I do not have an extensive library but I students who visit my home from Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan or from FATA. Young intellectuals from these areas have long been enticing me to hand over the original books of Fanon.
There are three reasons that Fanon speaks to me (as a Sindhi) and to young students from Balochistan, FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan. Firstly, because his method aims to decenter the given discourses and concepts, often of colonialism, and in that sense teaches one how to critique and think from one’s situation and allow physiological discomfort (anger) to inform one’s ideas. Secondly, because his method of decentering the claims and discourse of colonialism and post-colonial states aims at decolonization. Finally, because between his actions and his ideas there is a symbiosis. He fought and died for this beliefs, which gives his texts a moral authority. In all his work he challenges practices that do not give sovereignty to the people – to those below. And colonial structures never give sovereignty to the people. It is precisely the wholesale institution or continuation of colonial practises in Balochistan, G-B, Sindh and FATA post-independence that make Fanon a comrade and ustaad for me and students from these regions.
Fanon’s written work and activities challenge colonialism as a project and discourse. Colonialism can be defined as rule of a distant territory by a metropole centre. To effect a colonial project a metropole centre has to create and disseminate a discourse that makes such domination possible – justifying and motivating the colonizers and then normalizing it for the colonized, the colonizers and the world at large. In the case of European colonialism, this discourse was racial. Put simply, the closer one is to ‘whiteness’, the closer one is to being ‘human’ and the rights that it entails, and the closer one is to European culture, the closer one is to being civilized. It is clear that black persons and those of the Third World would then be furthest from being either ‘human’ or ‘civilized’. European Colonization begins in 1492 when Columbus lands in the Americas and through various modification its discourse has been on repeat up to the present.
Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, written when he was 25, demonstrates best his method of decentering colonial discourses. As a student from Martinique in France, Fanon was, as he writes, ‘over-determined from the outside’ – like all non-white persons. His skin colour, seen as black by the colonizers’ eyes, signified the binary other of whiteness, that is, it made him, to quote Fanon, ‘an animal’. If European civilization stands for whiteness and then whiteness in turn stands for that which is good, then the non-European would always come up short. Over five hundred years, the colonial discourses have embedded themselves in the European ‘collective unconscious’. They are everywhere. For example, in films, books, poems, advertising, songs, paintings and philosophy. Fanon notes that this led to a superiority complex in white people and an inferiority complex in non-white persons. Strive as the non-European might, she cannot come up to the standards of civilization (defined as they are always by whiteness) and try as a white person may to understand the ‘other’ he can never really leave the superiority that is structured not only in the ‘collective unconscious’ but also re-affirmed by material situations.
Colonizers create which they affirm in their discourse – for example, the idea that Pakhtuns love their customs, are fierce about their independence and weapons and are ‘tribal people’, justifies the British and Pakistani imposition on them of the (barbaric) laws of the Frontier Crimes Regulations. This in turn structurally re-affirms guns, tribes and customs at the material level – books and schools or democratic practices are not allowed, which in turn re-affirms the colonial discourse on Pakhtuns. Given that a tribal system is seen as inferior to a civilized system of modernity, how could a Punjabi not feel superior when he or she sees a Pakhtun selling glasses in a market in Lahore (I would argue that the economic poverty of Pakhtuns is also structured by coloniality and is not a historical fact). What I am illustrating in this example is that the discourse on the Pakhtun is reinforced by the material conditions created by the colonizers and not by the Pakhtun himself. This is the basis of the colonial project and discourse. It makes of the colonized, ‘objects’ without agency, both of discourse and, as the colonized do not have sovereignty, they become objects to be governed by the metropole centre. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon is concerned with the psychological effect of coloniality and he notes that the colonized is,’‘skilfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement’. What option does the colonized subject then have? Fanon notes two options, that of nativism and that of re-creation in battle.
Nativism would to be an attempt to posit a counter value system from a pre-colonial past. Gandhi, would be a nativist. Nativism is not possible according to Fanon, because colonialism has been too totalizing a project – it had erased or re-written sources of the pre-colonial societies and ruptured their economic, political and social bases. Likewise, nativism, for Fanon, fails to advance humanity. Finally, nativism fails to note the advances made for all, even during colonialism. He does not reject the other side of colonialism – notably, the Enlightenment (though, he does not see it in bloated terms either for he constantly notes its underside – colonialism). Fanon then champions recreation in and through struggle.
Recreation begins in the struggle of understanding the colonial situation – or any situation of oppression. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon outlines a method for the oppressed for such an understanding. The method relies on the body. Here, Fanon, is in affinity with Nietzsche. From physiological discomfort values can be born.
The oppressed, Fanon is suggesting here, have to trust their instincts. They have to trust how they feel. This sounds rather simple but it is pre-requisite for decolonial politics. If colonialization operates a totalizing discourse that finds its way into TV, books, movies, and other cultural and intellectual productions and if that is then reinforced by the creation of material conditions that reflect back on to the discourse then the only space where the colonized can find themselves is in those quiet feelings of discomfort. They have to theorize that – for everywhere else they are told lies and they see these lies reinforced in the material conditions that surround them. Let me illustrate this again with an example. A Sindhi hari is told that haris are poor because they are lazy and illiterate in depictions on PTV. When the hari looks around at other hari’s he sees them lounging around and he also notes his own illiterate state. The discourse and material conditions are reinforcing themselves. Yet, sometimes – when he sees the landlord’s Rolex or stupidity displayed in matters of agriculture – he has a feeling that the system was built this way – that if he had land and capital he would work hard and that, in fact, it is the labour of hari’s that makes land productive and not the capital of the landlord. It is these moments of bodily discomfort – or even explosions or resentment – that Fanon wants the colonized to trust and theorize. He asks us to understand and analyse the system from our position in it. By doing so we create our own understanding of our world, and in so doing, we decenter the discourse of the colonizer or the post-independence colonizers. It is precisely because Sindhis, Baloch, those from FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan find themselves only in negativity in the collective discourse of Pakistan that they find themselves in affinity with Fanon. Some of the common discourses include, the lazy Sindhi or the womanising wadera of songs and drama, the violent Pakhtun, the greedy oppressive anti-state Baloch sardar – it ought to be noted here that out of the thirty-plus Baloch sardars, only four sardars have taken up a politics for Baloch rights and only Khair Bux Marri has been consistent in that position.
This method of analysis is the first stage of what I have called Fanon’s decolonial project. It is the stage of understanding. The second stage calls for us to transcend the explosion and analysis into something positive and universal. He asks us to act. Fanon puts it best, ‘to education man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act’. It is this second stage, of the ‘act’ of decolonization to which Fanon devoted the rest of his life. He did so in the belief that only when we have decolonized can we have genuine interaction between people. In this sense Fanon is in close affinity to the fakir poets of South Asia. Like Sachal Sarmast and Bulleh Shah, his politics are geared towards eradicating barriers to love. Fanon asks us to create a world where genuine interaction and love are possible.
During journeys for protests across Pakistan I have carried Fanon’s book with me. They have helped me understand the continuity as well as the break from our colonial past. The continuity is in the form compartmentalization that reduces the majority to slaves not even waged labourers, torture as a fabric of governance and draconian autocratic structures over most of the country to extract and sell on resources – be it gas of Sindh, coal of Thar, the copper and gold of Balochistan or raw earth mineral of K-P. Let me tell you how it all works.
I was twelve when my family moved into a freshly painted white bungalow in Phase four of Defence Housing Authority in Karachi. It was designed in the 1970s and showcased modernist use of vertical and horizontal lines, glass and concrete. The architect had based the house on a series of rectangles. The rectangle of the boundary walls contained within a rectangular building. On the front, as you entered from the gate, was a courtyard with a hanging garden, and on the right a lawn. The left side of the house had a separate gate for a car and on that side the building was a mere five feet from the boundary wall. Inside, there were three bedrooms on one side of the house and on the other there was a dining area and entertaining rooms going onto the lawn. At the back corner there was a kitchen. Farooq, a domestic worker who had come from our village of Bhiria in Naushahro Feroze district also lived in the house. But not on the inside.
His room was on the outside behind the car park area. I recall it as a small room of 10 feet by 12. It had one light bulb in the middle, a fan and a small plastic mirror hanging on the wall. Next to Farooq’s ‘servant quarter’ was ‘the servant toilet’. I never really saw it. But I recall it was dark and had a tap a foot or two from the floor. The floor and walls were cemented but not tiled. It had a desi (squat) toilet. Farooq was not allowed inside the house unless invited. The kitchen had an entrance from inside the house and one from outside. The outside was for him, and the triangle of the car park, ‘servant quarter’ and kitchen was his world. My father held court in the lawn, and his world and that of Farooq, were physically demarcated – my father never went to the back of the house where Farooq lived and worked and Farooq only entered his side when conducting a task. For my father Farooq served only an instrumental purpose. If I spent too much time with Farooq I was reprimanded for ‘wasting time with servants’. My Karachi house was in microcosm of a colonial world. The architect had designed the house with colonial principles of slave and master in mind. Farooq was the native who had to be quartered and my father the master. My household merely reflected wider colonial patterns of Pakistan. As Fanon notes, ‘All that happened at independence is that the white master was replaced by the brown master’.
I want to use coloniality to describe those dehumanizing attitudes and practices that have a genealogical link to colonial modes of governance – either European or others. One element I have already noted above – that of compartmentalization of physical zones – the native quarter and that of the masters, held beautifully apart by check-posts, architecture and the injection of inferiority in the consciousness of the oppressed majority.
I want to read Fanon’s last three works, Towards an African Revolution, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched Of the Earth, as companions to understand Pakistan today.
Having already published, Black Skin, White Mask, Fanon went on to complete a doctorate in psychiatry and soon after, around the age of 28, became director of Blida-Joinville hospital in Algiers. It was here in Algeria, in 1953, that he began to see the effects of colonization. The Algeria that Fanon arrived in was a colony of the French Empire, and he was an employee of the colonial government. Two types of patients came to dictate his thoughts. The military officials who administered torture and the Algerian who was tortured. Both sought his solace and his expertise. The former came voluntarily and the latter were thrown to him after electrocution, drowning, beatings and sexual abuse. Fanon saw first hand how the system of colonialism debased both. He relates an instance of a French policemen who administered torture and an Algerian he had tortured accidentally meeting in his hospital grounds:
“He [the policeman] was leaning against a tree, looking overcome, trembling and drenched with sweat: in fact having an anxiety crisis. I took him into my car and drove him to my house. Once lying on the sofa he told me he had met in the hospital one of my patients (an Algerian patriot) who had been questioned in the police barracks. I then learnt that the policeman had taken an active part in inflicting torture on this man. I administered some sedatives which calmed his anxiety. After he had gone, I went to…the hospital where the patriot was being cared for…the patient could not be found. Finally we managed to discover him in a toilet where he was trying to commit suicide: he on his side had recognised the policeman and thought that he had come to look for him and take him aback again to the barracks.”
Allow me two asides. First, Fanon treated both and cared for each – his struggle with his patients was reclaiming something human in both, because what debases all of us is the structure of violence, whichever side we are on. This, then, is the essential aim of decolonial politics – to create a human world for everyone. We fight not to repeat the colonizers’ structures of domination but to end the structures that dehumanize all of us.
Second, that torture, institutional and systematic – like enforced and ingrained compartmentalization – is the cornerstone of coloniality and also prevalent in Pakistan in colonial proportions. The victims are mainly Baloch and Pakthuns – 20,000 Baloch are missing. Many are young students. Most are picked up at check-points across Balochistan and the Supreme Court has made statements make it clear that it is the Army and various arms of the army that are responsible for their abduction.
Sana Sangat Baloch
However, it is the bodies of these young men after they have been ‘dumped’ that tells us all we need to know about colonial practices. Take the case of Sana Sangat Baloch, a student leader of a non-violent, though independence seeking Baloch Student Organisation-Azad (BSO-A). He was abducted in 2009.
Sana’s body was found three years later in Kech district of Balochistan, on the side of the road in a pool of dust. He had been savagely tortured. Shot twenty-seven times in the chest, his arms and legs were broken.
Sana is not the only body that speaks volumes of Pakistani coloniality. There are thousands of missing and murdered activists by the state. The violence of the state is an everyday violence of maintaining the structure of coloniality. Fanon, notes that this structure, aims above all to alienate the people from their land and its resources for international capital.
Fanon found himself with the colonizers by way of his employment and that he could not do. He resigned from his office and joined the Algerian revolutionaries. He put his reasons in a public resignation letter in 1956, which made it clear that French colonialism was ‘non-viable’ and dehumanizing. He wrote:
“The function of a social structure is to set up institutions to serve man’s needs. A society that drives its members to desperate solutions is a non-viable society, a society to be replaced. It is the duty of the citizens to say this. No professional morality, no class solidarity, no desire to wash the family linen in private, can have a prior claim. No pseudo-national mystification can prevail against the requirement of reason.”
Reason required action. From this point on until his death in 1961 Fanon went underground and worked for the Algerian FLN(National Liberation Front).
Three actors wanted to play out their desires in the Third World. The colonizers’ desire to hang on to the colony, the national elites’ (brown sahibs) desire of a formal independence but without the dismantling of colonial structures, and opposed to the two the colonized people’s desire for substantial decolonialization. Let me elaborate on these briefly.
Fanon’s articles collected in A Dying Colonialism and Towards an African Revolution note the desperate attempts of the colonizers to hang on to colonies or to forge altered methods of neo-colonial rule with the collaboration of the national elite. Fanon warns of the dangers of allowing neo-colonialism to enter through the back door of formal decolonialization. The assassination, by the CIA in 1961, of Patrice Lumumba, a friend of Fanon, hit him particularly hard but also alerted him to the danger of neo-colonial rule. Writing in the FLN organ El-Moudjahid, he seems alert of a new collaborative class, whose interests are linked to neo-colonialism. He writes:
“It is true that these Africans were directly interested in the murder of Lumumba. Chiefs of puppet governments, in the midst of a puppet independence, facing day after day the wholesale opposition of their peoples, it did not take them long to convince themselves that the real independence of the Congo would put them personally in danger.”
What was true to the Congo in the 60s is true in Pakistan today. Take, for example, the mechanism of governance in Gilgit-Baltistan – though, one could equally talk about Balochistan or FATA. When the British left and those in Gilgit revolted against the Maharaja of Kashmir, who ostensibly claimed sovereignty in the region, from the lowlands the Pakistani government sent a ‘political agent’ to replace the British agent. And so 60 years later a modified system of political agents still runs the place. The people of the area have no representatives in the National Assembly nor are they able to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Instead, they are governed by bureaucrats of Islamabad with the army being a senior partner. Unelected, and also non-representational of the local population, they hold sway on all major matters. The people of the region are in opposition to this apparatus of governance. Note, for example, the hundreds of thousands of people who held a ten day dharna across the region from Gilgit city to Skardu in April of 2014 led by the Gilgit Baltistan Awami Action Committee (G-B AAC). Their main demand was the instituting of a wheat subsidy but they also demanded changed methods of governance. Decolonialization of Gilgit-Balistan would see social, economic and political institutions controlled by those of the region. It would see them change from being subjects by way of colonization to citizens by way of exercising effective sovereignty. However, as Fanon notes, there are puppets in whose interest it is to perpetuate draconian systems and like any good colonialists they use the law and bayonet to maintain their power. So much so that activists of the GB-AAC have been charged under the Anti-terrorism Act and in the case of and were up to recently in jail.
Fanon critique was matched for his actions. He worked for the unity of the oppressed peoples and nations. Here, he acts as a spokesperson for a Third World internationalism that he shared with the likes of Che Guevara. In his last years he wrote of a ‘United States of Africa’ and the need for the continent to move together. Small nation states left alone, he argued, would be picked off by neo-colonialism. He also argued for Third World countries to support those still colonized.
An independent Algeria, though after Fanon’s death, under Ahmed Ben Bella was to do so. It hosted members of the Black Panthers who were so mercilessly pursued back home by the United States of America. They provided logistical support to Che Guevara in his attempts in support of Congo independence, and they also helped Angola gain independence, working with Cuban fighters and the Russians. Fanon saw such solidarity as the only possible way of breaking out of the global system of inequitable exchange that colonialism has set up.
In this light, Pakistan’s brown sahibs’ decision to join the Baghdad Pact in 1955, accept America tutelage and not follow a Third World path has cost us dearly. The Pakistan model has more in common with the Mughal dispensation of charity than welfare.
Our model of economy and labour aids the economy of developed countries via debt servicing, out-flows of money from the corrupt for properties in London and Dubai, and exports of resources and labour. It does nothing for the people.
For Fanon, the unity of the formerly colonized could achieve development. Fanon was re-imagining the state and nationalism when he talked about a United States of Africa. That is something we too need to consider. Can there be greater Asian identity? An Asia that works for the people would require a settlement of border disputes, porous borders and freer movement of people and goods. Some of this already happens (the border between Pakistan and Iran sees massive exchange of oil) but illegally and thus the benefit is stripped from the people and given to corrupt custom officials and the security state.
Fanon’s last book, The Wretched of the Earth, while continuing the two themes mentioned above also explores the consciousness of the colonized at the moment of decolonialization. As debilitating social institutions fall away, as shackles give way, Fanon notes the contours of the new subject that is coming into being. Upright, alert, transformed from slumber through often violent struggle, the native in struggle loses ‘his inferiority complex’ and becomes ‘fearless’ and gains ‘self-respect’.
He alerts us that a colonial system – such as we have – which is held up by bayonets – will die a violent death. The lesson is clear for us: the violence of resistance stems from the violence of the system that oppresses. To answer with torture and more state violence is to merely repeat the cycle. The oppressed, to feel human, would find counter-violence a cleansing force in a colonial situation. To move beyond this requires the end of the architecture of colonialism. What needs to go are checkposts, kill and dump, immunity for those involved in extra-judicial crimes, and the state’s sponsorship of death-squads. This is precisely what social movements from BYC to PTM are asking for.
To conclude, our compartmentalized landscape, the body of Rana Sangat Baloch, the structure of governance in Gilgit Baltistan and ex-FATA tell us of a Pakistani coloniality.
It has the same aim the British had: Alienate the masses from themselves and the land to exploit them and the land. The British had carried out the foundational violence of conquering and establishing a new order of draconian governance. The Pakistani state had the fortune to inherit the conquest. They got it as a gift from Jinnah and that is why he is their patron saint. Their violence is a violence of maintaining and further intensifying this colonial system, aided now by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, the US and sometimes China.
The struggle of the Baloch, Sindhi, Pakthuns and those of Gilgit-Balistan are struggles of decolonialization, of wanting control again of land and governance. Fanon would have fought with them.
