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

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

Otherness in African Cosmology

By Biko Agozino

African’s have always seen the world as multicultural and interdependent. The other is not to be killed or eliminated without harming the self. Chinua Achebe captures this notion with his Igbo saying that when one thing stands, something else stands beside it. One tree does not make a forest. The Igbo take this saying beyond the plant kingdom to say that the eagle should perch and the kite should perch, if one does not want the other to perch, it should show the other where to perch because there are many branches and many trees in the forest. The Igbo also say that there should be life for the fish and life for the river. They also say that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king, Igbo ama eze. 

This democratic principle was relatively contradicted by discrimination against women in the inheritance of property and by the divisions of some Igbo communities into Amala or the free-born and those who descended from Ohu (slaves) or from Osu (dedicated to the worship of shrines) beginning with the slave raids. However, the Igbo have used cosmopolitanism to combat such discriminations through equal educational opportunities. Nobody refuses to go to school, hospital, court, church, bank, or to take public transportation, or to watch football matches and Nollywood movies or to listen to music simply because any of the officials came from the prejudicial backgrounds that Azikiwe outlawed in the 1950s. Poor Ghanaians still dedicate their daughters as shrine wives to pay off debts. Soyinka credited Africans with exemplary religious tolerance because Africans never wage war to promote their religions. He also observed that the Igbo are admirable because they have never tried to invade and conquer their neighbors in order to build kingdoms or empires.

The earliest awareness of otherness in African worldview was the emergence of gender differences which demonstrated that men and women are the others of one another to be cherished and protected rather than to be combated and eliminated. Children came along as beloved others, other families emerged, other communities, other languages, other religions, other people’s property, rich people and poor people, insane people and sane people, our people and foreigners, good people and evil ones, the living and the ancestors.

Albinism became a marker for otherness probably with the arrival of Europeans in Africa. Albinos are sometimes referred to jokingly as White people. Perhaps because power and wealth were associated with the colonizers, some ritualists believed that using the body parts of an Albino to make money medicine will bring wealth and fortune to individuals. As a result, many Albinos are killed in different parts of Africa for ritual. Whiteness seduced many others into skin-bleaching and Fela Kuti criticized that with the song, 'Yellow Fever'. Ngugi portrayed this sickness in The Wizard of the Crow with the story of how the elites desired whiteness and how this drove them insane enough to imagine that there is a dollar tree where money grows to be plucked but female freedom fighters campaigned for a better society.

Arab settlers in North and East Africa also developed concepts of light-skinned supremacy in Africa but with emphasis on religion as the marker of insiders and otherness, believers and infidels. Colorism is still dominant here because Black Africans who are Muslims continue to be discriminated against by their fellow lighter skinned Muslims who claim Arabic descent as far south as Somalia.

The introduction of whiteness as a mark of privilege by Europeans also dominated Arabs and Asians in Africa who were treated as if they were dark-skinned compared to Europeans. In South Africa, this evolved into the system of apartheid which unjustly deprived the African majority of rights and presumed that they belonged to other homelands that were separate from the white dominated state. The African majority and their allies insisted that the country belongs to all who live in it.

The concept of Ubuntu or the bundle of humanity is used by Desmond Tutu to capture the African philosophy that I am because we are human as opposed to the Cartesian, I think, therefore I am. According to Tutu, everyone has something for which they should ask to be forgiven and everyone deserves to be forgiven something because there is nothing that is unforgivable. 

Achebe captures this principle of Ubuntu with the Igbo celebratory art form of Mbari through which the entire community comes together to build a miniature mud hut and populate it with the representatives of the community and with the foreigners in their midst as a tolerant prayer for protection from the ancestors and the gods also represented under one roof, following the principle that the sun shines on all without discrimination. 

Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of the World House repeatedly to emphasize that people of African descent regard everyone as the children of one God to the extent that we say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and so white-supremacy is a threat to all. Rasta refer to such as One Love for all, not just for some.

Other forms of otherness were introduced into Africa by the colonizers in the form of homophobia whereas Africans did not give a damn about who people loved or how they showed the love until European colonizers outlawed homosexuality. The first military coup in Nigeria in 1966 announced that, in addition to fighting corruption, 'homosexuals will be shot'. Major Gideon Orkar echoed this in his April 1990 abortive regional coup announcement when he said that he was out to overthrow a '... corrupt ... homo-sexuality-centered ... administration...' Of the estimated 3.1 million people killed in the genocidal aftermath of the coup, none has been identified as a homosexual, showing that homophobia promotes violence that affects the whole society. Most people did not even know that homosexuality may have been a problem in the military perhaps because the British officers used it to humiliate the African recruits in order to dominate them. Long after the Europeans who imposed both the death penalty and the homophobic laws on Africa abolished both in Europe, the Africans are hysterically retaining such barbaric laws in Africa contrary to the tolerant culture of our ancestors.

No African society banned homosexuality before the colonization of Africa because Africans were more interested in the abilities of individuals to serve their communities and not the ways that consenting adults loved one another in the privacy of their homes. No African military ever had a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell rule for joining the military and no African society ever made a law called the Defense of Marriage Act. Africans always knew that some men liked to dress like women to perform the spirits of female ancestors in Agbomma or Gelede masquerades, for instance. 

Today, dressing like a woman in parts of Nigeria could get a man stoned to death under Islamic law while same-sex couples could be sentenced to 10 years in prison if convicted under the Nigerian criminal code. Critics point out that this is ridiculous given that the military have yet to defeat the Boko Haram militants who kidnap school girls in the busloads in a country that ranks first with the proportion of children out of school and with low human development index.

Similarly, Africans believed that there were people who had the powers of witchcraft but Africans did not go hunting for them to kill them until Europeans came with their interpretation of Christianity to emphasize exorcism or the killing of the other. In medieval Europe, an estimated 9 million people were killed, and most of the victims were women, on the suspicion that they were witches. No such genocidal records existed in Africa in precolonial times but today poor unemployed youth in South Africa and Tanzania often attack and kill poor old grannies on suspicion that they are the ones who use witchcraft to make jobs disappear or they blame it on those Africans who are attacked because their languages are said to sound incomprehensibly like Makwerekwere. In Nigeria, some parents are encouraged by fake pastors to drive six inch nails into the heads of their children because they were suspected to be witches who prevented their parents from becoming wealthy.

In Renascent Africa, Nnamdi Azikiwe (1937) called on Africans to abandon superstitious beliefs and adopt the scientific methods in healthcare and in the struggle for the restoration of independence. Two years later, Obafemi Awolowo published a rebuttal in a Liverpool-based magazine to say that Africans can use Juju as a science with which to kill their enemies from a remote distance by simply saying their names three times. The colonizers must have been shaking in their boots except that the African Juju only killed fellow Africans. For this reason, Fanon stated that the African was more afraid of the powers of ghosts than the powers of the corrupt police that could be bribed. Today, even professors of physics side with Awolowo against Azikiwe in the debate over the efficacy of the scientific method versus Juju. A Nigerian military dictator, Obasanjo, once called for Africans to use Juju to fight against apartheid.

One of the most dangerous otherness promoted by the divide and conquer strategies of Europeans is ethnicity which the Europeans wrongly called tribalism. According to Rodney, to call the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria a tribal war would be to call Shell BP, the Labour Party Government in the UK, and even the Soviet Union, African tribes because they orchestrated the killing of the Igbo who led the struggle for the restoration of independence in Nigeria. Rodney added that there was no record of the Christianized neighbors of the Christianized Igbo committing genocide against them prior to colonialism. 

The solution is Nkrumah's United Republic of African States with the right to travel, work, and run for office anywhere while relying on federal might to stop oppressive otherness and to empower Africans with the scientific methods advocated by Azikiwe.

Criminal Resistance? A Review Essay

-->

Oriola, Temitope B. (2013) Criminal Resistance? The Politics of Kidnapping Oil Workers, Aldershot, Ashgate, pp 243. HB. 

Reviewed by Biko Agozino

As the Series Editor of the Ashgate Publishers Interdisciplinary Research Series in Ethnic, Gender and Class Relations in which Dr. Temitope Oriola’s book was published, I was pleased and honored to be invited to review this original contribution to knowledge during the public presentation of the book at Alberta University, Canada where the doctoral research that led to the book was done and where the award-winning author was soon lured back, as an Assistant Professor, from a major US university.

As the Series Editor who recommended the innovative manuscript for publication, I was tempted to decline the invitation to be a reviewer of the book but I relish the challenge to replace my editor’s cap with that of the critic and reflect on the book in a way that a Series Editor’s preface may not have permitted. For full disclosure, I must also confess that the author, Dr. Oriola, caught my attention in 2005 as a graduate student when he hailed my book, Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason, as laying the foundation for what he called a ‘Post-Colonial Criminology’ in a review essay that I published in the African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies that I served as the founding editor for the African Criminology and Justice Association. It is clear that his own new book is a major contribution to that paradigm of post-colonial criminology.

Following the guidelines for book reviews provided by one of my undergraduate mentors at the University of Calabar, Professor Inya Eteng, who passed away recently at the University of Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta terrain of Oriola’s book, I will proceed by critically reviewing the empirical tenability of the book’s claims, the internal consistency or theoretical adequacy of the book, and the policy efficacy of the implications of the conclusions and inferences. I will leave out a summary of the contents because the author himself has provided one in chapter 8 and because I do not wish to spoil the fun for those of you yet to read the book.

The empirical tenability of the claims in the book is without doubt and the attention to the triangulation of data sources, or what the author called ‘methodological eclecticism’, in the book is very commendable. The reflexivity of the author in terms of the potential to be perceived as an outsider because of his Yoruba ethnic identity is equally noteworthy as a key for understanding the violent ethnic chauvinism that tends to cripple intellectual excellence and everything else in its wake. Scholarship should be judged on its merit and not on the basis of the pigeon hole into which the author’s tongue could be classified but not in Nigeria where who you know is often more important than what you know. The risks he took to be added to the mailing list of militants, to interview army generals and observe focus group discussions of villagers in the creeks of the Niger Delta where he was ‘jokingly’ threatened with kidnapping by a key informant, and the attention that he paid to the history of gendered and class-specific ethnic violence in Nigeria makes his book required reading by all who are interested in resolving the violent crises that plague African societies today.

In this connection, the claim in the book that over 80% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings come from the ‘monocultural’ oil industry of the Niger Delta may need to be contextualized: The eminent Marxist economist and another mentor of mine at the University of Calabar, Professor Eskor Toyo, in his chapter,  ‘Revenue Allocation and the National Question’, in the book edited by Abubakar Momoh and Said Adejumobi on The National Question in Nigeria that I published in the same Ashgate Series as Oriola’s book, estimated the contribution of oil and gas to Nigeria’s GDP to be less than 50%. This appears to be supported by annual data published by the National Bureau of Statistics which reported that the contribution of oil and gas to the GDP in the second quarter of 2012 was less than 14% while the contribution from agriculture was 40% http://www.nigerianstat.gov.ng/. The estimate by Toyo only appears counter-intuitive because Nigerians tend to extrapolate from the estimate that hundreds of millions of barrels are produced in the country per day, then multiply them with the price of oil and deduce what they assume to be the contribution of oil to the national income but without taking into consideration that Nigeria probably only receives 10% royalties from whatever the oil companies declare as their profits after production and exploration expenses. In any case, oil and gas being finite resources should not be the exclusive motive for any social movement organization to kidnap workers, bomb and kill citizens and sabotage the environment without turning such an organization into a reactionary anti-social movement organization.

The empirical tenability of the claims in the book could be challenged on the ground that the author left out some of the important details but in fairness to the author, no book ever covers everything and so the author should be commended for narrowing down his topic to a manageable scale under the able supervision of his dissertation advisers. Yet, the empirical tenability of the claims in the book could have been greatly enhanced through a more historical-materialist epistemological approach or through a post-structuralist discourse analysis with more coverage of the narratives of trade unionists and kidnapped workers whose voices appear drowned out by those of militants, villagers and soldiers in the book.

I flag up the relative erasure of the narratives of workers in the book as a loophole that could be filled by future researchers or during the anticipated follow-up by the author towards advancing, revising or challenging some of the arguments and conclusions in Criminal Resistance? The Kidnapping of Oil Workers. I also suspect that the relative neglect of the workers’ perspective may have resulted from the choice of theoretical frameworks that are eclectic while privileging the symbolic interactionist perspectives of Ervin Goffman and the interpretive perspective of Max Weber rather uncritically unlike the reluctant application of the historical materialist theory of social banditry, according to the Africa-born Eric Hobsbawm, that eventually formed the explanations for kidnapping found in chapter seven. The author initially questioned its relevance in chapter two because of criticism that Hobsbawm restricted the concept to rural bandits even while predicting that social bandits would become more common in Africa whereas Oriola found that the Niger Delta insurgents operated in both rural and urban locations.

Oriola’s theoretical originality lies in the application of the theories of dramaturgy and frame-making that were developed in micro or messo sociological studies of radically individualist Euro-American societies to a macro sociology of power struggles with local and global implications in African societies that the author described as still ‘very much communalistic’. The book is internally consistent to the extent that the author sticks with the chosen frameworks even after briefly considering competing perspectives. The difficulty with the chosen analytical frameworks, in my opinion, is that a less skillful writer could have ended up with ahistorical and disjointed analysis given that frame-making tends to focus on a bird’s eye-view of one frame at a time and dramaturgy implies the beginning, climax and end of conflict whereas the historically specific nature of politically-motivated violence in Africa requires deeper social structural and more systemic analysis.

The question that arises for all African researchers is this; how suitable are theoretical perspectives developed for advanced capitalist societies in the West for the study of more communalistic societies in Africa? Oriola answered this question by borrowing metaphorical terms from his rich Yoruba vocabulary to explain the intricate Althusserian ‘interpellation’ of space and social process in the Niger Delta with implications for all and sundry. Perhaps the author should have considered the theory of African Fractals which has been found by Ron Eglash (African Fractals: Indigenous Design and Modern Computer Engineering), Abdul Bangura (Fractal Complexity in thoughts of African Writers), Horace Campbell (on the 2008 organization of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign) and as illustrated in my conclusion to Counter-Colonial Criminology - a common framework employed by Africans from different cultural backgrounds to emphasize the interconnectedness of society, culture and nature in contrast to the lineal analysis of much of Cartesian European frameworks or paradigms.

Given the nature of the subject matter, I believe that a historical materialist approach synthesized with the African Fractals-influenced perspective of deconstruction (see Derrida, Specters Of Marx) and chaos theory (as Hal Pepinsky attempted but without reference to the African roots in the Geometry of Violence and Democracy) could have complicated the analysis and raised more challenging implications of the study as Stephen Pfohl recommended (Images of Deviance and Social Control) than through the liberalist and apparently pluralist perspectives chosen for the analysis of what is obviously a systemic and post-structural violence.

Thirdly, how efficacious, policy-wise, can the conclusions and implications of the book be said to be? This is a question that haunts the reader right from the preface by Professor Patrick Bond where it was almost gleefully stated that the book proves that the ‘romanticization of non-violence’ by African scholars was debunked by the book. The author repeats this theoretical claim without endorsing it in the book and reports the belief of the insurgents that non-violence failed and so, presumably, violent armed struggles were more successful. I invite readers to engage the ex-insurgents in debates on this conclusion that the author stated alongside the views that contested the presumed efficacy of violence because violence deserves more explicit critique given the high frequency of futile violence in Nigeria:

First, the claim by ex-insurgents that non-violence has failed and by implication only violence led to their success appears spurious given that the history of Africa is enveloped in permanent violence since the intrusion of Arabs and Europeans starting with Trans Saharan and then Trans Atlantic slavery and continuing in the post-colonial situation under the domination of imperialism as Oriola himself pointed out and as Toyin Falola detailed in Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria. If violence is a successful strategy, then Nigeria would have since joined the ranks of developed democracies given its recent history of a genocidal war in which an estimated three million people were killed presumably to guarantee access to the oil of the Niger Delta for members of the ruling class and yet another mentor of mine from the University of Calabar, Professor Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe (Biafra Revisited) never tires of reminding us that the Igbo genocide is the foundation of the genocidal state in post-colonial Africa. Similarly, the genocidal states in Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Congo have all failed to record significant success despite the abundance of violence and despotism. The failure of insurgent violence and violent military repression cannot be overemphasized but all Nigerians need to extend their concern to the poor throughout Nigeria who appear to be deliberately deprived of the benefits of modern education, healthcare and jobs in the midst of plenty of national resources.

Secondly, it is dubious to cite Fanon as an evangelist of violence because Fanon used his psychiatric skills to explain why people resort to violence under violent domination but not why they should do so. On the contrary, Fanon repeatedly pointed out the violent pitfalls of national consciousness by people who may fall upon each other and continue to kill even after the foreigner has been forced to withdraw as he predicted in Ivory Coast which lived up to the prediction with the fanatical blood-thirsty ideology of Ivorite or the search for who is more purely Ivorian than others. Fanon saw violence more accurately as a sign of mental disorder displayed by the torture victim who runs down the street screaming that he was going to kill a settler with a kitchen knife only to be gunned down, on the one hand, and equally by the torturer who goes home after work to torture his wife and kids, on the other. What he offered was an explanation of violence and not a prescription of violence and he concluded by inviting us to find a different path that avoids the abomination of humanity everywhere by Europeans who were nevertheless tirelessly theorizing about humanity. Had the insurgents adopted the African philosophy of non-violence they would not have resorted to the superstitious dehumanization of younger women who were expelled from their camps whenever they had their periods with the belief that such crude sexism was necessary to avoid polluting the 'warriors' who nevertheless welcomed post-menopausal women to come and 'fortify' them spiritually for victory.

Ali Mazrui may have inadvertently validated the Eurocentric wanton adoration of militarism only four years after the genocidal war in Biafra by positing that Africa was reviving a glorious ‘Warrior tradition’. He completely neglected the much more vibrant tradition of non-violence and participatory democracy that relatively survived European conquest and distortion even among the African Diaspora where Martin Luther King Jr. led a successful non-violent revolution while the Rasta philosophy of Peace and Love remains lively. Not surprisingly, Oriola found vocal condemnation of violence and kidnapping even by a major insurgent commander who complained that the tactic of kidnapping had been hijacked by purely criminal elements and rejected especially by communities that did not have a ‘benevolent insurgent commander’ who could rationalize such violence by providing infrastructures and patronage in the vacuum created by those that Fanon called the unproductive phantom Bourgeoisie of post-colonial Africa.

Contrary to the claim in the book that scholars are relatively silent on the efficacy of violent modes of struggle, left-wing scholars tend to romanticize violence to the extent of misreading Karl Marx as advocating only a bloody revolution without realizing that The Manifesto of the Communist Party was not a call for the establishment of an army and that Friedrich Engels stated in the preface to Capital that Marx saw England as having the possibilities for a non-violent revolution. Subsequently, the Bolshevik party of Lenin was called the Social Democratic Party and his answer to the question of What Is To Be Done was the establishment of a newspaper for the organization of the masses. Gramsci capped the much misrepresented Marxist tradition with the observation that even the ruling class cannot afford to dominate by force alone or even mainly by force but more commonly through coerced consent or hegemony – the very exact strategy through which the working class wins the support of other oppressed classes, not by force or mainly by force but through intellectual and moral leadership - hegemony. Amilcar Cabral applied this in his national liberation war by emphasizing the need to understand that culture and even theory is a weapon in the struggle, not just militarism. Joe Slovo also defended the strategy of the national democratic revolution in South Africa against enthusiasts of militarism (who preferred to chant one settler, one bullet) just as Lenin defended the strategies of social democracy and dismissed the militarists as people suffering from the infantile disorder of left-wing communism. Mao Tsetung suggested that the contradiction between violence and non-violence is a false contradiction because the response depends on the nature of the challenge posed. Malcolm X also stated that any means necessary was appropriate in the struggle for freedom but Malcolm used the means of intellectual and moral leadership himself, he never kidnapped or killed workers for ransom.

Finally, to answer the rhetorical question that Oriola posed with his very own title: Criminal Resistance? The Kidnapping of Oil Workers; the unambiguous answer is affirmatively yes; it is criminal to kidnap and kill workers and this cannot be justified with the claims to ‘resistance.’ It is completely reactionary violence to bomb citizens who were gathered to celebrate the independence day of their country and claim that the militants were doing so ‘with due respect’ because, in their view, there was nothing to celebrate. It is indeed criminal to bomb an oil refinery and kill or wound dozens of workers as one militant organization did while this review was being written at the end of October 2013. At last MEND apologized for bombing oil pipelines and thereby spilling oil to pollute the environment that they pretend to be seeking to protect with questionable ‘resistance’ strategies that are simply geared towards what Oriola dismissed as ‘crass opportunism’ designed to extort ransom payments from the state and from oil companies for the benefit of a few ethnic warlords who would not hesitate to collude with the state to eliminate scores of their own supporters who question their leadership style as some members of the community complained to Oriola during his courageous fieldwork.

Rather than be seduced by violence, readers of the book should also read Chinua Achebe (There Was a Country) who condemned the hostage-taking of Italian oil firm workers as a tactical blunder by Biafran troops that cost them a lot of goodwill internationally. He called on all Africans to revive the greatest contribution of Africans to political strategy and philosophy – the discourse of Ubuntu or Mbari which Mahatma Gandhi claimed that he learned as non-violence from the war-like Zulu in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed these thoughts in 1967 at the outbreak of the Biafra war which coincided with the climax of the Civil Rights Movement in America, the Vietnam War and the anti-apartheid movement, in three speeches on the theme of a 'World House' that was inherited by distant relatives of different races, religions and classes who must learn to love peace and end violence before violence puts an end to them (Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?) 

What the militants in the Niger Delta want more than anything else is a fair distribution of the revenues from oil and the protection of the environment but if these can be guaranteed by the Nigerian government and by the oil companies, there will be no question about the criminality of the kidnapping of workers for ransom, the killing of citizens with explosives or the damage of the environment in the name of resistance. The late President Umaru Yaradua heeded this kind of logic by abandoning the militarist strategy of his predecessor, General Olusegun Obasanjo whose security forces committed massacres in Odi in the Niger Delta and in Zaki Ibiam in Benue State, and instead initiated the 50 billion Naira amnesty program for the rehabilitation of the ex-insurgents who gave up their arms. Such a program of reparative justice should be extended to the survivors of the mass violence by the state and insurgents alike by allocating generous resources as a fund for reparations for the continued killing by militants, terrorists, cultists and by the state all over the country.

This can be partly achieved by setting aside at least 10% of the budget annually to be awarded to the citizens as grants for them to invest as they see fit while using the rest to develop basic infrastructures in the country rather than embezzle the bulk selfishly and use token sums to settle insurgent commanders. Nigerians should also look beyond their own ethnic interests and collectively demand that the Nigerian state should atone for the Igbo genocide that evidently brutalized the consciousness of the nation so much that the slaughter of students in their dormitories, the killing of worshippers or the kidnapping of babies and workers for ransom could be seen as legitimate by some selfish or deluded groups and individuals.

The South American countries that followed the path of guerrilla warfare for decades have since transitioned power to the former rebels through the ballot while the violent method has achieved nothing in the Niger Delta except to force the release of one corrupt politician from detention or win the release of one insurgent commander from jail. Given the hundreds of billions that are annually allocated to the Niger Delta states by the Nigerian federation, the militants could democratically win control over such budgets and use them to transform their localities rather than encourage the kidnapping and killing of workers in Nigeria, including foreign employees of oil companies that they xenophobically call ATM but rarely kill unlike their Nigerian counterparts that tend to be wasted by their predatory abductors. The fact that they describe kidnapped workers as ‘enemy combatants’ is an indication of how much they mimic the ideologies of the war on terror by the international community.

In the light of the recognition of the exceptional tolerance that Wole Soyinka (Of Africa) identified as characteristically African, the Niger Delta ex-insurgents should renounce their past violent strategies against workers, go beyond their narrow focus on the Niger Delta and utter neglect of the suffering of other Nigerians in other parts of the country and other Africans with whom we should unite to build a more viable Peoples Republic of Africa, and desist from their inexcusable destruction of the environment as ‘collateral damage’ in the greed for ransom from oil companies and from the state just to enable a certain  ‘Mr. Government’ to offer them patronage which he is capable of continuing to dish out anyway from the profits of the pipeline security contracts that were awarded to him as part of the amnesty agreement. They too should consider the non-violent strategy of Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr. and the Ogoni who successfully sued a major oil company in the US and won some damages but without taking workers hostage, bombing them or spilling oil through the inexcusable and irresponsible damaging of pipelines for profit. Kidnapping workers and killing some to extort ransoms is bad enough but to target the members of one of the most radical trade unions in Nigeria, National Union of Petroleum Energy and Gas employees, who paid huge prices for their opposition to military rule when most of the so-called militants were nowhere to be found, deserves to be condemned by scholar activists for the neo-fascist opportunism that it represents.

This book, in short, demonstrates that there is no heroic exploit in exploitation – a term that is used interchangeably to refer to the extraction of natural resources and to the exploitation of workers in the English language. Oriola carefully avoids using the term, resource exploitation, preferring to talk about extraction while the villagers and ex-insurgents were more likely to call the spade of exploitation the spade of exploitation. The Canadian First Nation people, the Innu, also have a story that Joseph Campbell included in his classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, about the raven who tricked the native people and made them run away so that he could have the carcass of a whale cow all to himself. That was not heroic because the greedy raven could never consume all that meat by himself and would more likely watch the meat rot and waste to damage the environment or stuff himself into the chronic illnesses associated with affluenza or excessive consumption.

The lesson of Criminal Resistance is that criminologists should not focus exclusively on street crimes when the macro analysis of political criminality could make more original contributions to knowledge. The ‘denouement’ that Ken Saro Wiwa warned against at his conviction and subsequent execution for the murders of Ogoni chiefs that he did not commit is also a self-fulfilling prophecy of the brutalization effect of capital punishment which tends to escalate violence than deter it wherever it is applied and therefore the death penalty should be abolished. In spite of a damning report by Amnesty International in October 2013 to mark the international day for the abolition of capital punishment, Nigeria under a president from the Niger Delta, Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, is pursuing the resumption of capital punishment instead of joining the enlightened world to abolish the barbaric punishment that contributes to the normalization of violence in Nigeria.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech. Agozino@vt.edu