#59 Frantz Fanon – Concerning Violence

Winston Churchill isn’t the only person going down fighting in the end. Frantz Fanon, a black Martinique/Algerian writer from the early sixties, has a big professional interest in violence.

“The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can’t say that he is terrorised, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of quarry for that of hunter. The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”

Fanon is writing about the fight between European colonists and native populations. And, make no mistake, it is a fight. The relationship between the two populations is one of inevitable hatred, driven by the way the two communities are divided. In one sense, this is pure economics and envy:

“The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light… The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession – all manner of possession. To sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible.  The colonised man is an envious man. And this the settler knows very well.”

But equally important, to Fanon at least, is the psychological gulf that sits between the two groups. The settler will always be a foreigner, who identifies with their country of origin rather than the land they occupy. Yet at the same time the inhabitant of the colonised country becomes a ‘native’, simply because they lack any touch of foreign ‘otherness’. The result is that they are alienated from their own home.

One world, either that of the settler or that of the native, must be destroyed to bring the colonial system to an end. Not simply a military defeat or a political deal – the total destruction of the other mode of living. “Its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country,” in Fanon’s words. That process can only come about through violence.

Nor is there much question of which side Fanon favours in that struggle.

“When a native hears a speech about western culture he pulls out his knife.”

The violence is, to Fanon, more than justified by the violence already perpetrated by the colonists, used to keep the natives down. If one group has to be destroyed, annihilation is the only way in which the conflict can reach its end. He can paint his violence as being needful.

This isn’t an easy book to read these days. Fifty years ago, I imagine it must have felt terribly alluring and just, given all of the suffering endured by the colonised peoples of the world. Today, it sounds almost sickeningly violent. Intentionally so – Fanon genuinely believes in violence as an improving influence upon the people perpetuating it.

“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

In his eyes, violence as a helpful, positive force that unites the perpetrators as a single people for the first time. As they stain their hands with blood, they are overcoming all of their own internal phobias, making themselves strong and free. Violence is not only the right of the oppressed colonial peoples, according to Fanon, but it will also be their education. It will improve their character, it will form the foundations of their political institutions. It will make them more resistant to strongmen and demagogues, given its power to strengthen their character.*

Reading through Fanon, you get the sense that in his eyes that violence isn’t just about ending the colonial system. It seems to have an even greater end. Fanon was a psychiatrist by training, and it becomes clear that he wants to use this moment to reforge the very nature of who we are.

“Let us reconsider the question of mankind. Let us reconsider the question of cerebral reality and of the cerebral mass of all humanity, whose connections must be increased, whose channels must be diversified and whose messages must be rehumanised.”

A while ago I talked about there being two kinds of anti-colonialist – the practical and the utopian. Fanon is the latter, and with a knife clasped between his teeth. His struggle for decolonisation is about rejecting the dehumanising methods of Europe and building a new kind of man. Building a new kind of human being is usually an ambitious goal; building a better one through murder seems a bit more dubious.

Which leaves me with the question of why this is in the Great Ideas series to begin with. It’s useful to understand Fanon, but I can say that about a lot of people you wouldn’t want to publish under the heading of ‘great’.** It’s not to say that Fanon’s reputation as a philosopher of decolonisation isn’t deserved, but history has not borne out his methods. Today, we know that the Mandelas of the world are a better force than the Mugabes, and ultimately stand the same chance of triumph. And trying to remake mankind in a charnel house has never, ever ended well.

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* Fanon never really explains how having a bunch of armed terrorists who are convinced of their right to kill whoever stands in their way will lead to greater political freedom, but he seems quite convinced of it.

** That ‘reach for his knife’ quote further up has uncomfortable parallels with a line Goering used to use about ‘”When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver”