This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.

Mural of Paulo Freire at the entrance to the Florestan Fernandes National School of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Guararema, Brazil, 2018. 
Richard Pithouse

From Brazil to Africa

Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921. After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and dependence of the oppressed.

In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school programmes sponsored by the US government through agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere.

In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced to leave the country.

During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.

Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.

Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the domination of consciousness. This domination — which, of course, is entwined with racism and sexism — can seep into our being, our actions, and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that requires constant learning.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.

In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this position until 1991. He died in 1997.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world. In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987, Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite among the oppressed could become new oppressors.

Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.

In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an important radical intellectual in many fields, including education, explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and struggle.

Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone — both the oppressed and the oppressor — and that emancipatory forms of politics — the strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice — are, ultimately, a demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.

But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors’.[1] Freire believed that political education during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor’.

For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human; the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said, there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is ‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as ‘foreigners’) for their poverty.

True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and critically about how things really are (our actual lives and experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we can fight more effectively to end it.

The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions — especially by asking ‘why?’ — to understand the root causes of why things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about. Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others [is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account. Freire wrote that:

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.

This is very different from many political education programmes organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people — they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress’.

Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as equals.

Freire wrote that:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.

In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.

This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.

Book covers of Pedagogy of the Oppressed in different languages.

The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa

Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking and methods.

The Black Consciousness Movement

Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement (UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire … made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.

Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana remembers that:

Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and understanding that they had.

For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know. And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive system in South Africa.

Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against white supremacy.

The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation. Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso, explains that the link between Black Consciousness and ‘conscientisation’ is clear:

The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words … joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay … for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated but it is systemic.

Steve Biko (standing) and Rubin Phillip (far right) at a 1971 conference of the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso) in Durban.
Steve Biko Foundation
Steve Biko
Fraser MacLean / Historical Papers Research Archive University of the Witwatersrand

The Church

In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa. Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an Anglican archbishop, explains that:

Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology. He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of liberation theology.

In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were — together with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the United States — a powerful influence on various currents of struggle. Bishop Rubin recalls that:

The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.

The Workers’ Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso. The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker education projects were started by left students in and around the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire, primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.

During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists, such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became committed activists.

David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:

Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement. Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings striving for freedom.

Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). He recalls that:

Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about teaching and an affirmative way of teaching – taking into account the audience and how to relate with the audience.

In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward, a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a sweeper a defined general worker.

Clover’s main factory at Congella (Durban) was crippled when its 500 African employees went on strike for higher wages. 7 February 1973, Clover Dairy, Durban. 
Mike Duff / Source Sunday Times

After the Durban Moment

The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the foundations for much of the struggle to come.

But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.

Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner was assassinated.

In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was — in the spirit of the Durban Moment — strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop stewards.

In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It united community-based organisations across the country with a commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s, millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles that were linked together through the UDF.

Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the 1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in Sached — he was the Cape Town director — and in other education circles he was involved in. John Samuels — the national director of Sached — met Freire in Geneva’.

From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over society. Others thought that building democratic practices and structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life — in workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.

Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late 1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders.

Rick Turner, undated.
Helen Joseph Collection of the Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand
(Left to right) Henry Fazzie, Murphy Morobe, and Albertina Sisulu at Khotso House, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF). Johannesburg, South Africa, undated.
Joe Sefale / Gallo Images
Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) meeting, undated.
Wits Historical Papers

Paulo Freire Today

Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of “conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among ourselves as conscientised students’.

In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods, such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in 1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.

Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with new struggles.

Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:

In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power. Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that is taken by the cruelty of oppression].

In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the MST’s political education school.

There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.

Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer, explains that:

The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We don’t believe in the banking method of education.

Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And consciousness has no real beginning’.

The Frantz Fanon Political School at the eKhenana Land Occupation of Abahlali baseMjondolo, Cato Manor, Durban, South Africa. 14 October 2020.
Richard Pithouse

Acknowledgements

This dossier was researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa.

We would like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for this dossier:

Omar Badsha, Judy Favish, David Hemson, Aubrey Mokoape, Mabogo More, Zodwa Nsibande, David Ntseng, John Pampallis, Bishop Rubin Phillip, Barney Pityana, Patricia (Pat) Horn, Vuyolwethu Toli, Salim Vally, and S’bu Zikode.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for contributing to the research that informed this dossier:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, The Church Land Programme, Levante Popular da Juventude (‘Popular Youth Uprising’), The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, The Paulo Freire National School, and The Umtapo Centre.

We would also like to thank Anne Harley, whose pioneering work on Freire’s ideas in South Africa opened the door for much of the work done here, and who offered generous support to the production of this dossier

Further Reading

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Raven Press. 1996.

Friedman, Steven. Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970-1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.1987

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 1976.

Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. 1993.

Freire, Paulo and Macedo, Donaldo. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. 1987.

Hadfield, Leslie. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1996

Macqueen, Ian. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008

Magaziner, Dan. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2008

More, Mabogo. Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Pretoria: HSRC Press. 2017.

Pityana, Barney; Ramphele, Mamphele; Mpumlwana, Malusi and Wilson, Lindy (Eds.) Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. David Philip, Cape Town. 2006.

Turner, Rick. The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg. Ravan Press. 1980.

The flags of the MST and Abahlali baseMjondolo photographed at the celebration of the movement’s fifteenth anniversary. eKhenanan occupation, Durban, South Africa, 4 October 2020. 
Landh Tshazi / Abahlali baseMjondolo

[1] In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and developing emancipatory alternatives.

Frantz Fanon walking up a ship gangway. To Fanon’s right is Rheda Malek, a journalist from the Algerian National Liberation Front newspaper El Moudjahid. .
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

French colonial map of Martinique from the Covens & Mortier’s Atlas Nouveau, 1942.
Wikimedia Commons / Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

On this earth there is that which deserves life.

Mahmoud Darwish

Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. He was thirty-six years old. At thirty-six he had been a protagonist in two wars, a political militant in the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa, a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist.

Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara – another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist – Fanon’s life was marked by a permanent, courageous, and militant motion into the present, and into the specificity of the situations in which he found himself.

Fanon’s thought carries, in Ato Sekyi-Otu’s memorable phrase, an ‘irrepressible … openness to the universal’. In the realm of the political, as in the poetic, the truest route into the universal has always been through an intense engagement with the particular in its concrete manifestations in space and time: this piece of land occupied in the interstices of this city, these women rebuilding in the ruins of the last attack, the plastic burning in this brazier as the night wears on, these men stepping out of the shadows with these guns.

‘Courage’, Alain Badiou writes, ‘is a local virtue. It takes up a morality of the place’. This is the terrain on which the radical thinkers who produce work that sustains a capacity for illumination and inspiration across space and time ground their intellect. It can be dangerous terrain. For the militant the price for the possibility that, in Fanon’s words written in France in 1952, ‘two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over the world’ may be that ‘the possibility of annihilation’ is risked.

For the radical intellectual, the confrontation with the particular may sometimes require solitary labour, as in some forms of prison writing. But the primary ground of militant reason is, in Karl Marx’s words, ‘participation in politics, and therefore real struggles’. And emancipation – communism, in Marx’s words – is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ and not ‘an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself’.

For Marx, the world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle. Cedric Robinson speaks to this imperative when he writes that, in order to ‘cement pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action’, it is necessary to ensure that ‘the practice of theory is informed by struggle’.

For Fanon, the development of radical reason – which is to say emancipatory reason – certainly includes conversation with philosophy as it is defined by Paulin Hountondji: ‘not a system but a history’. But, the plane of becoming on which this work constitutes itself is, not unlike Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, that of struggle – the struggles of the damned of the earth. Fanon is, in Gramsci’s terms, a democratic philosopher. ‘This philosopher’, Peter Thomas writes, ‘is no longer defined in terms of separation from the “life of the people”, but as an expressive element of that life which it aims to cultivate, increasing its capacity for active relations of knowledge and practice’.

Since his death in late 1961, Fanon’s thought has had an extraordinary life, reaching from the maelstrom of the Algerian revolution to the American prison, the French banlieue, the Brazilian favela, and far beyond. Sometimes expressed via a potent poeticism and always rooted in a radical humanism – an immediate, universal and militant affirmation of the equality and value of human life – his political vision is resolutely opposed to the Manichean logic of colonialism.

Manichaeism is a central concept in Fanon’s thought. The term comes to us from a religion founded by Mani, known by his followers as the ‘Apostle of Light’, in Babylonia in the third century. Mani wove a set of diverse religions into a single new faith that proposed an absolute dualism between good and evil represented, in symbolic terms, by light and dark. Brought into contemporary discourse as metaphor, Manichaeism speaks to an absolute split between all things light and good (and true, beautiful, clean, healthy, prosperous, etc.) and all things dark and evil (and false, ugly, dirty, diseased, impoverished etc.). It is an inherently paranoid orientation to the world.

Fanon’s thought is marked by an axiomatic commitment to an immediate and radical egalitarianism – including the recognition of a universal capacity for reason. It is shaped, in its deep structure, by a profoundly dialectical sense of the capacity for the human to be in motion. His thought, taken as a whole, did not waver from what Aimé Césaire, the extraordinary surrealist poet, described as the obligation ‘to see clearly, to think clearly — that is, dangerously’.

Liberation must, Fanon insists, restore ‘dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein’. For Fanon, the restoration of dignity is not a matter of return. The journey towards what, in the last year of his life, in a letter written to the Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati, he called ‘that destination where humanity lives well’ is undertaken via a constant process of becoming and enlargement of the sphere of democratic reason. As Lewis Gordon notes, for Fanon, legitimacy is not a matter of offering proof of racial or cultural authenticity; rather, it emerges ‘from active engagement in struggles for social transformation and building institutions and ideas that nourish and liberate the formerly colonized’.

For the university-trained intellectual, Fanon poses a simple demand, but one that retains its radical charge almost sixty years later: to move beyond the ontological and spatial ordering of oppression and commit to a form of insurgent and democratic praxis in which ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’ is developed between protagonists from different social locations.

Frantz Fanon at a press conference of writers in Tunis, 1959.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

(Mis)readings

Fanon’s last book, Les Damnés de la Terre, arrived in the world shortly after he left it. In 1963 it was mistranslated into English as The Wretched of the Earth. Some scholars prefer to refer to it as The Damned of the Earth, which is a better translation. From the outset, Jean-Paul Sartre, a committed anti-colonial intellectual, set many readers off course with an introduction that – although sympathetic – misinterpreted Fanon as a Manichean thinker. In 1970 Hannah Arendt, a thinker who acquired significant standing in the North American academy and beyond despite taking consistently anti-black positions, compounded the problem with an influential misreading that reduced Fanon’s complex thought to his support for armed struggle against colonialism.

However, there is a set of intellectuals who have read Fanon as a sophisticated thinker rather than a racial archetype. Paulo Freire was one of the first major intellectuals to understand Fanon’s theory of praxis. In 1968, Freire was finishing the manuscript of his second book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in Santiago while living in exile from the military dictatorship in Brazil. In an interview in California in 1987, he recalled: ‘A young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’.

After reading Fanon, Freire developed a radical humanism committed to the immediate recognition of the full and equal personhood of the oppressed as a pre-condition for emancipatory action. Like Fanon, his form of praxis is predicated on an ethic of mutuality between the authorised intellectual and people who have not had access to much formal education.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published later that year and, in 1972, it was taken up by the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) which had been formed by Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, Rubin Phillip, and others, in 1968. Beginning in Durban, Freirean ideas became central to a form of radically democratic action that aimed to work towards critical consciousness as a shared project, rather than to announce new versions of what Marx had called ‘dogmatic abstraction’ to the people.

In the late 1970s, and through the 1980s, Freirean ideas about praxis – shaped to a significant extent by Fanon, and in many cases read together with Fanon – were central to the political work undertaken in workplace and community struggles across South Africa. Freire’s theory of praxis enabled the emergence of some of the most impressive and powerful social forces on the planet at the time, in which ordinary people became central protagonists in struggle, and in the making of meaning, counter-power, and history from below.

In terms of reading Fanon as a theorist of praxis, the quick but extraordinary and enduring response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots by Sylvia Wynter was exemplary. In her explicitly Fanonian conclusion to No Humans Involved: A Letter to My Colleagues, she reached beyond Los Angeles and towards ‘the throwaway lives . . . of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the “favela/shanty town” of the globe and their jobless archipelagos’. Wynter argued that, for university-trained intellectuals – who she understands as trained ‘grammarians’ of the constituted order, an order that does not count everyone as equally human – it is imperative to ‘marry our thought’ to that of the oppressed.

In 1996, Sekyi-Otu produced a brilliant and deeply dialectical African-centred reading of Fanon that situated the question of praxis, and – crucially – what Sekyi-Otu calls ‘the reprieve of prodigal reason’ at the heart of what Fanon referred to as ‘the weary road to rational knowledge’. Scholars like Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon and Tracy Sharpley-Whiting have also significantly enriched the scholarship on Fanon.

Meeting of Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dwellers’ movement, in February 2020.  Rajesh Jantilal

Radical Humanism

In contemporary South Africa, Fanon is read and discussed from the political education workshop organised on a hard-won urban land occupation to the trade union political school to the academy, in both its dissident spaces and in its highest reaches. Fanon’s life and work offer inspiration as well as analytical acuity to all of these audiences. Achille Mbembe, writing from Johannesburg, explains that:

I myself have been attracted to Fanon’s name and voice because both have the brightness of metal. His is a metamorphic thought, animated by an indestructible will to live. What gives this metallic thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and, its corollary, the injunction to stand up. It is the inexhaustible silo of humanity that it houses and which, yesterday, gave the colonised strength and which, today, allows us to look forward to the future.

There are numerous lines of connection that open fruitful possibilities for dialogue between Fanon’s work and contemporary forms of struggle. These range from his account of the centrality of the racialisation of space and the spacialisation of race in the settler colonial project, to questions of language, policing, the racial unconscious, and – of course – the brutal realities of what has come to be termed the postcolony.

In the metropolitan academy, Fanon’s humanism is, with notable exceptions – such as the valuable work of Paul Gilroy – often ignored or treated as passé, or even pre-critical. Sneering condescension from people whose humanity has never been placed in question is not uncommon. But in contemporary South Africa, it is the question of the human – of how the count of the human is made, and how humanity is asserted – that ties Fanon’s theoretical work most closely to the intellectual work undertaken in the often-perilous struggles for land and dignity. Here, dignity is understood as the recognition of full and equal humanity, including the right to participate in deciding public affairs. These kinds of struggles – frequently undertaken against considerable violence from the state and the ruling party, and the contempt of civil society – are fundamentally rooted in an insurgent humanism which legitimates and sustains resistance. Nigel Gibson’s important work on Fanon and South Africa has a firm grasp of this.

The contemporary political potency of radical humanism is not unique to South Africa. From Caracas to La Paz to Port-au-Prince, accounts of popular and potentially emancipatory politics frequently stress the neighbourhood as an important site of struggle, the road blockade and the occupation as important tactics, and the affirmation of the humanity of the oppressed as the foundation of the strength to sustain resistance. This affirmation is often explained as being sustained by social practices in which women play a leading role, and frequently spoken of in terms of the recovery of dignity. It is not uncommon to hear people speak of indignity as consequent to the expropriation of the right to participate in making decisions about public affairs, as well as land, labour, and bodily autonomy.

The question of the human is, in part, a question of how oppression seeks to distribute the attribution of the capacity for reason, and to recognise some speech as speech while dismissing other speech as mere noise – noise consequent to unreason. It is a question of how we determine who is honoured and who is dishonoured, who can be slandered with impunity and who deserves public respect, whose life is valued and whose is not, whose lives should ordinarily be governed with law and whose should routinely be governed with violence, and who, in death, should be mourned and who should not. The denial of full and equal humanity allows oppression to draw the line between forms of organisation and contestation that it can see as politics, and those that it cannot, and between civil society and the sphere of engagement that it considers to be mindless, criminal, or a manifestation of conspiracy.

Fanon’s radical humanism, a humanism made – in Césaire’s famous phrase – ‘to the measure of the world’, sustains a capacity to speak with real power to many of the ways in which the question of the human is posed, and contested, from within contemporary forms of grassroots militancy undertaken from zones of social exclusion and domination.

The Open Door of Every Consciousness

Before coming to France in late 1946 to study medicine, and then to specialise in psychiatry, Fanon had been a soldier with the Forces françaises libres (‘the Free French Forces’), fighting against fascism in Europe while simultaneously confronting constant racism within the French army. In 1944 he was wounded in the battle for Colmar, a French town near the German border, and received the Croix de Guerre for bravery. In 1945 he returned home to Martinique, where he worked for the successful campaign by Césaire to be elected as the mayor of Fort de France on a Communist platform.

From the outset, Fanon’s writings in France were concerned with how racism produces what Michel-Rolph Trouillot would later term ‘an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants’. In The North African Syndrome, an essay published at the age of 26,  Fanon examined how French medical science approached the North African migrant with ‘an a priori attitude’ that, crucially, is not derived ‘experimentally’ but, rather, ‘on the basis of an oral tradition’. He observed that that ‘The North African does not come with a substratum common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African, spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing on the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework’. In this framework, the North African appears to the French doctor as ‘a simulator, a liar, a malingerer, a sluggard, a thief’.

Stephen Biko (standing) at the 1971 conference of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). The Alan Taylor Residence hall, where the event was held, was the University of Natal’s black-only residence for medical students under apartheid.
Steve Biko Foundation

Fanon shows that in the consciousness of the racist, and in the general intellect of racist social formations, the imagined ontological split on which racist ideology depends is part of what Immanuel Kant called the a priori – the categories through which sense is made of experience. This deception of reason – what Gordon calls ‘racist rationality’ – results in racist societies producing forms of knowledge that, while authorised as the most fully formed instances of reason at work, are fundamentally irrational.

Fanon’s first book, Peau noire, masques blancs was published in the French summer of 1952, a few months after The North African Syndrome, and in the same year as Richard Wright’s Invisible Man, with which it has often been read. It was translated into English as Black Skin, White Masks in 1967. Superbly analysed by Gordon, it is both a statement of a radical and affirmative commitment to human freedom and a brilliant critique of racism in the Caribbean and in the metropole that engages questions ranging from language to popular culture, to romance and sex, to anthropology and psychology. It remains a foundational text for critical race studies.

Black Skin, White Masks was dictated to Josie Dublé, a comrade and lover who Fanon would later marry, as he paced up and down in his student room in Lyon. The prose carries a sense of the cadence of that motion and is sculpted by a compelling poeticism with discernible influences from his reading of poets like Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain. Parts of the book read, not unlike some passages from Walt Whitman, as if they were meant to be declaimed.

Every politics rests, consciously or not, on an ontology, on a theory of human being. For Fanon, there are two signal facts about human being, both mediated through an affirmative disposition. The first is that the human being ‘is motion toward the world’. In the tradition of French philosophy that runs from Sartre to Badiou, the prospect of what Fanon called the ‘mutation’ of consciousness – the capacity of the human being to change – would remain a central theme of his thought until the end. In his work produced during his immersion in the Algerian revolution, the mutation of consciousness would be explored in the context of collective struggle.

For Fanon, consciousness is not only dynamic. The second signal fact about human being is that consciousness is free in the way that it is in Sartre’s existentialism. For Fanon, ‘In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it’. But Fanon does not share the pessimism of Sartre’s view that the human is ‘a useless passion’. Fanon’s humanism carries a fundamental optimism that can arguably be located in a tradition of Caribbean humanism with African antecedents and parallels that runs from Toussaint Louverture through to Aimé Césaire and on to Sylvia Wynter and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He begins and ends his first book by insisting that ‘Man is a yes’.

His humanism also carries a universal dimension: ‘Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man’. Fanon affirms that ‘Every time a man has contributed to the victory of 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’. Of course, the use of gendered language that is sometimes (but not always) introduced in translation, is unfortunate for an intellectual who insisted that ‘[We] must guard against the danger of perpetuating the feudal tradition which holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element over the feminine’.

For Fanon, the imperative to recognise every consciousness as autonomous and possessed of the capacity to reason and to exercise freedom is ethical as well as empirical. He concludes his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, by insisting that ‘At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness’. Fanon’s commitment to the recognition of every consciousness as an open door is a universal principle, a militant axiom, entirely opposed to the aristocratic conception of philosophy that, running from Plato to Nietzsche, and on to their contemporary descendants, reserves reason for a privileged caste. Earlier in the book, he writes as a clinician and in intimation of the theory of praxis that would later be worked out in the vortex of the Algerian war:

Examining this 73-year-old farm woman, whose mind was never strong and who is now far gone in dementia, I am suddenly aware of the collapse of the antennae with which I touch and through which I am touched. The fact that I adopt a language suitable to dementia, to feeblemindedness; the fact that I ‘talk down’ to this poor woman of 73; the fact that I condescend to her in my quest for a diagnosis, are the stigmata of a dereliction in my relations with other people.

Meeting of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a leading anti-apartheid body that launched in 1983 and joined the struggles of many South African organisations.
Wits Historical Papers

Manichean Delirium

Black Skin, White Masks is also a theory of how racism ‘encases’ human being. Fanon describes wanting ‘to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together’ but finds himself ‘sealed into a crushing objecthood’. He offers a theory of racist ideology as a form of ‘Manichean delirium’ in which, in the racist imagination that structures everything from advertising to entertainment, science, and the unconscious, whiteness is associated with beauty, reason, virtue, cleanliness, and so on, and blackness with the obverse. To the limited extent that progress is possible within the logic of this schema, ‘From black to white is the course of mutation. One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent’.

Fanon describes the inevitable failure of attempts to find a way to win the recognition required to live freely against the crushing weight of racism: ‘Every hand was a losing hand for me’. One of those losing hands was reason. The fanaticism with which reason was coded as white in the racist imagination was such that it was impossible to be recognised as simultaneously reasonable and black: ‘[W]hen I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer’. The end result is collapse: ‘Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disembowelled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep’.

Fanon concludes that there can be no personal solution to the problem of racism. What is required is ‘a restructuring of the world’. He ends Black Skin, White Masks by asserting that ‘To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act’. This is a commitment to praxis, a term that appears consistently in the original French publications of the work that he would go on to produce in Tunis, but which is largely elided in English translations.

Radical Mutations

After concluding his studies in France, Fanon took up a position as the head of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, a colonial institution in which he implemented radical reforms. Alice Cherki, an intern at the hospital, and later Fanon’s most sensitive biographer, recalls that his aim as a clinician was ‘not to muzzle madness but to listen to it’.

In 1956, describing colonial society as ‘a web of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man’, he resigned from his position at the hospital to join the revolution against French colonialism from a base in Tunis. He would work for the revolution as a psychiatrist, journalist, editor, and diplomat, undertake reconnaissance work, and teach philosophy – including Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) – to soldiers on the front. In his years as a revolutionary he would encounter people like Simone de Beauvoir, Cheikh Anta Diop, Patrice Lumumba, Es’kia Mphahlele, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In December 1957, Abane Ramdane, Fanon’s closest comrade in the Algerian national liberation movement, was assassinated by a right-wing faction within the movement that aimed to subordinate political work to military authority. Fanon’s name was placed on a list of people to be watched, and subject to a similar fate should there be open defiance within the movement in response to the assassination. From this point on, Fanon lived knowing that there was a potential of significant risk from the authoritarian nationalists in the movement, and a vital struggle within the struggle.

Fanon’s second book, L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, was published in 1959 and translated into English in 1965. In English it has been known as A Dying Colonialism since 1967. The book is, Fanon explains, an account of how participation in the struggle ‘to impose reason on … [colonial] unreason’, to oppose ‘the indignity, kept alive and nourished every morning’, results in what he calls ‘essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonized’.

It is, as Cherki observes, very deliberately a book about ‘the common men and women’ – women and men in a society in motion, rather than the personalities and actions of revolutionary elites. In contrast to elitist forms of anti-colonialism that aim to direct ‘the masses’ from above, the imperative to recognise the ‘open door of every consciousness’ is extended to the common people.

Fanon makes his position clear at the outset: ‘The power of the Algerian Revolution . . . resides in the radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone’. In the context of revolutionary struggle, mutation has escaped the stranglehold of racist ideology – which can only understand progress as movement from black to white – and is now an autonomous and self-directed process.

The book offers five case studies of the kind of ‘radical mutation’ – or change in consciousness – that can take place in the vortex of struggle, of collective motion. In each case, Fanon offers an account of how the Manichaeism introduced by colonialism breaks down in struggle. The book examines how technologies introduced through colonialism and initially identified as inherently colonial – namely the radio and biomedical medicine – are taken up in struggle, how gender relations change in struggle, and, in the final chapter, how some of the European minority choose to offer support to the anti-colonial revolution.

Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

Perhaps unsurprising given the all-or-nothing context of the Algerian war, Fanon’s case studies of the development of radical political solidarities across class, gender, and race all plot a unidirectional movement of progressive enlightenment. For instance, the doctor –formerly seen as an agent of colonialism, but now ‘Sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the mechtas, living the drama of the people’ – becomes ‘our Doctor’.

Gendered norms are also shown to change in struggle. Fanon describes the Algerian woman, ‘who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action’, as ‘bursting the bounds of the narrow world in which she had lived … [and] at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman’. This aspect of Fanon’s work, and his wider engagement with gender, is very well analysed by Sharpley-Whiting, who concludes, in a rigorous feminist analysis, that it is clear that ‘Fanon recognized the Algerian woman’s right to exist as an autonomous and complete social being’.

Anyone who has participated in a sustained popular struggle will immediately recognise the value and validity of Fanon’s account of the ‘radical mutations’ that can dramatically, and often rapidly, change people’s capacities and thinking. However, in A Dying Colonialism, there is no sense of a struggle within the struggle, nor any sense that dialectical progress can be reversed, and that it often is once struggles have subsided.

A Very Hard Red

In June 1959, Fanon suffered serious injuries when a jeep he was travelling on was blown up by a mine near the Tunisian and Algerian border. He was sent to Rome for medical treatment, where he narrowly escaped assassination, most likely at the hands of a violent settler organisation linked to the French state.

In March 1960, Fanon was sent to Accra to become a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian national liberation movement, the Front de libération nationale (‘National Liberation Front’). His encounters with newly independent states were frequently dispiriting. In November 1960, he was part of a team tasked with a reconnaissance mission aimed at opening a southern front on the border with Mali, with supply lines running from Bamako across the Sahara. At the last minute, suspecting a trap, they abandoned their plan to travel by air and drove the two thousand kilometres from Monrovia to Bamako. The plane on which they had been scheduled to travel was diverted to Abidjan, where it was searched by the French military.

In his logbook, Fanon recorded his concern with the limits of forms of politics that fail to reach beyond the Manichaeism introduced by colonialism and to develop emancipatory ideas and practices: ‘Colonialism and its derivatives do not, as a matter of fact, constitute the present enemies of Africa. In a short time this continent will be liberated. For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology’.

Moved by the vast desert vistas, and returning to the poeticism of his early work, Fanon wrote that: ‘Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters’. Though the trip across the desert had left him visibly exhausted, he immediately went to Accra to write a contribution to an English-language publication by the Provisional Government of Algeria. An examination by a doctor in Accra raised the possibility of leukaemia. He returned to Tunis, took a blood test, and diagnosed himself with leukaemia. That evening, he announced his resolve to write a new book. After receiving treatment in a clinic outside of Moscow, he had a brief window of opportunity to write as the cancer went into remission.

After Frantz Fanon died in 1961, his body was carried across the border from Tunisia to be buried in Algeria.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

The Weary Road to Rational Knowledge

Parts of Fanon’s last work, The Damned of the Earth, were dictated from a mattress on the floor of a flat in Tunis as he was dying. The book offers a searing indictment of settler colonialism, a critical account of the struggle against colonialism, an equally searing account of the postcolonial morass, and a radically democratic vision of emancipatory praxis. It ends with a harrowing account of the damage wrought by the violence of colonial war.

The critique of the colonial city in the book’s opening pages is particularly powerful and continues to resonate into the present. The Manichean ideology that Fanon critiqued in France took on a concrete material form in the settler colony, of which apartheid was a paradigmatic case. The colonial world is divided into different zones, intended for different kinds of people. It is a world ‘of barbed wire entanglements’, ‘a world divided into compartments’, ‘a world cut in two’, ‘a narrow world strewn with violence’. In Fanon’s view, authentic decolonization requires a decisive end to a situation in which ‘this world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by different species’.

The description of the anti-colonial struggle continues the exploration of collective mutation developed in A Dying Colonialism. In Fanon’s narrative, the initial response to colonial oppression is fundamentally shaped by what it opposes: ‘[T]he Manichaeism of the coloniser produces a Manichaeism of the colonised’. Fanon is clear about the costs of this counter-Manicheanism: ‘To the lie of the colonial situation the colonized replies with an equal lie’. Within the struggle there is, he says, an initial ‘brutality of thought and mistrust of subtlety’.

But, as there is movement along what Fanon calls ‘the weary road to rational knowledge’, colonial paradigms are transcended rather than merely inverted. The people begin ‘to pass from total, indiscriminating nationalism to social and economic awareness’. Fanon is clear that this process requires that ‘the people must also give up their too-simple conception of their overlords’ as ‘the racial and racist standard of judgment is transcended’.

Sekyi-Otu, making a point that is crucial for enabling serious readings of the work, shows that a set of emphatic statements offered as definitive statements at the beginning of the book are later challenged as Fanon’s narrative unfolds. To take just one instance, in the beginning it is asserted that: ‘Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the indigenous people and ruins the foreigners’. Later on, Fanon explains that – as it becomes clear that ‘exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one’ – initial certainties run into obvious limits.

Fanon writes that, as the Manichean certainties that mark the first moment of struggle begin to break down, ‘The idyllic and unreal clarity of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders consciousness’. Over time, as the struggle develops, ‘Consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’. Things are rethought in the light of the experience of struggle, of collective motion, against colonialism. The fundamental purpose of Fanon’s account of this move out of the Manichean logic of colonialism is, Sekyi-Otu argues, ‘to stage the upsurge of richer modes of reasoning, judging and acting’ than those immediately accessible within the limits of colonial thought.

30 October 1974: The anniversary of the 1962 Algerian War for Independence.
Alamy

Fanon had witnessed the first years of the African Thermidor, the moment when, as he explains, the ‘liberating lava’ of the great anti-colonial struggles was cooled as the people were expelled from history, ‘sent back to their caves’ by leaders who, ‘instead of welcoming the expression of popular discontentment’ and the ‘free flow of ideas’, took it on themselves to ‘proclaim that the vocation of their people is to obey and to go on obeying’. In his last book, he was clear that holding to principle meant undertaking a struggle within the struggle, as well as confronting the colonial enemy. He warns that ‘an unceasing battle must be waged, a battle to prevent the party from ever becoming a willing tool in the hands of a leader’. Fanon argues that, in order to set the rebellion on a rational foundation, it is necessary to resist ‘those inside the movement who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute dangers’ and leaders who insist that ‘the only worthwhile dogma . . . is the unity of the nation against colonialism’.

His critique of the national bourgeoisie, ‘the rapacious bourgeoisie’, their use of the state as an instrument to prey on society, and their misuse of the history of collective struggle to shore up their own authority is unsparing. Fanon is clear that there are forms of nationalist militancy that hold ‘the same unfavourable judgments’ about the most oppressed among the colonised that are held by the colonisers. He insists that national consciousness – ‘that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors’ – must be supplemented with political and social consciousness.

Fanon issues a clear warning about parties aiming to ‘erect a framework around the people that follows an a priori schedule’ and intellectuals deciding to ‘come down into the common paths of real life’ with formulas that are ‘sterile in the extreme’. For Fanon, the vocation of the militant intellectual is to be in the ‘zone of occult instability where the people dwell’, in the ‘seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge’, and, there, to ‘collaborate on the physical plane’. He is clear that the university-trained intellectual must avoid both the inability to ‘carry on a two-sided discussion’, to engage in genuine dialogue, and its obverse, becoming ‘a sort of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the people’. Against this, he recommends ‘the inclusion of the intellectual in the upward surge of the masses’ with a view toward achieving, as noted above, ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’.

Fanon affirms the practice of mutuality rooted in an immediate commitment to radical equality, something like Marx’s youthful vision of ‘an association of free human beings who educate one another’. His consistent commitment to the recognition of ‘the open door of every consciousness’ brings him to a radically democratic understanding of struggle rooted in local practices in which dignity is affirmed, discussion carried out, and decisions taken. For Fanon, the primary task of political education is to show that ‘there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people’. He affirms the importance of ‘the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people’. There are clear resonances with C.L.R. James’ famous assertion that, in a phrase borrowed from Vladimir Lenin, ‘every cook can govern’. Fanon, committed until the end to the emancipation of reason, to its emancipation in and via struggle, ended his last book with the imperative to ‘work out new concepts’.

To be worthy of its name, communist thought must be an expression of intellect in motion, of intellect grounded in real movement, and, therefore, in permanent dialogue with others in struggle. It should carry the militant desire for – in Étienne Balibar’s pithy summation of a central thrust of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics – ‘as many as possible, thinking as much as possible’. This is the form of militancy from which Fanon speaks to us today, with such compelling power, with the brightness of metal.

A strike organised by Dano textile workers in Hammarsdale, South Africa, 1982.
Wits Historical Papers

Further Reading

Cherki, Alice. Frantz Fanon: A portrait. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,

2006.

Elhen, Patrick. Franz Fanon: A spiritual biography. New York: The Crossroad Publishing

Company, 2000.

Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1976.

Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Gibson, Nigel. Fanon: The postcolonial imagination. Londo:. Polity, 2003.

Gibson, Nigel. Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali 

baseMjondolo. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.

Gibson, Nigel & Beneduce, Roberto. Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics.

Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2017.

Gordon, Lewis. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An essay on philosophy and the 

human sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gordon, Lewis. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought.

Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1996.

Lee, Christopher. Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Johannesburg: Jacana

Press, 2015.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2016.

Neocosmos, Michael. Thinking Freedom in Africa: Towards a theory of emancipatory politics.

Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2016.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1996.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Sharpley-Whiting, Tracey. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Roman &

Littlefield, 1998. 

Wynter, Sylvia. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum H.H.I. 

Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (Fall 1994): 42-73.