The
Wretched of the Earth – On National Culture
This chapter, Fanon says,
is concerned with legitimacy, and it has little to do with political parties. Colonialism was not content to merely
exploit and abuse the people, the colonial power stripped the indigenous people
of culture and history as well. The result was like a “hammer
to the head of the indigenous population.” The quest of the colonized intellectual to reclaim
the past is not a national endeavour. It is done on a “continental
scale.” The colonized intellectual’s attempt to right this wrong
must then be continental, too, and they embrace African, or “Negro,”
culture. As colonialism places white culture opposite other “noncultures,”
“Negro” culture,
especially “Negro”
literature, must encompass the entire continent. “Negro” literature,
Fanon says, is an example of negritude, and its writers do not hesitate to go
beyond the continent of Africa.
Negritude
has stretched all the way to America, where the “black world” is formed by those
from Ghana,
Senegal, and Chicago. However,
African
culture instead of a national
culture is a “dead end” to African intellectuals. African Society for Culture, which
was created to establish the existence of African culture. The
African Society for Culture quickly turns to the Cultural Society for
the Black World, and they include all of the black diaspora, including the millions
of black people in the Americas.
Even, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes must admit that their experiences are completely
different from Léopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. Fanon claims, and they are
forced to assume two identities. For instance, a colonized individual is both Algerian and French or
Nigerian and
English.
Culture cannot be simplified, Fanon says, and this is why the
intellectual is “out of step.” In an
independent nation, the painter returns to the people and wants to represent
national reality, which is often “reminiscent of
death rather than life.” The poet must first define his or her
subject in order to write, but he must first understand his or her “alienation.” The intellectual must commit
wholeheartedly to the national struggle, and “muscle power is required.” The people of
Algeria,
for instance, are fighting for liberation, and Algerian national culture takes shape in that fight. National
culture is not folklore, nor
is it gestures or words. National culture is
the “collective thought process of a people to describe,
justify, and extol” the struggles of liberation.
There is no connection between
the national cultures of Senegal and
Guinea, other than that they are
controlled by the same French colonialism. The creation of a unifying
black culture forgets that “Negros”
are disappearing, Fanon says,
under the weight of cultural and economic supremacy. This chapter, which was
first presented as a paper at the Second Congress of Black Writers and artists in
Rome in 1959, is in some ways a continuation of the previous
chapter. Fanon begins by considering the “colonized
intellectual,” someone who has been educated by the colonist but
reacts against him. The intellectual’s
strategy is to counter the demeaning force of colonized culture by “racializing”
culture, for instance advocating for a “Negro literature” or “Negro art”
that unites all of Africa.
In fact, Fanon details
three stages in the cultural trajectory of the colonized intellectual. In the
first stage, the intellectual mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes.
In fact, Fanon details three
stages in the cultural trajectory of the colonized intellectual. This is the Négritude phase in which, in reaction
to the European casting
of African
culture as inferior, the intellectual extols each and every thing
about African
culture as superior. The
intellectual begins to write “combat
literature, revolutionary literature” that hopes to galvanize
the people into fighting the colonist.
This is an important progression,
because it moves the intellectual from a pan-African approach to an approach
that is about a nation—rather than an entire race—asserting its nationhood
against colonialism. European culture justifies colonialism; in the
third phase, national culture justifies anti-colonialism. According to Fanon, “the
colonized intellectual is responsible not to his national culture, but to the
nation as whole, whose culture is, after all, but one aspect.”
“National
culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and
extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong,”
writes Fanon.
“National culture in the underdeveloped countries,
therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these
countries are waging.” Fanon spends a good deal of space in this chapter
focusing on one example, a poem by Guinean intellectual named Keita Fodeba.
Fanon summarizes these recent calls: “Humanity, some say, has got past the stage of nationalist
claims. The time has come to build larger political unions, and consequently
the old-fashioned nationalists should correct their mistakes.”
In chapter (4) "On National Culture" published in The Wretched of the
Earth , Fanon
sets out to define how a national culture can emerge among African nations that
were once and, at the time of its release in 1961, still colonized. Fanon argues
that a national culture must be built on the material resistance of a people
against colonial domination. Fanon narrates the essay referring to what he
calls the “colonized intellectual.”
For Fanon,
colonizers try to write the precolonial history of a colonized people as a
"barbarism, degradation and bestiality"
in order to justify the supremacy of Western civilization. Fanon suggests that colonized intellectuals
often fall into the trap of trying to prove the existence of a common African
or "black" culture. This
points to what Fanon
sees as one of the limitations of the Negritude
movement. When articulating a continental identity, based on the
colonial category of the 'Negro',
Fanon argues that “the
men who proposed to embody it realized that every culture is above all national.”
According to Fanon, for in rejecting
the normalized Eurocentrism of colonial thought, these intellectuals provide a
"condemnation radical"
of colonialism and its greatest undertaking.
This radical condemnation reaches
its full meaning when we consider that the "ultimate
aim of colonization", according to Fanon,
"was to convince the indigenous people that
it would save them from the darkness". Fanon calls "combat literature", a writing which
exhorts the people to wage the struggle against the colonial oppressor. Fanon specifically uses the example of Algerian storytellers, changing the
content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present
moment of struggle against French colonial rule.
While the common trope of African-American jazz musicians was, according to Fanon, "an old 'black',
five whiskeys to his credit, lamenting his misfortune", the
bebop was full of an energy and dynamism that resisted and undermined the
common racist trope.
Fanon explores the idea of a
national culture and why it seems, on the surface, that colonized peoples do
not have one or else have a very limited and primitive one. As a result,
colonizers perceive African or Arab culture as
one homogeneous entity and dismiss all preceding historical achievements as
unimportant.
Thus, rather than thinking about Algerian or Moroccan or Madagascan national culture in a
limited manner, artists from these countries should conceive of African
culture, broadly, as a lived experience.
Frantz Fanon,
the Martiniquan born psychiatrist, committed Algerian
revolutionary and Pan-African thinker,
died 60 years ago on December 6,
1961 just after the publication of his last book, The Wretched of the Earth.
To mark this 60th anniversary, Nigel C. Gibson has
just published his collection, Fanon Today: The Reason and
Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth. He discusses some important
quotes from Fanon’s global classic.
Fanon
rocked the All-African
Peoples Conference in December 1958 when
he raised the issue of violence in contrast to Kwame Nkrumah’s nonviolent “positive action” agreed upon by many
delegates.
“Manichean
World” is a Persian religion found
during 3rd century. Fanon uses Manichean as an analogy for
colonialism. He exposes without violence decolonisation cannot be possible.
Cause of
Colonisation:
1. There
was raw materials
2. Colonizers first
gave the benefits them(African)
How
European has Colonized them:
1.
African kings had no common in their common of mind.
They always wanted to war.
2.
Natural disasters.
3.
Poverty.
4.
European had advanced machine gun.
5.
In 1878, King Leopold 2 has
given a financial assist to H.M. Stanley to explore The Congo Association. It is treated with over 400 treats,
and through this they has taken the power. Stanley has covered a lot of area in Africa.
6.
British has taken the power for the first
time in Nigeria.
7.
In the time of Stanley, France has already occupied Senegal on the West Coast.
8.
Germany has also taken keen interest in Africa territories after
1880.
9.
The Dutch has established Cape Colony in South Africa which was won by the Britishers in the early nineteenth century.
About
the Author: Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, French
philosopher, Indian psychiatrist, excels post-colonial studies, critical
theory, and Marxism. He was interested in psychopathology in colonisation.
Introduction: The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnes de la terre, 1961) translated in 1963 by Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, exposes the effects of
dehumanising upon the individual and the nation. He explores the imperialism.
In Algeria,
a black man witnessing the brutal war to get independence from France
in the 1950s. The book expresses
colonial and post-colonial situation. Some of the scholars express about the
book that is revealing race, nation,
and global capitalism. The book has been become as the
classical text. It is based on colonisation and decolonisation.
On
National Culture: Fanon begins by considering the “colonized intellectual”, someone who has
been educated by the colonist but reacts against him. The intellectual strategy
advocates for a “Negro literature” or “Negro art” which unites all of Africa.
This is called the Negritude
movement.
There are three stages in the
cultural trajectory:
1. Intellectuals
mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes.
2. The
intellectual extols each and every thing about African culture about as
superior.
3. The
intellectuals begin to write “combat literature” revolutionary literature.
Guinean intellectual
named Keita Fodeba – the
poem text draws upon his nation’s history while also re-contextualizing it
within the struggle for liberation. National
culture is the highest form of culture. A national fight will be
nationhood.
History
of Algeria:
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Algeria's colonial history includes the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, which lasted until Algeria gained independence in 1962. French Algeria, or Colonial Algeria, was an integral part of France. French rule in the region began in 1830, after the successful French invasion of Algeria, and lasted until the end of the Algerian War in the mid-20th century, by which Algeria gained independence in 1962. After being a French colony from 1830 to 1848, Algeria was designated as a department, or part of France from 4 November 1848, when the Constitution of French Second Republic took effect, until its independence on 5 July 1962. Algeria gained independence following the Evian agreements in March 1962 and the self-determination referendum in July 1962.
Algeria became a destination for hundreds of
thousands of European immigrants. They were first known as
colons, and later as pieds-noirs, a term applying especially to ethnic
Europeans born there. Settler domination of Algeria
was not secured,
however, until the fall of Napoleon III in 1870 and the rise of the Third Republic in France. France has taken more than 70
years to take the throne of Algeria. They have killed almost 5lakhs Algerian.
From
The Text:
One has to be a vital part of Africa and its thinking, part of all that
popular energy mobilized for the liberation, progress and happiness of Africa. At the first signs of a dispute, Colonialism feigns comprehension by acknowledging with ostentatious
humility that the territory is suffering from serious underdevelopment that
requires major social and economic reforms.
Colonialism realizes it is incapable of achieving
a program of socio-economic reforms that would satisfy the aspirations of the
colonized masses. Colonialism proves to be inherently powerless.
Faced with the colonized intellectual's debunking of the colonialist theory of
a precolonial barbarism, colonialism's response is mute. They must have been
overjoyed to discover that the past was not branded with shame, but dignity, glory,
and sobriety.
The result was to hammer into the heads of the indigenous
population that if the colonist were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and
bestiality. The
colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its
physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune. Colonialism, little troubled by nuances, has
always claimed that the "nigger" was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a "nigger." For Colonialism, this vast continent was a den of
savages, infested with superstitions and fanaticism, destined to be despised,
cursed by God, a land of cannibals, a land of "niggers."
The colonized intellectual, steeped in Western culture and set on proving the existence of his own culture,
never does so in the name of Angola or
Dahomey. The culture proclaimed
is African
Culture. When the
black man, who has never felt as much a "Negro" as he has under white
domination, decides to prove his culture and act as a cultivated person, he
realizes that history imposes on him a terrain already mapped out, that history
sets him along a very precise path and that he is expected to demonstrate the
existence of a "Negro" culture. In Africa, colonized literature over the last
twenty years has not been a national literature but a "Negro" literature.
The "black world" came into being, and Busia from Ghana, Birago Diop from
Senegal, Hampate Ba from
Mali and Saint-Clair
Drake from Chicago were quick to claim common ties and identical lines of
thought. The Arab leaders have tried to revive that famous Dar
el Islam, which
exerted such a shining influence in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. The aim of the Society was therefore to
establish the existence of an African culture, to detail it nation by nation and
reveal the inner dynamism of each of the national cultures. The African Society for Culture was to become the Cultural
Society for the Black World and was forced to include the black diaspora, i.e., the
dozens of millions of blacks throughout the Americas.
During the First Congress of the African Society for Culture in
Paris in 1956 the black Americans spontaneously considered their problems
from the same standpoint as their fellow Africans. Second Congress of
the African Society for Culture
the black Americans decided
to create the American Society for African Culture. "Negro" or "Negro-African" culture broke up because the men who set out to
embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national. Colonialism's insistence that "niggers" have no culture, and Arabs are by nature barbaric, inevitably leads to a
glorification of cultural phenomena that become continental instead of
national, and singularly racialized. "Speaking
as a Senegalese and a Frenchman .... Speaking as an Algerian and a
Frenchman."
The foregoing is sufficient to explain the style of the
colonized intellectuals who make up their mind to assert this phase of
liberating consciousness. “Combat
literature”,
revolutionary literature, national literature emerges. The colonized
intellectual, at the very moment when he undertakes a work of art, fails to
realize he is using techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier. Culture
eminently eludes any form of simplification. The French poet, Rene Char fully understood this when he reminds
us that "the poem emerges
from a subjective imposition and an objective choice. The poem is a moving
assembly of decisive original values, in topical relation with someone whom
such an undertaking brings to the foreground." Keita
Fodeba, minister for
internal affairs of the Republic of Guinea, when he was director of the African
Ballet, did not
trifle with the reality of the people of Guinea.
Here is a poem by Keita
Fodeba, a genuine
invitation for us to reflect on demystification and combat. Naman was in North Africa in good health and was asking for news
of the harvest, the fishing festival, the dances, the palaver tree and the village.
After
Corsica and Italy Naman was now in Germany and
was proud of having been decorated. Naman, hero of the battlefields of Europe, Naman
who vouched for the
power and the continuity of the metropolis, Naman mowed down by the police at
the very moment he returns home; this is Setif
in 1945, Fort-de-France, Saigon, Dakar, and Lagos.
All the "niggers" and all the "filthy Arabs" who fought to defend France's liberty or British civilization will recognize
themselves in this poem by Keita Fodeba. The poet Keita Fodeba was preparing the minister for
internal affairs of the Republic of Guinea to thwart the plots organized by French
colonialism. "Negro-African" culture and who continue to organize conferences
dedicated to the unity of that culture should realize that they can do little
more than compare coins and sarcophagi. There is no common destiny between the
national cultures of Guinea and Senegal1 but there is a common destiny between
the nations of Guinea and Senegal dominated by the same French colonialism.
"Negro-African" culture grows deeper through
the people's struggle, and not through songs, poems, or folklore. In this respect,
the case of Algeria is significant. From 1952-53 on, its storytellers, grown
stale and dull, radically changed both their methods of narration and the
content of their stories. National culture is the sum of all these
considerations, the outcome of tensions internal and external to society as a
whole and its multiple layers. The nation satisfies all those indispensable
requirements for culture which alone can give it credibility,
validity, dynamism, and creativity.
The birth of national consciousness in Africa strictly correlates with an African consciousness. The responsibility of the African toward
his national culture is also a responsibility toward "Negro-African" culture.
Thank You
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