BY MULUGETA GUDETA
In “The Wretched of the Earth”, Frantz Fanon writes about national culture by saying that, “Culture has never the translucency of custom; it abhors all simplification.” For Fanon, national culture is the culture of people that were struggling to throw off the yoke of colonialism and by extension, that of neocolonialism. A close reading of Fanon reveals that there is no gap between “then” and “now”. They are the two faces of the same coin. They are continuations of the same phenomenon as expressed in the slavery of black people by colonialism and later on neocolonialism.
Speaking of the colonialists’ lack of awareness as to the condition of black people in Africa and everywhere and their claim of what they call, “civilizing mission”, he says that, “If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat.”
And in “Black Skin, White Masks” he ascertains his freedom by saying, “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.” The slavery that dehumanized his ancestors was different from the slavery that came later on. The first was the slavery of colonialism. The second is the slavery of neocolonialism; the two being organically linked.
According to Encarta Encyclopedia, “Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961), French West Indian psychiatrist and political theorist whose analyses of colonialism place him among the leading revolutionary thinkers of his time, in the United States, where Fanon’s works became popular after his death, he was a guiding figure in the black liberation movement, particularly in the formation of the Black Panther Party. “
Fanon published one of his classical works on colonialism in 1967 as “Black Skin, White Masks”. He based his work on his experiences growing up in Martinique, a then French colony with values and schooling modeled after those of France. Fanon was a black man educated in the values of the white man and prepared to become white mentally. It is his rejection of this whiteness inculcated in the back man by the white colonial power that led him to write a critical psychological treatment of feeling white while being black.
His arguments are directed against this major paradox and its attending manifestations. As a psychiatrist by training Fanon was in a unique situation to speak eloquently against the paradox of being white in a black skin. He later on became one of the major leftist intellectuals on France who spoke against colonialism in general and Algeria’s colonization by France in particular.
On the blurb page of “Black Skin, White Masks” are written the following words, “…it is Fanon the man, rather than the medical specialist or intellectual, who makes this book hard to put down. His ideas and feelings fairly our out …he became a fighter and a voice for the oppressed, whom he also had the courage to warn: no religious or mystical attitude, no psychological ‘defense’ will enable the black man to feel ‘secure’ or ‘himself’ until he is no longer the white man’s social and economic pray.”
Right in the first chapter of the book, Fanon raises the role of language in the relationship between the black and white man. He says that the black man is forced by the white man to speak his language and the black man feels that he does not exist for the white until he speaks the language of the white man. Language thus become a fundamental element in the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
Fanon says in this respect that, he ascribes a basic importance to cause, to the phenomenon of language because it provides us with one of the elements in the colored man’s comprehension for the dimension of the other because as he put it, “It is implicit that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other”. In other words, for the black man to be considered an existing being he has to speak the language of the white man and this is the basic reason why many black people go to school to learn the language of the colonizer. “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture”.
So by speaking the language of the white man, the black man somewhat feels proud and superior to his black counterpart. This may be interpreted as one of the effects of learning the language of the white that makes him feel “equal to the white man” This phenomenon was not specifically true to colonial realties. During the time of direct colonialism, the white man was imposing on the black population the necessity of speaking the metropolis’s language in order for the black man to be assimilated with the white colonizers and feel equal to them although he was not.
This is an illusion the colonizer in intentionally creates and perpetuates in order to keep the black man under the cultural yoke of the white man. After colonialism gave way to neocolonialism, the back man himself is eager to speak the language of the colonizer who was portrayed or brainwashed as inferior to the white man. For this reason, the black man eagerly resort to learning the language of the white in order to be considered “civilized”.
He however does so by shunning his own language and culture and by looking down at his fellow black people as inferior or “uncivilized”. This kind of thinking was intentionally perpetrated with the view to making the black man not only inferior to the white man but also for black people to feel inferior to the white population as long as they do not speak their language.
That may be why during the post-colonial period young black people were attracted to the culture of the metropolis and tried hard to learn the language of “civilization” at the cost of his own national language. This process however unfolds subtly rather than openly as during the period of colonialism. In the 20th century and down to our day, the metropolitan developed West subtly promoted the same policy of making the black man in Africa and around the word a “slave of the new Slavery” that is to say neocolonial slavery.
This is why young people from Africa and elsewhere went to the West in order to learn and adapt the culture of the white man if they wanted to be civilized and considered to the “civilizers”. This process was later on promoted subtly with the help of literature, films, music and other aspects of western culture. This is also why the white masters look down at those Africans who choose their own language and culture over the language of the Western nations.
We can perhaps extend this relationship from the domain of individual interactions between the colonized and the colonizers to the domain of relations between rich and poor countries. That is also why rich people from the developed West want poor countries from the so called third Word to accept and practice modernity their cultures and languages as vehicles of civilization or modernity while in actual facts they are the tools of domination and exploitation of the black people.
Relations between rich and poor countries in our days rather look like what they were sixty or seventy years ago with the difference that colonialism has evolved from overt occupation, exploitation and subjugation of poor peoples and territories into present day neo-colonialism as a more disguised, subtler but equally ferocious system of domination and exploitation of the same territories.
Sixty years ago, colonialism in Africa controlled both the lands and the peoples and their natural resources through direct rule. Nowadays, it is doing so indirectly through its agencies and institutions particularly designed for the same objectives. When Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe published his classic “Things Fall Apart” African culture had come into a head on clash with European tradition and the product was not only culture shock but the uprooting of centuries old traditional African cultures and their replacement with European cultures. It was also a moment of uprooting Africans culturally.
Since then Africans have been systematically being uprooted from their traditional and cultural practices and forced to adopt unnatural and foreign cultures that not only uprooted theirs but also planted the seeds of oppression and degradation. Africans are living in their land but they are not practicing their cultures as they were forced to transact their natural freedoms in exchange for European material benefits.
Africans have never been returned into their own natural cultural milieus but taken farther and farther away from their heritages and forced to adopt the Western or European heritages to which they had not belonged in the past. There had been a return to the land of Africans as the colonizers left the occupied territories. But there had never been a return to African spirit, African consciousness and African heritages.
They are forced to adopt the European way of life, attitudes and psychologies. They were made to live act and feel like the white men of Europe and America like what Malcolm X called the “house negroes” in America unlike the “field negroes”. This phenomenon is the focus of another African writer, namely Frantz Fanon who clinically dissected the African psychological (or psychiatric) dilemma in “Black Skin White Masks”.
Before he wrote “Black Skin, White Masks”, Fanon had given us “The Wretched of the Earth”, the first anti-colonial classic describing in great details the African colonial problematic and the way out. It is difficult if not impossible to capture the entire range of views contained in this classic treatment of colonialism.
As an anti-colonial classic, “Black Skin, White Masks” goes beyond analyzing the black versus white relationship in all its manifestations. The book is not constrained by time and does not claim to a book on colonialism. Some of its basic ideas go beyond the narrow confines of colonialism and look into the future. In one of his arguments at the end of the book, Fanon says the following: “Every time a man has contributed to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act.” This is but one place where Fanon speaks not only of the past but also of the present and the future. The future of black people and oppressed countries everywhere in the world. In this sense “Black Skin, White Masks” is not only an indictment of past colonialism but also present day Western neocolonialism.
The Ethiopian Herald October 9/2021
