Abstract:
100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness, and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP. And Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers in Colonie Belge - the cover design of my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology. As the African Union yearns for the guns to be silenced across Africa while the insurgencies rage across the wretched continent; and lumpen bourgeois politicians spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans in genocidal proportions, I advance the innovative interpretation that Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm were all adherents of the philosophy of Ubuntu as the non-Western path for the development of democracy in Africa. Both Edwin Madunagu and Joe Slovo have written to support the strategy of social democratic peoples revolutions., rather than wait for the armageddon of armed struggles as the only means necessary. From the perspective of organic intellectuals, books are mightier than bombs!
Narrative:
"Contrary to the Malcolm myth, violence was not a major part of Malcolm's program for building revolutionary politics in the West....Malcolm was not advocating violence but completely rejecting nonviolence because of his radical understanding of the real world" - Kehinde Andrews (2025) Nobody Can Give You Freedom: The Political Life of Malcolm X, London, Allen Lane, p. 78.
100 years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Patrice Lumumba in 1925, let us be reminded that they were all advocates of the Africana philosophy of non-violence. Fanon was a psychiatrist who analyzed violence as a symptom of mental illness and he prescribed revolutionary literature as the tool with which to educate and mobilize the peasant masses in the countryside, lest the 'phantom bourgeoisie' seize control of the new nation and continue the oppressive exploitation of the masses. Malcolm prescribed that people should choose the ballot and not the bullet by joining civic organizations like the NAACP and progressive religious organizations. Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers and privileged the call for reparations rather than retaliation.
To emphasize the armed struggle today in the neocolonial situation across Africa means to kill fellow Africans with weapons of mass destruction supplied by former colonizers to facilitate the extraction of African mineral wealth. That is why some call it homeycide - the killing of homies! I survived one such genocidal violence in Biafra as a Biafra Baby, 1967-1970, costing 3.1 million lives in 30 months, or 100,000 per month, mainly through the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war', as claimed by Nigerian government officials who were diplomatically and militarily aided by the UK Labour Party government and by the Soviet Union.
When I posted this message to a radical sociology discussion group and to an African discourse group online, I received strong opposition that convinced me that the thesis needs to be tested in an extensive research project for a book monograph.
A response quickly followed from a graduate student at a flagship state university in the US, telling me that he was an admirer of all three brothers and therefore could not stomach my revisionism to suggest that they were advocates of nonviolence. He said that my revision of their work to emphasize non-violence could only be true ‘… if one exempts defensive violence (self-defense, overthrow of colonialism and Jim Crow) from "violence."
He went on to assert that ‘Fanon's "Wretched of the Earth" is a magnificently argued call for killing the colonizer, both mentally and physically.’ He added that Malcolm had no problem with violent self-defense, “By any means necessary”, including violent defense. He credited Lumumba with being a founding member of FRELIMO, “an organization dedicated to armed struggle to achieve Mozambique national independence.” Then he alluded to the claim by Malcolm that only the Black revolution claims to be a non-violent revolution whereas the American, French and Russian revolutions were very bloody. “The perpetrators of these revolutions are considered national and international heroes” he claimed, and added that “Fanon, Malcolm, and Lumumba asserted that Africans in America and in Africa had the same rights as white people.” In conclusion, he stated as follows: “Surely, it alters their contributions to say they were non-violent.” Yet he signed off with the greeting: ‘peace’ before his name.
Another brother quoted Malcolm, in the African Dialogue Series, from his1963 Message to the Grassroots in Detroit to say:
"There’s nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old-time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life: That’s a good religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal.!"
But Malcolm did not take any life (that we know of) in revenge for the lynching of his father, he did not drive anyone crazy the way his mother was institutionalized, he did not burn any home in retaliation for the fire-bombing of his home, and he did not burn any church in retaliation for the 50 bombing explosions between 1947 and 1965, including the killing of three black girls in church in 'Bombingham', Alabama. He said that he loved a white man to the amazement of Manning Marable, but Frederick Douglass also said that he loved that overseer who whipped him for learning to read the Bible. Malcolm apparently forgave his enemies, in my humble opinion, perhaps so that the All Merciful may forgive him his own sins!
I responded to the brother as follows: I agree with you that self-defense is no offense by any means necessary. I propose to read the Africana classics more strategically. Reading The Wretched of the Earth strategically, I propose to test the hypothesis that Fanon, the psychiatrist, emphasized that the frequency of the violence of the colonizers was causal in relation to the violence of the colonized mainly against their own brothers and sisters; if x then y; if you do not wish to see y, then prevent x. It was the violence of the colonizers that drove Africans nuts and also drove the violent colonizers insane. It is still happening today all over neocolonial Africa and in the inner cities of internal colonies in the Diaspora, just as the colonial violence drove Europeans insane enough to embark on their tribal world wars over the greed for colonies in Africa that killed an estimated 80 million people, despite the warnings of Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois against imperialism and its reckless greed for resources.
Moreover, when Fanon joined the national liberation movement after quitting his impossible job as a colonial psychiatrist, he dedicated himself to diplomacy, intellectual and moral leadership as a theorist and not as a suicide bomber. Same can be said about the rest of us intellectuals who write books rather than throw bombs. Antonio Gramsci concluded that even the bourgeoisie rules by coerced consent mostly (though not without threat of force) whereas when imperialists resort to violence, it is proof that they had lost the hegemonic struggle.
Brother Malcolm never killed anyone that we know of. When asked if it was true that the Nation of Islam calls for violence as a means for achieving freedom in America, Malcolm X replied that 'we are not a violent group, we are taught to obey the law, but we are also taught that we reserve the right to defend ourselves against violence...we have never bombed white churches' unlike the white supremacist groups, and yet the propaganda of violence is attributed to the Nation of Islam but not to whites, he said.
I propose to analyze his speeches to explain why he answered the provocative question that agents provocateurs may have posed to him, 'By the Ballot or By the Bullet?' By the ballot, he chose even while defending the right to self-defense in a country where the right to bear arms is guaranteed by the liberal Constitution.
There is no principle of armed violence in the 10-point program of the Black Panthers. Instead, they emphasized the principle of arming the people with knowledge, according to its former President, Elaine Brown, who gave this retort to a white woman who asked her why the Panthers fetishized the carrying of guns at a conference in the Schomberg Center, New York Public Library - carrying a gun did not make you a revolutionary or police officers will be the biggest revolutionaries, she said. Rather, the Panthers preferred to watch cops to make sure they did not abuse their enormous powers, they organized free breakfast programs for poor students, and organized free medical care for the poor while encouraging people to register to vote. To them, self defense included legal defense in courts, marches, and rallies. Often, the protests of the Panthers were nonviolent until the cops and the FBI started rioting.
Same thing goes for Lumumba who called on the United Nations to send troops to defend the restoration of independence in the Congo. During the struggle for the restoration of independence, he campaigned against the violence of the colonizers and demanded reparative justice, just like Fanon, without calling for violence as a principle in the struggle to regain independence.
Both FRELIMO and the ANC started as non-violent organizations before the violence of the colonizers drove them to adopt armed struggles which were suspended to allow for negotiations. Those African states that were forced to adopt the armed struggle as a tactic do not compare more favorably with those that adopted the non-violent positive action of Nnamdi Azikiwe and his mentee, Kwame Nkrumah; though Nkrumah later wrote the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare after being overthrown by the same neocolonial army of occupation that he commanded.
What the brothers were teaching us is evident today - wherever Africana people are armed, they tend to use the arms to kill one another in genocidal proportions while western arms companies laugh at us all the way to their banks with huge profits. On the other hand, those who have adopted the Ubuntu philosophy or what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable (to which Tutu responded that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu), such as Columbia after the bloody civil war from 1958-2016, or Northern Ireland after the troubles, have reaped greater dividends than those who continued fratricidal violence with western weapons of mass destruction in places like Biafra, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria, Algeria, Western Saharawi, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Uganda, etc.
The Abrahamic religions of the Book may claim to be the genesis of non-violence and forgiveness, but Derrida demonstrated that each of them also made exceptions for that which is unforgivable and each holy book is full of violent scenes. Only the Africana tradition, according to him, tends to forgive the unforgivable. Tutu and Tutu retorted that there is no such thing as the unforgivable under Ubuntu. The Igbo symbolize it with Mbari ritual architecture, according to Achebe, Martin Luther King Jr analogized it with the Great World House (preferring a beloved community to chaos, though Africans and modern architects and engineers use the system of African Fractals to integrate chaos into their designs for improved public safety - sometimes it is better to deconstruct the old house and rebuild on a new foundation, according to Ron Eglash), Rasta dub it One Love, and Rwanda calls it Gacaca. Gandhi admitted that he learned the experiments with truth from the warlike Zulu who taught him about non-violent resistance.
I propose that non-violence, the philosophy that Gandhi claimed that he learned from the warlike Zulu, is one of the greatest contributions of Africans to world civilization. African languages have no word for violence but they all have expressions for peace! Kassala Kamara attributed its origin to classical African civilization when the rulers of Kemet granted independence to the rebellious principality of Damascus rather than seek to crush their rebellion. Maulana Karenga illustrated it with the case of the eloquent peasant who used logic to seek the recovery of his stolen property rather than take up arms against the government officials that robbed him. Chinua Achebe illustrated this with the case of Ezulu, the Chief Priest in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and a hunger strike to resist being forced to become a colonial chief among the democratic Igbo who brag that they know no kings.
Even Karl Marx, according to Friedrich Engles' preface to the first English edition of Capital, observed that a non-violent revolution, such as the abolition of slavery, was possible in England, provided that the enslavers did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion as they did in the US.
I propose to test the original hypothesis about the centrality of non-violence in Africana civilizations. Rasta philosophy of One Love will back me up with the example of how Bob Marley refused to call ‘Babylonian’ forces to arrest the youth man who came to ask for forgiveness for having tried to assassinate him. One Love for All! Peace and Love! Can this philosophy be extended to resolve the insurgencies ravaging Africa today from state violence to Boko Haram, ISWA, and al Shabab militants? Mandela demonstrated the love for the enemy by jointly accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace with DeKlerk who had held him in prison..
Conclusion:
Steve Biko denied instigating violence as alleged by the apartheid prosecutor in court. He was accused of calling for the people to confront apartheid. Biko answered that he was being confronted by the prosecutor but there was no violence in the court room. Anyone who wishes to ‘waste … time in sterile litanies and the nauseating mimicry’ of the European tradition of genocidal violence will need to re-read more carefully the conclusion to The Wretched of the Earth where Dr. Fanon, the psychiatrist, precisely and unambiguously prescribed repeatedly that we should shun violence as follows:
"Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration." - Fanon, Conclusion, The Wretched of the Earth.
What Fanon, Lumumba, and Malcom preferred were war against illiteracy and diseases in Africa, the erasure of the colonial boundaries that divided and weakened Africans enough to incite xenophobic violence against fellow Africans who are suspected of stealing jobs and women, psychological healing of the slow-healing wounds of hundreds of years of terrible torture against Africans, party building for social democracy, and agrarian revolution to feed the people with adequate funding for infrastructures. Walter Rodney stated in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that when the colonizers pretended that there was no money for education, the Africans tasked themselves to build schools. C.L.R. James emphasized that the most important achievement by Nkrumah was the National School Movement.
Azikiwe knew this when he recommended young men like Nkrumah to go abroad for the golden fleece of further education, and he called for scientific methods to be adopted by Africans in all their affairs. Awolowo introduced free primary school education in Western Nigeria but went on to commit the infamy of justifying the use of 'starvation as a legitimate weapon of war' during the genocidal war against the Igbo in Biafra that killed 3.1 million people in 30 months. Steve Biko identified the mind of the oppressed as the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressors, and South African students demanded that fees must fall. Ngugi called for the decolonization of the African mind. W.E.B. Du Bois called it a necessity to ensure that at least 10% or the talented tenth were given the chance to pursue higher education to help lead the Pan African Movement. Both Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey agreed that education is the key to uplift the people of African descent! Down with Militarism!
Happy 100 Years Birthdays to Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcom! Peace and Love!
"I lost so many peers
I shed so many tears!
Too many of my homies
In the cemeteries
I shed so many tears!"
Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061
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