Both Chris Hani and Steve Biko echoed Frantz Fanon’s warning that unless the fight against oppression is a fundamental one, decolonisation will just mean ‘the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period’. Part 2 in a two-part series.
Read Part 1 here
Many of the people who invoke Fanon don’t seem to have read his extraordinarily prescient The Wretched of the Earth, and, more particularly, its chapter “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”.
Written in 1961, it could easily be thought of having been published yesterday, as will shortly be demonstrated. So germane is this chapter that it merits a longish quotation: “The (post-independence) national middle class discovers its historic mission: that of intermediary. Seen through its eyes, its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation; it consists, prosaically, of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neocolonialism.
“The (post-independence) national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent… But this same lucrative role, this cheap-jack’s function, this meanness of outlook and this absence of all ambition symbolise the incapability of the national middle class to fulfil its historic role of bourgeoisie (embedded in capitalism).
