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in
consequence to set their mistakes aright. We, however, consider that the
mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip
the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness,
I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it
is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture.
The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication.
Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee.
National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that
will give us an international dimension. This problem of national
consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special
dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly
contemporaneous connexion with the African consciousness. The responsibility
of the African as regards national culture is also a responsibility with
regard to African-Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact
of a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills
that every independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still
entrenched is an encircled nation, a nation which is fragile and in
permanent danger.
If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing
today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is
true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and
reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of
necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising
values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national
liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history.
It is at the heart of national consciousness that international
consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately the
source of all culture.
|
"..the
leader of the nationalist party... loudly proclaims that he has nothing to
do with these Mau-Mau, these terrorists, these throat slitters. At best, he shuts himself off in a no-man's-land between
the terrorists and the settlers and willingly offers his services as go-between; that is
to say, that as the settlers cannot discuss terms with these Mau-Mau, he himself will be
quite willing to begin negotiations.
Thus it is that the rear-guard of the national struggle, that very party of
people who have never ceased to be on the other side in the fight, find themselves
somersaulted into the vanguard of negotiations and compromise - precisely because that
party has taken very good care never to break contact with colonialism..."