"The Wretched of the Earth" Chapter 2 Part 3 - Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness - Frantz Fanon

Hello everybody and welcome back to the anarchist audio library. Today we are going to be continuing with reading France Fenon's the wretched of the earth. We are currently on chapter 2 part three. Chapter 2 is titled spontaneity its strength and weakness. Meanwhile, however, the leaders of the rising realize that the various groups must be enlightened, that they must be educated and indoctrinated and that an army and a central authority must be created. The scattering of the nation, which is the manifestation of a nation in arms needs to be corrected, and to become a thing of the past. Those leaders who have fled from the useless political activity of the towns rediscover politics no longer as a way of lulling people to sleep, nor as a means of mystification, but as the only method of intensifying the struggle and of preparing the people to undertake the governing of their country clearly and lucidly. The leaders of the rebellion come to see that even very large-scale peasant risings need to be controlled and directed into certain channels. These leaders are led to renounce the movement in so far as it can be termed a peasant revolt and to transform it into a revolutionary war. They discover that the success of the struggle presupposes clear objectives, a definite methodology and above all the need for the mass of the people to realize that their unorganized efforts can only be a temporary dynamic. You can hold out for three days, maybe even for three months on the strength of the ad mixture of sheer resentment contained in the mass of the people, but you won't win a national war. You'll never overthrow the terrible enemy machine, and you won't change human beings if you forget to raise the standard of consciousness of the rank and file. Neither stubborn courage nor fine slogans are enough. Moreover, as it develops, the war of liberation can be counted upon to strike a decisive blow at the faith of the leaders. The enemy, in fact, changes his tactics. At opportune moments, he combines his policy of brutal repression with spectacular gestures of friendship, maneuvers calculated to seow division, and psychological action unquote. Here and there he tries with success to revive tribal feuds using agents provocators and practicing what might be called counter subversion. Colonialism will use two types of natives to gain its ends. And the first of these are the traditional collaborators, chiefs, cades, and witch doctors. The mass of the peasantry is steeped, as we have seen, in a changeless, ever recurring life without incident, and they continue to revere their religious leaders who are descended from ancient families. The tribe follows, as one man the way marked out for it by its traditional chief. Colonialism secures for itself the services of these confidential agents, by pensioning them off at a ransom price. Colonialism will also find in the lumpen proletariat a considerable space for maneuvering. For this reason, any movement for freedom ought to give its fullest attention to this lumpen proletariat. The peasant masses will always answer the call to rebellion. But if the rebellion's leaders think it will be able to develop without taking the masses into consideration, the lumpen proletariat will throw itself into the battle and will take part in the conflict. but this time on the side of the oppressor. And the oppressor who never loses a chance of setting the n-words against each other will be extremely skillful in using that ignorance and incomprehension which are the weaknesses of the lumpen proletariat. If this available reserve of human effort is not immediately organized by the forces of rebellion, it will find itself fighting as hired soldiers side by side with the colonial troops. In Algeria, it is the lumpen proletariat which furnished the harus and the miselists. In Angola, it supplied the road openers who nowadays precede the Portuguese armed columns. In the Congo, we find once more the lumpen proletariat in regional manifestations in Casai and Gatanga. While at Leoldville, the Congo's enemies made use of it to organize quote unquote spontaneous mass meetings against Lumumba. The enemy is aware of ideological weaknesses for he analyzes the forces of rebellion and studies more and more carefully the aggregate enemy which makes up a colonial people. He is also aware of the spiritual instability of certain layers of the population. The enemy discovers the existence side by side with the disciplined and wellorganized advanced guard of rebellion, of a mass of men whose participation is constantly at the mercy of their being for too long, accustomed to physiological wretchedness, humiliation, and irresponsibility. The enemy is ready to pay a high price for the services of this mass. He will create spontaneity with bayonets and exemplary floggings. Dollars and Belgian franks pour into the Congo. While in Madagascar, levies against Hova increase. In Algeria, native recruits who are in fact hostages are enlisted in the French forces. The leaders of the rebellion literally see the nation capsizing. Whole tribes join up as Harkis and using the modern weapons that they have been given go on the war path and invade the territory of the neighboring tribe which for this occasion has been labeled as nationalist. That unonymity in battle so fruitful and grandiose in the first days of the rebellion undergoes a change. National unity crumbles away. The rising is at a decisive turning of the way. Now the political education of the masses is seen to be a historic necessity. That spectacular volunteer movement which meant to lead the colonized people to supreme sovereignty at one fell swoop. That certainty which you had that all portions of the nation would be carried along with you at the same speed and led onward by the same light. That strength which gave you hope. All now are seen in the light of experience to be symptoms of a very great weakness. While a native thought that he could pass without transition from the status of a colonized person to that of a self-governing citizen of an independent nation, while he grasped at the mirage of his muscles own immediiacy, he made no real progress along the road to knowledge. His consciousness remains rudimentary. We have seen that the native enters passionately into the fight. Above all, if that fight is an armed one, the peasants threw themselves into the rebellion with all the more enthusiasm in that they had never stopped clutching at a way of life which was in practice anti-colonial. From all eternity, by means of manifold tricks, and through a system of checks and balances reminiscent of a conjurer's most successful slight of hand, the country people had more or less kept their individuality free from colonial impositions. They even believed that colonialism was not the victor. The peasants's pride, his hesitation to go down into the towns and to mingle with the world that the foreigner had built, his perpetual shrinking back at the approach of the agents of colonial administration. All these reactions signified that to the dual world of the settler, he opposed his own duality. racial feeling as opposed to racial prejudice and that determination to fight for one's life which characterizes the native's reply to oppression are obviously good enough reasons for joining in the fight. But you do not carry on a war nor suffer brutal and widespread repression nor look on while all other members of your family are wiped out in order to make racialism or hatred triumph. Racialism and hatred and resentment, quote, a legitimate desire for revenge," unquote, cannot sustain a war of liberation. Those lightning flashes of consciousness which fling the body into stormy paths, where which throw it into an almost pathological trance, where the face of the other beckons me on to giddiness, where my blood calls for the blood of the other, where by sheer inertia my death calls for the death of the other. that intense emotion of the first few hours falls to pieces if it is left to feed on its own substance. It is true that the neverending exactions of the colonial forces reintroduce emotional elements into the struggle and give the militant fresh motives for hating and new reasons to go off hunting for a settler to shoot. But the leader realizes day in and day out that hatred alone cannot draw up a program. You will only risk the defeat of your own ends if you depend on the enemy, who of course will always manage to commit as many crimes as possible to widen the gap and to throw the whole people on the side of the rebellion. At all events, as we have noticed, the enemy tries to win the support of certain sectors of the population, of certain districts, and of certain chiefs. As the struggle is carried on, instructions are issued to the settlers and to the police forces. Their behavior takes on a different complexion, becomes more quote unquote human. They even go so far as to call a native quote unquote mister when they have dealings with him. Attentions and acts of courtesy come to be the rule. The native is in fact made to feel that things are changing. The native who did not take up arms simply because he was dying of hunger and because he saw his own social forms disintegrating before his eyes, but also because the settler considered him to be an animal and treated him as such, reacts very favorably to such measures. Hatred is disarmed by these psychological windfalls. Technologists and sociologists shed their light on colonialist maneuvers and studies on the various quote unquote complexes pour forth. The frustration complex, the belligery complex, and the colonizability complex. The native is promoted. They try to disarm him with their psychology. And of course, they throw in a few shillings, too. And these miserable methods, this eyewash administered drop by drop, even meat with some success. The native is so starved for anything, anything at all that will turn him into a human being, any bone of humanity flung to him, that his hunger is incorable, and these poor scraps of charity may here and there overwhelm him. His consciousness is so precarious and dim that it is affected by the slightest spark of kindliness. Now it is that the first great undifferentiated thirst for light is continually threatened by mystification. The violent total demands which lit up the sky now become modest and withdraw into themselves. The springing wolf, which wanted to devour everything at sight, and the rising gust of wind, which was to have brought about a real revolution, run the risk of becoming quite unrecognizable if the struggle continues, and continue it does. The native may at any moment let himself be disarmed by some concession or another. The discovery of this instability inherent in the native is a frightening experience for the leaders of the rebellion. At first they are completely bewildered. Then they are made to realize by this new drift of things that explanation is very necessary and that they must stop the native consciousness from getting bogged down. For the war goes on and the enemy organizes, reinforces his position and comes to guess the native strategy. The struggle for national liberation does not consist in spanning the gap at one stride. The drama has to be played out in all its difficulty every day, and the sufferings engendered far out measure any endured during the colonial period. Down in the towns, the settlers seem to have changed. Our people are happier. They are respected. Day after day goes by. The native who is taking part in the struggle and the people who ought to go on giving him their help must not waver. They must not imagine that the end is already won. When the real objectives of the fight are shown to them, they must not think that they are impossible to attain. Once again, things must be explained to them. The people must see where they are going and how they are to get there. The war is not a single battle, but rather a series of local engagements. And to tell the truth, none of these are decisive. So, we must be sparing of our strength and not throw everything into the scales once and for all. Colonialism has greater and wealthier resources than the native. The war goes on, and the enemy holds his own. The final settling of accounts will not be today, nor yet tomorrow. For the truth is that the settlement was begun on the very first day of the war. And it will be ended not because there are no more enemies left to kill, but quite simply because the enemy, for various reasons, will come to realize that his interest lies in ending the struggle and in recognizing the sovereignty of the colonized people. The objectives of the struggle ought not to be chosen without discrimination as they were in the first days of the struggle. If care is not taken, the people may begin to question the prolongation of the war at any moment that the enemy grants some concession. They are so used to the settler's scorn and to his declared intention to maintain his oppression at whatever cost that the slightest suggestion of any generous gesture or of any goodwill is hailed with astonishment and delight and the native bursts into a hymn of praise. It must be clearly explained to the rebel that he must on no account be blindfolded by the enemy's concessions. These concessions are no more than soops. They have no bearing on the essential question. And from the native point of view, we may lay down that a concession has nothing to do with the essentials if it does not affect the real nature of the colonial regime. For, as a matter of fact, the more brutal manifestations of the presence of the occupying power may perfectly well disappear. Indeed, such a spectacular disappearance turns out to be both a saving of expense to the colonial power and a positive way of preventing its forces being spread out over a wide area. But such a disappearance will be paid for at a high price, the price of a much stricter control of the country's future destiny. Historic examples can be quoted to help the people to see that the masquerade of giving concessions. And even the mere acceptance of the principle of concessions at any price have been bartered by not a few countries for a servitude that is less blatant but much more complete. The people and all their leaders ought to know that historical law which lays down that certain concessions are the cloak for a tighter reign. But when there has been no work of clarification, it is astonishing with what complacency the leaders of certain political parties enter into undefined compromises with the former colonialist. The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing. Whatever the native may gain through political or armed struggle is not the result of the kindliness or goodwill of the settler. It simply shows that he cannot put off granting concessions any longer. Moreover, the native ought to realize that it is not colonialism that grants such concessions, but he himself that extorts them. When the British government decides to bestow a few more seats in the National Assembly of Kenya upon the African population, it needs plenty of effrontry or else a complete ignorance of facts to maintain that the British government has made a concession. Is it not obvious that it is the Kenyon people who have made the concession? The colonized peoples, the peoples who have been robbed, must lose the habits of mind which have characterized them up to now. If need be, the native can accept a compromise with colonialism, but never a surrender of principle. All this taking stock of the situation, this enlightening of consciousness and this advance in the knowledge of the history of societies are only possible within the framework of an organization and inside the structure of a people. Such an organization is set a foot by the use of revolutionary elements coming from the towns at the beginning of the rising together with those rebels who go down into the country as the fight goes on. It is this core which constitutes the embriionic political organization of the rebellion. But on the other hand, the peasants who are all the time adding to their knowledge in the light of experience will come to show themselves capable of directing the people's struggle. Between the nation on a wartime footing and its leaders, there is established a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment. Traditional institutions are reinforced, deepened, and sometimes literally transformed. The tribunals which settle disputes, the jamas and the village assemblies turn into revolutional tribunals and political and military committees. In each fighting group and in every village, hosts of political commissioners spring up, and the people who are beginning to splinter upon the reefs of misunderstanding will be shown their bearings by these political pilots. Thus, the latter will not be afraid to tackle problems which, if left unclarified, would contribute to the bewilderment of the people. The rebel in arms is in fact vexed to see that many natives go on living their lives in the towns as if they were strangers to everything taking place in the mountains and as if they failed to realize that the essential movement for freedom has begun. The towns keep silent and they're continuing their daily humrum life gives the peasant the bitter impression that a whole sector of the nation is content to sit on the sideline. Such proofs of indifference disgust the peasants and strengthen their tendency to condemn the town's folk as a whole. The political educator ought to lead them to modify this attitude by getting them to understand that certain fractions of the population have particular interests and that these do not always coincide with the national interest. The people will thus come to understand that national independence sheds light upon many facts which are sometimes divergent and antagonistic. Such a taking stock of the situation at this precise moment of the struggle is decisive for it allows the people to pass from total indiscriminating nationalism to social and economic awareness. The people who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive manism of the settler. Blacks and whites, Arabs and Christians realize as they go along that it sometimes happens that you get blacks who are whiter than the whites. that the fact of having a national flag in the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the population to give up their interests or privileges. The people come to realize that natives like themselves do not lose sight of the main chance, but quite on the contrary seem to make use of the war in order to strengthen their material situation and their growing power. Certain natives continue to profiteeer and exploit the war, making their gains at the expense of the people who, as usual, are prepared to sacrifice everything and water their native soil with their blood. The militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realizes that while he is breaking down colonial oppression, he is building up automatically yet another system of exploitation. This discovery is unpleasant, bitter, and sickening. And yet everything seemed to be so simple before. The bad people were on one side and the good on the other. The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi darkness that bewilders the senses. The people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face or an Arab one and they raise the cry of treason. But the cry is mistaken and the mistake must be corrected. The treason is not national. It is social. The people must be taught to cry stop thief. In their weary road toward rational knowledge, the people must also give up their too simple conception of their overlords. The species is breaking up under their very eyes. As they look around them, they notice that certain settlers do not join in the general guilty hysteria. There are differences in the same species. Such men who before were included without distinction and indiscriminately in the monolithic mass of the foreigner's presence actually go so far as to condemn the colonial war. The scandal explodes when the prototypes of this division of the species go over to the enemy, become nwords or Arabs, and accept suffering, torture, and death. Such examples disarm the general hatred that the native feels toward the foreign settlement. The native surrounds these few men with warm affection, and tends by a kind of emotional overvaluation to place absolute confidence in them. In the mother country, once looked upon as a bloodthirsty and implacable stepmother, many voices are raised, some those of prominent citizens in condemnation of the policy of war that their government is following, advising that the national will of the colonized people should be taken into consideration. Certain soldiers desert from the colonialist ranks. Others explicitly refuse to fight against the people's liberty and go to prison for the sake of the right of that people to independence and self-government. The settler is not simply the man who must be killed. Many members of the mass of colonialists reveal themselves to be much much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation. The barriers of blood and race prejudice are broken down on both sides. In the same way, not every n-word or Muslim is issued automatically a hallmark of genuiness, and the gun or the knife is not inevitably reached for when a settler makes his appearance. Consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited, and unstable. As we may surmise, all this is very difficult. The task of bringing the people to maturity will be made easier by the thoroughess of the organization and by the high intellectual level of its leaders. The force of intellect increases and becomes more elaborate as the struggle goes on. As the enemy increases his maneuvers and as victories are gained and defeats suffered. The leaders show their power and authority by criticizing mistakes, using every appraisal of past conduct to bring the lesson home and thus ensure fresh conditions for progress. Each local eb of the tide will be used to review the question from the standpoint of all villages and of all political networks. The rebellion gives proof of its rational basis and expresses its maturity each time that it uses a particular case to advance the people's awareness. In defiance of those inside the movement who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute dangers and drive wedges into the solid block of popular opinion. The leaders stand firm upon those principles that have been sifted out in the national struggle in the worldwide struggle of mankind for his freedom. There exists a brutality of thought and a mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions. But there also exists another kind of brutality which is astonishingly like the first and which is typically anti-revolutionary, hazardous and anarchist. This unmixed and total brutality, if not immediately combed, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks. The nationalist militant who had fled from the town in disgust at the demagoguic and reformist maneuvers of the leaders there, disappointed by political life, discovers in real action a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old. These politics are the politics of leaders and organizers living inside history who take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for freedom. These politics are national, revolutionary and social. And these new facts which the native will now come to know exist only in action. They are the essence of the fight which explodes the old colonial truths and reveals unexpected facets which brings out new meanings and pinpoints the contradictions camouflaged by these facts. The people engaged in the struggle who because of it command and know these facts go forward freed from colonialism and forewarned of all attempts at mystification inoculated against all national anthems. Violence alone, violence committed by the people. Violence organized and educated by its leaders makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there's nothing but a fancy dress parade and the blare of the trumpets. There's nothing save a minimum of readaptation. A few reforms at the top, a flag waving, and down there at the bottom, an undivided mass still living in the Middle Ages, endlessly marking time. So ends chapter 2 of France Fernan's the wretched of the earth spontaneity its strength and weakness and our next chapter that we will be reading is titled the pitfalls of national consciousness. Thanks for reading along with me.