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. 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 of weapons from imperialist countries to kill fellow Africans with, 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 peaples revolutions.

 Narrative: 

 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 progressive religious organizations. Lumumba campaigned against the use of corporal punishment by the violent criminal justice system of the colonizers. 

When I posted this message to a radical sociology discussion group, I received strong opposition that made me convinced 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 is 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. 

 I responded to the brother as follows: I agree with you that self-defense is no offence 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 as causal in relation to the violence of the colonized 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. I propose to analyze his speeches to explain how 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. 

 Same thing goes for Lumumba who 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 was suspended to allow 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 Guerrilla warfare handbook after being overthrown by the same army 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 of what Jacques Derrida called the forgiveness of the unforgivable (to which Tutu responded that nthere 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. 

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. Only the African 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. 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 in Arrow of God who used non-violent battle of wits and 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 African 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? 

 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.

Salute To Courage

 By Onwubiko Agozino

Today, January 15, I reflect on 'The World House' which MLK repeatedly said that we inherited from our ancestors. We must share with brothers and sisters in the Jim Crow South, in Vietnam, in apartheid South Africa, in Palestine and everywhere else. We must share all in a 'Beloved Community' or fight in 'chaos' and burn it down. Achebe identified the world house as Mbari, an ancient symbolic architecture still observed among the Igbo. It requires communal ritual selections of representatives to go into the forest and commune with the spirits of the ancestors for days. They return to restructure and reconstruct the miniature Mbari world (mud) house every now and then. When the foundations are shaky or the walls crumbled, a new one was collectively created to replace it. The new Mbari is  repopulated as usual with images of people from all over the world, along with ancestral spirit figures, animals and plants under the same roof. This symbolizes how tolerant of differences Africans are and it demonstrates that chaos is not always a bad alternative to order or the beloved community, since they coexist; as Abdul Bangura, Horace Campbell and Ron Eglash remind us with theories of the science, arts, and cultural politics of African Fractals. Desmond Tutu called the sharing spirit, Ubuntu or a bundle of humanity (and of nature too). Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day! Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to You. Onwubiko Agozino

Christchurch and Colonialist Violence

By Biko Agozino

The massacre in a Christchurch Mosque raises doubt about the applicability of the theory by Martin Luther King Jr. that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. White supremacists have been reported celebrating the shooter as a hero while the shooter hailed Donald Trump as a hero of white nationalism. Perhaps, white supremacist terrorism is an exception to the universalistic Ubuntu thesis of Desmond Tutu which states that I am because we are. Chinua Achebe also saw postcolonial genocide as a contradiction of African traditional preference for tolerance of difference.

On further reflection, however, it is clear that racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence has repercussions that are felt by all across the world, though not in equal proportions. The white supremacist terrorist travelled from Australia to go and commit the massacre in New Zealand and so it may be a good idea to look at conditions in Australia that may have produced that level of hatred and intolerance and how the repercussions are felt by all to different extents.

In June 2018, media reports indicated that Australian troops in Afghanistan displayed a Nazi flag on their tank and collected killings as trophies. The terrorist shooter in Christchurch may be the same age as the Australian troops who identified with Nazism and could admire them. Officials were reported as saying that such white supremacist ideologies were not consistent with Australia. But indigenous peoples in Australia say that they have been at the receiving end of such genocidal white supremacist violence institutionalized by the settler colonial state and supported by individual genocidists for centuries.

Irene Watson applied the indigenous Australian story of the giant frog to legal theory as an explanation of the survival by those who governed the land cooperatively for thousands of years prior to being buried alive by colonizers. Moana Jackson applies Indigenous Maori theory to critique imperialist scientism that attributed to Indigenous peoples, ‘warrior genes’, when they were gardeners without repressive fetishes like the prison for thousands of years before being criminalized. Chris Cunnneen, Juan Tauri, Harry Blagg, and Thalia Anthony, among others, condemn the over-incarceration of Indigenous people and call for the decolonization of the justice system and the entire society. Deathscape focuses on the mapping of Indigenous deaths in custody.

It is a fact that the white male terrorism that claims many lives around the world also claims hundreds of white Christian lives just as ISIS violence also claims Muslim lives. That is right, terrorist white men tend to kill many white men in settler-colonial locations. They also kill white women and rape them in large numbers in militaristic Australia, the US, Russia, etc.

Homicide being intracultural more than intercultural in most cases, Indigenous people also kill fellow indigenous people in large numbers more than they kill people who are not indigenous but they kill fewer indigenous people than white male terrorists kill fellow white men. Often the victims are intimate family members, friends or acquaintances with few being random strangers.

Official reports show that homicide rates in Australia occurred mainly through stabbing (38%), beating with fists (24%), other means such as poisoning claimed 15%, while gunshots claimed 13% and 8% of homicide victims died of unknown causes from 2012 to 2014.

This indicates that the banning of assault weapons by the government may not be enough to address the threat of white supremacist violence that has a long history of being institutionalized. Mass violence is not mainly a problem of individual attitudes or choice of weapons but also a problem of institutionalized ways of doing violence that brutalize the conscience of white supremacists who may seek to strike again even against fellow white men. With 64% of homicide victims in Australia being men who are also six times more likely to commit homicide compared to women and with 45% of the killings taking place at home, racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence is a systemic threat to all.

There were 91 deaths in custody in Australia from 2016 to 2017 with men making up over 90% of the victims and non-indigenous people making up 60-78% of the deaths in police and prison custody. Indigenous Australians are over-represented in prison custody at 27% of all prisoners but non-indigenous Australians make up over 70% of the prisoners.

If angry poor white male Australians knew this, they would join the struggles to end the colonial system of mass incarceration and oppose imperialist militarism, racism and sexism which are articulated to escalate intolerance at the expense of all. Part of the solution may be the establishment of Love Studies to replace military academies, to study the decolonization paradigm, and to support reparative justice for Indigenous peoples in the interest of all.

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

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