Fanon, F. (1963) ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’. In The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove press, pp. 148-205.

This text is about the difficulties to raise and maintain a national consciousness, not just during the fight for freedom against the colonial power, but also during the more complex process of national reorganisation that comes afterwards. And it is during this specific moment that all the problems related with colonisation come out: unity against the centrifugal tendencies, racism, religious intolerance, corruption, economic underdevelopment and stagnation, state violence etc. In his work, Fanon seems particularly worried about the behaviour of specific categories such as the Party, the State, the leader, the intellectual class, the military and the police; but two of them represent the core of every problem: the national bourgeoisie and the masses (or The People). While Fanon gives positive attention to the latter, the former gets more attention throughout the text and receives almost all the hatred that can be possibly generated by someone. If the people need to be taught before acting in a proper way (otherwise one cannot expect too much initiative), apparently the bourgeoisie does act all the time and always in a very ‘bad way’. Even if Fanon is really engaged with the masses’ role within the nation-building process, even if it seems to be a central one, a scent of “passivity” spreads all around the argument: people act properly only after being woken up, raised, directed by the leader, taught; all this underlining the strength of the colonial education and the difficulties to overcome that piece of history.

On the other hand we have the bourgeoisie, with its frenetic acting, influencing the Party, the government, the economic life and the leader. The difference here is that the bourgeoisie do not seem to need any re-education: its position, its possibilities and, more than everything, the European role model, seems to be enough to know what is better, despite the fact that it does not do it. Fanon recognises that “The bourgeoisie is above all the direct product of precise economic condition” (p.178) and because of that the national bourgeoisie of African ex-colonies are not proper bourgeoisie. Despite that, he expects a lot from this social group, not just in terms of agency but also in terms of orienting the national culture (p.175), being what a “authentic bourgeoisie” is capable to do, like the Western ones: to serve their own interests, to reaffirm their ideology, and also to spread positive democratic ideas such as the call for participation:

A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe (…) Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a minimum of prosperity. (p.175)

But, unfortunately:

The get-rich-quick middle class shows itself incapable of great ideas or of inventiveness. It remembers what it has read in European textbooks and imperceptibly it becomes not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature (p.175).

In terms of agency for the nation-building process, this class is accused of being not only useless, but even to “retard the country evolution” (p.177). Perhaps what Fanon is not seeing is that the colonial middle class, with its greedy practices, is actually the European bourgeoisie stripped of the humanistic-developmentistic narrative. This same narrative of history, that conceives modernity as a sort of Darwinist tendency to which every society will eventually aim at, is, in Mark Neocleous’ opinion, a sort of Trojan horse for all the strategies related with securing the capitalist Western mode of production during the Cold War in the so-called “Third World” . Moving from the Fanon’s beliefs about the necessity of modernisation as national development, and the framing of this myth into a specific technology of power, I wonder how we can conceive different categories and different practices, actually able to change some of the standing power relations, and challenge somehow what is vaguely called “The System”, because even if it is difficult, I still believe it is possible. Well, this is my personal utopian horizon.

[1] Neocleous, Mark. 2008 Critique of Security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p.171-176.

Written by Miriam Grossi