The 1789 Discourse: Fanon And The Fight Against Colonialism
The legacy of colonialism is not simply confined to the history books. Nor is it particular to the nations that were colonized. Since the first days of Western Europeans setting out to stake claims in indigenous lands that didn’t belong to them, the native peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas have suffered brutality and slavery, poverty and death. The impacts of colonialism reverberate down through the ages and are still felt deeply today. Not just in decimated indigenous communities across the world, but within the Western world as well. Few have understood the legacy of colonialism quite like philosopher, psychiatrist and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon.
Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony, in 1925, Fanon left home at the age of 18 to join the Free French forces fighting the Nazis in Europe at the height of World War II. Despite arriving in France as a liberator, he was subjected to constant racism from the French he had come to help. After the war he returned to France to study medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, and qualified in 1951. Afterwards he wrote and published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the negative psychological effects of colonial subjugation upon Black people.
In 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria. The following year, the Front de Libération Nationale began their war of independence from France for the North African nation. Fanon joined the FLN, but continued to work at a French run hospital where he was responsible for treating both French soldiers experiencing psychological distress from engaging in torture, and Algerians who were being tortured.
After leaving his work at the hospital in 1956, Fanon served as Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional Algerian Government. His experience of the Algerian War of Independence inspired him to write The Wretched of the Earth. Influenced by psychopathology, Pan-Africanism and Marxism, he argued that colonized peoples not only had the right to use violence in the overthrow of their colonial masters but that it was necessary for their mental health and political liberation. Shortly after the book was published in 1961, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia and died in December of that year.
The age of colonialism in the traditional sense may be over, but modern society has been shaped in integral ways by its history of colonization and all the suffering that comes with it. In this sense, the lessons that Fanon wished to teach are still as applicable today as they were in the aftermath of World War II, and his understanding of the world can be used to examine many of the issues facing society now.
The colonial experience, for Fanon, is one of pure violence. The violence of colonizer against colonized, White against Black, seeps into every aspect of both their lives. This even applies in the services offered by the state to its citizens, including, it can be argued, healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic is still ravaging the American people, putting millions of people out of work and killing them by the hundreds every day. Despite the danger, President Donald Trump makes daily demands over Twitter for the complete reopening of the economy and even suggesting that the rate of testing should be drastically reduced.
Those most at risk should Trump get his way will, of course, be those working in the service industry. Even with precautions, service by its very nature requires close contact with members of the public during long and often hectic shifts. On top of this, a huge number of those working in the service industry are members of minority ethnic groups. According to the CDC, Black and Hispanic people have a death rate from COVID-19 twice as high as the death rate for whites.
The willingness to sacrifice the lives of Black and Hispanic Americans on the altar of the economy is the exact type of colonial violence Fanon wanted to address. White Americans are still ingrained with the colonial mindset that views Black and Brown bodies as less human, and therefore less valuable, than themselves. Reopening the economy without making any attempt to address the racial disparities in coronavirus death rates is a remnant of colonialism that has no place in the modern age.
Free trade too, in Fanon’s philosophy, is an act of colonial violence. As a student of Marxism, Fanon would argue that colonialism is driven by market forces seeking resources and labour to be exploited. Even after the colonial government has left, however, the exploitation of the market continues. European states once plundered their colonies of precious metals and oil. In the modern day, that role is taken over by corporate entities acting in European and American interests.
Free trade, as Fanon would see it, allows these corporations to plunder the mines, forests and oil fields of the Third World and cheaply bring their product home to their First World markets. In addition to this, the indigenous people of the countries being plundered are exploited by the capitalist market. Free trade allows business operations to be moved into countries where native workers are paid poverty wages, or barely paid at all, in the pursuit of maximising profits. The continued plundering of resources and exploitation of native workers is modern day colonial violence.
The violence that Fanon discussed is not merely implicit in today’s society. If the Black Lives Matter protests continuing to sweep through America and the world have proven anything, it is that state power asserts itself violently no matter what decade you look at. American police have made liberal use of weapons of war or even, in the case of tear gas, weapons banned from war. New reports emerge almost daily of grievous bodily harm delivered onto the protesters by police.
For Fanon, this would not be the time for peaceful protests. Always at the mercy of violently racist state power, he would say Black Americans have the right to violently strike back against their oppressors. Not only do they have this right, but in fact the only way to heal from the scars of colonialism is to break the State’s monopoly on the use of violence. Fanon would not call for the abolition of the police and hope the politicians hear him. He would encourage Black Americans to remove the police themselves by force.
Like Marx before him, Fanon would fall into the category of “populist”. While working in Algeria he expressed disdain for the African “elites”, who he believed had absorbed more than anyone the colonial idea that Blacks were subhuman and were attempting to become White. For Fanon, the colonial yoke could only be thrown off, both materially and psychologically, by popular struggle against the colonizers and the African elites that followed them. Looking at populism today, he would say that the right-wing populism emerging in Europe and America is the remnants of colonialism in the psyche of White people. They are unable to psychologically let go of their superiority in the past and seek to grasp it again politically in the modern day.
Fanon is one of the greatest anti-colonial thinkers of the modern world. Unlike some political philosophers, his ideas are informed by the lived experience of both being ruled by a colonial power, and engaging in violent revolution against it. Though he died nearly sixty years ago, his analysis of the effects of colonization upon the colonized can still be applied today when looking at the problems modern society faces in a world that still has not fully healed from the scars of colonialism.