ABSTRACT
Lumumba and Fanon: these two great dead men represent Africa. Not only their nations: all of their continent. Reading their writings and deciphering their lives, one might take them to be implacable enemies. Fanon, the great-grandson of a slave, left his native Martinique, a country which at that time had not yet become aware of the Caribbean identity and its needs. He espoused the Algerian revolt and fought as a black among Muslim whites. Drawn with them into an atrocious and necessary war, he adopted the radicalism of his new brothers, became the theoretician of revolutionary violence and underlined in his books Africa’s socialist calling: without agrarian reform and without the nationalization of colonial businesses, independence
was an empty word. A victim of Belgian paternalism – no elite, no bother – Lumumba, despite his vast intelligence, did not possess Fanon’s learning. On the other hand, he did appear at first sight to have the advantage over Fanon of working on his own soil for the emancipation of his brothers of colour and of his own native country. On countless occasions he said that the movement he was organizing, and whose uncontested leader he became, would be non-violent, and apart from the provocations or a few local initiatives of which he always disapproved, it was by non-violent means that the MNC1 established itself. As for structural problems, Lumumba clearly defined his position in his Présence africaine lectures: ‘We do not have an economic option.’ By that he meant that political questions – independence, centralism – came first, that political decolonization had to be achieved before the instruments of economic and social decolonization could be created.
