Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
original).5 For Fanon, national liberation was a universal politics concerning humanity as a whole and not a matter of attaining independence in a particular country. Unsurprisingly, national liberation could only be non-identitarian and pan-African in its vision, and this pan-Africanism could only be popularly based:
The optimism that prevails today in Africa is not an optimism born of the spectacle of the forces of nature that are at last favourable to Africans. Nor is the optimism due to the discovery in the former oppressor of a less inhuman and more kindly state of mind. Optimism in Africa is the direct product of the revolutionary action of the masses ... The enemy of the African under French domination is not colonialism insofar as it exerts itself within the strict limits of his nation, but it is the form of colonialism, it is the manifestations of colonialism, whatever be the flag under which it asserts itself (1967: 171).
In this affirmation regarding the universality of national liberation and freedom, a clear similarity can be observed with the writings of Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian struggle for freedom. This is not surprising; after all, we are, in both cases, in the presence of an excess over the extant and hence of the (re-)assertion of a universal truth. But Fanon’s thinking on the formation of the nation is not reducible to that of the formation of a state, and freedom for him is not synonymous with the simple fact of independent statehood.6 Rather, following Rousseau, the people are not considered as a simple given, as in various ‘populist’ positions, but have to first constitute themselves as a collective political subject.7 For Fanon, the core process in national construction is precisely the formation of a people and thereby the changing of social relations and of personal consciousness also, as the effectuation of a nation is premised on this process. It is this that founds the universality of the human. For Fanon, then, in Algeria as in Haiti, it was people (les gens) who constituted the nation by constituting themselves as a people (un peuple), not the state.8 And the people did so through a form of politics that, while not necessarily opposed to the state as such (but only to a particular kind of state, the colonial state), distinguished itself fundamentally from state subjectivity. It is in this sense that any emancipatory politics can be said to always exist ‘at a distance’ from the state. Moreover, the concept of ‘the people’ is understood here as a political concept, not as a social one.
Yet, at the same time as affirming the political universality of the human, Fanon’s nationalism is one founded on a category of the people ultimately represented by a party. This creates a difficulty for his thought of politics, for the idea of the people is no longer exclusively self-created but also represented, which implies that it is created in a political space by a party. Along with the category of class, ‘the people’ comes to be conceived of as a ‘circulating’ category – as a sociological grouping as well as a self-created political subject – with the result that we are also confronted by a reductive relationship between the objectively social and the subjective. This becomes apparent when, immediately after independence, a class whom Fanon refers to as the ‘national bourgeoisie’ detaches itself from the people and becomes unable to contribute to the making of the nation, as its interests link it closely to colonial power. Indeed, the ‘national bourgeoisie’ excludes itself from the nation; it is unable ‘to rationalise popular praxis, in other words to understand its rationality’ (2002: 145, my translation), and so finally excludes itself from the people themselves, for it is
only a sort of greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it. This get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature ... The national bourgeoisie ... must not be opposed because it threatens to slow down the total, harmonious development of the nation. It must be stoutly opposed because, literally, it is good for nothing (1990: 141).
It should be apparent here that the national bourgeoisie refers to a social category as well as a political category. ‘It’ is a socio-economic entity that acts politically coherently; it is a political subject. It is this circulating notion of class – a category circulating between political economy, on the one hand, and the thought of politics, on the other – which enables Fanon to analyse the decline of the politics of the people-nation and their replacement by state politics, by the politics of the nation-state, for the national bourgeoisie succeeds in representing the whole nation as well as its own interests: ‘nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed’ (p. 163). It is clear, then, as Lazarus (1996: 207) makes plain, that it is not the advent of a state politics that destroys emancipatory politics but the saturation of emancipatory politics that makes statism possible, for ‘the return of a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation’ (my translation). To understand the way Fanon analyses this process, we have to look first at the role that the category of class plays in his argument and then at his understanding of the party. Both these categories clarify the limits of Fanon’s emancipatory thought and, more especially, the subjective political impasse faced by the NLS mode of politics itself.
Fanon accounts for the collapse of nationalism into a statist project primarily by reference to the collapse of liberatory pan-Africanism – ‘African unity, that vague formula, yet one to which the men and women of Africa were passionately attached’ (1990: 128) – into a vulgar xenophobic chauvinism after independence: ‘we observe a permanent see-saw between African unity which fades quicker and quicker into the mists of oblivion and a heart-breaking return to chauvinism in its most bitter and detestable form’ (p. 126). The reason for this is to be found, for Fanon, primarily (but not exclusively) in the economic interests of the national bourgeoisie, who wish to move into the posts and the businesses vacated by the departing Europeans. As a result, they assert a form of nationalism based on race and indigeneity in order to exclude; their concern is with access to resources, and a claim to indigeneity is, from their perspective, the only legitimate way of privately accessing such resources. Fanon notes that ‘the racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear’ (p. 131). In any case, whether the concern is accumulation or asserting a ‘narrow’ racially based nationalism (p. 131), ‘the sole slogan of the bourgeoisie is “Replace the foreigner!”’ (p. 127). As a result:
The working class of the towns, the masses of the unemployed, the small artisans and craftsmen for their part line up behind this nationalist attitude; but in all justice let it be said, they only follow in the steps of their bourgeoisie. If the national bourgeoisie goes into competition with the Europeans, the artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans ... the foreigners are called to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked (1990: 125).
The nation now refers to something other than a purely subjective collective affirmation; it refers to a social category founded on indigeneity. Who is and who is not an Algerian, a Ghanaian, an Ivorian, now becomes defined in terms of a state politics founded on asserting indigeneity: birth, descent, history, race or ethnicity. We should note that it is not simply a class politics that is at stake here, one representing economic interest, but more broadly a politics associated with ascribing the nation to an objective social category of the indigenous; a politics concerned with maintaining divisions, hierarchies and boundaries: in sum, a state politics. It is thus the state that defines the nation in social terms and that is unable to sustain a purely affirmative politics. The nation is now a representation, no longer a presentation. At the same time, this statist way of defining the nation is gradually naturalised in thought, as given by history and communitarian ‘belonging’ (birth, descent, etc.). Yet it should be abundantly clear not only that it is the effect of a state form of politics but that such naturalisation is made possible by its social embeddedness; for it is impossible to naturalise the purely subjective without first locating it in the social, without objectifying it. Moreover, the state also technicises as it depoliticises, something which Fanon deplores, emphasising that ‘if the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’ (1990: 162). Harsh words. Fanon’s