Forgetting Fanon, Remembering Fanon
Early in May 1962, a French journalist working for the daily Le Monde arrived in Ghardimaou, a small Tunisian town only a few kilometres from the border with Algeria. Once a French military base, Ghardimaou was now the headquarters of the Algerian Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) (National Liberation Army) and the situation there was tense. Two photographs decorated the otherwise bleak walls of the political commissariat. They were of Fidel Castro and Frantz Fanon.1 In the last week of June, Paris-Presse’s Jean-François Kahn also travelled to Ghardimaou to report on the situation there. He too saw a photograph on the wall. It was of Frantz Fanon, ‘the pamphleteer from Martinique’. Algeria’s long war of independence was virtually at an end; the Evian agreements had been signed by the French government and the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) on 18 March and a ceasefire had come into effect the following day. Relations between Algeria’s ‘forces of the interior’ and the ‘frontier army’, penned behind the Morice Line of electrified wire entanglements, floodlights and mine-fields, had long been strained and were now almost at breaking point. Tensions between the GPRA, headed by Ahmed Ben Bella, and Colonel Houari Boumédienne’s ALN were also dangerously high. Kahn was convinced that a coup led by Boumédienne, former head of the ALN and now minister of defence, was in the offing. He was both right and wrong; Boumédienne’s Armée Nationale Populaire entered Algiers in triumph on 9 September 1962, but the coup against President Ben Bella did not occur until 1956. Boumédienne remained in power until his death in December 1978; Ben Bella remained in detention until 30 October 1980. He then spent ten years in exile, returning to Algeria only in 1990.
The djounoud (soldiers; the singular is djoundi) Kahn met in their stark concrete barracks were dressed in Chinese-style uniforms and wore neither decorations nor insignia of rank. They did not salute their officers, and addressed them in French with the familiar tu. Kahn asked a young officer what would happen if ‘certain leaders’ attempted to put a brake on their revolution. The officer was young – perhaps in his thirties – handsome and romantic-looking, but his tone was harsh and his answer brooked no argument: ‘We would eliminate them.’ The journalist concluded: ‘If one had to find an ideological name for the mystical faith that inspires these men, it would have to be “Fanonist”.’2
Kahn’s ‘Fanonists’ did indeed eliminate their enemies. As Boumédienne’s tanks swept into Algiers, they left corpses in their wake; an embittered Ferhat Abbas, who was the GPRA’s first president, later remarked that this was the only war ever fought by Boumédienne and his djounoud.3 Kahn’s spontaneous association of Fanon with ‘mystical’ violence sets the tone for much of the subsequent discussion of the man and his work. Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism. He was the horseman of a new apocalypse, the preacher of the gospel of the wretched of the earth, who were at last rising up against their oppressors. Although this image of Fanon is by no means inaccurate, it is very partial. The Fanon who advocated the use of violence in his Les Damnés de la terre, which was published as he lay dying far from Algeria, was the product of the most bloody of France’s wars of decolonization. There were other Frantz Fanons.
Frantz Fanon had been dead for six months when Kahn visited Ghardimaou, and it is possible that some of the djounoud he met there had been part of the honour guard that saluted Fanon’s body as it lay in ceremony in the field hospital. Fanon did not die, as might reasonably have been expected, in combat or at the hands of an assassin, although he did survive at least one assassination attempt. He died of leukaemia in an American hospital, and his body was flown back to Tunis in a Lockheed Electra II for burial on Algerian soil. At 14.30 on 12 December 1961, a small column crossed the border into Algeria. For the first and only time in the war of independence that they had been waging since 1954, the FLN and ALN were able to bury one of their own with full honours:
On the Algerian border. Two ALN platoons present arms as the coffin enters national territory. The coffin is placed on a stretcher made of branches, raised and carried up the slope by fifteen djounoud. An astonishing march through the forest begins, while two columns of ALN soldiers stand guard on the hillside and in the valley floor to protect the path the column is following. The forest is majestic, the sky dazzling; the column moves along silently and in absolute calm, with the bearers taking it in turn to carry the coffin.
Gunfire can be heard in the valley, further to the north. Very high in the sky, two aircraft fly over. The war is there, very close at hand, and at the same time, things are calm here. A procession of brothers has come to grant one of their own his last wish.
In a martyrs’ cemetery. Once the site of an engagement, now in liberated territory. The grave is there, carefully prepared. Speaking in Arabic, an ALN commandant pronounces a final farewell to Frantz Fanon, who was known to everyone present: ‘Our late lamented brother Fanon was a sincere militant who rebelled against colonialism and racism; as early as 1952, he was taking an active role in the activities of liberal movements while he was pursuing his studies in France. At the very beginning of the Revolution, he joined the ranks of the Front de Libération Nationale and was a living model of discipline and respect for its principles during all the time that he had to carry out the tasks with which he was entrusted by the Algerian Revolution. During one of the missions he carried out in Morocco, he was the victim of an accident which probably brought on the illness that has just carried him away. He continued to work unrelentingly and redoubled his efforts, despite the illness that was gradually gnawing away at him. Realizing that his health was obviously deteriorating, the higher authorities advised him on several occasions to cease his activities and to devote himself to treating his illness. His answer was always the same: “I will not cease my activites while Algeria still continues the struggle and I will go on with my task until my dying day.” And that indeed is what he did.’4
It was then the turn of the GPRA’s Vice-President Belkacem Krim to bid Fanon farewell:
In the name of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, in the name of the Algerian people, in the name of all your brothers in struggle and in my personal capacity, I bid you farewell.
Although you are dead, your memory will live on and will always be evoked by the noblest figures of our Revolution.
Born into a large family, you experienced at a very early age the privations and humiliations which colonialists and racists inflict upon oppressed peoples. Despite these difficulties, you succeeded in becoming a brilliant student and then began an equally brilliant career as a doctor, especially at the psychiatric hospital in Blida. But even while you were at University, your desire to be a serious student did not prevent you from taking part in the anti-colonialist struggle; the heavy obligations you faced as a conscientious doctor did not interfere with your militant activities on behalf of your oppressed brothers. Indeed, it was through your professional activities that you arrived at a better understanding of the realities of colonialist oppression and became aware of the meaning of your commitment to the struggle against that oppression. Even before our Revolution was launched, you took a sustained interest in our liberation movement. After 1 November 1954, you flung yourself into clandestine action with all your characteristic fervour, and did not hesitate to expose yourself to danger. More specifically, and despite the dangers you could