Education, Part 4c
We must not voodoo the people
In the well-known chapter
from “The Wretched of the Earth” called “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”,
Frantz Fanon says things like:
“In its
beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies
itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think
that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already
senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness or the will
to succeed of youth.”
After such denunciations, it
is quite easy to overlook the more positive, last third of this essay, in which
Fanon the freedom fighter and psychologist seeks to prescribe what the
newly-independent ex-colonial country, which he refers to as the
under-developed country, should do; and this mostly has to do with education.
For example:
“Everything can be explained to the people,
on the single condition that you really want them to understand.”
“Now,
political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the
birth of their intelligence; as Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls'. To
educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political
speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the
masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their
responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is
no such thing as a demiurge, 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.”
“The
collective struggle presupposes collective responsibility at the base and
collegiate responsibility at the top. Yes; everybody will have to be
compromised in the fight for the common good. No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers.
We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country
and in the terrifying emptiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a
coward or a traitor.”
“The duty of
those at the head of the movement is to have the masses behind them. Allegiance
presupposes awareness and understanding of the mission which has to be
fulfilled; in short, an intellectual position, however embryonic. We must not voodoo the people, nor
dissolve them in emotion and confusion.”
“To educate
the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of
the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.”
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Frantz
Fanon, Pitfalls of National Consciousness, 1963, Part 3.
Here are some words from the
Conclusion to Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”:
“Let us try
to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to
triumphant birth.
“All the
elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different
times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in
practice the mission which fell to them, which consisted of bringing their
whole weight to bear violently upon these elements, of modifying their
arrangement and their nature, of changing them and, finally, of bringing the
problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.
“Today, we
are present at the stasis of Europe.
“Two
centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It
succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which
the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling
dimensions.
“Comrades,
have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe?”
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