Lest we forget ...

Posted by Madibeng Kgwete: 25 March 2009

One of Jean-Paul Sartre’s observations in his famous preface to Franz Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth, is that, during the colonial period: “The European élite undertook to manufacture a native elite,” singling out promising adolescents and branding them with the principles of western culture.

According to Sarte, the colonisers would take these promising young people to Western countries for indoctrination and then sent them home, whitewashed. “These walking lies,” Sartre says, “had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.”

For it to succeed, “the national revolution must be socialist; if its career is cut short, if the native bourgeoisie takes over power, the new State, in spite of its formal sovereignty, remains in the hands of the imperialists.”

When the colonizers come knocking, dressed up as liberators and modernizers, Sartre warns that “everything will be done to wipe out [the traditions of the colonized societies], to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours.”

But how will that be done? Well, Sartre explains: “Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job; guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him by dint of flogging to till the land for them.

“If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and he’s a dead man; if he gives in, he degrades himself and he is no longer a man at all; shame and fear will split up his character and make his inmost self fall to pieces.”

The reason so many different tribal groups in former colonies fight against each other is this: “they cannot face the real enemy,” says Sartre — “and you can count on colonial policy to keep up their rivalries.”

Look at Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for example. When President Mwai Kibaki was announced as winner after the December 2007 elections, the opposition, led by Raila Odinga, disputed the results; and what happened? The poor went on rampage on the streets, fighting along tribal lines.

In the midst of the riots, between 700 and 1000 people were left dead, with an estimated 260 000 more displaced because of violence, fought along narrow party political and tribal lines. And what would Sartre say? “They cannot face the real enemy” – the power-hungry leaders who incite violence and fight for positions using the poor.

Whatever our fate as Africans, we can’t say we were never warned. We can’t always quote Greek philosophers when we had amongst us the likes of Fanon and his fellow comrades in the struggle for freedom: freedom from colonialism, imperialism, hunger, fear, as well as economic and cultural dependence on former masters.