Column: Black World
December 1999
40 years since Fanon's Dying Colonialism
by Lou Turner
It's been 40 years since Frantz Fanon's second and perhaps least examined
work, A DYING COLONIALISM, was published and immediately banned by France's
colonial-imperialist government of Charles de Gaulle. Recently, I shared a
panel in Philadelphia at the African Studies Association Conference and the
following day, in New York, at a Columbia University African Institute
round-table with scholars discussing the significance of this most
dialectical work on the Algerian Revolution.
Dying at the all-too-early age of 36, in December 1961, Fanon didn't live
to see Algeria gain its independence, nor to witness its incompleteness
retrogress into the fratricidal violence that presently engulfs it. The
fate of such Third World revolutions was the subject of Fanon's last and
greatest work on the dialectics of revolution, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH.
The one exception to the judgment that A DYING COLONIALISM is Fanon's least
studied work is the book's first chapter, "Algeria Unveiled," on women in
the revolution. At the other end of Fanon's book, which he originally
titled "The Fifth Year of the Revolution" in homage to Karl Marx's 18th
BRUMAIRE, the last chapter of A DYING COLONIALISM on the Minorities
Question has received scant attention. And yet, in today's world of faddish
multiculturalism, crises of multiethnic democracy and identity politics,
let alone the near daily savagery of "ethnic cleansings," this overlooked
chapter leaves no doubt as to Fanon's continuing significance.
In fact, what Fanon means by "minority" is POLITICAL minority. He had
written three sharply critical articles at the end of 1957 for the Algerian
journal, EL MOUDJAHID, on "French Intellectuals and Democrats and the
Algerian Revolution." In them he takes the French Left to task for
blackmailing the liberation movement regarding its conduct of the
revolution. A year or so later, in A DYING COLONIALISM, his attitude is
considerably changed.
The National Liberation Front (FLN) of the Algerian Revolution had, as had
its nationalist predecessors, sought the support and solidarity of French
democrats,workers, students and the Left from the beginning of the
revolution in 1954. However, as Fanon noted, "Other things being equal, it
can be said of Algeria's European democrats what has been endlessly
repeated of the French parties of the Left: for a long time history is made
without them." Though the Left is unable to prevent the imperialist
adventures of France, "Nevertheless," Fanon adds, "their existence has
forced the neo-fascists of Algeria and France to be on the defensive.
THE LEFT HAS DONE NOTHING FOR A LONG TIME IN FRANCE. Yet by its action, its
denunciations, and its analyses, it has prevented a certain number of
things."
It is precisely this political duality of the Left, unable to act but
having prevented a certain number of things by its denunciations of French
imperialism, that reveals France's vaunted democracy being shed, even as
its neo-fascism was being exposed in Algeria. Left support movements, Fanon
informed his French democratic audience (the chapter on minorities having
been published originally in LES TEMPS MODERNES), both elicit and expose
the social fascism of so-called democratic governments when it (the Left)
denounces the imperialist-militarist foreign policies of its own
government. Left forces in Algeria and in France were in this way
"constantly forcing the extremists to unmask themselves, and hence
progressively to adopt the positions that will precipitate their defeat."
So crucial were political minorities for making the revolution and for the
reconstruction of Algerian society afterwards that Fanon singled out two
"minorities" in particular to demonstrate his dialectical approach to both
of these historic tasks. Of Algeria's Jewish minority Fanon wrote that
"Even today, the Jewish lawyers and doctors who in the camps or in prison
share the fate of millions of Algerians attest to the multiracial reality
of the Algerian Nation."
He described the broad mass of Algerian Jews (some three-fourths of the
Algerian Jewish population) as "a floating, highly Arabized mass having
only a poor knowledge of French, considering itself by tradition and
sometimes by dress as authentic 'natives.'"
Fanon went further. He lets us hear the voices of Algeria's Jewish
dimension. As one Jewish group in Constantine wrote in August 1956, on the
eve of the Battle of Algiers: "One of the most pernicious maneuvers of
colonialism in Algeria was and remains the division between Jews and
Moslems.... The Jews have been in Algeria for more than two thousand years;
they are thus an integral part of the Algerian people.... Moslems and Jews,
children of the same earth, must not fall into the trap of provocation.
Rather, they must make a common front against it, not letting themselves be
duped by those who, not so long ago, were offhandedly contemplating the
total extermination of the Jews as a salutary step in the evolution of
humanity."
Fanon made common cause with another political minority, one which to our
way of thinking today would appear extraordinary. He found that even a
segment of European settlers had greatly aided and supported the liberation
movement, allowing their farms to be used as "infirmaries, refuges, or
relay stations..., and granaries." Not only would FLN weapons caches be
located on settler farms, but, "in many areas, [FLN] meetings would be held
on European farms."
Fanon's point, which was also his original point of departure for this last
chapter of A DYING COLONIALISM on minorities, is that "Algeria's European
minority is far from being the monolithic block that one imagines." There
are twin aspects to the point of Fanon's essay, aspects that are as
practical as they are dialectical, namely, that being a revolutionary under
the whip of counter-revolution or, as in our own day, in a period of
retrogression, makes one a political minority. It is a political reality
that makes it more imperative than ever to practice a dialectical approach
to reality that digs deep for the other, revolutionary dimension that lies
in every country, in every oppressed minority. From Rwanda to the Balkans,
to right here in the U.S., we see that Frantz Fanon was a practicing,
thinking dialectician who continues to speak to our age.
CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE
CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS
|
