Frantz Fanon. David Macey

of Fanon’s role. Ever since its birth in the 1930s, modern Algerian nationalism has been defined as ‘Arab-Islamic’, and it is very difficult to absorb a black agnostic into that nationalism. Within two years of independence, it could be argued by certain Algerians that ‘Fanonism’ was an alien ideology which was foreign to Islam, and therefore to the Algerian nation, and that Fanon could not be Algerian because he was not a Muslim.¹⁹ In the 1970s, similar points were being made by Mohammed El Milli, a graduate of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University and Director of Information for the Algerian Ministry of Information and Culture. El Milli once worked with Fanon on the FLN’s newspaper El Moudjahid, but he was at pains to stress that Fanon owed much more to the Algerian revolution than it owed to him.²⁰ Attempts to turn Fanon into ‘a key figure in the Algerian FLN’²¹ or ‘one of the chief theoreticians of the Algerian struggle’²² are simply not consonant with either contemporary or historical accounts of the Algerian revolution, none of which gives Fanon a leading role.²³

      In his autopsy of the war of independence, Ferhat Abbas, who was the GPRA’s first president and was for a while quite close to ‘this psychiatrist-doctor’, does not accord him any great importance in either organizational or political terms.²⁴ Even as a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria, Fanon had little power. Ambassadors for self-proclaimed provisional governments have little or no internationally recognized authority; Fanon did not have a diplomatic passport and travelled on short-term tourist visas. He was never a member of the FLN’s ruling body, the Comité de coordination et d’exécution, or of the Provisional Government established in September 1958. A colleague who worked with him in both Algeria and Tunisia recalls one of the inevitable discussions in Tunis in which Algerian exiles speculated about what they would do ‘after independence’. Someone half jokingly told Fanon that he would become Minister for Health. He was certainly better qualified than most in the FLN and even the GPRA to hold that position, but a touchy Fanon snapped that he did not want to be a minister. He was a psychiatrist, and he wanted to go on being a psychiatrist in an independent Algeria.²⁵ Fanon certainly did not see himself as the Algerian Revolution’s chief theoretician and he has been cast in that role by default. There was ‘only one hero’ and in a sense, this was a revolution without a face. For many outside Algeria, Fanon became its face or perhaps its mask. The mask of ‘chief theoretician’ conceals as much as it reveals about both Fanon and Algeria.

      In Martinique, Fort-de-France has its Avenue Frantz Fanon, as does the neighbouring town of Le Lamentin. There is a Centre Culturel Frantz Fanon in the suburbs of the capital, and a dilapidated Forum Frantz Fanon on the Savanne once hosted open-air events and meetings. The town of La Trinité has a Lycée Frantz Fanon. Yet, here too, it was possible to complain in 1991 that ‘For a very long time, Fanon has been marginalized by everyone, including the Martinique Communist Party.’ Here too, it could be said that even the generation of 1968 completely eclipsed Fanon, so great was the enthusiasm for revolutions that had taken place elsewhere in China and Albania.²⁶ Fanon is an uncomfortable presence in Martinique, and particularly in Fort-de-France. It is difficult to reconcile the existence of an ‘Avenue Frantz Fanon’ and the inevitable evocation of the wretched of the earth with the street names that invoke a republican and abolitionist tradition (rue de la Liberté, rue Lamartine, rue Victor Hugo, rue Marat . . .) in such a way as to suggest that the history of Martinique began with the final abolition of slavery in 1848. A slightly different note is struck by the name of a street in the Terres-Sainville area, just outside the centre. Here, the rue de la Pétition des ouvriers de Paris recalls that, in 1848, the Parisian working class petitioned for the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, but it still suggests that Martinique’s history centres on Paris. The statue in front of the Palais de Justice depicts Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893), the parliamentary architect of abolition: ‘the liberator frozen in a liberation of whitened stone’.²⁷ In a paternalistic gesture, his right arm is draped around the shoulder of a black child; his left hand points the way to freedom. This is ‘white France caressing the frizzy hair of this fine negro whose chains have just been broken’.²⁸ Only the graffiti on Schoelcher’s plinth suggests that his statue might not tell the whole story: ‘Death to the colonists.’

      A further hint that the urban landscape of Fort-de-France might not tell the whole truth about its history can be seen on the Savanne, the large grassy square where a young Fanon played football on Sundays. The Savanne’s most famous monument is the statue of Joséphine. Marie-Josèphe Tascher de la Pagerie (1763–1814) was a white Creole born in Les Trois Ilets across the bay from Fort-de-France, and wife to Napoleon from 1794 to 1809, when he repudiated her because she could not give him an heir. The cult of Joséphine is alive and well in Martinique and there are still those who, like the Mayotte Capécia Fanon despised so much, can say that ‘The fact that a woman from Martinique could become Empress of the French, of the whole French Empire, filled us all with pride. We venerated her and, like every little girl in Martinique, I often dreamed of that unparalleled destiny.’²⁹ Others do not take that view. ‘Joséphine, Empress of the French, dreaming very high above the nigger mob [la négraille]’,³⁰ is widely believed to have been responsible for the reintroduction of slavery, which was first abolished in 1794, in the Napoleonic period. In 1991, Joséphine’s head was removed by some unidentified supporters of independence for Martinique, and it has never been replaced. The plinth of her statue has been daubed in red with Creole slogans demanding ‘Respect for Martinique’. Precisely how the head of a marble statue standing within earshot of a police station could be removed at night without anyone seeing or hearing anything is one of Martinique’s mysteries.

      The streets of the little southern town of Rivière-Pilote tell a different story to those of Fort-de-France. A plaque in the rue du Marronage records the history of the runaway slaves or marrons who launched armed attacks on the white plantations.³¹ It explains: ‘In the Caribbean, some slaves fled to the hills and woods in order to rebel against slavery and to prepare for insurrection. This was marronage. The marron-blacks [les nègs-marrons] formed communities and organized themselves into small armies under the command of one leader in order to launch attacks on the plantations of the white masters so as to liberate their brothers and their country. Their heroic leaders included: Makandal, Boukman, Palmarès, Pagamé, Moncouchi, Simao, Secho . . .’

      Nearby, a plaque in the rue des Insurrections anti-esclavagistes records the history of two centuries of slave rebellions. The French text reads: ‘Brought by force from Guinea, Senegal, Dahomey, Angola, etc., by French slavers, our Ancestors waged a fierce struggle for freedom from the very first days of their deportation and throughout the two hundred years of slavery: 1639, 1748, 1776. 1801: revolt in Le Carbet, led by Jean Kira, who raised the black and red flag. 1817: insurrection in St.-Pierre, organized by Molière. 1822: rising in Le Carbet. 1831: insurrection in St.-Pierre. 1833: revolt in Le Lorrain (formerly known as Grande Anse). May 1848: the slaves are victorious.’ It ends with an inscription in Creole: ‘Nég pété chenn’ (‘The black man broke his chains’). Slavery was abolished in the French colonies on 27 April 1848, but before the official decree reached Martinique, one final insurrection forced the governor to make a premature declaration of its abolition.³² That Fanon never mentions this insurrection, and believed that France simply granted her colonial slaves their freedom without a struggle,³³ is a telling indictment of the history he was taught at school.

      It is very unusual to see Creole inscribed in a public space, other than in the form of a graffitied ‘Wançais dewo’ (‘French out’). From 1946 onwards, Fort-de-France was the fief of Aimé Césaire, mayor, député, poet of negritude, former Communist and founder, in 1956, of the Parti Populaire Martiniquais; Rivière-Pilote is the stronghold of Alfred Marie-Jeanne, former teacher, mayor and founder, in 1972, of the small Mouvement Indépendentiste Martiniquais (MIM).³⁴ In the general election of June 1997, Marie-Jeanne won the parliamentary seat of Le François and Le Robert with 64.07 per cent of the votes cast.³⁵ It is probable that the vote reflected the popularity of an energetic mayor rather than active support for independence for Martinique, but Marie-Jeanne has been described by a political opponent as ‘the marron who slumbers in all of us’; he himself claims to be ‘one of those negroes that France despises so much’ and as ‘a great rebel before the Lord’.³⁶