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IRENE L. GENDZIER
newly liberated men of Africa. He condemned the neocolonialism of the
former mother country and the willing tools of its exploitation: the lead–
erS, the new bourgeoisie, the real "proletariat," the privileged caste
that
is the first to benefit from the advantages of independence and the end
of foreign rule. His analysis of political parties with their "ideological
laziness" and their contemptible mistrust of the rural masses left no
doubt as to where Fanon's allegiance lay. The major crime of the new
politicians and the new parties was their separation from the land and
the people. It was not the bourgeoisie as a socio-economic class he
condemned, but its African version which had neither the economic base
nor the intellectual support of the European past. Fanon saw the
bourgeoisie of Africa and of underdeveloped countries as sycophantic:
it is good for nothing; it is interested in its own betterment and it will
transform the potential strength of party into the dead hand of an ad–
ministration no better than its foreign predecessor. The dominance of
the bourgeois politician leads to its practical dictatorship, its alliance
with the army, its return to the colonial power for support.
The truth of the nation, Fanon felt, the spontaneous revolutionary
fervor of which it disposes in the liberation struggle, these are to be found
among the masses, among the rural peasants. The responsibility of the
party, of the leaders who have not sold out, is to establish a link with
the masses; and to the extent that it recognizes its responsibility it will
lead the nation in the path of independence and fulfillment. Whether or
not Fanon was right in his evaluation of the masses remains for the
future to judge. That he was right in his devaluation of the cult of the
leader, in the sterilization of party rule and in the alienation of the
masses from its so-called representatives, is beyond doubt. This was
Fanon's legacy, not merely the rationalization of violence but the socio–
political ethics of reconstruction.
There is nothing cordial about Fanon or his writing. There is
nothing friendly or sympathetic unless the unrestrained passion for purity
in and of life be itself translated as friendliness and sympathy for being.
Fanon was intolerant and believed with vehemence, as a true believer
believes, that certain things, certain norms, certain traditions are not to
be tolerated. In his letter to the Governor General of Algeria, written
ip. 1956, and reproduced in
Towards an African Revolution,
Fanon
declared that it was no longer possible for him to continue in his
capacity as doctor of the psychiatric hospitals of Blida-
J
oinville. To
collaborate in a society that destroys its subjects, whether one or all,
is
to collaborate in a ritual murder. There comes a time, wrote Fanon,
when silence becomes a lie. To defy that lie, to eradicate the silence of
