Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
coloniser–colonised. What connects them both is fundamentally an uncompromising disgust with the degradation of some humans by others. For an important introduction to Fanon’s thought, see Gordon (2015).
3.The version of The Wretched of the Earth referred to here is the 1990 Penguin edition translated by Constance Farrington. Where I have thought that the translation is not particularly accurate (as when the French word ‘colonisé’ is regularly converted into the English word ‘native’), I have translated myself from the French edition (Fanon, 2002). In such cases my translation or modification is indicated.
4.The thesis referred to by Fanon is evidently Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach, see Introduction, n. 38
5.‘This principle of inclusion [in the nation] had a special significance for Fanon because it was intimately linked to the idea ... that every new step towards liberation would transform whites as well as blacks, colonizers as well as colonized’ (Cherki, 2000: 106).
6.In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Saïd argues that many African nationalist thinkers, including Fanon and Cabral, distinguished between independence and liberation; in other words, that they did not see an independent state as the sole objective of nationalist politics. It is difficult to disagree with this point; the problem, however, is that, although noted, the distinction is not fully theorised in Fanon’s work in particular.
7.‘... before considering the act by which a people submits to a king, we ought to scrutinize the act by which people become a people, for that act, being necessarily antecedent to the other, is the real foundation of society’ (Rousseau, 1979: 59). For a discussion of this point, see Balibar (1996: 101–29). See also Gordon (2014) for an important discussion of Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ in relation to Fanon’s ‘national consciousness’.
8.It should also be noted that Fanon (1989) insists that the formation of a people is also a process of self-transformation as well as one of the change of social relations in the direction of greater egalitarianism.
9.See David Beetham (1974, esp. ch. 4) on Max Weber’s conception of politics, for example.
10.In what amounts to a brilliant study of Fanon’s thought, Sekyi-Otu (1996) argues that Fanon deplores the absence of an ‘organic’ link, in the Gramscian sense, between the party and the masses characteristic of the independence struggle, as soon as postcolonial power is established. In consequence, hegemony, ‘that mode of political authority in which force is ... tamed by consent to imperfectly shared ends’ (p. 149), is absent, so that crude violence and corruption become the standard rather than the exceptional features of the rule of the postcolonial bourgeoisie. The difficulty faced by Fanon, however, is greater than that suggested by Sekyi-Otu, as Fanon is caught, in the thought of his time, within the contradiction derived from thinking the ‘national bourgeoisie’ as a circulating category: as a socio-economic entity as well as a political subject represented by a party.
11.It is important to note that Fanon insists here on a subjective political orientation, namely ‘revolutionary principles’, yet the problems in sustaining such principles within a context of state politics are not thought through. A similar problem is encountered in Cabral’s notion of the ‘class suicide’ of the petty bourgeoisie, as the subjective excess over class interest is not theorised in his work, as we shall see below.
12.Similarly, the popular pan-African affirmation of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics is gradually replaced by a reactive subjectivity of official pan-Africanism viewed as a mere agglomeration of states.
13.One attempt to warn against ignoring politically the national question has been outlined by Mamdani (2008b) with reference to Zimbabwe and gave rise to an extensive debate. Although Mamdani’s warning that ignoring national grievances over land made possible the opportunism and authoritarianism of Mugabe’s nationalism in Zimbabwe, since addressing this issue resonated among significant numbers of people, is fundamentally a correct one, critics largely chose to respond by emphasising the appalling human rights record of the regime. Unfortunately, Mamdani himself remains at the level of thinking a state form of nationalism exclusively, while the majority of his critics ignore the relevance of the national question in favour of liberal notions of rights. As a result, the current form of the national question in Africa still remains unaddressed, especially from the position of the majority of people. See Jacobs and Mundy (2009).
14.‘... we must not waste time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread in slavery’ (Fanon, 1990: 167, translation altered).
15.For a recent assessment of Cabral’s thought, see Manji and Fletcher (2013).
16.The dates of this sequence can obviously be debated. At the level of the Third World as a whole, the mode probably began as early as 1910 with the publication of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1958), which was a systematic critique of colonial values accepted uncritically by the Indian middle class. See Hardiman (2003: 66–93). The following very important remark, which illustrates the emancipatory character of Gandhi’s thought, is taken from this text (p. 72): ‘to believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man’.
17.Although, again, its origins can be stretched as far back as the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, as we saw in chapter 1.
18.See Fanon (1989: ch. 1) on the struggle of Algerian women.
19.The fact that in the same paragraph Cabral refers positively to this formulation as being in tune with the thinking of Fidel Castro indicates the extent to which such an apolitical notion of individual ‘morality’ was dominant in the NLS mode worldwide. Elsewhere, Cabral insists that ‘a reconversion of minds – of mental set – is thus indispensable to the true integration of people into the liberation movement. Such reconversion – re-Africanization, in our case – may take place before the struggle, but it is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the popular masses in the communion of sacrifice required by the struggle’ (1973: 45). It is impossible to ascribe these intentions to a collective political subject, of course, as they are only attributable to individuals. Whatever the case may be, morality or individual commitment, the problem remains that, while he had understood the necessity for an excess over class interest in emancipatory politics, that political excess still remained untheorised by Cabral.
20.Lenin’s influence on Cabral’s thought of politics is apparent here. Given that Leninism was so central to the NLS mode and thus to the broader thought of emancipation in Africa in the 20th century, I will return to it in detail in chapter 7.
Chapter 5
The People’s Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
The people shall govern!
– The Freedom Charter, 1955
The people have formed these area committees, so that they can try to control themselves.
– An activist from the Eastern Cape, Isizwe, March 1986
RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN LIBERATION STRUGGLE
Having shown at some length the features of the National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics, I now wish to assess how it was transcended in South Africa in the 1980s. I will outline the new popularly based subjectivities which saw the light of day in that decade and will argue that the period 1984–6 witnessed an event (in Badiou’s sense of the term) in South Africa. This event gave birth to a new mode of politics for the 21st century in Africa, which can be called the People’s Power mode of politics, one that was revived in 2011 in North Africa. I will suggest that the People’s Power mode in South Africa inaugurated a frankly new way of thinking emancipatory politics for the 21st century, which has attempted to overcome some of the limitations of the NLS mode on the continent.
Throughout