The Janus face of Pan-Africanism

Janus is the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, endings and traditions. It’s month is represented by January and we are getting close to it now.

 

Frantz Fanon, ideologue of the Algerian war of independence, called for violent revolution.  Nelson Mandela, a descendent of the noble Tembu tribe in South Africa decided it could be achieved peacefuly.

 

Mandela has just been enshrined in the pantheon of democracy. Fanon, whose strategy opened the door for him, is a forgotten martyr.

 

It’s an ironic coincidence that Nelson Mandela died last week on December 5th, just one day before the 52nd anniversary of the death of Fanon. Over the past half century Mandela spent 28 years in prison. It wasn’t until he had moved his political views toward the center he gained his freedom and became the first elected leader of non-apartheid South Africa. 

 

Frantz Fanon didn’t receive homage in a stadium in Soweto built to host the world cup finals.  He took his final breath in a research hospital operated by the United States government. Later, he was buried in a martyr’s cemetery at Ain Kerma, in Algeria, near the border with Tunisia.

 

Several sources confirm that the certificate of death, issued by the city of Bethesda, Maryland, in the northern suburbs outside of Washington identified the deceased as “Ibrahim Fanon.” The cause of death was attributed to the effects of leukemia.

 

Fanon’s health went into decline in 1959 after a serious automobile accident in Morocco. He continued to follow an exhaustive schedule of travel in Africa and in Europe.

 

The french colonial government banned Fanon from living in Algeria in 1957. Like the controversial ideologist of the American Revoultion, Thomas Paine, Fanon effectively became a man without a country.

 

He spent much of his time living and writing in Tunis, a relatively open city that provided him a base he could regard as a safe haven.

 

The KGB, the CIA and the Fanon’s physican and mental decline

 

Like Nelson Mandela, Frantz Fanon was a person of interest to the Soviet KGB and the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

When he was diagnosed with leukemia his connections with Moscow were instrumental in arranging for his treatment there. But he continued his writing and continued traveling and lecturing and advocating violent revolution. It is possible his immune system was weakened by the frenetic pace.  Some biographers suggest Fanon became more impatient, vitriolic and moody, indications that he may have been struggling with chronic depression.

 

Showing improvement after treatment in Moscow, his leukemia worsened in 1961.  

 

He decided to accept the offer of experimental treatment in the United States through the good offices of Oliver Iselin, a CIA officer with responsibilities in the Maghreb.

 

‘’Ollie’’ Iselin, from a prominent American family, had his own international network.

 

Fanon’s first days in Washington were spent at the DuPont Plaza Hotel, not far from the White House and the adjoining Old Executive Office Building. Senior CIA officials used buildings in that neighborhood because their new headquarters in northern Virginia was under construction and would not officially open until after Fanon’s death.  It was convienent for officials to visit Fanon in the nearby hotel. After eight days he was transferred to the hospital in Maryland where he died on December 6, 1961.

 

The Kennedy administration, which had just taken office, was reach out to African nationalists and to push back perceived communist influence in the region. Fanon’s friend Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, visited the White House in March of that year. 

 

Some biographers have noted that Fanon’s body was returned to Tunisia from the United States in a Lockheed Electra aircraft. The travel was made possible through back channels involving the U.S. Department of State and the Bourgiba regime in Tunis. 

 

Journalists and an African-american ‘’black consciousness’’ website report that ‘’Ollie’’ Iselin was not only present at the funeral, he allowed himself to be photographed, not standard operational security protocol for intelligence operatives.

 

Did Frantz Fanon adopt the Muslim religion at the end ?  Or was the name Ibrahim an operational ruse developed by the United States for its own motives ? That question has remained unanswered for 52  years. The French government has embargoed over one thousand pages of dossier on Fanon, and it has offered no signs that it plans to open its archives to researchers in the future. 

 

The leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria and the Algerian intelligence service prefer that he fades into obscurity.

 

Fanon in the struggle. Mandela a distant outsider

 

With the publication of ‘’White Faces, Black Masks’’ in 1952, his articles in El Moujahadid and his meetings with panafrican movement leaders in Accra, Ghana, in 1956, Fanon’s theories advocating the use of force to gain independence from the colonial masters had spread throughout Africa. He was close to Kwame Nkrumah, Holden Roberto, Jomo Kenyatta and Sekou Touré, all of whom shared his views.

 

In contrast, Mandela didn’t project his views on violent revolution the way the ‘’Accra Group’’ did. He maintained a low profile on the international front, with good reason.

 

At the time of Fanon’s death Mandela was a member of the executive committe of the Communist Party of South Africa, which maintained a relationship with Moscow, which has been quietly reported in the United States by National Public Radio, the New York Times and by some British publications.

 

 

The existential fate of the revolutionary

 

Regardless of whether he was a Marxist-Leninist, a product of the Negritude movement of his early mentor, Aime Cesaire in Martinique or a radical French-educated psychiatrist steeped in the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud,

 

Like his comrades, George Padmore et George Habbash, he heen relegated to the dustbin of revisionist history while Mandela, the consummate politician, exits center stage as a global icon of freedom.

 

Today, all the praise afforded Nelson Mandela won’t stop the anarchy and fighting between tribes and faith-based groups in the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Uganda, Mali and Nigeria.

 

Is Joseph Kony inspired by the words of Nelson Mandela.  Or what about Mullah Omar ?  If they are, their inspiration is masked by the fog of war between syncredic christians and Islamists as they respond to the divide and conquer tactics of former colonial powers.

 

The French have returned to the CAR en masse and their defense minister has hinted they will likely be their longer than six months. The British are providing logistical support.  Washington’s Africa Command has thousands of troops and advisers on the continent and in the sea lanes to provide security. Is this neo-colonialism in the name of democracy?

 

Fanon being influenced by the Negritude movement and its focus on the roots of slavery is well known. But non of his work underlines the historic role played by Arab tribes and those in the Maghreb who engaged in pan-African slavery and the more lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade that emerged later.  Nor did Nelson Mandela.

 

Billionaire George Soros, the patron of the International Crisis Group (ICG) has recommended that Al Qaeda become a direct participant in the government of Algeria in order to make the nation ‘’more democratic.’’  U.S. secretary of defense Chuck Hagel has also been supportive of the Soros-ICG initiative.

 

What would Frantz Fanon say about this?  What would Mandela, the friend of Gaddafy, Arafat and the Arab world say ?

 

note: some content in this post is cross posted on 6 December in French at  Al Huffington Post Maghreb at this link http://www.huffpostmaghreb.com/eric-ehrmann/rappelezvous-ibrahim-ibra_b_4390594.html