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Vol. 8 Issue 22…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…June
3, 2005
Fanon and the Colonial
Mind-Set
By John Burl Smith
Longevity
itself is not important; it is the impact of one's life that matters. That
statement epitomizes Frantz Fanon's short but productive life. Born in France
(1925), Fanon grew up amidst African slave descendants on Martinique. A
political thinker, psychiatrist and revolutionary writer, he saw himself as
French. He fought with guerrillas against the pro-Nazi Vichy French and
returned to Europe to fight with the French underground in World War II.
However, Fanon's encounters with French racism shaped his psychological
theories and his writings profoundly influenced radical movements in the
Caribbean, US, Africa and Europe during the 1960s.
Fanon moved to Algeria in1952 and joined the Algerian liberation struggle
fighting for freedom from the French. Fanon's revolutionary struggles produced
two powerful anti-colonial statements. In the first, Fanon drew on his
psychiatric training to analyze colonialism in Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
He saw the colonized mind-set as a race-based color system held together by a
whole range of words, images and symbols, such as a dark soul, that supported
their inferiority complex.
Existentially, he theorized that colonialism imposed a degrading inhumane
existence upon its black victims. It forced the colonized to accept their
wretchedness as an inherent condition. For instance, "speaking French
forces or coerces one to accept and internalize cultural values or a collective
consciousness that identifies blackness with evil and sin." Desiring to
escape that association, "blacks don a white mask, hoping to negate their
black skin."
While traveling to guerrilla camps from Mali to the Sahara, Fanon examined
class conflicts and questions of cultural dominance that arise when creating
and maintaining a national consciousness. Those understandings and his Algerian
experiences formed the basis of Fanon's second anti-colonial statement--The
Wretched of the Earth (1962). A must read of black liberation movements
during the 1960s, it influenced such anti-colonial writers as Kenya's Ngugi Wa
Thiong'o, Zimbabwe's Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Senegal's Ousmane Sembène.
Fanon's basic argument was that post-colonial African nations end in disaster
because they simply replace white colonial leaders with black Africans trained
by Europeans. Such leaders see blacks like Europeans and continue their
oppression under the old capitalistic class structure. These leaders cater to
whites that come to Africa as speculators in search of riches, or tourists
looking for the exotic, big game hunting and casinos. African countries become
pleasure resorts, centers of rest and relaxation. Tourism (pleasing white
folks) becomes their national industry.
Fanon believed that true revolutionaries grow from the struggle to own and
control the land. Moreover, he believed that violent revolution is the only
means of ending colonial repression and cultural trauma in the Third World. He
argued, "Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his
inferiority complex, despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores
his self-respect."
The Dark Knight-Batman/White Ninja/Zorro has signed a contract, and he has
shown a remarkable degree of dedication to completing the first full month of
the agreement. With his eyes on the prize, he has needed little encouragement
to tackle his daily assignments. There is something to be said for the right
incentives. When queried for comments, the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro said, "I
can't wait to get my bike!"
Rwanda (1800-1994)
A small landlocked country, Rwanda is located in the Great Lakes
region of Central Africa. Surrounded by Uganda, Burundi, the Congo and
Tanzania, Rwanda is a rural country with approximately 90% of it population
engaged in primarily subsistence farming. Its major exports are coffee and tea.
Fondly known as "Land of a Thousand Hills (Payes des Mille
Collines)," because of its hilly terrain, Rwanda is the most densely populated
country in Africa. Three ethnic groups, Hutus, Tutsis and Twa, make up the
majority of the country's population.
Prior to Western colonialism, Rwanda functioned as a monarchy.
When it became a German province in 1895, the indigenous monarchical system
remained largely intact under Germany's indirect rule. After Germany's lost in
World War I, Belgium took over the protectorate under a League of Nations
mandate. Unlike Germany, Belgium directly ruled the region. Backed by Christian
churches, mainly Catholics, Belgian colonizers used the Tutsi high class to
enforce its stringent tax and forced labor policies. Tutsis served as buffers
between Belgians and the majority Hutus and lower class Tutsis. This class
structure widened the social gap between these ethnic groups and exacerbated
the Hutu-Tutsi division.
After World War II, Rwanda became a United Nations trust territory
with Belgium as the administrative authority. Gradually, through a series of
reforms, the assassination of King Mutara III Charles (1959) and the flight of
the last Nyiginya clan monarch, King Kigeri V, to neighboring Uganda, the Hutu
increasingly amassed more power. When Rwanda gained its independence on July 1,
1962, the Hutu held virtually all power.
A military coup in 1973 brought President Juvenal Habyarimana, a
Hutu, to power. By the end of the 1980s, partly because of corruption,
increasing repression and a general economic decline, the once popular
Habyarimana regime began to lose support and control of his political party,
the National Republican Democratic Movement. On October 1, 1990, the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF), a group of mostly Tutsi refugees, launched military
attacks against the Hutu government from their base in Uganda. The Habyarimana
regime responded with genocidal pogroms against Tutsis, claiming they were
trying to re-enslave the Hutus. The government and the RPF signed a cease-fire
agreement known as the Arusha Accords (1992) in Arusha, Tanzania.
On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated when his
plane was shot down while landing in Kigali. Hutu extremists controlling the
Rwandan government launched genocide against the Tutsis. Over the next three
months, the military and militia groups killed approximately 800,000 Tutsis and
Hutu moderates. Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutu regime and ended the killing in
July 1994.
End the Sudanese Genocide
Ken Silverstein's April 29 Los Angeles Times article carefully
documented the connection between the US and Sudanese governments. While the
CIA works with the brutal regime of Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, providing access
to terrorism suspects and sharing intelligence, the US looks the other way as
genocide in the Darfur region continues.
Between 200,000 and 400,000 innocent civilians have been brutally
murdered in Darfur. Thousands more have been forced from their villages.
According to United Nations estimates, more than a million people have been
displaced. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry declared on January 25,
2005 that "government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate
attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances,
destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and
forced displacement, throughout Darfur. These acts were conducted on a
widespread and systematic basis."
The international community is calling on the West to end the
Sudanese genocide by cutting off its funding starting with the State of
Kentucky, which has two retirement pension funds with over 1.6 billion dollars
invested in multinational corporations that do business with the government of
Sudan. The Kentucky Teachers' Retirement Systems has $1,013,874,072.57 invested
in 13 companies that do business with the government of Sudan. Furthermore, 21%
of KTRS' total equity holdings are invested in companies with ties to
terrorist-sponsoring states or proliferation-related concerns. Thus, the
State's money may flow into business ventures that enable the Sudanese
dictatorship to purchase weapons and continue a military campaign that both
Congress and the State Department call "genocide".
Sign the petition at www.KentuckyDivest.com. Join world community members
in calling on the state of Kentucky to divest from Sudan until the genocide
ends. Send a message to the Sudanese dictatorship that the killing and slave
raids must stop.
Venue for an Artist
Not to Forgive Wasting Time
By Al Globus
Bodies
strewn akimbo across a church yard of sorts,
Only
part of Valentina's story;
Hiding
in the blood of her family's hacked body parts,
Only
part of Valentina lives on.
Only
a cog in the gear of man's cyclical genocide,
Rwanda,
small part of an old story,
A
predictable effect of those in power who lied.
The
big, chanted lie
That
makes us die,
'There is something less than human'
In
those about whom the politico lies.
Will
we not ever learn to be deaf to those men?
Who
will so mislead, only for power he cries!
Not
the first, but hopefully among the very last,
Rwanda's
lost children, families torn away, afar
Society's
competence
shredded
beyond recognition past,
Pushing
for now and ever, the generations set ajar,
The
fabric of life,
misshapened,
miswoven, its bas relief-
Indelible,
inevitable, durable,
an
ugly and tragic picture.
We
will transmute it through learning,
through
tears of accepted grief,
Making
all of life's future, the path to a humane,
artful,
growing sinecure.
Can
we not learn from this cruel seemingly ever contemporary history?
What
could we do to fashion,
to
shape a seemingly soaring seamless story?
We
will find a view of the world fashioned by us,
the
people, leading
Those
'leaders' who are crazed by power
in
our swelling advance, bringing
To
fruition the lure of imagined affection
and
kindness towards
All
who embrace others as separate, yet one, as life's wards,
It
is not a choice, rather it is inevitable, as water flows to the lowest level.
Have you ever noticed that men and women, armed, march in uniformity in rank
and file,
But
in loving they laugh, sauntering arm in arm,
each
along a branched enthralling trail?
Choosing
not to know, we can turn our faces away
from
these grizzly and gruesome vistas.
Cambodia,
Vietnam, the holocaust,
naming
only a few, the predecessors, so many Rwandans
By
so doing we, the people, would be co-conspirators in the crime
Instigated
by the power crazed politicos.
Staying
the inevitable time
When
life is held precious.
When
difference is honored,
When
all by loving all of life
Are
loved, rather than trapped, by self.
"In
remembrance is the secret of redemption".
We
will look and see squarely
That
acts of liars crazed by power
turn
loved ones into bleached bones, deadly
Machete,
gas chamber, imprisonment,
especially
acts of arrogant indifference.
We
will bring those liars crazed by power
to
a just and blind bar eschewing vengeance.
We
will not blend justice to satisfy a blood lust
springing
armed from grief and loss.
Not
that they do not deserve the torture
of
bearing responsibility's terrible cross,
Rather
we do not deserve to live in the certain,
secret
knowledge that we bent justice
Hypocritically,
only to quench our flames
set
by the acts of sadistic, grasping vice.
Justice
must only be used by us
to
set love's course inevitable, certain and straight,
To
ease our spirits, soul and our bodies
from
the cycle of pain initiating new pain,
Through
a humane alchemy,
we
choose the freeing liberty of fairness in our pain,
Bringing
to arrogant, power crazed political liars,
justice's
corrective might.
About Me: In 1997, PBS aired "Valentina's Nightmare," an account
of the Rwanda genocide. The
documentary detailed Valentina’s mutilation and the practice of exterminating
the Tutsi community in Nyarubuye. The killings took place in a Catholic Church
courtyard in April of 1994. Al
Grobus is a physician and member of Friends for Rwanda Association (FORA),
which helps Rwandan orphans.
Hood
Notes
By John Burl Smith
The 1994 merciless killings in Rwanda rank among the worst cases
of genocide. Understanding why such an atrocity happened today is beyond the
mental grasp of most people. Attempting to bring clarity to this quandary, Hotel
Rwanda (1994) presents a true-life story.
Caught up in an ethnic conflict between the Tutsis and Hutus, the
story centers on Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu innkeeper, played by Don Cheadle. As
events spiral out of control, Paul struggles to cope with one desperate life or
death situations after another. Paul must not only save himself, but he must
maneuver to save the lives of his family and more than a thousand Tutsis
refugees thrust upon him.
A powerful story, exemplifying a man besieged by war whose only
weapons are his wits, is made even more gripping by Cheadle's Academy
Award-nominated performance. One cannot help but be profoundly touched by
Paul's patient manner amidst chaos. Isolated and abandoned by the civilized
world, Hotel Rwanda is a clear statement about a white political structure that
will not lift a finger to help Africans. Surrounded by treacherous people
without limits on the power they exercise, yet without power, Paul proves the
strongest.
Watching events unfold in Rwanda, Frantz Fanon's psychological
analysis of colonialism become a matrix that overlays the catastrophe. What was
at work there was not simple hatred but the psychological fruits falling from
trees planted decades earlier by Belgium colonizers. Reading Fanon's Black
Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth one can predict
such outrages taking place in Africa, just as one can predict events by reading
Nostradamus.
The real culprits in Rwanda were Europeans and their dehumanizing
system of colonialism. What the vindictive machete wielding Hutus and the
defenseless Tutsis did not comprehend is that they were both victims of a
mind-set planted in their great grandfathers' heads by Europeans. Moreover,
given Fanon's analysis, it was their European descendants that were safely
evacuated from the chaos that deserved to die, instead of Hutus killing Tutsis.
Unfortunately, colonialism is a broken record that still plays in
places like Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela, Colombia, and
across Africa. Hotel Rwanda is a must see movie for families. It is a great
teaching aid for lesson about humanity. Also, for those who want to understand
the devastating and dehumanizing impact of colonialism, Black Skin, White
Mask and The Wretched of the Earth are great companion study
guides.
Disgruntled says: On Wednesday, Amnesty International released its annual human
rights report. Citing a gulf between its rhetoric and reality, the report
charged the United States with responsibility for the global retreat on respect
for human rights and the corresponding rise in abuse. Painting a bleak picture,
the report cited human rights abuses that violate international law at Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq and the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Basically, according to the report's authors, "When the most powerful country
in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a
license to others to commit abuse with impunity." With such a poor global
record, it is the height of hypocrisy and folly to blame a brief article in
Newsweek magazine for anti-US violence.
Disgruntled feels: Undiplomatic! Controversy
surrounds the John Bolton nomination for US ambassador to the United Nations.
With a long government career, Bolton has seen lots of action. A real
hard-liner, he helped doctor the intelligence on Iraq. Over the course of his
career, Bolton seems to have a real knack for opposing democratically elected
governments and supporting dictatorial regimes. Despite the controversies that
plague the Bolton nomination, the Bush administration still stands by its man,
because in the much-anticipated UN debate on a number of issues, especially
Iran, the US position requires a real dog rather than a diplomat.
Disgruntled wants to know: Recently, the issue of class has figured prominently in the
news. Thanks to comedian Bill Cosby, there is a black face on the class
struggle. Dr. Cosby has been harshly critical of "lower class" blacks
on a variety of topics from poor parenting to improper use of the English
language. While there is certainly plenty of blame to spread around on the poor
state of blacks in North America, we must ask Cos, as he is affectionately know
in the black community, when will he turn a critical lens on the role others
played in shaping conditions and attitudes in black America?
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