Frantz Fanon and the African Revolution Author(s): G. K.

Grohs Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Dec., 1968), pp. 543-556 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/159334 . Accessed: 25/09/2012 13:36
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The Journal of ModernAfricanStudies,6, 4 (1968), pp. 543-556

Frantz African

Fanon

and Revolution

the

by G. K. GROHS*
THE theory of the African revolution, which is still in many respects only in its initial stage, found a most powerful inspiration in the West Indian psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon. His writings were at first confined to the French-speaking public, and even after their initial translation into English (published by Presence africaine) they remained almost unknown. But the growing race tensions in Africa and the United States are drawing more and more attention to this original thinker. Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, the old capital of Martinique. He studied medicine in France, specialised in psychiatry, fought in the French army during World War II, and went as a doctor to Algeria, working first in the hospital at Blida, until he became a member of the F.L.N., the Algerian freedom movement. At the age of 27 he wrote Peau noire, masquesblancs, published in I952. In I959 there followed his second book, L'An V de la revolution algerienne.His most work, Les Damnes de la terre, appeared one year before his important death. Fanon became in 1960 ambassador of the Algerian Republic in Accra, but died in Washington the following year at the age of 37. His short but intensive life was influenced by very disparate environments and experiences. His origins in the French colony of Martinique, his studies in the I950S in Paris, his qualifications as a doctor and a psychiatrist, and his constant fight, up to the last day of his life, for the Algerian revolution: these four periods indicate the important phases of his intellectual development.
MARTINIQUE

Fanon's

first book,

Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris,

i952),1

is an

analysis and appraisal of Martinique as the author saw it before he went to France. Since 1635 this island, today numbering 270,000
* Senior Lecturer in Sociology, The University College, Dar es Salaam. An earlier version of this article was published under the title, 'Frantz Fanon, ein Theoretiker der afrikanischen Revolution', in Kolner Zeitschrift (Cologne), xvi, 3, I964, fiir Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. PP. 457-79. 1 In this article, the English translation by Charles Markmann, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1967), will be quoted.

544

G. K. GROHS

inhabitants, had belonged to the French colonial empire. It showed all the characteristics of a colonialised society, which had forgotten its own culture after centuries of contact with France and had become more and more alienated from itself. The upper class consisted of the white colonial officials, some French settlers and traders, and some evolues. Skin colour became the sign of social status, so that 'whiteness', as Fanon puts it, encircled the whites as 'blackness' encircled the blacks. The relations between black and white as a problem of alienation is the theme of the book, in which Fanon uses a method of investigation which he calls ' psychoanalytic', but which in reality is a mixture of sociological, psychological, and Marxist elements and notions. Fanon analyses the problem of self-alienation on different levels, first that of language. Here he shows that good French, especially if perfectly pronounced, was in Martinique the criterion for a high social position. Therefore to study in France guaranteed not only a certain education but also the most important opening to social mobilisation. To speak like the French, to look like the French, became an obsession; and some Frenchmen's bad habit of speaking petit-negre,a kind of pidgin French, to all foreigners, even those who could speak a more elegant French than they could themselves, became a hurtful offence. In this situation the poetry of Aime Cesaire, who published in I939 Cahierd'un retourau pays natal, an early expression of negritude,came as a cultural liberating force. He used the language of the oppressor not only with superb skill but also as a weapon against cultural oppression. His name became widely known when Andre Breton, the founder of French literary surrealism, detained in Martinique by the Vichy regime, discovered the tiny review, Tropiques,edited by Aime Cesaire and his wife Suzanne. In the first numbers they tried to rediscover African history before the slave trade and thus to trace the history of their own people who had been brought as slaves to the islands. They referred in their investigations to the writings of the German Africanist and historian Leo Frobenius.1 But on this point Fanon differs from Cesaire and the later negritude movement: he thinks it is useless to study the African past and to romanticise it. He does not believe that this helps to solve present-day problems. He suspects that all the endeavours to elucidate African history and to compare it with European history are only the outcome of a deep inferiority complex. For him this seems to be only a reactionto
1 See Jahnheinz Jahn, Muntu: an outlineof the new African culture(New York, I96I), and L. Kesteloot, Les Ecrivains noirs de langue franfaise: naissance d'une litterature (Brussels,
I963).

545 actions and only from this viewEuropean challenges; but he demands point is he interested in the writings of Aime Cesaire. The inferiority complex is for Fanon not an inborn complex, as D. Mannoni describes it in La Psychologie de la colonisation.l It is the result of a colonised society. He makes this clear with two novels as examples, one by a woman writer from Martinique, Mayotte Capecia, Je suis martiniquaise,and one by a Senegalese, Abdoulaye Sadji, Nini. The first shows a girl from Martinique whose complexion is not quite so black as the skin of others and who dreams of marrying a white man. The second shows a coloured girl who fears to lose her social status by marrying an African. Fanon describes white racialism as a parallel to European anti-Semitism. Like Sartre, who describes the Jew as the creation of the non-Jew, the Christian, he thinks that colonised Africa with its inferiority complexes is the product of the prejudices of the white man and his superiority complex. In a chapter on 'The Negro and Psychopathology', Fanon compares the situation of the negro with that of the Jews: On the phenomenological level there would be a double reality to be observed. The Jew is feared because of his potential for acquisitiveness. 'They' are everywhere. The banks, the stock exchanges, the government are infested with 'them'.. .'They' control everything. Soon the whole country will belong to 'them'... As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles!...They have so many children that they can't count them... Things are indeed going to hell. The government and the civil service are at the mercy of the Jews. Our women are at the mercy of the Negroes.2 This neurotic attitude of Europeans towards black people is borne out by an empirical study. Fanon asked 500 Europeans which notions and words they associated with the word, 'negro'. Sixty per cent of the answers gave such terms as: biological, sexual, strong, athletic, boxer, wild animal, devil, sin, and so on. The validity of Fanon's methods of selection and interrogation are rather doubtful, but it shows that he tried to examine the evidence for his thesis. He was very much influenced by the German psychologist Alfred Adler, a heretical pupil of Sigmund Freud. Adler stated that inferiority complexes are often compensated by superiority complexes.3 This applied also to the colonial inhabitants of Martinique, in the opinion of Fanon, although their superiority complex was related not to the whites but to the Senegalese who had been brought to the island as soldiers
1 D. Mannoni, and Prospero Caliban: a studyin thepsychology colonisation of (New York, 1956). 2 Black Skin, White Masks, p. 157. 3 Alfred Adler, {iber des nervisenCharakter (Miinchen, I928).

FRANTZ

FANON

AND

THE

AFRICAN

REVOLUTION

G. K. GROHS 546 and happened to be even blacker than the Martinique people. So Fanon asks whether all the French teachers and school inspectors know what they have done. They have inculcated, by their books, teaching methods and curricula, a strong inferiority complex in their pupils. Fanon refers to Hegel's view that self-consciousness constitutes itself only through acknowledgement by others. The African in Martinique has to free himself and not to wait for acknowledgement by the whites alone; the African has to find his identity in the fight against suppression and prejudice. This last part of Fanon's book leads on to his later attempts to develop a theory of revolution. The phrase of Marx which he quoted at the beginning of the last chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs became the Leitmotivof his later works:

The social revolution... cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead. Before, the expression exceeded the content; now, the content exceeds the expression.
ALGERIA

The social revolution of the twentieth century, the revolution of the developing countries, is experienced by Fanon as both observer and participant in the Algerian revolution. He left the realm of theory and entered the political praxis. The first results of his observations he algerienne'-a title whose similarity to published as L'An V de la revolution Marx's The 18th Brumaireof Louis Bonaparteis not accidental. The books resemble each other in offering not a historical account but an analysis of a social situation which has produced a historical event and which has been changed by this event. But they are different in that the hero of Fanon's book is the people, a hero marching to victory. The hero of Marx's book is the proletariat, and it is losing the battle against the reactionary forces. Fanon's book is sociological. The doctor and psychologist becomes a sociologist without forgetting his training. His method is participant observation. It is the account of a revolutionary, of a man who says of himself: 'sleeping on the bare earth with the men and women of the mechtas,he lives the drama of a people and he becomes a piece of the flesh of Algeria'. This book contains the phenomenology of the revolution, not its
L'An V de la rivolution (Paris, 1959). The English translation quoted is by Haakon algdrienne Chevalier, Studiesin a Dying Colonialim (New York, I965).

FRANTZ

FANON

AND

THE

AFRICAN

REVOLUTION

547

theory. Fanon starts with a seemingly superficial aspect, clothing. 'The way of clothing, the traditions of costume are the most obvious, that means the immediately recognisable forms of the particularity of a society.' This is the first sentence of the first chapter, which bears the ambiguous title, 'Algeria Unveils Herself'. The colonial government, the employers, the churches, all worked together to abrogate the traditional veil of Muslim women. But just this attack on a traditional requisite made of it a symbol around which the resistance of the people was crystallising. 'We find here a law of colonisation', Fanon writes. 'In the first phase the actions and plans of the occupation power determine the centres of resistance around which the will of survival of a people is organised. The white creates the black. But the black creates the negritude.Against the colonialist attack on the veil he puts up the cult of the veil.' But the development went further. The women had to join the ranks of the resistance movement, had to take off the veil, to wear European clothes, to work as spies in the European quarters of the Algerian towns. The war changed completely the traditional role of Algerian girls and women, who had to fight side by side with their fathers and brothers. The revolution brought the emancipation of Algerian women. It forced the patriarchal father to tolerate and to acknowledge a daughter who as a soldier of the revolutionary army obeyed her superiors and not her father, who led a life unknown to him and showed him her open face, which had been unthinkable only a few years previously. But the veil became a political instrument again in I957, when the police started to prohibit the carrying of luggage and parcels in the streets by women. They then returned to their traditional clothing, especially their veils, to smuggle weapons and other important consignments needed for the revolution. So the meaning of the veil changed from a traditional symbol to an instrument of resistance. Fanon analyses the many consequences of the Algerian war for the traditional family pattern. The elder brother loses his predominant position because his younger brothers are soldiers like him, perhaps even his superiors in the army. The husband loses his prerogatives because his wives are fighting beside him in the army; and special courts have to be instituted to deal with divorce cases between members of the army, giving women more rights than the traditional Mohammedan law provided. The radio, previously held in contempt as a European device, becomes a centre of family life because it provides information on the war, on the fighting members of the family, on instructions for the future. This change in the functions of many

G. K. GROHS 548 institutions is also illustrated in the social role of medical men. Instead of being seen as representatives of the colonial power, controlling diseases and caring for Europeans distrusted by the population, doctors now appear as F.L.N. fighters, caring for the wounded men and helping their brothers to resist European measures by using exactly the same European inventions as had been seen before as another means to destroy the traditional culture. I will not comment further in detail on his second book. It is, in its heterogeneous, essayistic form, a preparatory venture for his major theoretical work, Les Damnes de la terre. But it makes it clear that the Algerian war brought about many revolutionary changes, even in the most traditional sections of society and in the most personal aspects of life, which have much more difficulty breaking through in Africa south of the Sahara, because such a revolutionary purgatory did not take place. This slow process of modernisation may also lead to a loss of solidarity and an increasing fragmentation of society, without that basic consensus which was created in Algeria by the violent attacks of the French settlers, French soldiers, and French police.

COLONIAL

LIBERATION

AND

THE

FUTURE

Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence was apparent even in Fanon's first book, writes the introduction to his last work, Les Damnes de la terre.1 He feared, like many Frenchmen of that time, that the Algerian war was starting to demoralise the soldiers and officers of France, and to destroy the last remnants of humanism, thus leading to a moral catastrophe in France itself. Sartre asks himself if this catastrophic process can be stopped, and if so, how. He answers: Yes. For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted ... This is the end of the dialectic; you condemn this war but do not dare to declare yourselves to be on the side of the Algerian fighters .. Then, perhaps, when your back is to the wall, you will let loose at last the new violence which is raised up in you by old, often-repeated crimes. But, as they say, that's another story: the history of mankind. The time is drawing near, I am sure, when we will join the ranks of those who make it.2 I think it is not necessary to direct the reader's attention to another version of Sartre's challenge, with only one word changed: 'You condemn this war but do not dare to declare yourselves to be on the
1 Les Damnes de la terre (Paris, I96I). The English translation quoted is by Constance Farrington, The Wretched the Earth (London, I967). of 2 Ibid. p. 26.

549 side of the Vietnamese fighters.' This would mean the acceptance of violence. 'Concerning Violence' is the title of Fanon's first chapter. Only by violence can colonialism be destroyed. Only by violence can colonialised countries liberate themselves. Fanon analyses the situation first on the national then on the international level, to see the global consequences of the Algerian situation. The colonial society is for Fanon a divided world, in which the whites live in their own town quarters, with their own schools and hospitals. The white despises the Algerian, the Algerian envies and hates the white. Between these two worlds there is no intermediary; the soldier and the policeman represent naked violence. The church has the task of destroying the indigenous culture: The church in the colonies is the white people's church, the foreigner's church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few are chosen... All those Saints who have turned the other cheek, who have forgiven trespasses against them, who have been spat on and insulted without shrinking are studied and held up as examples.l The first instruction given to those under colonial rule is to stay where they are and not to overstep the borders. No wonder that aggressive feelings develop, that dreams refer to flight and the overcoming of frontiers, and that these aggressions must find an outlet. Fanon sees two such outlets. In traditional society there is a criminal reaction against one's own tribesmen and the flight into dances and the wild mythology of indigenous religions. The reactions of the bourgeoisie are different. They also suffer humiliations, they also are prevented from developing their capacities, but their economic and cultural interests do not allow them to enter into open revolution as long as they can hope to save their privileges and goods. Therefore they proclaim nonviolence. 'In its simplest form this non-violence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonised country that the bourgeoisie has the same interest as them and that it is therefore urgent and indispensable to come to terms for the public good.' The bourgeoisie is caught within its own immobilism. 'When they are told "action must be taken", they see bombs raining down on them, armoured cars coming at them on every path, machine-gunning and police-action...And they sit quiet.'2 Fanon thinks that this reasoning is historically wrong. Even Napoleon
2

FRANTZ

FANON

AND

THE

AFRICAN

REVOLUTION

1 The Wretched the Earth, pp. 32 and 52. of Ibid. pp. 48-9.

G. K. GROHS 550 had to retreat with his superior army from Portugal in I8IO when the population led a guerrilla warfare against him. Capitalists are not in the long run interested in a war that only costs money and brings no hope of success: 'the monopolistic group within this bourgeoisie does not support a government whose policy is solely that of the sword. What the factory-owners and financial magnates of the mother country expect from their government is not that it should decimate the colonial peoples, but that it should safeguard with the help of economic conventions their own "legitimate interests".'1 Also, the economic competition between East and West does not allow colonial wars to be protracted for too long. If one considers these arguments of Fanon in the light of the experience of the Vietnamese war one may come to different conclusions, but this cannot be discussed here. The consequence for Fanon is that not compromise but fight will force colonialism to retreat. But this fight can only be initiated-and this is a very important point in his theory-when the leading elite in the cities, with ideas but no base for action, turn to the countryside, where they find people ready for action but without sufficient intellectual leadership. The error of the political parties in colonial countries consists in the fact that they do not establish contact with the masses, but restrict their interest to the workers, craftsmen, and civil servants in the cities, who are a tiny portion of the population. Fanon believes that at this point the Marxist theory does not work. The proletariat in the colonial countries is not the suppressed mass of poor industrial workers, but a small privileged group of wage-earners, who have, in contrast to the poor peasants, far more to lose than their is chains. Also, the bourgeoisie not the inventive, productive, entrepreneurial class of the Communist Manifesto, but a parasitical bourgeoisie profiting from the colonial economy. Neither the parties nor the proletariat can promote the revolution; but there are three other groups which can: the peasants, the intellectuals, and the outcasts and rootless fringe groups living unemployed and destitute in the outskirts of the great cities. The revolutionary process works, according to Fanon, in the following way. The radical members of the political parties in the city discover that they are unable to change the bourgeois apathy of their party structure, and they find themselves isolated within the parties. They have to emigrate to the countryside, where they suddenly meet a group of men and women asking, 'When can we start to fight?' The radicals accept the challenge, and give the peasants the leadership they need and the 1 The Wretched the Earth, p. of
51.

55I and technical knowledge they lack. The colonial power, political becoming aware of this new development, tries to counter-attack-the so-called contre-subversion-with the help of two groups, the religious This leads to a certain amount of leaders and the Lumpenproletariat. but soon the leaders realise that they have to give up the confusion; fiction of a united nation on the one side and a united white front on the other side. They take into account the different economic groups and interests of their people, and the existence of a group of whites who sympathise with their cause and condemn colonialism just as they do themselves. It is not the whites who have to be fought, but colonialism. Fanon is not, however, content simply to analyse the Algerian situation and to describe the violent methods which are necessary to win the battle against colonialism. In a chapter, 'Mesaventures la conscience de nationale', he tries to predict developments after the victory. He bases these predictions on his observations of those African and South American countries which had won their independence. Ghana especially seems to have inspired some of his conclusions, which deal with four aspects: the function of the national bourgeoisie, the role of the national leader, the position of the party, and the organisation of the army. The national bourgeoisie has, as Fanon observes, the psychology of traders and not of entrepreneurs. It takes over the vacated positions of the colonialists, and uses three or four slogans to demand enormous endeavours from the industrial and agricultural workers in the name of national reconstruction. This attitude is taken up also by the petitbourgeoisie, the artisans, and the craftsmen. 'The artisans and craftsmen start a fight against non-national Africans... From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism and finally to racism.' Fanon's conception of nationalism is quite different; he warns: 'If nationalism is not made explicit, if it is not enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism, it leads to a blind alley.'l Fanon believes that the vague formula of African unity is falling to pieces, considering the regional differences within nations, the fight between Christianity and Islam, the differences between Arab and black Africa. 'The racial prejudice of the young national bourgeoisie is a racism of defence, based on fear.'2 This fear, this feeling of insecurity vis-d-vis not only colonialism but also mass illiteracy and tribal life in the old traditions, drives the bourgeoisie to seek its security in a single party. 'The single party is the modern form of the dictatorship of the
Ibid. pp. I25 and I65.
2 Ibid. p. 13.

FRANTZ

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G. K. GROHS

bourgeoisie, unmasked, unpainted, unscrupulous and cynical.' It is a shield for private profit ambitions, a defence against the mounting dissatisfaction of a people who hoped for real betterment of their living conditions. To fulfil this function more efficiently, a charismatic leader is necessary: Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people for bread, land and the restoration of the country to their sacred hands, the leader will reveal his purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie. In spite of his frequently honest conduct and his sincere declarations, the leader is seen objectively as the fierce defender of these interests, today combined, of the national bourgeoisie and the ex-colonial companies.1 The leader is the more necessary as the old revolutionary party has ceased to exist, only preserving the name, the emblem, the slogan. But behind these remarks of Fanon there stands the ideal of a party as it should be: an organic party, characterised by a dynamic movement of ideas and people, an animated discussion at every level. But this organic party, which existed during the war against colonialism, is no more. Fanon proposes four ways of overcoming the impasse: (a) The people must be politicised. They must have the chance to participate in the decision-making process. the administra(b) The tertiary sector of the economy-especially tion-must be nationalised; trade must be controlled by the state. (c) The party must be completely separated from government and administration. It must become a means of discovering and formulating the needs and demands of the people. It must cease to be a means for individuals to get jobs within the administration. (d) State and party must be decentralised. The regions should have their own representatives, to counteract the process of'macrocephalisation'. Fanon declares: 'In an underdeveloped country the leading members of the party ought to avoid the capital as if it had the plague. They ought, with some few exceptions, to live in the country districts. The centralisation of all activity in the city ought to be avoided.. The party should be decentralised in the extreme. It is the only way to bring life to regions which are dead, those regions which are not yet awakened to life.'2 Fanon derived from his experiences in the Algerian war a principle
1 The Wretched the Earth, pp. 132 and 133-4. of
2

Ibid. p. I49.

FRANTZ

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of 'fundamental democratisation', in Karl Mannheim's sense, to avoid conflicts between bourgeoisie and proletariat, city and countryside, party and population. He is convinced that it is useful to slow down the speed of development in order to explain to the people every measure which is introduced to modernise the society and the economy. It is not authoritarian measures which guarantee development, but patient collaboration and education. Fanon also considers the army from this point of view. The army should be-as in Israel-the school of the nation. Its function is to further a sense of solidarity between the different regional groups, to teach reading and writing, and the basic notions of technical knowledge, so that men may contribute to the national development tasks. Fanon is against a professional army and in favour of a militia. He is, like all members of resistance movements, opposed to an organised military profession. He learnt to know professional soldiers in the form of French parachutists and the Foreign Legion. Fanon knows, however, that all his proposals cannot solve the basic problems of developing countries. He knows also that the introduction he strongly supports-does not achieve of a socialist economy-which from foreign aid, from the help of the industrialised independence countries. But this aid he sees as a kind of compensation, not charity but an international obligation, a moral duty of the developed nations. He hopes-and here some doubts may arise-that the masses of industrial workers will acknowledge one day their solidarity with the masses of the third world.' But, disregarding this hope, he is realistic enough to admit that the help of the industrialised nations is needed. Fanon takes a similar attitude towards all efforts to rediscover African history and culture. He does not believe in an African culture, but in a national culture, which has to be created with the help of the people. The organised and conscious battle led by a colonised people which hopes to regain its sovereignty is for him the most perfect cultural manifestation that exists. 'To hold a responsible position in an under-developed country is to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses, on the raising of the level of thought, and what we are too quick to call "political teaching".'2
1 Stokely Carmichael expressed similar hopes, that the white American workers would join forces with Afro-Americans, in a talk to university students in Dar es Salaam, I967. On the influence of Fanon on the Black Power movement generally, cf. Locksley Edmondson, "Black Power" Africa and the Caribbean' (Makerere University College, Kampala, 1968, mimeo). 2 The Wretched the Earth, p. I59. of

554
FANON

G. K. GROHS AS THEORETICIAN

If after this quick review of the work of Frantz Fanon we try to assess the originality of his thinking, it becomes obvious that he is neither an existentialist, as some have assumed because of his close relations with Sartre, nor a dogmatic Marxist, in spite of his wide reading of the works of Marx, Engels, and Hegel. His nationalism is ambivalent, because he sees it as a means of liberation, but also hopes that it will transcend its borders so that all people may co-operate in a new humanism. He is not racialist, as shown by his strong reaction to Sartre's dialectical description of nigritude as a kind of 'anti-racialist racialism'. For Fanon, race was no category; he knew only human beings as an entity transcending all races. In one sense his theory is populist, because for him 'the people' has the ultimate authority, not the government, the party, or the leader.1 But this people, the nation, could itself be pluralist, and it was not difficult for him to imagine the solidarity of all oppressed men and women, whether white, yellow, or black. Here also lies the difference between Fanon and Stokely Carmichael, for example. They agree on the use of violence as a means of liberation, on the black man's demand for self-assertion vis-a-vis the white man. But Fanon refuses to base his resistance, his concept of culture, on racialism. There are nations and individuals, oppressors and oppressed, but not an oppressor race and an oppressed race. This division is too simple for Fanon. The shortcomings of this theory lie in Fanon's proposals for the development of an independent Africa. He opts for a socialist economy against a bureaucratised and centralised dictatorship. He aims at a moderate federal state which does not break up in regionalism. But he does not show how a socialist economy can avoid bureaucracy, how the federation can avoid breaking up into its component units, or how a party which is separated from the administration can avoid being taken over by it. He does not explain how the parasitical bourgeoisie can be changed into a productive bourgeoisie; he only demands its 'liquidation'. But how can a class be abolished without being immediately succeeded by a substitute? He wants to protect minorities, but he does not explain how to destroy the prejudices of the majority against the minority. Finally, one may question the general applicability of his concept of violence. There is much evidence that violence may be necessary in
1 Cf. John S. Saul, 'On African Populism', in E. Gellner and G. Ionescu (eds.), Populism (London, 1968).

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African countries which are or were dominated by white settler groups, as in Algeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and the Portuguese territories. But in other countries-Ghana, Tanzania, Sierra Leonewhere such groups were lacking, no violence was necessary to achieve independence and to transform the colonial economy into something approaching a 'socialist economy'. The outcome of much violent action in Europe and the U.S.A. in recent years has shown that violence as a means of revolution has to be viewed far more discriminately. It is time to think afresh about the roots, the efficiency, and the controllability of violence. This means going beyond the ideas of Frantz Fanon, which were derived to a great extent from his experiences in the Algerian war. But, in spite of these and other shortcomings, his analysis has proved useful in the following ways: (a) His proposal to relate the urbanised elites to the masses in the countryside was put into practice in Cuba, and to a certain extent also in the struggle for independence in Southern and Northern Rhodesia, and remains a strategic problem of the first order. (b) His warning that the existing bourgeoisie has a strong tendency to become parasitical, and that something must be done to encourage it to become productive, has been acknowledged by many African leaders, from Senghor to Sekou Toure.1 (c) The strong interest of capitalist countries, especially the former colonial powers, in influencing and, if possible, dominating the economy of the newly independent countries is seen clearly by Fanon, with all its international consequences. (d) His observation that peasants and unemployed town-dwellers have to play the role of the proletariat because the workers belong to the privileged class in developing countries, at least in the initial period, offers a useful correction to orthodox Marxist views. (e) His conclusion that only violence is able to force settlers-and other groups with strong economic interests to defend-to give up their privileges was taken over specifically by the Cuban revolutionaries, by representatives of'Black Power', and even by some European left-wing groups. It is therefore not surprising that the books of Frantz Fanon have had a growing influence on the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the Third World, not least in Africa, where many leading politicians and political thinkers have paid tribute to him and his
1 This problem has been discussed in many speeches by responsible African politicians, including Leopold Senghor, Sekou TourS, and Julius Nyerere. 36

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G. K. GROHS

work.l Fanon can only be adequately interpreted, however, if his arguments are critically assessed and the consequences are examined in the light of his ultimate goal: the liberation of man from exploitation by other men.
1 See 'Homage to Frantz Fanon', in Prdsence africaine(Paris, English edition), xii, 40, pp. 130-52, and the special issue of Partisans (Paris), II, I962. The number of reviews is steadily increasing: see, for example, A. Zolberg in Encounter(London), xxvII, November I966, pp. 56-63; R.S. in Africa Report(Washington), xi, May 1966, pp. 69-77; I. L. Gedzier in The Middle East Journal (Washington), xx, I966, pp. 534-44; and F. Ansprenger in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), I, 3, pp. 403-5. A posthumous collection of the shorter political writings of Fanon was published under the title, Pour la revolution africaine (Paris, I964).