Pan African Baraza & Thoughtworks

Presents
FRANTZ FANON AT 90: HIS RELEVANCE TO THE PAN AFRICAN VISION TODAY
A Public Lecture by
Professor Lewis Gordon; Nelson Mandela visiting Professor at Rhodes University, South
Africa, and Professor of Philosophy and Africana Studies, with affiliation in Judaic Studies, at
the UCONN, USA. Lewis Gordon - author of What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to
His Life and Thought
Held at: PAWA254, Nairobi, Kenya, January 8, 2015
Well, Hamjambo? As you have heard I am Jamaican so I will also ask, How you keepin?
And as some of you may have observed, I dont speak with my shoes on. I have many reasons
for that, which some people have seen from viewing different speeches I have given. You know
some of them. It is the establishment of a sacred space in which you speak truth. Others would
say, however, Ah, its because he is comfortable, and then some people say, He is from
Jamaica, they just dont wear shoes there! But you know all could be true, and they are all true,
though I assure you, most people I Jamaica wear shoes. I just prefer t speak bare feet.
Thanks Firoze [Manji]1 for that introduction, and I would also like to say thank you Lyn Ossome
and Wandia Njoya and all of you who are here. You have taken a break from your holiday to
come and spend some time with me, and I have taken also a break for a variety of reasons. The
first one is, as Firoze said, this is the 90th year of Fanons birth, so people are writing and talking
about Fanon all over the world. Fanon understood his commitment not only to the globe, to those
in the global south, but his commitment to Africa was such that I wanted to make sure that the
very first lecture for Fanons 90th year, for 2015, that I give on Fanon takes place on this
continent. So I thank you for joining me in this celebration of Fanon.
Now before I continue, there are some other things I should say. You know a lot of people dont
realize that most Jews in the world are actually of colour, and its a shame that the world has
gotten to a point where when they meet a black Jew, they are trying to figure out how is that
possible. You know, I am a born Jew. My mother is from Palestinian Jews and Irish Sephardic
Jews, and in Judaism, if your mother is Jewish, youre Jewish. There is more to it and as you
know you have a neighbor [Ethiopia] who had quite a few Jews around. But the complicated
thing is Jewish history is distorted in many ways, and believe it or not, Fanon is linked to Jewish
history in a very interesting way. So that is one thing.
The second thing is as you can see, Firoze and I came properly dressed. He is wearing his Cabral
t-shirt. Now I have a whole lot of t-shirts that I wear. One of them I have been going around with
says, Danger, Educated Black Man. However, I chose this one [I Cant Breathe] and we
already know that this is part of the struggle not only around the question of Black Lives
Matter. It is also around the struggle, you know: We saw the graphic asphyxiation of a black
man in Staten Island and its really poignant that this message is also connected to something
that Fanon in a book called Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, basically said. Its something
that people dont often hear. He said, you know, revolution is truth, and he said that this truth is
1

Firoze Manji, director of Pan-African Baraza (www.thoughtworks.com), and host of the event

the oxygen through which you can establish a new humanity. And so one of the issues we are
facing all over the world, the reason you have people everywhere talking about Black Lives
Matter, I Cant Breathe, and the many statements that are going around, is because in fact, all
across this planet, humanity is being asphyxiated. A lot of us are choking and a lot of us are
reaching out for that oxygen, we are trying to breathe, so already even those who havent heard
the name Fanon, they are already articulating a Fanonian situation.
The next thing Id like to bring up is: Here he is90. Fanon was born on July 20th 1925. You
know who else was born in that year? Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba. Yeah, you know there are
some folks here would say the word God. Well, God that year must have been saying, This
might be a good year to make some revolutionaries. You know what I mean, and you know
when you look at this, what Firoze said is right, this question, what has happened when we look
in the world today when we look at young people, you know many of us dont realize when we
read the writings of Fanon we are talking about the ideas of a young man.
Fanons first book was written when he was 25. The classic for which he is known Les Damns
de la terre, The Damned of the Earthyou all know it as The Wretched of the Earth. But
there are reasons, which later I will talk about, why I prefer to say Les Damns. He wrote that
when he was 35. He wrote it in 10 weeks, by the way. And when we think about this question,
about Fanon at that time, we begin to ask ourselves some real important questions because you
see why is it that most of young people today are being told, you know, what a lot of you young
people on this roof* are being told today, constantly, you all know it, youre always being told
what you cant do, and one of the reasons youre constantly told what you cant do is because
youre living under the social condition of perpetual infantilization. You see in Fanons world all
youre thinking about when youre a boy or you are a girl is when youre going to be a man or a
woman. Now weve got even middle-aged people acting as if they are still children. And what
happens to ideas when people no longer have sense of maturation is that we have a stagnation of
thought. So we are going to back-up a little and we are going to talk a little about Fanons life.
The other thing I want to say about Fanon, and this may surprise many of you, is that Fanon
really, really, really wanted to be wrong regarding a lot of what he wrote about. You know there
are people today who really would love for Fanon to be wrong, but one of the tragedies is that if
he were to come around and see the things he was right about he would be very unhappy and this
already tells you something. Because we are talking about a way of thinking that is so humanistic
that even when you see the truth and you speak the truth, you hope the truth could be wrong. It
was almost like giving a diagnosis and you hope there will be miracles.
So we begin with who this person was.
Well, Fanon was born in 1925 in the island of Martinique. He was from a family in which there
were 8 children, 4 boys, 4 girls. Two of the girls died. Fanon, as he grew up as a child, was a
rather unusual child. In fact one of the things he confessed to his brother Jobyhe said: I wont
live long. You ever wonder what it is like to be with people who know they wont live long?
And then there are these people who get surprised. I was talking to Harry Belafonte, last year
about this. As I was walking with him I said, You know Harry (its funny, you know, Harry
Belafonte is one of those people where, no matter how famous he is, everyone calls him Harry).
*

The number of people who showed up exceeded expectations. The venue was changed to the roof top
of the PAWA254 centre.

You know, I said, Harry I have a theory about you, and he said, Well, what is it, Lewis? I
said, You didnt expect to live long, did you? and he said, No. And in fact his decision, his
commitment to the idea that he wasnt going to live long meant he understood there were things
he had to do and this is one of the reasons why although you know someone like Harry Belafonte
as a recording artist, as an entertainer, as an actor, what you dont know is that he is a person
who took money to fund SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee]. You dont
know about the times the Klu Klux Klan tried to kill him. You dont know the fact that he was
involved in a lot of struggles similar to the ones we are talking about right now.
And when we come to someone like Fanon, the thing about Fanon that you dont know is that he
also thought about death in a very strange way. Now one of the things thats strange about the
way Fanon thought about death was that deathand this is, I am very seriousand he wrote
about this in his plays, death was white. Yeah, every time he wrote about death it was about
whiteness. So what a lot of people didnt understand was that for Fanon the demystification of
whiteness was also the demystification of death. And his concern with confronting death was
such that he took seriously an issue that many people may overlook. For instance, when you say
the name Frantz Fanon, many people automatically say the word violence. In fact, you cant
even finish it; you say Frantz FanonViolence! You know what I mean? And its as if the
man is only known for violence. A lot of people dont know that Fanon detested violence. This
is because a lot of people dont know what violence means.
You see, Fanon was born in a colonial world, and in that colonial world Fanon understood
something that many of you here understand; its one of the reason that am wearing this t-shirt,
because, you see, in a colonial world, in a racist world, in an anti-black world, in a world that
questions your humanity, those who do not belong, so to speak, within the realm of the human,
violate that world simply by appearing. In effect Fanon understood violence as a condition into
which he was born. And being born into violence, it becomes then a situation in which if he were
to do nothing about it, it would mean being complicit with ongoing violence.
So in fact, Fanon had a critique of the people who claimed to be anti-violence. You ever met
anti-violence people? Anti-violence people valorize pacifism; they tell you, Oh no! no! no! there
are always other ways and so forth, but they dont explain why they are able to go to sleep at
night when so many other people are suffering, when so many other people are being crushed
under the heels of brutal police forces, when so many people are suffering from genocidal
activities across the world, when so many people are just slowly dying from starvation. They
sleep well at night, and they walk through the world claiming they are anti-violence. So for
Fanon the problem with that is that if your anti-violence means doing nothing about violence,
then you are actually an agent of violence. For Fanon if you are not actively doing something,
then you are a hypocrite to the very question of human dignity.
The second thing Id like to bring up is something from his childhood. When Fanon was a little
boy, there was a woman who was killed and he heard there was an autopsy to be done on her in
the church nearby. This [Martinique] is a small island [which is why the post mortem occurred in
a nearby church], so he went to see this, and when he witnessed the autopsy, it disgusted him.
Why? Because Fanon realized that to see a human beings entrails opened, to see the body there
was such an abrogation of dignity that it disgusted him. His anti-violence in other words was
connected to his profound position that the humanity of every human being matters.

Every colonial regime had their categories, as Malcolm X talked about, of good negroes and
bad negroes. And you know who the bad ones were? Anyone who would stand up to
colonialism. The problem in the French world was that each area of the French world had their
categories of the so-called good versus bad [blacks]. And Martiniquans were treated as being
more French, more civilized, more well, less black. So as these folks walked around with
their sense of their superiority to other blacks, suddenly [in 1942], they were in a world in which
there were people, there were all these French soldiers on the island, who were going around tu
[French familiar term for you] tu-ing them, that is speaking to them in the diminutive. There
were white soldiers who were basically just raiding the women over the island and beating up
black men. Fanon, by the way, was, however, what we call today totally gangsta. He wouldnt
take any crap. So when he was insulted by a white soldier, you know what he did? He kicked his
ass. And this was very, very important because, you see, a lot of people dont realize this: as
those sailors were beating up people on the island, what Fanon realized was that he had to stand
up for himself. And within that framework Fanon realized he was part of something larger than
himself.
So Fanon volunteered to fight against the Nazis in World War II. Now, when he decided to do
this, one of his Lyce professors, high school professors, one of them said, Fanon, what are you
doing? You telling me youre going to fight a white mans war? And Fanons response? He
said, Wherever there is a degradation of human dignity, wherever there is suffering, wherever
man or humanity is threatened I will fight against it. And [the professor] said, Well, go ahead,
man, its your funeral.
So Fanon went to Dominica, trained, and went on to fight against the Nazis when he was 19
years old. However, Fanon then saw something that many of you see all the time. You see, one
of the things that colonialism and racism do is to create a world of double standards of worth. So
even if youre going to go fight for France, the blacks who volunteered to fight for France were
put in the hollow of ships like slaves, while the whites who volunteered were put up top.
Then one of the other indignities came into play. You see, one of the things I argue in my
writings is you cant, its an error, its a fallacy, to talk about race issues as if they could be
disaggregated from gender and class issues. The black women most people dont realize that
black women volunteered to fight against Nazis. Where were these black women placed? They
were told they had to sleep in the bedrooms of the white officers, so they were being sexualized
within that moment of their fighting for the freedom of France.
But then Fanon landed in North Africa, on the continent. And you know when blacks come to
Africa for the first time, its like, Yo! We are going to the continent, coming home, you know
what I mean? So Fanon and the other Martiniquans landed on the continent. But you know the
French have a word that they use to refer to blacks: les ngres. And les ngres could be
translated as Nigger or Negro but it often means Nigger. So Fanon says he shows up, he and his
brothers, you know, the crew, We are on the continent, brothers! And the Arabs, the Berbers
and others, they would look at them and say, ngres!, and they [the Martiniwuans] were like,
Yo! Yo! Who you talking to? Im coming here to fight and Im being called Nigger on the
continent? And then Fanon and they discovered they were being treated in terrible ways. The
worst off of the soldiers were the Senegalese. But, you know, they [the Martiniquans] wore
special berets to show that they were Martiniquans. And then the French decided: Well if you
are Martiniquans, you are more like whites. So they put them in the cold areas to fight. And you
could imagine being from the Caribbean and youre suddenly in the Alps. You know, being

white may be a prize, but its at a damn cold price! And then when they liberated villages they
found the people they were liberating were also calling them Niggers and deprecating names.
Fanon volunteered for the most dangerous missions. He was twice decorated, but even at the end
of the war the black soldiersthis happened with the Americans as wellthe black soldiers
were sent ahead home in cargo ships. Could you imagine that you were originally brought over
as slaves and you are sent back in cargo ships? And they were sent with bare rations. There was
no parade; there was no welcoming. He was sent back to Martinique [without fanfare] and when
the former Lyce professor asked him, Fanon, you fought for France for human dignity. Whose
war was it? Fanon replied, It was a white mans war.
Fanon then went and fought for Aim Csaire to be the mayor of Fort-de-France under the
communist ticket. And from there I had a great discussion with Firoze about this he
decided, as a veteran, he had a full scholarship to go study. And by the way, I am just giving this
biography for people who are not as familiar, since I hear that his biography is less known on the
continent now. So he talked with his relatives and friends and they decided that Fanon would go
to France and study to be a dentist. In my book, I talk about this. You could imagine all the
issues he would face as a revolutionary dentist! I wont get into the puns especially with my
good friend Firoze here, because he was also a dentist. Anyway, he decided to leave Paris and go
to Lyon, where he studied psychiatry.
And that is where Fanon got involved. One of the things we have to bear in mind, several things,
because I am going to skip over his biography a little. He got his medical degree there but among
the things Fanon did was, in World War II, he was also among those that were liberating the
concentration camps. Fanon saw in a very clear way what dehumanization can do at the level of
brutality. You also should understand from the context I which Fanon lived, the category of
Jews was more amorphous, because he knew African Jews, he knew European Jews. But also,
what some of you may not know is he has two children: His first child was with a Jewish
woman. So Mireille Fanon-Mendes, Frantzs daughter, is Jewish by birth. His second child was
with someone who was Gypsy and Corsican, thats Olivier. But Olivier was born after Fanon
returned to Martinique.
Now, again, when we talk about Fanon and violence a lot of people, again because they are so
obsessed with the idea of a black man talking about violence, and part of the hypocrisy of it is
that a lot of people dont admit it, its not only about a black man talking about violence, because
for a lot of people, black men are violence. You know, we already know this. You know
sometimes all you gotta do as a black man to be violent is just walk into a room. You know,
Here I am: violence.
We could ask about the situation of black women but the complicated thing, especially with the
history of colonialism, which is in another context in which I have written about, is that there is a
complicated history of how gender functions within it. If you write the humanity out of women,
there is this construction of black woman as un-violate-able. Do you know what that means? If
you are un-violate-able it means that anything can be done to you because its not being done to
a person. The score, the complex history of rape and degradation of black women arent even
written in the history books as violence because there is a pre-supposition of black women as
empty slates on which to place ones force.
I bring this up because of when Fanon returned to Martinique. When most people talk about
Fanon, they talk about Fanon in the context of revolutionary violence. But they dont understand

that Fanon also encountered domestic violence. One of the things when Fanon got his medical
degree is that he had studied not only to be a psychiatrist but also a forensic physician. He was,
in other words, a medical detective. And if you read his writings as a medical detective, you
could see how he investigates the colonial situation. Well, when he came to the island he came
across medical records that didnt look right and it was of a woman who had died. So he had her
exhumed and he determined from conducting an autopsy on her that she was a victim of
domestic violence. He pushed the case but the authorities would do nothing about it. So Fanon
began to realize that if he is going to deal with certain social issues, it isnt enough to do it at the
psychiatric level, it has to get to the governing political level. And so Fanon went back and
studied to be what is called a chef de service. This gave him the power to be the head of a
psychiatric facility and this led him to Blida-Joinville in Algeria and this is where the Fanon that
many people know begins.
Because, you see, when he went to Algeria, while he was there he began to implement very
different ways of practicing psychiatry [based on his conviction] that a lot of mental illness
emerged from people not being treated like people. So he argued that psychiatric facilities, if
they were more human oriented, if more social, could become an environment conducive to
human health.
While he was there, as many of you know, the Algerian war broke out and Fanon found himself
in this very untenable situation where a patient would come to him and say, Doctor, doctor I
need your help. Oh what happened? I tortured someone today, I feel so guilty. Help me be
better. Now you could imagine this, help me be better, let me learn to torture without a
conscience. But then he would also have anpther patient come later in the day and say, Doctor,
doctor help me. Whats the matter? I was tortured. What did they do? Oh they cut off my
testicles, they jabbed me in the eye, they raped me and they did this and that.
What is Fanon supposed to do? Make you well adjusted to torturing and being tortured? And so
Fanon began to point out a fundamental problem, that we have to take seriously, of what a sick
society is. He began to train people at the hospital. He set up techniques of how to resist
divulging details under torture and, of course, this would mean eventually he would be arrested.
Fanon eventually, though, resigned. And, by the way, if you ever want to know how to write a
good resignation letter, read Fanons resignation letter. You see there are resignation letters you
hand or mail to your boss but Fanons resignation letter is the kind that you throw on the desk,
you know what I mean? You know it had great sentences like, madness is one of mans means
of escaping his freedom. And after this, his resignation, and its coming out that he was going to
join the FLN [Front liberation nationale], made him an enemy of France.
But before Fanon did this, he went, in 1956, to the Black Writers Congress in Paris. It was rather
amusing because, you know, Fanon had already begun to develop techniques on how to travel
under cover because, you know, if you start engaging in revolutionary activities, particularly on
the side of the opposition to your country, there are people who will try to kill you. So he learned
to travel under aliases. Its rather amusing as Fanon at the black writers congress showed up as
I mean everyone knew it was Frantz Fanon, he gave a great talk on racism and culture, but he
showed up asAim Csaire. If you read James Baldwins discussion of the congress you will
learn there were two Aim Csaires, and Baldwin thought the young one was really charismatic!
Anyway, Fanon then made his way to Tunisia. His family joined him shortly thereafter. The
revolutionary was at work. A lot of people in the Academy read about Michele Foucault and his

critique of madness, and a lot of people too dont pay attention to the fact that he did a lot of his
studies while he was in Tunisia, and that meant he had to be drawing from the work of Frantz
Fanon. There is not a single reference to Frantz Fanon in that mans writings. And this is
something you should pay attention to and its gonna connect to a lot of what I am talking about.
Because you see when we talk about intellectuals in the global south, the first thing we have to
understand is this idea: it is that we have to free ourselves of the notion that thought is only
legitimate if it comes from the mouth or the writings of people who are white.
Now you know, Im not against white people. Im against the idea of making white people into
gods. And one of the errors we make is that we tend to use in the academy the idea that ideas,
theory, must be white. And what do you look for from black people or people of colour? You
look for experience. You know, we are to be studied, but explained through whiteness. But the
problem, of course, if you try to lock yourself into just experience is, well, everyone of you in
this room have had this experience, you know the experience Im talking about: everyone in this
room has had the experience of trying to figure out your experience. You know what Im talking
about. And if you think about it, you know something could happen for the women in the room;
it often happens in that moment where somebody may do a pass and youre trying to figure it
out. You know, when there are all kinds of weird things to figure out or someone may try to do
something to put you down, you usually, under those circumstances, go to a friend or someone
you trust and talk about the experience. And what you are trying to do is to bring a theory to it, to
figure it out: Is that what happened? So now you begin to see a different problem. You see, if
you do not see the role you play in figuring out your experience, then you are going to be
dependent on others to tell you what your experience is: and if you do, then youre locked in
what is called epistemic or knowledge colonization. Its a form of dependency that will make
you in fact not take responsibility for thought. And that means if you seek freedom or liberation,
through that abrogation, you would actually affirm your dependency.
So the question emerges: who is responsible for thoughts and ideas? And the answer, in a
nutshell, is everyone. But the danger is when you are black, you are told not to think, not to
theorize. And often what happens is a kind of de-intellectualizing that will make many black
people actually step aside from knowledge itselfthe very condition that even articulates what
you are.
So as Fanon begins to go through this kind of a practice, you begin to find in his books this issue.
You see, although Fanon was a revolutionary and he engaged in many activities, the question
you should ask yourself is: Why did he write? Why did he write? And the other thing when you
read his books is he didnt just write, he wrote in a way that challenged the way you write about
ideas. Fanons writings are poetic, they are full of humour, they are full of curse words, they are
full of the gritty, dirty, flesh and blood human elements.
His first book was actually presented as his doctoral thesis when he was 25, but it was rejected. It
was entitled On the Disalienation of the Ngre. His doctoral committee was a group of psychophysiologist and frankly a lot of them were pretty racist; they were like: A black man writing on
black people? Please!
So what he did was he went back and in two weeks wrote another doctoral dissertation and that
was on Friedrichs disease, a nervous condition [involving the degeneration of the spinal chord]
but the interesting thin, was that that thesis explored the question of how we treat people with
degenerative diseases and in it he argued that there was a failure to take seriously the role in

therapeutic practice of addressing the patient as a human being. You see, so he got his thesis in
anyway, just in very turgid technical medical language.
But then he decided he wanted to publish his original thesis, so he went to Francis Jeanson who
was a protg of Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous French existentialist. Jeanson said, I want to
publish it, its a brilliant piece of work, come meet me. So Fanon went to meet him and Jeanson
repeated, I love the book. I want to publish it. Fanon, however, looked at him and said, You
mean its not bad for a nigger, huh? Jeanson was shocked. He opened the door and said, Get
out of my office. At that moment Fanon smiled and said, I can work with you. The fact that
Jeanson stood up to him represented for Fanon a true critical relationship. They remained friends
for the rest of Fanons short life.
It was Jeanson who decided that The Disalienation of the ngre wasnt a good title. He
suggested Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, translated, Black Skin, White Masks.
In Black Skin, White Masks you get a variety of theses that many people, especially in France,
did not hear before because Fanon took on questions crucial for anybody studying the African
Diaspora.
If youre going to do anything that deals with black people and youre doing any work that deals
with the conditions of Africa or the global South, there are three questions you must address:
What is a human being? That question is obvious because in the modern world black people are
people who have been told we are not people. The second question is: The question of freedom.
If you look at all the writings in the modern world, people talk about freedom all the time. Look
at the writings of many European intellectuals. Freedom! Freedom! We are fighting for freedom!
Freedom! But how the hell are they talking so much about freedom when they have made more
rigorous the implements of slavery and servitude! And so you have this complicated question,
you have freedom linked to liberation and you have the human question, the philosophical,
anthropological question.
But if you think about the challenge to your humanity, and really think about this, when people
are told they are not people, our instinct is to defend ourselves and say, What do you mean by
saying Im not a human being? Im as human as you are! What you should ask, however, is
what if that person who challenges your humanity is a low standard? Do you really want to make
colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, do you want all those things to be the standard of what
it is properly to be human? So suppose you drop all that and you say, Im going to be the
standard. The problem with that is that you may not have sufficiently interrogated yourself and
in fact what you begin to discover is that maybe you need to interrogate the standard. And if you
interrogate that standard, you begin to deal with a different kind of question, because now you
begin to ask yourself, if am going to be free, if am going to seek liberation, what am I going to
become? What kind of a human being am I going to become and if you begin to ask yourself
those kinds of questions, this leads to the third question: how do you justify whatever you talk
about? How do you justify even justification?
Fanon takes on the question of what it is to be a human being. One of the things he says is that
most people talk about what it is to be human beings in imbecilic ways, and he says that since he
calls a lot of people imbeciles, or idiots, its up to him to prove it. And what he brought up is the
basic point, which is that people naively think that they could simply respond to these issues by
simply asserting a valorization of the self.

But what Fanon points out is something of which many of you on this roofbecause you
actually know what many of your ethnic identities areis that there was no reason for anyone on
this continent to have called his or herself black before that imposition was forced onto them.
You see black is indigenous to the Euro-modern world and the Euro-modern world rejects black
people, so black people face the paradox, the contradiction in fact, the melancholia of being
indigenous to a world that rejects us. And we face a problem that W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard
Wright and Frantz Fanon identified. If you want to know the problem, the problem in a nutshell
is basically this: the problem is of being a problem.
When Sartre visited the United States, for instance, he went out with Richard Wright and he
saidbecause you know, he was Sartre, and Sartre, some of you may not know, really loved
good weed and so he asked, Richard, man, could you take me to Harlem? because that was the
black part of New York. So Richard Wright took him to Harlem and while they were hanging out
there, Sartre says, Richard, tell me about the black problem. Richard Wright turned to him and
said, The black problem? There is no black problem. There is a white problem. And thats
when Jean-Paul Sartre realized, Ah, the problem in Europe, they always talk about the Jewish
problem. No, its the anti-Semites problem, its the haters problem! But, you see, what Du
Bois pointed out, and something you all know, the moment you say youre studying black
people, researchers start studying black people as problems instead of as people who face
problems. And there is a huge distinction between them. Because, you see, if you look at people
as people who face problems then you could analyze the conditions that would actually lead to
the social changes needed. But if you make people themselves into the problem, what are they to
do? You know what they are to do? Disappear. So in effect the kind of argument that says, Oh,
you know, black people disappear as black people; that makes black people into problems. So
whether we like it or not, although we were not initially black people, we are both-and. You see,
many of you on this roof are your ethnic identities and you are also black people.
Now, what is even more complicated about this story is that Fanon points out the naivety of what
it is to reconstruct yourself willy-nilly. The place, when you think about construction the most, is
language. And in fact many people attempt changing themselves through it. People think if they
could master the language you could change; you know, the French say you could be really
French if you could speak French perfectly, youd be an volu, youd be a French man, youd
be French. You know there are people who try to learn Oxbridge English or people where doing
the same with Castilian Spanish, and many others seeking transformation through some other
colonial language. But of course what Fanon pointed out is that the system contradicts itself
because for those who mastered the dominant language well, they are treated as or accused,
Fanon says, of starting something. They are accused of beginning to get educated. They are
accused of beginning to read these nasty things such as, you know, The Communist Manifesto,
Gramscis Prison Notebooks; they start reading things like Antnor Firmins Equality of the
Human Races. You know who Antnor Firmin isany of you? If you dont you should! He was
a Haitian anthropologist, lawyer, philosopher,writer. In 1885 he wrote a lot about these issues of
racism beyond what you may think. You begin to learn your history when you start getting
educated.
May we talk about Frantzs Pan Africanism? Whenever we talk about Pan Africanism we always
talk about Pan Africanism, for instance, only in terms of men, but did you know that one of the
co-organizers of the first Pan African Congress was a woman? She was Anna Julia Cooper. Do
you know she wrote a doctoral dissertation on the Haitian revolution? She wrote, fas well, a

fabulous essay, if you get a chance to read it, called, What Are We Worth? in which she
argued, for instance, that those who are really worth a lot are those who give more than is
invested in them. And, boy a lot of the settler groups on this continent will have a problem with
that, wont they? Because you know how much it costs just to raise a settler? But a lot of people
across the continent are poor. Even with minute investments in some of the poor across the world
leads to high returns. Cooper wrote about this, and she argues that, in so many cases of many
women, so little is invested in women yet there is so much that many women contribute to the
world.
So Fanon, when he was looking at this question of construction in language, showed the problem
is, in a nutshell, this: If you speak the dominant language a certain way and you are white, you
are told you sound like a book, you sound like a professional. If you are a black professional and
you speak like a professional, you know what youre told? Eih, yo, man! Youre speaking
white! And you see the problem: if you treat it as a contradiction of terms to do what any other
professional does, then you are treated almost as an infection of professionalism. So that means
that your blackness is actually treated as that which contaminates the system.
Fanon goes further in that book and examines the human sciences, and he notices something
interesting. I dont have enough time to go into it in detail, but many people think when he wrote
on the categories the woman of colour, the white man, the man of colour, the white woman, they
think he is writing about interracial relationships. He isnt. Hes actually writing about this: that
these normal systems in a patriarchal society should have a situation in which black women and
black men are structurally different. But what Fanon discovered is that colonialism structures
black men and black women into the same psychosocial relation. Because under that system, you
are only legitimate if you get what is called words of whiteness. You actually get legitimation
in that world from a category called a white man.
Fanon goes even further and argues that we, when we fight against racism, dont understand the
true nature of our struggle. You see many of you have heard that racism is a struggle between the
self and the other, and some people walk around saying I dont want to be the other. But what
Fanon pointed out is something rather interesting. Because, you see, in Europe there are people
who are selves and others. But what racism does is to say that there are those who are not a self
and not even an other. If you are in the zone of non-being, that means that you dont even
appear in an ethical relationship. And if you do not appear in an ethical relationship, it means
whatever is done to you is not registered as unethical (because of being located outside the
sphere of ethics). That is why so many people of colour, and particularly black people, live in
and despite violence. Because literally if you are in the zone of non-being it means the system is
legitimate when you do not appear.
But now you have a problem: because it means, if you appear, you have violated the system. In
fact the violence is that that which should not appear has appeared. So you could imagine: How
do you now tell the system that youre not being violent? It means you have to step back and go
back into invisibility, into non-being. So in effect, Fanon pointed out this: Racism is not about
being the other; its about not even being an other. So if you are struggling against racism it
actually requires not even collapsing into the presumption of the kind of a language that will
legitimate those who challenge your humanity. It means, then, that ethics is suspended, and
literally the best way to fight racism, from Fanons point of view, the best way to fight
colonialism, the best way to fight global injustice, is to be political. And this creates something
rather interesting because you see if you look at the way people talk about these issues, they tend

to talk about them moralistically; people worry about who is good, who is badAm I a good
white, a bad white? Am I a good black, a bad black? Fanon says that is all b.s, That is all
irrelevant. The real question is the kind of actions that are needed to create the conditions in
which people can really be in ethical relationships.
And so once he does this, Fanon begins to take on a different kind of question. You see Fanon
was dying from Leukemia, and during this period of his life, Fanon was functioning as the
representative to the provisional Algerian government in Ghana. And as he travels through
Ghana, through Mali, through different parts of the continent and he was doing this while
there were death threats, constant efforts to kill him by the way. You know its funny, I was
watching The Godfather the other day, and you know the scene where, if you have seen this
movie, the scene where Vito Corleone is in the hospital and his enemies are trying to kill him:
well, when Fanon was injured and he was in Rome, a newspaper put [out]: revolutionary from
the FLN is in room blah, blah, blah in this hospital. And when Fanon looked at the paper he said
get me out of this room. Twenty minutes after he was put in another room some guys broke into
the originally reported room with machine guns and they were like, Oh, where is he? This is
the kind of life he was leading.
But he always checked his blood and he was suspicious, and it turns out he had Leukemia, and
you have to picture this: Leukemia, blood cancer. What it is to be a person who has written about
race and racism and dying of blood cancer. And if you think about the old language of race, they
always used to say black blood, white blood, that kind of a thing. Well Fanons background
was that his maternal grandfather was Alsatian, and his paternal one was East Indian. His
grandmothers were black. His name was Frantz Omar Fanon and Frantz with a tz was to
pronounce his name the way the Alsatian say Frantz and Omar because a lot of the East Indians
in the Caribbean were Muslim. And when you think about Omar and its relationship to his
Hebrew origin it means not only he who is good with words but also connected to this question
of that person through words bringing social change. [There is controversy over whether Omar
was really his middle or an adopted name. The French secret police in Algeria stated his name
as Frantz Maguerite Victor Fanon.--LRG]
Well Frantz Omar Fanon was dying. And so he decided to write a few books before he died. He
ended up completing only one, which he composed in 10 weeks. It was Les Damns de la Terre.
And the reason why I think its important to translate it as The Damned of the Earth is because,
you see, in English, wretched has a different meaning. When you think about damned, you
should now get into its etymology. Damned is from adamah and it means of the earth. So, he
is saying those of the earth, twice, to be damned also damns. It means that you could be
damned, even if you didnt do something to warrant it. So what he is trying to bring up is the
extent to which what is suffered in the Global South (in those days they said the Third World),
what the people of that context were dealing with was a circumstance in which they were pushed
to a proverbial hell. And in fact, in his first book, he said, the reason its a zone of non-being is
because there is no hell into which blacks can go. How are you going to go to hell if you are
already there!
But of course here Fanon is also being poetic, because if you think about the images of hell, you
could think about, for instance, Dantes Inferno, and those of you who have not read Dantes
Inferno: you should. Its a spectacular poem and in fact a lot of the images you know about hell
in Christianity are actually from Dantes poetic portrait. They are not from the Bible. Its always
funny as a Jewish guy talking to Christians because when I explain a lot of, because Im also a

professor of Jewish studies and religion, [scholarship on these issues, the audience is often
shocked]. One of my best bus rides was: I ended up in a bus one time with a group of evangelical
Christians and we had a great bus ride together because for two hours we were talking about so
many things that they thought were in the Bible that just didnt exist. A lot of what people
believe is from this powerful poem. But whats interesting in it, just to bear in mind, is that
thought the protagonist in the poem is scared, hes also looking for revenge. He goes through
different layers, limbo, all the others, and he eventually gets to the center of hell and it is cold;
its not hot. Because, you see, hell is supposed to be the furthest distance from God, and if you
are the furthest distance from God, its very cold. And near the very center where he saw the
devil or whatever one chooses to call him, there were these two men: one was among the most
evil men that ever existed; he was a religious leader. And the other, after suffering the brutality
of what the religious leader did to his family, hated him so much that, although they were frozen
from the neck down, he stretched his head over and began to chew on the mans collar. The
protagonist seeing this, that is, what being consumed by hatred does, was released of his
attachment to hate and suddenly the guide Virgil showed him the way out of hell. And it has a
beautiful ending: He walks out and sees the stars at dawn. Its a great metaphor.
Well, if you look at Fanon in The Damned of the Earth, he walks you through that hell; he starts
off with violence and he points out that violence is only brought up if you threaten those in
power. You know its very interesting when people talk about non-violent movements. Many
people talk about the South African liberation struggle as non-violent; they talk about the civil
rights movement in the United States as non-violent, but they only call it non-violent because
nearly all the people who were being killed were black. Violence only begins if you start killing
white people. So the first thing that Fanon points out is that youre now caught in a Catch-22.
Because, you see, if you are dealing with a settler population, the settler population takes the
position that they have the right to what they have. They dont say, I have stolen land; they
dont say that I possess what I have from carnage; they say, I have the legal deed to my
property. Now you take whats called the native people, the people who were there before,
what they say is, You may have the deed but that was my land. How am I going to get my land
back? Well, the answer they receive is, make sure you do it non-violently. But the problem is
violation is defined as getting something unjustly. So now you have another Catch-22. What
Fanon says, see, a lot of people miss this, he says, decolonization is always violent. People think
what he means by that is the evisceration, the beating up, or the shooting of people. That is not
what he means. That happens. But that is not what he means. He means that someone has to
lose. See, one people may broker a situation; the only thing that will satisfy that group is if there
is no change at all, which means first nation peoples should endure ongoing violence. The only
thing that is justice for them is to change the system, which for the settler group means violence.
So, it becomes irrelevant and a waste of time to prove your non-violence to them.
But then Fanon goes to a next point. His next point, and this is the part that people miss. He
detested violence. He argued its nave to think that violence in of itself is going to make the
change that is needed. Because, you see, what you face when you do try to create a
decolonization moment is you face what I call the Moses syndrome. Now that ancient
transition is something on which I could give a long lecture on its own, but this, and I was
talking to Firoze earlier about this, this is connected to a work that came to print back in 1956.
In1956 when Fanon was at the Black Writers Congress in Paris, it was the year that Bourgeoisie
Noir by E Franklin Fraizer was published. Frazier subsequently translated it into English as The
Black Bourgeoisie. One of the problems that happened in the decolonization moment was a

selling out of the transition by undermining the very conditions for the development of a genuine
black bourgeoisie. So what you have in fact is a lumpen-bourgeoisie. A lumpen-bourgeoisie is a
bourgeoisie so-called but not in fact one. Its a group whose wealth and resources are not linked
to the material transformation of the society that would lead to the building up of the
infrastructure of the nation. Its people whose wealth is purely and simply a function of one
thing: mediating the relationship between blacks and whites. And so what happens in that
decolonization moment is what I call the Moses Syndrome.
Now, what Jews do at Seders is we talk about the biblical Exodus, and what many people dont
realize is that Moses wasnt permitted to enter the Promised Land. The reason he wasnt was
because he committed an act in which he said, Look what I did for you. But if you are involved
in a struggle, its not what I did for you; the idea is that every revolutionary must understand that
its not about him or her; its about the project that is greater than him or her. In the biblical
sense its about a god. Well the Moses Syndrome, in later struggles, is this: the people who fight
to create the independent state, the people who lead to the post-colonial state, say, Look what I
have done for you. But what Fanon is raising as a critical question to Les damns de la terre is
this: Those whose skills are best for decolonization are not necessarily those with the right skills
to build a nation. In fact, the big problem is that those people might be in the way, because if
their skill-set is the moment of the decolonization struggle, their legitimacy depends always on
having what? An enemy. And that is why they use xenophobia, racism, and over this continent
right now there are classes of people who are being constructed as enemies in a fictional notion
of African societies that actually is not what the societies were before.
You had pre-colonial Africa, and then colonialism came. Pre-colonial Africa is frozen. Then
after struggles, you get rid of the colonizers, and then people look around and say, Um, where
did we leave off? The problem with that view is that, you see, its premised upon another fiction
called primitivism. Its premised on the notion that there are people who belong in a different
time. But you see, when colonizers show up, when they meet the people they are colonizing, that
moment is a shared time, and if you are struggling against your colonization, then you are using
your values and transforming them into values that are actually part of this time. So when you
think about the African concepts that many of you use, as in the South African context they talk
about Ubuntu, you may wish to consider that you are actually dealing with them fully and
completely as part of a modern struggle. And its because those concepts have the capacity to
expand and engage and remind you of whom you are when you fightsomething crucial
because, you see, what is often forgotten when we talk about these issues is many of us
remember when I talked about that theory / experience thing many of us have a false history
of who we are.
A few years ago, there was celebration of the British supposedly ending the slave trade, the
Atlantic slave trade, and at that time I was the president of the Caribbean Philosophical
Association. I was invited to speak all over the place around emancipation issues. Now here is
what is very interesting: Everywhere I went, if you look at the metropole, the colonial center, the
story and the story that is fed to most of us across the world is that one day, some very,
very good, moralistic white people said, You know, slavery is bad. We should end it. However
everywhere I went, I found out a very different local story. There is noIm not kiddingthere
is no instance of the ending of enslavement or colonization that I have come across that did not
come about because the people struggled for it. So why is there a misrepresentation of the history
to make the people believe we do not fight? And I will give you an example, I will pick one that

is very different from the context you know, pick one of the Virgin Islands [St. Croix]. If you
were to go to Denmark, there is a statue of a Governor Peter von Scholten standing and it says on
the foundations below, he ended slavery in the Danish world. But the real story is a rather
fascinating one. When he was governor, what actually happened was at the fort, they used the
enslaved people to bring in the supplies. Well, each day, as the enslaved people were bringing
the supplies, they were slowly changing the gun powder with sand. So one day when the
governor woke up, he looked outside, and there were all these black people wearing white
surrounding the fort. Some of you may know that white is the symbol of death in much of the
African world, for example, what many of us wear to funerals. They had cutlasses, all manner of
weapons, and they stood up tall when the governor came out and ordered, Disburse! And the
enslaved people just looked at him. And he said, If you dont leave we are going to fire on you.
They remained. So he ordered all the soldiers to aim the guns, yet the people stood there, and
then he ordered, Fire! When the soldiers did, none of the guns worked because of having sand
instead of gun powder. Suddenly, he reflected on being surrounded by all those armed, enslaved
people, and he declared, Well you are all free. Now of course given the way the laws worked
then, because he was the law as the governor, meant the island was in effect free. Now
unfortunately there is a sad end to the story. Denmark didnt want the island anymore, so they
sold it to the U.S. Thus after the initial brief period of freedoms on the island, the U.S,
implemented its brand of apartheid and its accompanying mess. The main point, however, was
that freedom must be fought for.
And so one of the things Fanon points out, you can connect it back to even the domestic abuse
story. You see, if you dont fight for your freedom, then youre always held hostage to the
possibility of a return to domination. So part of your dignity, your humanity, is for you to stand
up for what you are. But Fanon then argued that every generation has its mission. What he meant
was for us to examine the population trained for decolonization: if they continue the practices for
which they are best suited, they will produce a society built on pathology.
Near the ending of the book [Les damn de la terre], Fanon does something very unusual; he
presents case studies showing the brutality of violence on both sides. In other words, he showed
not only that the French were torturing the rebelling population, but also the kind of homicides
that were being committed by Algerians. If he were trying to write propaganda about heroic
revolutionaries, why offer stories of little Arab boys killing their best friend who was white and
French, of a man thinking of his deceased mother to the point of eviscerating a white French
woman? Why tell these terrible tales? What is Fanon trying to tell us is that we should not build
a society on trauma.
There is something rather interesting here: What younger generations need is a conception, a
telos, a maturation process, in which they realize the uniqueness of the responsibility they have
for the world they are building. And within that framework, it means that those who usher in the
new post-colonial moment become those who must now be overcome. So you have this ongoing
practice, and in fact practice thats needed, and, within that framework, Fanon, if you want to use
old language, was trying to argue for an open dialectic. A closed dialectic is an old kind of
Marxist formulation that says, you know: You have one group fight for social change; you then
expand to the universal group who will take over the cause and bring forth universal freedom.
Fanon argues things dont work that way because if you use that model, you are going to be
stuck with the old argument of why those in suffering, those in bondage, those under difficult
conditions must always wait. But Fanon objects: Thats the old argument of imposing one

shoe, the one that fits all. There is a reason why Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, Why We Cant
Wait. There is a reason the Haitians fought for their liberation from 1791 to 1804. Every group
has to understand that it has the responsibility to set the conditions for its freedom and its
emancipation, so in fact what Fanon closes Les damns de la terre with, and it comes back to this
very important issue, is that its not enough to fight for material change. You need also set the
conditions for new concepts. The conditions that led to where we are are actually brief blips in
the history of our species. But the directions in which it will go depend on everyone. So, in
effect, Fanon is arguing for the kind of responsibilities we take on over the very knowledge we
have as the oxygen through which to set a foot the new humanity.
Well, that very creative young man ended up dying on December 6th 1961 in Bethesda,
Maryland. And whats very unusual is that if you look at one of his plays, he described well the
question that he struggled with. He said, he didnt want to collapse into the whiteness, but he did
collapse into the whiteness, and how strange it was because Leukemia is about white blood cells,
isnt it? How strange it was that he faded into white. But his book as we know, Les damns de la
terre, became one of the textbooks of the revolution. It became a text that people began to read.
In a way, because what they didnt understand is that Fanon was really talking to everybody, and
what Fanon understood is something that a lot of people miss. Many will tell you the universe in
truth is white, but Fanon has shown that that is actually one perspective. The black perspective is
very different; its not that a black perspective is complete; its that a black perspective realizes
that it has a relationship to other perspectives. And that means that it knows that its not the
universal; it is that which is struggling in a universalizing activity precisely because, as human
beings, our task is never done. Its just that we are building, struggling, fighting always to make
it better.
Questions
Q: Would you speak to the non-beingness, if my understanding of what you were saying is
correct then, this is my understanding, the non-beingness of certain sections of humanity today
whether they be at tribal level and I use that word in the most derogatory manner, or they be at
the religious level as relates to terrorists or where we have it seems both non-being from the
tribal and religious, so for example being ethnic Somali, is being a double non-being and an
intrusion especially if you are a male black Somali young man would you speak to that please?
Q: I would have left here without being healed if you didnt talk about trauma because the
history of Mau Mau, you have gone to the slavery, the entire Africa is in very powerful trauma
manifesting all over and Fanon talks about that psychology of violence. So my question is,
youre talking about Fanon, there has not emerged another generation that can help to
deconstruct or be like Fanon. What happened? Is it that trauma that is still enslaving us and that
is why we are here, and even you can see many of us are middle class here.
Q: First Fanon was a Pan-Africanist and when he came to Africa he was on a mission of unifying
Africa you know at the time. Now looking forward, 50 years after he wrote The Wretched of the
Earth, and a lot of what he talks about in that in terms of you have the bourgeoisie now talking
over and desiring what the white master had and now they have taken over, and if you look at
todays society, that is exactly what has happened and still at the same time, the idea of a united
African nation still hasnt come about. Now if Fanon was here and just as you said before, hed
be disappointed that he was right. What do you think he would, basically based upon that
diagnosis, What do you think hed propose as a way of both overcoming that new master? The

white master has become black and also that African unity has not being achieved how do we
move forward from here if you were part of this generation that needed to establish a mission for
them to either fulfill or betray?
Q: We are struggling here with a rapid turnover of our leadership, particularly political
leadership that seems to change completely in DNA when they move from movements to
occupying public office and I wonder if there is anything with Fanons analyses that could help
us with deconstructing that and transforming that reality?
Q: We are all here today because somebody paid a price and those were the likes of Fanon and
the likes of Malcolm X all those people, and my question is: do you think so there is a third
liberation that is running Africa and is running the world right now and this is the liberation of
the young people, and innovators and all that stuff? Im a social entrepreneur myself, do you
think the third liberation or the third revolution is a social economic revolution?
Q: I want to say thank you also for affirming my thinking that I do not have to always attach
myself to some thinker somewhere who is almost always white, to say ok therefore I think this
because so and so also said it, to affirm that it is okay. I could also have a completely divergent
view that is not necessarily attached to someone else and that is okay, and that it is also okay to
be angry with the situation. And I, in the moment I think that we lose the ability to get upset with
injustice, I think we have you know gone a bit further. If you would kindly speak about
philanthropy and you know the question of how philanthropy, and I ask this a lot, and people
who have ever being in a place where I am I always ask about money and why I ask about
money is because I also feel that that also desensitizes and depoliticizes almost everything,
because when you put money in it becomes something else, so anyway philanthropy, democracy,
if anyone is thinking about what political systems work in our system, I dont think democracy is
one of them, but maybe it is but I just highly doubt it so philanthropy, democracy, question of
anger and emotion and feeling things.
Q: If Frantz Fanon was alive today, what do you think of Bob Geldof trying to save Africa and
dehumanizing Africans?
Q: I wonder in todays world, one wishes to probably imagine that in his time there was some
orientation, colonialism you have to, you know, fight the settler, kind of take over the state
machine or whatever but in todays world, what would Fanon at age 90, this observation over the
time, the disintegration of the soviet union that it disoriented politics at that time, in todays time
what would have Fanon, what would have oriented Fanon as an example for the rest of us to
follow.
Q: You use the word de-colonization, maybe people who have the insight may have the
equipment, may have the tools, may have the charisma to move a people from that state which
they need to change the status quo and in modern day that person is called the activist and just
what you mentioned echoed an article I read by a former classmate, you can Google it later,
called Hashtags Do Not Manufacture Revolutions, and he said there is a clear distinction
between a leader and an activist, its debatable but I dont know, would you maybe like to
comment more about that is it true that not all activists make good leader because they are
always in a hangover of dealing with a certain issue and once they move out of being stuck in a
rut they are left high and dry and they are wondering, weve got it, what next?

Lewis Gordon responds:

Ultimately, even though I spoke for a while, the most important part for me was to hear from
you. And a lot of what each of you had to say are really connected and, so to speak, I am going
to put it, instead of point by point, together into a single narrative.
So the first thing to bear in mind is that one of the things that Fanon, remember what had said
that, wanted to be wrong. The other thing is that Fanon would highly encourage us and this
may sound very unusual to transcend him. In other words that he was part of articulating a
problem that was indigenous to certain social conditions, we must take seriously and look around
us, pay attention, to the problems we face. If we are facing his problems, it means that we have
failed actually to make ourselves indigenous to our times.
One of the big problems that the intellectuals have for instance, which I see it all over the
continent and all over the global South, is that when we think about intellectual work many
intellectuals treat their ideas and their institutions that produce those ideas as if they are
independent of the hegemonic, the colonial and political situations at hand. If you choose, look at
South Africa for instance, a big problem in South Africa, and its also a problem in Kenya, is that
a lot of universities during colonialism, a lot of universities during apartheid, saw themselves as
independent. So that means then, if you are going to implement post-apartheid, they dont see
why they have to change, because they thought they were not part of apartheid to begin with.
And so if they dont change, that means you have an educational and an intellectual apparatus
that is actually linked to colonial practices. [Because apartheid and colonialism in fact produced
academic institutions suitable for their purposes.]
Now an example of this, and this is something very crucial to understand: You remember when I
talked about what it is to be a human being? Well if you take being a human being seriously, the
problem of what happens when we try to de-humanize human relationssee models that really
tell you not to be angry or not to be humorous, the error they make is they miss something, and
this ia something that Anna Julia Cooper wrote about as well. You see if you laugh, it means you
get the joke, if you get the joke it means you understand, so there is a pedagogical value in
humor. If you are angry it often means you understand the problem.
I had a debate many years ago, a very funny one. I was having a debate about, you know,
whether we should have black studies in the university, and the opposition had a great argument.
He said we shouldnt have black studies because it makes students angry, and you could imagine
my response. And what is wrong with that? Because you see, what are students anyway? Well,
students are people who come to learn, and if you come to learn, the person who is teaching you,
you hope, is committed to learning. That means if that person doesnt know something that
person should admit it or go and seek learning it. Teachers who tell you that a certain format of
knowledge is complete and there is nothing more to learn are lazy intellectuals. And so when
students take black studies, they are concerned because there is this whole world of knowledge
that existed, but when they dont put the word black before the subject, they dont hear about it.
If you take a class entitled politics, there are people in the African continent learning politics
and never talk about Africa. There are people in the continent studying philosophy, and they
never talk about philosophy in Africa. There are people, we could go down the list, even in some
who are supposed to be in progressive areas, there are people who take courses in feminist theory
and on gender, and they never, ever come to the framework of dealing with the lives of people of

colour. If you take a black studies class, say on philosophy, you dont only learn about black
philosophers, you also read white philosophers, because black philosophers are arguing in a
relationship with white philosophers. You learn about East Asian philosophers, about Indian
philosophers. Its the same thing when you take almost all black anything.
If youve noticed, you cant study anything black without it being black, and that is because
you see the hubris of whiteness is whiteness tells you if youre white youre pure. But if youre
pure it means youre cleansed of everything else, so you dont have to be in a relationship with
anything else. Its a fiction. If you deal with the question of blackness, you are admitting you are
in a relationship with something else, so what happens is the first premise is the philosophical
anthropology that Fanon was arguing for is the human being not as a thing, not as a substance,
not even as an individual, the human being is a relationship.
You know when I gave that example about experience and thought, you noticed I said you go to
someone. Its because all of us, we,are relationships. If you had no relationships from birth, you
wouldnt even be able to figure out who or what you are. We are creatures in a world of
language, communication; were in a social world, we are in a world of culture, we are
relationships. So even those models that try to wipe away our relationship to people who are
brown, white, whatever colour we like, that wont work, we are all relationships. Now this
begins to connect to something very crucial, because you see the question you ask is a question
about whats called theodicy. For those who dont know what theodicy is, theodicy is
something that everyone of you who may believe in a god or God faces every day. And that is
this, if God exists, why is the world so terrible? Everybody who is religious faces that question:
If God exists, why do innocent people get killed? Why do terrible people get rich, why do
terrible people get protected? Why are there innocent people who get eviscerated, destroyed? If
God is so powerful, all knowing, why is there evil?
Now one thing that is very interesting is that if you take God out of the picture, if you look
carefully, that argument continues, because you see there are two ways when God is in the
picture that people respond. The first way goes back all the way to an African by the name St.
Augustine (a lot of people forget when they study St. Augustine that he was African). And St.
Augustine had two classic responses that were later taken up by and other thinkers. The first
responseyou all have heard itthe first response is Who the hell are you to question what
God does? You, finite being, who are you to question God? You dont know what Gods plan is?
In other words, the problem is not God, its you. The second response is: You know what, God
gave us freedom and then we botched it up; in other words, God is still good, we are the ones
who are still bad. See, if you take God out of the picture, look carefully at what tends to replace
God; what tends to replace God are systems, systems of knowledge, government, particular
groups and so it takes the same form. Who are you to question the society, the system of justice,
science, whatever it may be. Maybe there is something wrong with you, or: the system really
works; its just that you are no good. In other words it goes back to what Du Bois, Richard
Wright, Frantz Fanon, all of them said, the response is to make you the problem instead of
addressing the problem.
So when we think about those different groups, we have to take seriously that if we take people
out of relationships then were treating people like gods, like nonhuman entities, and then human
beings have to be in the world as if were completely self-sufficient and separate from each other
instead of dealing with the reality that we are in this together. Now once we begin to make that
move, this begins to connect to a lot of the questions that many of you asked, because, you see, if

Fanon says the question is to transcend that, it means we have to get rid of some complexes. I
already mentioned the Moses syndrome, but the Moses syndrome is connected to the Messianic
syndrome. The Messianic syndrome is the belief that someone has to come and save you, the
Great Leader. Fanon was a radical democrat; he believed in participatory democracy; he believed
in collective responsibility for society. At the end of the day, although charismatic leaders are
charismatic, they also may have good ideas, they have a particular function. No institution can
work, no idea, no structure, without human beings making them work, and that means then that
the responsibilities for that world is not waiting for who is going to come save us. It means we
have to get up and do the work ourselves.
We have to take something very seriously. And one of the things we have to take seriously is that
we live under conditions that are already emphatically very different worlds. Let me explain. If
Fanon were here, he would be making a mistake if he looks at the paradigms of the 1950s and
60s. One of the reasons for this is that first of all lets begin with population. Our planet now has
8 billion people on it. You know what 8 billion people means? It means whether we like it or not
we live on a smaller planet. The second thing to bear in mind is that we live in a period right now
of the technological means of communication, information and ideas moving at a nano second.
That means distance is very different for everybody, even the poor, believe it or not. There are
people, for instance, if they take a trip anywhere and it takes more than three days to get there,
they are pissed off. There was a world in which people said, Im going to take a quick trip; it
will take 3 years. Even our expectation of time is different from generations that preceded us.
And now within that framework you now add to it the fact that we also, since we are
relationships, we are not by ourselves in this struggle.
So, for instance, when we raise the question of Pan Africanism, we have to understand the very
history and the conditions we now face. What is Africa in a context like that? You see what Im
saying? And in a context like that, you add another, the other context is now we look at the
former governors. If you look at the former governors, they are at war with two reactionary
concepts. The first one is neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism basically says that people are not
capable of governing themselves, and for the world to function well you need first and foremost
and above all else order. You see, and if you take the position that order must reign supreme,
thats when, if you push it to its extreme, you know what that is: Its fascism. If you bring it back
a little you are going to be obsessed with security, military forces, police, and in fact look at the
language that the police use today. The language that the police use today is the language of
unaccountability; they dont see themselves in a republic under which they are also governed by
laws; they see themselves randomly as the laws, and under those conditions there are people
willing to abrogate law for the sake of maintaining order, which leads to an effort in fact to push
humanity conceptually into the 17th century through 18th century and that is why if you look at
the ideology that informs that stuff, it relies on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, those kinds of
people.
Then you have neoliberalism. Now people use the term neoliberalism a lot but they dont
explain it. If you look at neoliberalism, neoliberalism it depends on the idea of the non-relational
individual. Neoliberals always say they believe in rights but they always add individual rights.
Now I dont know about the rest of you, but I dont know the last time I was discriminated
against as Lewis Gordon by someone who doesnt know me personally. I have been
discriminated against as a black man, as a Jew, as an Indian, as an Arab, I have been
discriminated against as many things. Youre always discriminated against as a member of a

group, as an anonymous exemplar of it. No woman on this roof has ever being discriminated
against as an individual; youre discriminated against as a woman, youre discriminated against
as gay, youre discriminated against as poor; those are groups. So any system thats going to tell
you that you can only exist in it as an individual has made you vulnerable for exploitation. And
in neoliberalism, the theology of neo-liberalism, its theodicy, is the market and within the
framework of the market purely as individuals, you dont have any resource through which to
deal with the accumulated structures of privatization waged against you. Now within that
framework that means ultimately neoliberalism says, You know what our response to the
revolutionary movements of the 20th century is? Go to the 19th! You see how both are turning
the clocks back. But some people are attracted to these efforts to turn the clock back, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and if you look at neoliberalism, neoliberalism because it works
with individualism, works within moralistic logic.
You know many of us dont pay attention to this, but it makes absolute sense why President
Mandela emerged, why president Obama came to power, when they did. You know when
president Obama was running for presidentman!I lost a lot of friends, because everything I
said in 2007 was correct. The world we have now is what exactly I predicted, and I remember at
that time, because you see what people wanted from Obama was for him to be a god. Instead
they got a very human politician. We have to let go of our ego, we have to let go of
misunderstanding who we are, the I, who I am, and understand the relationships we have for
something greater than ourselves. It means then there are some things that need to be done,
whether you individually succeed or not. Because the only foundation for the future is going to
be the actions we articulate, build and struggle and forge to make happen.