Walter Rodney on Frantz Fanon: Specific reference to colonial education

There are two ways in which Fanon, his writings and his life can be studied in respect to the problem of education. First of all, Fanon was consciously involved in the issues of the formation of attitudes, as far as colonial people are concerned. His writings: Black Skin White Masks, for example – would deal specifically with many aspects of the problems of the formation of consciousness. When he writes in Towards the African Revolution, he is particularly concerned not only with the operational aspects of that revolution but also the consciousness which underlies such a revolution. And when he wrote The Wretched of the Earth, again there were significant sections and chapters which dealt with consciousness.

Secondly, by Fanon’s own life, the way he lived and the way he developed serves as an object lesson of what is possible or may be possible in the course of a colonial education. That is to say, in terms of an individual who received colonial education, what are the possibilities of his or her development. The second, in many ways, is of course critical for many people in the third world because many third world students would wish to inquire how it was that a Fanon was produced by the process of colonial education. And I imagine that is also a question which could be of interest in this context.

I will begin by taking the conventional approach. That is to say Fanon is a product of his education. There are aspects of his own education that were reproduced quite obviously in Fanon’s thoughts, his life, his writing. He was, by most standards, a highly educated man in the colonial world and in the metropolitan world. He went through secondary schooling in his home territory – Martinique – before the War, and he proceeded to France after the war to study medicine and psychiatry. So by the standards prevailing in the Caribbean, in Africa, in the so-called 3rd world and for that matter Europe itself, he was a highly educated individual.

As a specialist in psychiatry one expected that he would be reading Adler, Jung and Freud, as a French educated person he would be rooted in French philosophical traditions and in the traditions of French literature, and as an intellectual created in the immediate post-war years of sharp intellectual concern in Europe, he would also have been a product of an education which brought him in contact with Marx, and in the final analysis with his contemporary Sartre in France. And to a certain extent he must naturally enough be a product of that education which he was given. This is the conventional approach. Even in psychiatry this would have been true, and there would have been influences, he admits to the influences of Tosquelles, a Spanish surgeon, though practising in France, in terms of his psychiatric practice. But immediately one says that Fanon was a product of his own education, one must qualify this and recognise the extent to which he is also struggling against his own education, and the extent to which what he became was a negation of the process of his own education.

In Black Skins White Masks Fanon takes up some of the theories about the colonial man or colonised man. He takes to task for example the writings by Mannoni on the Malagasy people, and in so far as he deals with Mannoni and theories of that type, Fanon is thereby confronting aspects of his own education. He is rebelling against the processes of his own formation. And that rebellion has to be understood not only in terms of how he was educated in the formal sense, that is what schools he attended, e.g. the University of Lyon, but rather to his own experience which allows him to evaluate and confront the education which he was receiving. Because the purpose of the education which he received was to make him into an évolué, as the French say, a man who has “evolved”, a man who has become “civilised”. But along the line of his own development there were contradictions between this goal, this aim of an evolved person, and the reality of racial exploitation, racial discrimination, which even an evolved person faced in the Caribbean – in Martinique, first of all, and secondly in France itself.  We can say that the first element of contradiction in his own development which Fanon confronted, had to do with himself as a black man in a white society. This is reproduced in many colonial contexts, and it is reproduced in the United States. But that aspect of the contradiction in colonial society creates problems with colonised people internalising fully the education which they are being offered by the colonisers. It created problems even for people far less progressive than Fanon, because if we were to look at what is called negritude even the évolués such as Leopold Senghor, who were essentially pro-French, nevertheless had problems internalizing the real aspects of the teaching which they received.

So, I put as one stage in the development, Fanon confronting himself as a black man in a white dominated society.

Fanon and the Nationalist Struggle

The second stage, which proceeds rapidly from the first, is that Fanon recognises the framework of nationalist struggles as an essential aspect of the development of the freedom of colonised people – this freedom being defined both in terms of political freedom as well as in terms of ideological freedom, the freedom to think, the freedom to choose. To Fanon, the nationalist struggle was indispensable as a prerequisite, as a form within which colonised people would begin to confront their own history and begin to take that history into their own hands because the history had been seized from them in an earlier period of their own development.

There are a few remarks which he makes that are worth quoting directly. There is a biography of Fanon done by PANAF Publications Great Lives. There are a few quotations here directly from Fanon on the question of nationalism – he says here for instance that “to fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible. There is no other fight than culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle.”

There is more than one idea incorporated in this quotation: he’s speaking about national culture, which of course embraces the idea of education within a national context. He says that national culture requires, as a pre-condition, the fight for the liberation of the nation. You cannot be in Martinique or you cannot be in Senegal and speak of a Senegalese culture or a Martiniquan culture, Martiniquan education or a Senegalese education, unless you create within Senegal and Martinique the constituent elements of national independence. And he goes on to say that struggle for national independence and for national culture is only possible through popular struggle. So that’s another dimension to which we shall return – that it must be based on the vast majority of the people – popular struggle.

In another context, Fanon proceeds to say that “organised and conscious struggle, taken by the colonised people to restore the sovereignty of the nation, constitutes the most fully cultural manifestation there is.” Here he has introduced a term which we need to contemplate – the emphasis there is on organised, in my mind – because it shifts the focus from individuals, as individuals involved in a process of learning as though he is an entity independent of other beings in the society.  It suggests that the educational advance or development of that individual is only possible within the context of organised national struggle. So, this organisation is counterposed against individualism, against “doing your own thing” as the Americans would say.

Now we see what this means in practice when Fanon becomes connected with the Algerian War of National Independence. As most people are no doubt aware, Fanon was an active participant at various levels in the Algerian War of National Independence. He began, before he actively joined the struggle, as a conventional psychiatrist in a hospital in Algeria. He joined the struggle and served it in a military capacity, as a journalist, as an ideologue, and as a diplomat representing Algeria in different parts of Africa and outside. So Fanon had a rich experience within the Algerian national struggle, and it is within the context of that struggle which takes place after he had written Black Skin White Masks that he is then able to write Towards the African Revolution and, later on, The Wretched of the Earth, before he died in 1961.

Therefore, the Algerian experience must be seen now in that concretisation of things which he might have mentioned theoretically as an important “nationalist phase of struggle” – the importance of the popular phase of struggle in providing that context without which the education of a colonised man cannot reach the point at which he is decolonised. It will remain precisely that: a colonial education which produces colonial minds.

Let me then put to you a framework. We can start with an approach which superficially accepts human beings being trained in an educational system as becoming totally the product of that system. But we know of course that some colonised men did not emerge at the end of this process in exactly the same way the coloniser would have wished. Fanon, in a real sense, gives some of the indications, some of the points at which it is possible for the colonised man to break with the dominant colonial tradition in his education – the first being the participation in the war of national independence, assuming of course that individual has already reached a level of identification of himself as being oppressed – and if he is engaged in this war of national liberation. Fanon draws attention directly and indirectly to certain characteristics – to the processes of alienation and to the processes required to combat alienation. I think we can take this as a key concept.

Alienation in the Colonial Context

Let me for a moment indicate what I mean by alienation in a colonial context. Alienation applies in any society where individuals find the product of their own labour alienated from themselves, where there is appropriation of the surplus of the labour of one class by another. Over and above this, in a colonial context, alienation takes the form of the expropriation of surplus by one nation totally outside the boundaries of the society producing that surplus. And, of course, when we contemplate economic alienation, or that fundamental alienation that arises out of exploited labour, we have to add a series of other alienations: the alienation that is based on race, which Fanon deals with quite early, the alienation that has to do with the relationship between men and women.

Now here is a colonised man who has the product of his labour alienated, who has a structure of administration and politics which virtually negates his being. Fanon indeed goes so far to say that the colonised man, in the process of being colonised and being educated formally as well as informally becomes less than a man. He is dehumanized in the process. Fanon had a great deal to do with people who were mentally ill or who were defined as mentally ill in Algeria, and his assessment, after looking at a number of these psychiatric cases, was that basically these people were not suffering from some specific lesion – some specific problem of their own. They were the product of the overall alienation that was present in colonial society, that those so-called psychiatrically disturbed Algerians were the products of this massive alienation which took place in colonial society which led to their dehumanisation. Fanon spoke about the ways in which he conceptualised that this could be overcome. One of the most controversial of course, is where Fanon talks about violence within the process of confronting the colonisers. To deal with that subject we need to put it in the proper perspective, because I feel it has been abused, misrepresented.

Fanon on Revolutionary Violence

Fanon speaks about violence and its curative value, virtually the therapeutic value, cleansing the minds of colonised people in a very narrow context. First of all, he presupposed this organised national struggle. He wasn’t speaking about the colonised man suddenly going berserk, running around creating violence even against the coloniser. He wasn’t talking about an Algerian deciding he will go out on the street and kill the first Frenchman he saw. He was speaking about organised anti-colonial struggle. That in the process of coming to terms with himself, or herself, as we shall see with the Algerian women, it was necessary that the colonised should make an assault on the colonisers, and that assault should historically counter all the tendencies that had already been established by colonial violence that is implicit in the situation. The violence of the colonisers is one of the things about which Fanon speaks.

So, Fanon says firstly that violence exists as colonial violence. Colonial society is not peaceful. There is violence proceeding in a colonial society at all times: physical violence, economic violence, and the violence which Fanon was most concerned with – violence to the mind, was being done in colonial society. Fanon said within the context of the popular liberation struggle, violence then became a weapon to be turned against the violence of the colonisers, what he termed as revolutionary violence. This is what Fanon proposes as an element of the liberation of a colonised person.

I imagine one of the reasons that this did not win a great deal of favour among many people who had developed in the period after the Second World War, and who had seen the violence of Fascism and capitalism, is that the whole essence of the colonial situation as a violent one has not been properly apprehended. That is why persons are still capable today of saying they are against violence in the Republic of South Africa, they are not in favour of apartheid but they are against violence, because violence is a bad thing in and of itself. Right now, the German churches are opposing the World Council of Churches who are saying according to the Geneva accord they are willing to support armed struggle in South Africa on the part of the African people. But some of the churches say, “Oh, no, violence per se is unchristian.” Well, apart from its theological implications, which I will not enter into, it seems to me that some of these apprehensions is the failure to recognise that there is daily violence in a system such as the Republic of South Africa. One does not introduce violence when one resorts to revolutionary violence, you merely counter the existing colonial violence in the situation; and this is the element that Fanon is emphasising.

What is Education

In a broader sense, in terms of a theory of education, one of the important things we can derive both from Fanon’s writings and his life is an assessment through reflection on what is an educational process. What does society do to individuals when these individuals are carried through a process known as education. Even in the writings of somebody as progressive as Julius Nyerere, in his writings on ‘Education and Self-Reliance’, he starts with a supposition that education is the transmission of values within the society, in a sense as though the society is a homogeneous force, the society hands down the totality of its experience to the next generation. Of course, Nyerere is aware of the colonial contradiction; so, he at least looks at education for self-reliance, as distinct from education for dependence.

Nevertheless it seems to me that the mainstream of educational theory has been accepted even in the colonial and ex-colonial world is that the educator assumes basically that the society is healthy and assumes and that the people, the learner is healthy, and what will be required is that there has be some slight maladjustment that needs to be straightened out between society and individuals; but on the whole the society is healthy and the people who are being educated are healthy. Fanon is really saying something quite different. Fanon is saying that the society is warped, that the society is full of alienation in our case, alienation based on the exploitation of labour as well as the creation of racial monsters, the alienation of class as well as the alienation of a national culture that is submerged by an external one. In other societies the alienation may be different but there is a general principle to be considered, whether in fact educators operate on the false assumption that they are dealing with a “healthy” society. Fanon would certainly say we must see education as being part of an alienated society, or a society full of alienation.

 Secondly, Fanon would say that the individual with whom you are trying to deal with whether he is in a ward of a psychiatric hospital and is defined as mentally unwell or whether he is an official in the colonial structure, an African that is, and he is defined as well i.e. mentally sound, the truth of the matter is that the individual is also a product of alienation, so he is unhealthy. In a real sense then, colonised man whether he is in a mental institution or not is unhealthy because of the nature of the alienation that has been imposed upon that individual. So rather than trying to make minor adjustments between healthy society and healthy beings, Fanon said that we have to make revolutionary adjustments that require the simultaneous transformation of the alienated society and alienated being. That is a different problem, whether you accept it or not it is important that you see it as a different approach to the problem of what one is doing when one seeks to educate. 

So, if for instance, when Fanon went to the Algerian liberation movement, he was working as an educator for the Algerian liberation movement, he bore in mind that this Algerian society was a deformed society, i.e. its colonial aspect out of the development of capitalism in Algeria. He also bore in mind that the Algerians with whom he spoke, whether they were peasants or workers, were to a greater or lesser extent the victims of the alienation, the victims of false consciousness that was a part of colonisation.  Therefore, they needed to be transcended. 

How were they to be transcended? 

We spoke a little bit about the nationalist struggle, and what is implicit about that nationalist struggle is that Fanon is really saying that the educational process cannot be separated from the overall political and social processes in which both the educator as well as the educated have to be involved. So, he was emphasising the dimension of participation. Only in participation can one generate sufficient momentum to overcome this divergence that is created by being in an alienated society and the fact that the individual himself is alienated. So, the element of participation is implicit. Fanon himself participated; he gave up certain types of lifestyles to participate in struggle. You will note that he always sees transformation in consciousness as being dependent upon some degree of participation in this process. 

When he speaks of the Algerian women for instance the greatest achievement as far as he was concerned came when the Algerian women began to participate individually and collectively in the liberation struggle. And in many ways, you can see the message of that because after the revolution in Algeria the women were sent back to the kitchens. It is clear that there has been no further advance of liberation in terms of sexual liberation i.e that there was very little left of the Algerian revolution was partly because women do not participate in whatever is left of it. 

So, it does seem to bear Fanon’s point long after he has died. Now, that participation is in a nationalist struggle. But Fanon is constantly concerned with a dialectic, I mean as I have said, he read Hegel, he internalized Hegelian dialectics. You see in Black Skin, White Masks he writes about Hegel and the Black Man. He analyses the relationship between master and slave in terms familiar from Hegel’s writing. And in addition, he is a Marxist. So Fanon’s perception is never static. How does one overcome these contradictions? The answer to Fanon really is a complex answer because it goes through a number of stages and processes. It will return to the question of race and not realism to show that to overcome racism and to overcome the destruction of the national culture is in Fanon’s conception a very dialectical process. Particularly, there were some people who advanced the theory of negritude.

Probably familiar to some persons here and certainly associated above all with Léopold Senghor of Senegal and in the Caribbean with Aimé Césaire.

Negritude

Negritude in a way was a break or an attempted break with the racism of colonial consciousness because the black man, or the Negro as he was termed, was presented in the standard coloniser version, white dominant version of reality, as inferior, as incompetent and only capable of being incorporated into the ranks of civilised society to the extent that the evolved man was the only colonial man who was given any status. Even from the Ivory Coast, you really did not become a man until you got a French education, and you qualified to become part of the human family. Provided you were in the bush in the Ivory Coast, you were not there. But if you got French education, then you had evolved to the level of man. But before that you were sub-so essentially the evolves, even the évolués themselves were faced with a theory that presupposed not just cultural but I would argue a racial inferiority for them and part of the rest of the African people.

Some of them came up with the theory of Negritude. I will have to summarize this very briefly and therefore maybe I will not be as accurate on Negritude as one might wish. It certainly is not an ideology with which I am in agreement and so I may not be as sympathetic dealing with it as some other presentation. But I see Negritude essentially, to put it in the best light, as an attempt to confront the racism inherent in colonial ideology and so by finding some escape. If, for example, the Frenchman said we are not logical, then the people who were supporting Negritude said well we may not be logical in the form in which you are logical, but we are intuitively logical. You may have your form of logic which you got from Descartes, Kant and so on, and we may not be able to match that. But we have a special sensibility. We think with our senses as it is not necessarily a mental process. But we feel we are an intuitive people.

There was a lot about Negritude being inherent in the African.

In many ways therefore, there was always the tendency within Negritude that it was moved from an attack against white racism towards the creation of a new set of myths about black people, trying to destroy one set of myths and create another set of myths in its place. 

Okay, one set of myths about inferiority will be replaced by another set of myths that speak about the values of inherent qualities of African people. But the problem is that the second position which substitutes the new set of myths also accepts the fundamental distinctions between races, that there is something uniquely African and something uniquely European in a racial sense that is accepted by both camps. 

Fanon will go further than that and say that it is just an unscientific presentation that is itself part of the dominant culture. Therefore, those who speak about Negritude have not really broken with the unscientific assumptions about race. The substitution of one set of myths for another is not a scientific advance. At best it is romanticist and at worst it can become the cover for exploitation. This was shown very clearly in Haiti, in the West Indies, where the leadership in Haiti supervised the most brutal reactionary regime in the Caribbean in the name of Negritude.

It is also seen in Senegal and in doctrines such as authenticity which are promoted by no lesser person than Mobutu. These doctrines suggest that there is something uniquely African which Mobutu and his class are attempting to promote.

So, we are saying then that confronting colonial racism requires going further than posing one race off against another. It requires a recognition that the fundamental category of race was itself historically created in the process of exploitation. That it is part of an unscientific superstructure of ideas which the colonised man has to fight against. This is where it seems to me Fanon was heading to move against the racial ideology of oppression and to move beyond the racial ideology of resistance, to see it as an ideology of total liberation so that the Algerian man would liberate himself from all forms of racial connections and racial interpretations of the world – and maybe in the process he would also have liberated some Jews and some Frenchmen and so on and so forth who were in contact with that process.

Fanon on Nationalism

Fanon sees nationalism as a vital phase in the formation of a healthy anti-colonial person. A citizen of a colony had to move through the phase of nationalism before he could cleanse himself of some of the pressures, the alienations of a colonised society.

But it was not enough to stop at nationalism. To stop at the glorification of national culture is precisely what Fanon warned against in that very famous chapter of his in The Wretched of the Earth, “The pitfalls of National Consciousness”, where he notes that historically nationalism can advance the African people only so far but no further when it can itself become the new force that supervises exploitation.

The new set of jingo jokes, you speak about a national culture and you say we must not dress like Frenchmen and we are in an apparel that can look totally inappropriate in the tropics. And that should be self-evident once the point is made. But then you substitute those long flowing robes of African ancestry. But when you check on the situation you find that really only a very small proportion of the Ghanaian population can afford to wear the flowing robes of Kente cloth because I can assure you that it costs a great deal. When you see those Africans in the United Nations or if they come here looking very well dressed in culturally authentic clothing, it doesn’t mean they are peasants. If you went there you won’t find the peasants wearing these culturally authentic clothes. It will be lucky if they are wearing clothes at all.

So, you get a new dimension to the so-called nationalist culture where it becomes objectified and trivialised because to see culture just in terms of clothing is trivialising culture. The ruling class can trivialise the culture and sometimes they commercialise it. They will take drummers and dancers from their African context from the village where the dance was supposed to celebrate a harvest let us say. So, you take that dance and you bring it to the capital and you even send it to an international arts festival and you say this is Nigerian culture. But if you went back to the village there is no harvest to celebrate; if you went there you found only drought.

I think the great thing about Fanon because he was writing this in 1961 and we are now in 1978 is we can see more clearly in 1978. Whereas many people were still, I think, clouded by the colour and romance of National Independence in 1961, Fanon was rare in his perception at that early date that it is possible to struggle for one thing, Nationalism, and yet that nationalism could become the negation of itself. It could negate things which for people were struggling which were for a better life, for freedom, and to become the new stumbling block to the development of liberation in Africa. Therefore, the final dimension in Fanon’s talk on the concept of the formation of consciousness is that for those who are educated in the formal sense can only be educated in a radical and in a revolutionary manner provided they retain a constant link with the popular struggle. The emphasis now has to become popular as distinct from just nationalist. In other words, it has to shift from being nationalist to being a class struggle where the workers and the peasants who suffer most from alienation must be the dominant element in the social process. Because the évolués, who are nothing else than the African petty bourgeois, suffer from alienation we cannot deny that. But they suffer from far less profound alienation than the peasant and the worker.

And it is essential therefore that the educational process should come to grips with the most profound alienation not the most superficial alienation on the African scene. I will summarize before we go on to some discussion. I will summarize by emphasizing the idea of contradiction that it is implicit or sometimes explicit in Fanon’s theory.

The culture to which he was introduced was the culture of the feudal period transposed and passed on to the bourgeois period. It was not the culture of the ordinary Frenchman. Fanon could not go out in the street and discuss philosophy with French workers because the culture he was being given as French culture was in fact class culture.

Now, we don’t want to wait upon accidents to produce a Fanon. The process of education is supposed to produce at the other end people who can fit into the society and contribute to the society. So, in the colonial territories we are not satisfied simply with saying there will be a Fanon arising every generation, because while it is true that there is a Fanon arising in every generation there are many other Senghors and Houphouët-Boignys and various other types who are also arising every generation. But we are thinking in terms of a system that reduces the balance, that will produce a Mobutu every other generation. We can cope with one every generation and I think there are ways of neutralizing one who might be produced. But in order to make the system produce conscious beings who fight against alienation, it becomes necessary in the first place to expose the character of contradictions and the character of alienation. And let the education process be an arena in which people actually confront themselves, confront their ideological heritage and question themselves in relation to the processes of their own formation which is something very few educational systems like to do, for very good reasons of course, because most educational systems are class systems. 

If a system is of class domination, it does not want to expose to those who are dominated the mechanisms of domination. There is ability and bias in any system of domination in going to the root in explaining why the system is what it is. It is much nicer to say we are training you to be the future leaders of the society. All African leaders tell this to the secondary school and university students:  you should be very proud, you are going to be the future leaders of this society. So why should you challenge or question this society? If you work hard, if you are disciplined, if you never riot, if you never strike, you will be a future leader. Maybe not in Germany but in Africa many students will believe this. Although it used to be true, it is getting less true now because of course there are more students and a limited number of leadership roles, and those who get there first usually make quite sure that they don’t allow too many others to get in. 

Nevertheless, it seems to me the struggle for a new epistemology and a new approach to viable education in the third world has to come to grips with seeing education as much as more violent phenomenon in many ways, really because too often educators see their roles as a very peaceful one if not actually pacifying. They said, you know, reconciling contradictions is often the essence of the education. I mean, I had a colonial education, I am speaking where I interpret Fanon at every stage, I can see my school, I can see myself. I don’t have any difficulties empathising with that because he is writing for all of us. And I think we went through those processes in a sharper form probably than metropolitan students although those who live here in the metropole to some extent or another have some experience that is similar. But for us, I mean we know that in every sphere the education taught us to cover up exploitation, to cover up alienation, to adjust and reconcile contradictions, to extract from the stratum of workers and peasants a new class that will help the reproduction of the system of capitalism. So that one is constantly told that  education will raise the level. You will become a leader, you will no longer be part of the unprivileged masses of this world. 

There are a number of theories and Nyerere who I referred to before is of course concerned with the process in his own way. But I think that Fanon still has to be credited with grasping a very thorny problem because a lot of people do not like to grasp the issue in all its magnitude. They don’t like to grasp, for instance, the concept of revolutionary violence. This is not just Europeans but Africans themselves. Obviously because most African leaders are happy to say the nationalist revolution is completed. And if one sees revolutionary violence as necessary against the French colonisers or the English colonisers, they would consistently have to see revolutionary violence as necessary against the ruling classes in African society itself at another stage of development. So, there is of course another built-in bias against accepting Fanon's theory. But Fanon's theories are bound to have a basis, they do have a basis in African society because of the contradictions in that society. In the United States, in the Caribbean, in Africa people who are engaged in combat instinctively turn to Fanon's writings. They see this affinity, quite apart from the parts where Fanon may have been a little crude. I am not saying we should set perfect principles on elaborations of knowledge. There are many little things that if we wanted to be more precise we could say where Fanon did not  grasp the process in all its fine points. 

But the general thrust of what he has to say, tracing the process of the formation of consciousness of asking the first questions about alienation and exploitation and about the techniques of overcoming this. This to my mind remains a contribution which is unlikely to be overlooked by any groups, nations or parties that have engaged in struggle in Africa and in parts of the Third World. So, Fanon may be discussed in seminars such as this but more importantly, he will continue to be a force within actual historical processes of liberation in the third world. We can come to a judgement on him but that of course will be our academic privilege; it would not stop the processes of history outside in which Fanon is still a living force. 

Talk delivered, by Walter Rodney, 1978

Bremen, Federal Republic of Germany.

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY