Thk |
From: Ofege Ntemfac ntemfacnchwete@gmail.com [CACOWEDAFORUM] <CACOWEDAFORUM@yahoogroups.com>;
To: CAMNETWORK list <camnetwork@yahoogroups.com>;
Cc: cameroon_politics@yahoogroups.com <cameroon_politics@yahoogroups.com>; ambasbay <ambasbay@googlegroups.com>; ACCDF <accdf@yahoogroups.com>;
Subject: [CACOWEDAFORUM] The Wretched of the Earth. Franz Fanon. Still Cut. Colonisation, Neocolonisation, Concolonisation. The tragic Manichaen Dance on Camnet
Sent: Wed, Jul 30, 2014 12:31:40 PM
| The Wretched of the Earth *  Not so very long ago, the earth numbered 2,000 million inhabitants, that is 500 million human beings and 1,500 million natives. The former possessed the Word, the rest borrowed it. Between the former and the latter, corrupt kinglets, feudal landowners and an artificially created false bourgeoisie served as intermediaries. In the colonies, the naked truth revealed itself; the mother countries preferred it dressed; they needed the natives to love them, like mothers, in a way. The European elite set about fabricating a native elite; they selected adolescents, marked on their foreheads, with a branding iron, the principles of Western culture, stuffed into their mouths verbal gags, grand turgid words which stuck to their teeth; after a brief stay in the mother country, they were sent back, interfered with. These living lies no longer had anything to say to their brothers; they echoed; from Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we proclaimed the words 'Parthenon! Fraternity!' and, somewhere in Africa, in Asia, lips parted: '… thenon', '… nity'. It was a golden age. It came to an end: the mouths opened of their own accord; the yellow and black voices still talked about our humanism, but it was to reproach us for our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these courteous expressions of bitterness. At first there was a proud astonishment: What? Can they talk on their own? Look what we have made of them, though! We did not doubt that they accepted our ideals since they accused us of being unfaithful to them; then, Europe believed in its mission: it had hellenized the Asiatics, created that new species, Graeco-Roman negroes. And we pragmatically added, just among ourselves: anyhow, let them mouth off, it makes them feel better; their bark is worse than their bite. Another generation came, which shifted the argument. With incredible patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values were poorly suited to the reality of their lives, that they could neither entirely reject them nor assimilate them. By and large, that meant: you are making monsters of us; your humanism claims that we are universal but your racist practices set us apart. We listened to them, very relaxed: colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, and in any case they read him very little, but they have no need of this philosopher to know that an unhappy consciousness gets entangled in its contradictions – result, zero effectiveness. Let us therefore perpetuate their unhappiness: only hot air will come of it. If there were the hint of a demand in their moaning, the experts told us, it would be for integration. There was no question of granting it, of course: that would have ruined the system which rests, as you know, on over-exploitation. But it would suffice to hold this carrot before their eyes: they would gallop. As for their revolting, we were quite untroubled: what sensible native would go nd massacre the fine sons of Europe with the sole aim of becoming European like them? In short, we encouraged this melancholy and were once not averse to awarding the Prix Goncourt to a negro: that was before 1939. Now listen in 1961. 'Let us not waste time on sterile litanies or on nauseating mimicry. Let us quit this Europe which talks incessantly about Man while massacring him wherever it meets him, on every corner of its own streets, in every corner of the world. For centuries … in the name of a supposed "spiritual adventure", it has been suffocating almost the whole of humanity.' This tone is new. Who dares to adopt it? An African, a man of the Third World, a former colonial subject. He adds: 'Europe has reached such a mad and uncontrollable speed … that it is heading towards an abyss from which it would be better to move away.' In other words: it has had it. This is a difficult truth to admit, but one of which we are all – are we not, my dear fellow continentals? – convinced deep down. We must express a reservation, however. When a French person, for example, says to other French people: 'We've had it!' – which, as far as I know, has been happening more or less every day since 1930 – it is a passionate discourse, burning with rage and love; the orator puts himself in the same boat as all his compatriots. And then he generally adds: 'Unless …'. We can see clearly what this means: no further mistake can be made; if his recommendations are not followed to the letter, then and only then will the country disintegrate. In short, it is a threat followed by advice and these comments are all the less shocking because they spring from the shared national consciousness. When Fanon, in contrast, says of Europe that it is heading towards ruin, far from giving a cry of alarm, he offers a diagnosis. This doctor wishes neither to condemn it without hope – miracles can happen – nor to give it the means to recover: he notes that it is in its death throes, based on external observation and going by the symptoms he has been able to gather. As for treating it, no; he has other worries on his mind; he does not care whether it lives or dies. His book is scandalous for that reason. And if you murmur, in a joking and embarrassed way: 'He's giving us some stick!', the real nature of the scandal escapes you: for Fanon is not giving you any 'stick' at all; his work – so burning hot for others – remains ice-cold for you; in it, the author often talks about you, but never to you. No more black Goncourt winners, no more yellow Nobel prizewinners: the time of colonized laureates will never return. A 'French-speaking' ex-native bends this language to new requirements, makes use of it and addresses only the colonized: 'Natives of all underdeveloped nations, unite!'. What a decline: for the fathers, we were the sole interlocutors; the sons no longer even consider us as qualified interlocutors: we are the object of their discourse. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our famous crimes – Sétif, Hanoi, Madagascar – but he doesn't waste his effort condemning them: he uses them. If he dismantles the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations that unite and divide the colons from the 'metropolitans', it is for his brothers; his goal is to teach them to outsmart us. In short, the Third World is discovering itself and talking to itself through this voice. We know that it is not homogenous and that we still find subjugated peoples there, others who have acquired a false independence, others who are fighting to win sovereignty, and others, finally, who have won total freedom but who live under the constant threat of imperialist aggression. These differences were born of colonial history, in other words, of oppression. Here, the mother country contented itself with paying a few feudal.......TO BE CONTD. On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Albert Usumanu njoyaus@yahoo.com [camnetwork] <camnetwork@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen. __._,_.___ Posted by: Ofege Ntemfac <ntemfacnchwete@gmail.com>
 . __,_._,___ |
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ambasbay" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ambasbay+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment