One Hundred Years of Lumumba, Fanon, and Malcolm: Concerning Non-Violence

By Onwubiko Agozino 

 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. In his Independence Day speech, he stated as follows:

"We shall institute in the country a peace resting not on guns and bayonets but on concord and goodwill." https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/06/independence.htm

In his 'Address to Congolese Youth', August, 1960, Lumumba stated clearly:

"Young people who have been inactive and exploited for a long time have now become aware of their role of standard-bearer of the peaceful revolution."

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/youth.htm

And in his Address to the All African Congress in Leopoldville, August 25, 1960 Lumumba emphasized his message of peace as follows:

"We are acutely in need of peace and concord, and our foreign policy is directed towards co-operation, loyalty and friendship among nations. We want to be a force of peaceful progress, a force of conciliation. An independent and united Africa will make a large and positive contribution to world peace. But torn into zones of hostile influence, she will only intensify world antagonism and increase tension." 

https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/lumumba/1960/08/25.htm

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!"  

So Many Tears - Tupac.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061

The Afrocentricity of Marx

By Onwubiko Agozino 

I was delighted to receive this attached clip from my daughter telling me about a mention of my work by the 'social media sensation, @theconsciouslee. It is a moving commentary on my paper about how much Karl Marx admitted that African history was at the center of his own intellectual activism. My paper was first published in the Review of African Political Economy in 2014. I was invited by roape.net editors in 2020 to blog a summary and update of the article after several authors cited it as ground-breaking. Monthly Review republished the blog in 2020. A graduate student at Cornell University interviewed me for the Unequal Exchange YouTube Channel about the article and the interview audio was made available on Spotify in 2022. Now, this awesome commentary by NAACP Image Award Winner, George Lee Jr. on TikTok has convincingly called attention to the same article. It is about time that I completed the promised book follow-up.

See also the popular podcast, I Mix What I like, that devoted nearly 90 minutes to a detailed discussion of the article that the host described as ‘work that is new to me’ with expressions of the desire to invite me to the show to answer questions arising. As I stated in the paper, some of such questions would only be fully answered in a book length manuscript.

Marxism in Africana Studies

 

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani on Her Slave-Trading Grandfather

Adaobi Nwaubani narrates in the NewYorker the fact that there is hurt in every family that is self-inflicted. Having the humility to confess past wrongs and ask for forgiveness is part of the healing. Having the courage to forgive those who wronged you frees you from the resentment which Mandela called a poison that you take and hope that it kills your enemy. Desmond Tutu teaches that there is nothing that is unforgivable and there is no one who does not have something to be forgiven. Africans have forgiven the unforgivable crimes of 400 years of slavery, 100 years of colonization and 70 years of apartheid but some Africans still find it difficult to ask for forgiveness or to forgive members of their family for past wrongs. What Adaobi described is going on all the time in Igboland where the belief in witchcraft is not as pronounced as in some other cultures. Instead of hunting for witches to blame for your misfortune, the Igbo are encouraged to look inward and see if there are things that need atonement or to ask their Chi for a better deal. Adaobi's family did not kill or exile the adopted child of an enslaved ancestor but forgave him even after he was suspected of plotting to poison a leader of the family. Okonkwo was also told off by Achebe for killing Ikemefuna, a child that called him Papa, just because an oracle told him to do so. The Igbo have no history of raiding their neighbors for slavery or to execute genocide in order to colonize their land. They believe in letting the Eagle perch and letting the Kite perch. Egbe belu Ugo belu.

My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-Trader African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have lo...

Igbo culture, like all cultures, is not perfect. Culture is not defined as a way of life, contrary to colonial anthropology. Culture is defined by Cabral, Ngugi, Hall and James as a struggle between the forces of domination and the forces of liberation. The way poor people live under capitalism, the way women live under patriarchy, and the way that black people live under racism is not the way they chose to live as a way of life but represent the conditions that they did not choose, conditions imposed by law and tradition, under which they struggle to make history. Osu and Ohu emerged among the Igbo as a consequence of 400 years of being raided as prey during the European trans Atlantic slavery that cost an estimated 100 million lives to Africa, according to Du Bois. The Igbo, unlike their neighbors, had no kings and chiefs, nor did they have standing armies to defend them against slave raiders and kidnappers or with which to raid their neighbors; and that was why they were the predominant group of people captured for sale from what Europeans called the slave coast, according to Douglas Chambers, Murder in Montpelier: The Igbo Africans in Virginia. Despite the blight of Ohu and Osu (outlawed by Azikiwe in the 1950s) on the egalitarian Igbo system of direct democracy, the fact remains that the Igbo survived the impacts of the slave raids, colonialism, and post-colonial genocide very remarkably. We are survivors, sang Bob Marley and the Wailers.

The question that Adaobi is raising is the old one of how could Africans sell their own into slavery? This was the question that Walter Rodney tackled in his doctoral dissertation on the History of Upper Guinea Coast. He concluded that what happened during the 400 years of the African holocaust was the process of class formation and primitive accumulation. The few chiefs who sold fellow Africans did not regard the war captives as their own people because they belonged to a different class or to a different nation. It was not a trade of the sort where parents put their own children on the shelf to say that these ones are toro-toro, those ones are shishi-shishi, and those other ones are nai-nai pence. It was a long-running war of pillage and the hunting of labor in black skin that Marx condemned in Das Kapital. It is true that some African elites benefited from the enslavement of Africans just as some African elites continue to benefit from the looting of African resources today but the vast majority of the Igbo and other Africans have always been activists against oppression and the main beneficiaries were Europeans from royal families down to pirates. The fact that the wounds of slavery are slow to heal in Igboland is evidence that the Europeans still owe reparations to the survivors of the European slavery. Adaobi's family is showing the way by apologizing to those they hurt in their family and asking for forgiveness from the ancestors. When will Europeans make atonement for crimes against humanity?

Another Guyanese writer, Karen King-Aribisala, posed the same Rodneyian question in her novel, The Hangman's Game, in which a Guyanese professor of linguistics who was married to a Nigerian and who lived under a brutal military dictatorship that was killing fellow Nigerians with impunity, posed the question in the novel: how could Africans sell their own for 400 years? In the novel, her Nigerian husband retorted by asking, how could she write a novel today about a slave rebellion and still make the enslaved lose instead of giving them victory in her fiction? She protested that it was a historical novel but her husband encouraged her to revise the history. The pain of the African Diaspora is real and sometimes I get it from students in the US or in the Caribbean, were you not those who sold us? To which I would answer that I would never have sold anyone, I would have been among the warriors and freedom fighters who did fight back with sticks and stones against guns to try and save us from being captured as Olauda Equiano narrated and as Rodney documented in historical accounts written by even some Europeans. 

Chinweizu, in The West and the Rest of Us, disputes the 419 propaganda by the British that they came to fight against slavery in Arochukwu and that that was why they burnt the Long Juju. Chinweizi said that that was not true because by that time, the slave trade that the British and other Europeans had initiated had come to an end and that the British were only after the trade in palm oil that they wanted to monopolize in order to dictate prices against the interests of the middlemen in the interior. It is true that there are always saboteurs and collaborators in any system of oppression especially one that lasted for more than 400 years but it is not smart to blame the survivors for the massive crimes against humanity committed by Europeans against Africans. Frantz Fanon said that Europe owes massive reparations to people of African descent at home and abroad. Chinweizu also agrees that reparations are due since people of African descent appear to be the only survivors of historic wrongs that have not been offered any form of reparations and not even apologies simply because of racism. 

Adaobi played into this by starting her opinion with a doubt as to whether Africans deserve reparations given that Africans, like all human beings, have also hurt one another. Africans never traveled thousands of miles to enslave others for 400 years and colonize the survivors for another 100 years and ridiculously turn round to say that Africans owe them billions, according to Ekwe-Ekwe in Africa 2001. In Specters of Marx, Derrida agreed that Africans deserve to have the unpayable international debts cancelled. It is time for Europe to start paying back the debts owed to Africa and the Caribbean countries are demanding such reparations from European enslavers. It is high time that the African states joined the demand for reparations even while recognizing that, like all human beings, we have also hurt ourselves in our struggle for survival and we should ask for forgiveness the way that Mathew Kerekou visited an African American church, knelt down and asked for forgiveness for the role of Dahomey in the capture and enslavement of fellow Africans..

The vexing question was posed repeatedly by Henry Louis Gates in his infamous documentary for the BBC, Wonders of the African World, where he asked market women in Ghana what it felt like to meet a descendant of one of those that her ancestors sold into slavery. Gates never asked a similar question to the white BBC crew or to any white person he met, how does it feel to work with the descendant of those that your ancestors enslaved? Many poor whites resent such questions and claim that they did not benefit directly from slavery even though they did benefit directly and indirectly from the national wealth created by slave labor. It was poor whites who were the crew of the slave ships, who fought the American civil war to keep slavery going, and it is poor whites who join the KKK and the police to terrorize the survivors of slavery today in defense of white privilege without knowing that they too pay the price for white supremacy since injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, according to Martin Luther King Jr. Reparations for slavery will not come out of the pockets of poor whites but would be paid as percentages of the GDP which would have gone to corporate welfare and not necessarily to the poor. Europeans and North Americans should follow the example of Adaobi's family and ask for forgiveness from Africans, they should offer reparations too.

Adaobi's family should go beyond the annual singing of Psalms for forgiveness and endow scholarships for the children of their estranged family descendants of the adopted Nwaokonkwo. Education is the key to lifting the poor from poverty. The reason why a widow died and her children died mysteriously could be due to infections in a country where the life expectancy is 50 years. Adaobi's cousin was right that this sounds like the story of the bogeyman with which naughty children are warned to eat their greens or else. Africans should invest more in research to find cures for tropical diseases instead of simply praying for forgiveness for past wrongs. Families that educate their sons and daughters to the highest levels tend to thrive better whether they are Ohu, Osu or Amaala. Education is the key to the healing of the wounds of slavery in Africa. 

With more emphasis on education for which the Igbo are the leading achievers in Nigeria, people like Adaobi will make friends with more school mates irrespective of their family backgrounds and Adaobi may learn the Igbo language enough to understand the meaning of names. Her family name, Nwaubani does not mean someone from the coastal area, it is the name of King Ja Ja of Opobo who rose from 'slavery' to become king over the community of his master to show that it was not really slavery and whose name was actually, JoJo Ubani or someone who was wealthy in real estates: Uba is wealth and Ani is land. Similarly, the name of the town that they changed, Umuojameze, does not mean that the oracle is king. On the contrary, it means that the children of the flute, Oja, know no king, Ama eze. It is the Igbo egalitarian philosophy that the Igbo know no king but it is understandable that after the military imposed chiefs on Igbo ommunitiues in 1976 under the dictatorship of Obasanjo, those who wanted to be kings might be embarrassed by a name that said that the Igbo know no king.

Biko Agozino

NB: The following opinion editorial in response to this blog post may interest some:

https://www.sunnewsonline.com/igbo-cosmology-the-meaning-of-ubani/

Biko

‘Trump and the Trumpists’

By Biko Agozino

I was invited by editors to respond to WolfgangStreeck’s synthesis of Marxist analysis of Bonapartism with Weberian Status Group pluralism. Although this response was not selected for publication due to a high volume of responses, the publishers offered to pay me for my time and I asked them to donate it to an NGO that works to prevent mass starvation. Below is my response to the essay:

Du Bois and Azikiwe

The essay by Streeck provided an intriguing perspective on the emergence of politicians that he characterized as ‘Trumpists’. However, his critical essay is in need of more thorough conceptual clarifications to address some theoretical inadequacies and empirical untenabilities that threaten the validity of his analysis and the policy efficacy of the implications.

The author uncritically presented a rehash of Marx and Weber to suggest a hegemonic crisis characterized by the ‘death of the center-left’ that created a void to be filled with ‘class, status and party’ in a US supposedly dichotomized between the cities in apparent resentful polar opposition against the hinterlands. From this he concluded that the governmentality of Trumpism is potentially ungovernable and predicted that Trump may be forced to resign before the end of his term.

Streeck nearly ruined his essay from the start with the cyborg premise that ‘strange personalities’ can be identified by the atavistic stigmata of ‘extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and show of sexual power’ – gangster rap stereotypes that Trump evidently lacks given that his corporate suit is far from being extravagant, his rhetoric is monosyllabic, and he engaged Marco Rubio in size-of-hand envy.

The joke that the US had lost every foreign war since the defeat in Vietnam risks becoming an iatrogenic war-mongering capable of goading the most powerful military in the world (as if more excuses are needed) into the search for a face-saving winnable war.

Instead of jeering at Americans that they have 11 million illegal immigrants despite their ‘elaborate immigration policies’, Streeck should have asked what fortress Europe could learn from American pragmatism regarding the inevitability of immigration and the need to pursue increased diversity while providing a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reforms.

On Bonarpatism, Streeck invoked The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx to remind us that Trump is not the first figure to come to power and seek to rule as an absolute monarch to the disadvantage of the masses of peasants who supported Bonaparte simply because they liked his ideas. Streeck neglected to inform the readers that Marx did not intend this concrete historical example to be overgeneralized for he counted the instances of Bonapartism on two fingers of one hand. The concrete example was used by Marx to show that sometimes, the infrastructural mode of production is less of a determinant of historic outcomes than the superstructural ideology of his much-abused architectural metaphor.

Of course, Trump is no emperor and even if he wanted to rule the US the way that Bonaparte ruled France, Trump has to get past the Congress with anxious eyes on the 2018 Mid Term elections, past the courts that block his CEO style of orders, past the critical press that reveal scoops to force sacks from the government, and past the energized electorate ready to call his bluff from one ill-advised Executive Order to another dead-on-arrival attempt to replace Obamacare with Donaldon’tcare. Streeck repeated the Orwellian fact that Trump ‘won’ the election but failed to add that he actually lost the popular votes by nearly three million.

If Streeck had looked beyond German Sociology in his search for a suitable theoretical framework for the US, he could have stumbled on the theories of Thatcherism and Authoritarian Populism by Stuart Hall or Intersectionality by Kimberley Crenshaw as a more suitable paradigm for the analysis of the politics of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation in societies structured in dominance.

Another major weakness in the essay is the uncritical adoption of Weberian Status Group theory to explain the election of Donald Trump despite the fact that every status group was split between the two candidates. The error in Weberian pluralism is that it tends to underestimate the enormous power that is held by the military-industrial ruling elites as C.W. Mills demonstrated in The Power Elite.

Weber traveled to the US to interview German immigrants for his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but scandalously ended up not noticing that capitalism had more to do with hundreds of years of the enslavement of millions of Africans as Marx, Du Bois, Eric Williams, and C.L.R. James proved.

The pitfalls of nationalist sociological preferences may have marred the essay beyond redemption when Streeck asserted that ‘Trumps seem to emerge easily in countries with a colonial past –‘. He conveniently failed to add Germany to the list of imperialist countries despite the savage plunder by imperialist Germany in Africa, according to Du Bois, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Fanon, Rodney and Cesaire. Nazism emerged from this track record as the logical conclusion to the Weberian Enlightenment longing for rational modernization without compassion in the administrative quest for domination, according to Zygmunt Bauman.

Streeck erred by concluding that only groups that wanted to use the bathrooms that corresponded with their gender identity were interested in bathroom birther laws. On the contrary, many Americans opposed prejudiced laws that picked on other groups because history teaches that such authoritarianism eventually escalated violence in society to the detriment of all. When they came for the Jews, many said nothing because they were not Jews, then, finally  …

Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason and writer of ‘Trumpism and Authoritarian Populism’ in C-Theory.

Lost Path: Sociology of Depression

By Biko Agozino

On December 23, 2016, a young Nigerian Engineer contacted me by email to say that his Uncle, a Professor of Chemistry at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria, recommended that he should interview me for a video documentary on ‘getting lost’ or depression from a Sociological perspective. Having written a book chapter on ‘Postcolonialism and Insanity’ in the past, I quickly accepted the invitation to contribute to his documentary. But I wanted to know more about the purpose of the video. He told me that he nearly lost a close friend to suicide and decided to do the documentary as a way to help others.

With Kwanzaa approaching, I had the seven principles of Umoja (Unity), Kujichugulia (Self-Determination), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics), Nia (Purpose), Kuumba (Creativity), and Imani (Faith or Wellness) in mind when I suggested that we could conduct the interview any day from 26 December, 2016. Kwanzaa is a celebration at the end of the year from December 26 to 31 by people of African descent based on African cultural principles developed by Dr. Maulana Karenga. It is celebrated more in the African Diaspora than in Africa itself today.

The young man asked if I could record a video of myself answering his questions and send to him. I suggested a live Skype interview for him to record but the picture quality may not be ideal for a documentary. In the end, I decided to do a Powerpoint presentation with narration and I mailed this to him on December 28. He downloaded the large file from Google Documents but could not hear the narration. I suggested that he should download the most up to date Powerpoint X program and he did. He later posted on his Facebook page that I gave him the most valuable gift of the year through my presentation and I thanked him for giving me the opportunity to engage the community.  He went on to edit the Powerpoint presentation into a video with soundtracks and posted the series of slides and commentaries on Youtube. Feel free to see the work and leave a comment by clicking the link.

You will notice that the powerpoint presentation does not cover all the relevant sociological texts but you are welcome to fill in the gaps by, for example, bringing in the genres of Black Psychology and Symbolic Interactionism which I left out of my present(ation).

Chavez and Non-Violence

By Biko Agozino

As the whole world mourns the passing of a person of African descent, brother Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, it must not be forgotten that although a peace lover, he initially tried to seize power by force through an abortive military coup. When he was pardoned and released from prison for that felony by the successor to brutal dictatorship that he tried to overthrow, he and his group adopted the African philosophy of non-violence which the great Gandhi claimed that he learned from the war-like Zulu in South Africa.

The result was that Chavez won state power through the ballot and not through the bullet (even Malcolm X appears to favor the ballot over the bullet in that eponymous speech of his). Chavez went on to successfully defend the peaceful revolution against a military coup that removed him from power for four days with the explicit approval of the US under George W. Bush.

Chavez subsequently used state power to begin the radical transformation of Venezuela from high levels of illiteracy towards the elimination of the illiteracy with full publically funded education from the barrios up to university level, from mass landlessness to land re-distribution, and from exclusion to increased political participation by the masses, leading to the appointment of a bus driver as the Foreign Minister.  The chief error of Chavez is not that he failed to build the world’s tallest building as the AP reporter sniggered recently, but that he repressed oppositional journalists when he could have battled them with his effective weekly television broadcasts.

Internationally, Chavez did not invade any country or drop bombs on perceived enemies, he did not try to overthrow any country but spoke up for less powerful countries being bullied by the international community and gave subsidized oil to poor neighbors and even to poor citizens of rich countries. He may have helped to inspire similar social democratic revolutions across South America in preference to the fruitless decades of violent armed struggles. The revolutionary theorists from the North are slow to learn from this legacy of the African philosophy of non-violence that could be scoffed at but never completely debunked as a viable alternative to the ‘infantile disorder of left-wing communism’.

On Friday, February 22, Professor Jodi Dean visited Virginia Tech from her New York state college to present an Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) – sponsored lecture about her 2012 book, The Communist Horizon, published by Verso. The publishers stated on their blog that the book is a new Communist Manifesto for our time and indicated that the book seeks to unshackle the left from its accommodation with capitalism by challenging the Occupy Movement to transform itself into a political party.

Dean’s lecture started with reference to Garcia Linera, the Vice President of Bolivia who served time in prison for participating in the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army before running for office and from whom she borrowed her title, 'The Communist Horizon'. The recent turn towards left-wing victories in elections in South America, according to Dean, are without significant impacts on the living conditions of the poor probably due to the accommodation with capitalism by those leftist regimes. Venezuela and Chavez were not mentioned in her speech nor in her book but they are relevant to her arguments.

With colorful slides ranging from Barack Obama (portrayed as a communist leader) to Black Panther Party members marching, with pictures of mass protests in Bangladesh and shots of the Occupy Movement in between, Professor Dean argued that neither Obama nor the Occupy Movement, nor the Third World movements could be said to be communist in any sense. She concluded that what needs to be done is for the left to organize a party to seize power by force, reject the illusion of democracy and institute a 'supremacy of the people'.

And how do you plan to do that without an army, navy or air force? One student interjected. It was good to hear the doubts that the students expressed regarding the rejection of democracy under any ideology. As Churchill would put it, democracy is the worst system of government except for all those other alternatives. I agree with the students that we must strive to recover the concept and practice of democracy from their distortions as Chomsky advocates: The anti-globalization movement is more accurately, the global democratization movement whereas a crisis of democracy is exactly right-wing Political Correctness for when the people get involved en-mass as they are supposed to do in a true democracy.

Dean did not deviate from a Eurocentric conception of Marxism that exclusively privileged Western theorists while almost completely ignoring theorists from the global South who made original contributions to that perspective and by ignoring the extent to which Marx himself was influenced by struggles for freedom outside Europe.  Her introduction of her lecture with the phrase borrowed from Bolivia should have encouraged her to go beyond the icons of the Black radical tradition to take seriously the theoretical contributions from that tradition especially because she lectured during Black History Month. But she said, in answer to a question, that her book could not cover every detail and that she deliberately left details of the example of the Black Panther Party for future projects and for other researchers. Hmmm.

Dean's error is not just with the neglect of theorists and unique contributions from the global South but more with her avoidance of what some colleagues at her lecture characterized as the racism of the left in the global North. In her feisty self-defense, she complicated the charge by saying that she felt safe in her city in the state of New York but that poor blacks in the same city did not feel as safe. It is not just poor blacks; poor whites too, in fact all the poor, feel relatively unsafe in what Stuart Hall theorized as ‘societies structured in dominance’.

Dean’s mantra that she (and her non-existent party alone) must seize power by violent means is ridiculous because all she is doing is write tens of books non-violently, and I am happy that the students challenged her on what appeared to be her agent-provocation. As some colleagues insisted, the African philosophy of non-violence has proven more reliable as a revolutionary political strategy, given the decades of guerrilla warfare in South America with nothing but genocidal body-bags to show for it until they turned to electoral social democratic strategies that Marx and Engels called for in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (build a party they said, not an army). Dean answered that the reason why Marx and Engels called for social democracy was because democracy was non-existent in their day.

However, Lenin can be said to have practiced the exact strategy of Marx and Engels by naming his party the Social Democratic Party. While Lenin acknowledged that his movement had a military wing, he resolutely defended the correct strategies of social democracy against the “infantile disorder of left-wing communism” which opposed participation in bourgeois electoral politics. Lenin also answered his own question that “What is to be done” is to set up a newspaper to organize and educate the people, not a suicide squad, for instance. Dean countered that Lenin was for the dictatorship of the proletariat and could not be called a democrat.

Yet what Lenin called the dictatorship of the proletariat, following Marx, was more likely the democratic mobilization of the people through the exercise of what he called hegemony or intellectual and moral leadership but not by force. Gramsci recommended similar strategies with emphasis on intellectual and moral leadership or hegemony but with the originality that he attributed the same strategy to the ruling class which has too few members to rule by force alone. Joe Slovo also defended a similar strategy of national democratic revolution under the leadership of the ANC/CP coalition in South Africa.

Although her book never mentioned South Africa, Dean may counter that the South African revolution leaves a lot more to be desired by retaining capitalism with the consequence that the people continue to suffer but there is no doubt that South Africa achieved a lot politically through non-violent dialogue under Nelson Mandela who was serving a life-sentence for leading the military wing of the African National Congress (the dialogue was opposed by ANC militants who insisted on the defeat of apartheid militarily; “one settler one bullet”, they chanted). However, the dialogue succeeded remarkably compared to the situation in 1980 at the height of the armed struggle but the armed struggle could be said to have contributed indirectly to the success of the dialogue. Surely, no one would like to take South Africa back to the white minority reign of Botha in the 1980s, no matter how imperfect the country remains today.

Similarly, African Americans have been in the vanguard of the moral and intellectual movements to deepen democracy world-wide through non-violent means. Despite a million mutinies and maroon uprisings culminating in the glorious Haitian revolution that CLR James documented, the struggle against slavery was mainly non-violent until the enslavers declared a pro-slavery civil war in an attempt to extend enslavement nationally in the US.

During the Civil Rights revolution, WEB Du Bois was nearly jailed for advocating global peace and he stated in his autobiography that although he was able to defend himself in court against the trumped up charge, the railroading of thousands of innocent African Americans into jail is to blame for the fact that they tend to return to the community with resentment and anger, resulting in more violence in the community. Mohamed Ali was nearly jailed for refusing to fight Vietnamese who had never abused him racially and Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly jailed for advocating non-violent resistance to injustice. It is interesting that Dean did not mention the prison-industrial complex during her lecture nor in her book where she only referred to prison camps in the Soviet Union on page 29 and to the prison experience of the Vice President of Bolivia on page 2.

Whereas Malcolm X advocated the principle of ‘By Any Means Necessary’ in the struggle for freedom, he himself adopted non-violent intellectual and moral strategies, just like Martin Luther King Jr. As Dean conceded, the Eastern European revolutions were remarkably non-violent and it could be added that the hijacking of the Arab spring by armed groups has produced worse results compared to what was possible through non-violent resistance. An American trade unionist, who died in 1993, César Chavez, was also a strong advocate of non-violence and was quoted as saying that non-violent struggles can never be defeated because they are patient. Did he influence his name-sake, Hugo Chavez?