RICHARD PITHOUSE

Many South Africans who first read Fanon in the 1970s and 1980s have remarkable stories about their first encounter with The Wretched of the Earth. These stories are often told in a mythic style, not unlike some of the stories that are told about people’s first meetings with Chris Hani.

There is the feminist, now in her late fifties, who recalls a young man crossing a swollen river in the Transkei to bring her a copy of the book – wrapped in plastic and held high – after she had come through a harrowing time in the hands of the police.

There is the philosopher, now on the cusp of his eighties, who recalls how, in the electric days that followed Abram Onkgopotse Tiro’s defiant graduation speech at Turfloop in 1972, students secretly passed around a copy that each person would read through one night before passing it on to the next person.

People who were present in the moment of political creativity in Durban in the early 1970s centred around the charismatic figures of Steve Biko and Rick Turner have their own stories of the furtive circulation of the book, and then Josie Fanon’s visit to the city. There are also stories, from the late 1980s, of people getting a copy of the book, wrapped in brown paper, from Ike Mayet’s bookshop in Durban. Some people recall the care that had to be taken to turn the pages while reading with gloved hands.

My own story is prosaic. I had encountered Fanon’s name twice. The first time was in Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like which I found on the bookshelf of a friend’s mother early in my first year at university in Pietermaritzburg in 1989. Fanon is quoted twice. Both times a fascinating quote is introduced with “As Fanon puts it…” in a manner that implies that one should know who Fanon is.

I did not know who Fanon was but immediately wanted to know.

My second encounter with Fanon was later that year in Paul Johnson’s bestselling Intellectuals, which had come out in 1988. I read it while the police were making forays onto the campus and war between Inkatha and the United Democratic Front was raging in the valleys outside the city. Johnson excoriated Jean-Paul Sartre for “encouraging … violence” by writing the introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, described Fanon as “the founder of modern black racism”, wrote that he had “inflamed Africa” and dismissed The Wretched of the Earth as a “frenzied polemic”.

There was nothing frenzied about the two quotes from Fanon in I Write What I Like and it seemed that something about Fanon had pushed Johnson, who of course assumed a privileged claim on reason, out beyond the realm of reason.

Later, after reading Black Skin, White Masks, I would recognise the way in which many white people were pushed into this kind of irrationality by the forceful assertion of a full and equal humanity by black people as a form of what Fanon called Manichean delirium.

Newly arrived in London in 1993 I was working what in South Africa were called ‘piece jobs’, mostly as a labourer. One morning walking to the tube station to travel to see someone about the possibility of some work I saw a copy of The Wretched of the Earth on a wire rack on the pavement outside an Oxfam shop. It was the Penguin edition, printed in 1976 and priced at one pound. I bought it with the excited sense that I had stumbled across something that I had long been looking for.

Opening the book at the first chapter on the tube I was immediately transfixed by the description of the colonial city. It seemed that Fanon was telling more of the truth about my own country than any writer I had yet read and presenting that truth with extraordinary acuity.

As the narrative moved into a discussion of violence I understood, with the same immediacy, that Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose work I had lived with since high school, carried influences from Fanon. This was a writer who explained London as well as Durban, where I had grown up. This was a writer for the world. I missed my stop, aware that I was doing so, and kept reading on a long loop on the Circle line. This was a book that compelled a first reading in a single sitting.

I returned to South Africa on Christmas day 1994. I was stunned to receive a phone call on Boxing Day inviting me to an interview for a position to teach philosophy at the University of Durban-Westville.

The university was in financial, political and ethical crisis. The politics and philosophy departments shared a single computer. Students were struggling against exclusion. While there were many remarkable people working at the university a good number of the teaching staff did not believe that the newly arrived African students had the intellectual capacities to thrive academically. Some of the administrators treated African students with open contempt.

There was a simultaneous push into a democratic future and a deeply reactionary Indian backlash underway against the beginnings of deracialisation. This backlash was sometimes openly racist and sometimes masked in a pseudo-progressive garb. Real thuggery, extraordinary thuggery, was being carried out in the name of the left.

But in these difficult circumstances there were committed people doing excellent work and valuable nodes of shared commitment here and there. One of these people was the late Ben Parker, a wholly decent man, who ran the philosophy department in 1995, the year that I arrived on campus. In June that year Mabogo More, another wholly decent man, returned to the department from Harvard. Together Ben and Mabogo created a node of intellectual seriousness and real commitment to our students as well as a space where young academics were treated with respect.

In 1996 Mabogo took over the headship of the department. Meetings were spaces for collective reflection rather than issuing instructions. Books were shared, the television series Homicide: Life on the Street avidly discussed, vast amounts of coffee drunk and an informal course in jazz history carried out by Mabogo whose office was adorned with a huge poster of Malcom X.

One day a leading protagonist in the thuggish politics on the campus, a young white man in the grip of a wild-eyed fervour, confronted me in a book shop demanding that I denounce Mabogo on the grounds that he had once worn a dashiki, which was taken to mean that he was an African nationalist, something deemed entirely unacceptable.

In 1996 I proposed to teach a course on Fanon, an idea to which Mabogo immediately and enthusiastically agreed. At that point I had no access to information on Fanon’s life, or the secondary literature. I hadn’t even seen a copy of Black Skin, White Masks. My teaching method was to read out paragraphs from the copy of The Wretched of the Earth I had bought in London and then invite discussion.

Despite my limited experience as a teacher the students, many of whom were a little older than me, were transfixed. The first response to the book was often to say that Fanon was a prophet. It usually took a while to get to the point of reading Fanon critically, as an engaged thinker rather than a revelation.

Enthused by the enthusiasm of the students I immediately thought it urgent that the book should be translated into isiZulu. Mabogo was hugely excited by this idea, something that solidified it in my mind. This was a matter of accessibility, but it was not simply a matter of accessibility. It was also about expanding the academic resources available in the language, affirming its dignity and that of the speakers of the language coming to Fanon. Fanon, after all, had insisted on a mode of engagement between university trained intellectuals and oppressed people outside the university grounded in the aspiration of a “mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment” and political meetings as “privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak”.

The ethical value placed on encounters premised on mutuality is a Fanonian principle that can readily be applied to translation.

In 1997 Mabogo and I joined a project teaching unionised workers outside of the university. Thinkers like Fanon, Turner, Paulo Freire and Karl Marx were on the curriculum, as were topics such as socialism, feminism, and so on. The trade unionists we taught, many of them shop stewards, were also transfixed by Fanon. Again, the first response to the encounter with Fanon was to declare him a prophet. Over the years the idea of translating The Wretched of the Earth would be reinvigorated with every new experience of teaching Fanon.

In 2000 Lewis Gordon, a leading figure in the study of Fanon, and much else, visited the university at the invitation of Mabogo. His brilliance and personal and intellectual generosity instantly widened the access to ideas and books relating to Fanon. He too was excited about the idea of translation. His eyes sparkled when I tentatively mentioned it. In 2004 I was able to invite Nigel Gibson, also a major figure in the scholarship on Fanon, to visit the university. He was as generous as Lewis and these three men, Mabogo, who would supervise my thesis on Fanon, Lewis and Nigel have never wavered in their generosity.

It is important to recall that at this time the space around Mabogo in the philosophy department at UDW was a node of a very different form of intellectual engagement to the bulk of the wider South African academy, including that of other senior people in the department. There was a view that Fanon was a crude polemicist rather than a serious intellectual. It was often said that teaching Fanon was unethical, if not outrageous, on the grounds that he endorsed violence and that Fanon advocated for something like Johnson’s imagined ‘black racism’. Similar concerns were not raised about white philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, who advocated violent resistance to violent repression, or the many racist white philosophers taken as esteemed figures in the canon.

I met many wonderful people at UDW, some as students and some as academics and some, like the writer Pravasan Pillay, who moved from being students to colleagues and then friends. Nontobeko Hlela, a brilliant young woman, arrived to teach politics in 2001 and we became close. In the same year two young men knocked on my door one afternoon. They had come to ask which books they should be reading. One of those young men was Mwelela Cele. An equally brilliant person with a deep passion for books and ideas, he would develop a vast historical knowledge and serious expertise in the Zulu language, the practice of translation and the theoretical and ethical questions around translation.

When political hostility made it impossible to remain at UDW I accepted a job at the University of Natal. I was swiftly told that an interest in Fanon was intellectually immature and unserious and that his ‘support for violence’ made it unwise and unethical to pursue the study of his work. Trying to publish on Fanon resulted in referees insisting that ‘ethical questions’ pertaining to Fanon’s ‘support for violence’ be centrally addressed in any paper, thereby displacing other ideas.

After Abahlali baseMjondolo was formed in Durban in 2005 I found that when I was invited to contribute to the nascent movement’s self-initiated political discussions the two topics in which people were most interested were Fanon and the history of the struggles of impoverished people in Durban. Again, it was The Wretched of the Earth that captivated people, and again the first reaction to the book was often to see it as prophecy.

Archbishop Rubin Phillip, who had at one point been the deputy to Biko in the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), journeyed with the movement from its early days and church connections enabled initial attempts at translating fragments of Fanon, as well as Freire. They were not successful. The translations were undertaken by academic experts in the Zulu language and people said that the text was often impenetrable, and that they found the English easier to read. Although not everyone could easily read English, political education classes worked better with the English text and additional spoken translation when required. This translation generally took the form of simultaneous translation from English and into context.

This was an important lesson.

Fanon had insisted that “Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand”.

It was clear that a properly Fanonian translation of Fanon would require the kind of accessibility of the widely read daily paper Isolezwe. It would need to be a rigorous project but not an academic project for other academics.

After being forced out of what was now the University of KwaZulu-Natal for political reasons I found work at Rhodes University, in what is now Makhanda. Paul Bischoff, another decent man, welcomed my suggestion to teach Fanon and I was able to teach a semester long master’s course in which all the Fanon texts then available in English were read, at the rate of a book a week, along with biographical studies and the best critical work. The students in these courses were as transfixed by Fanon as everyone else I had taught, although Black Skin, White Masks was often the text that moved them the most. It was not unusual for the seminar on this book to be accompanied by weeping. Some students expressed a deep sense of relief at experiencing a kind of recognition of personal experiences and emotions in the work of such a brilliant thinker.

Students often contact me, years after having taken the course, to say how much it meant and still means to them. All I did was to create the space for people to read and think together. It was the encounter with Fanon’s writing that was transformative.

After the student movement of 2015 dissipated and there was a vicious backlash from some staff members seeking to regain lost ground it became impossible to remain at Rhodes. I moved to Johannesburg in late 2016 and have not taught Fanon at a South African university again.

I continued to teach Fanon outside of the academy though, including to trade unionists in South Africa and elsewhere and activists in Abahlali baseMjondolo, the movement for democracy in Swaziland, a socialist organisation in Ghana, the movement of the landless in Brazil, and so on. In all these spaces there was always the same recognition that something profound, often electric, was happening when Fanon was discussed. There was often, although not in Brazil where aspects of The Wretched of the Earth did not have the same experiential resonance, the familiar initial understanding of Fanon as prophet.

In 2019 I was asked to run the South African office of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in Johannesburg which, at the time, operated via a set of autonomous offices in different parts of the global south. Mwelela and Nonto joined the project in the same year. With resources to do valuable work, and the freedom to undertake that work on our own terms, we moved quickly to set up projects around Freire, Fanon, Black Consciousness and the history of mass organisation in South Africa, going back to the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU).

It was proposed that we set up a press, which we did, and it was now, more than twenty years down the line, suddenly possible to consider a project as ambitious as an isiZulu translation of The Wretched of the Earth. Vijay Prashad, the international director of the Tricontinental Institute, embraced the idea and was able to secure permission to publish a translation. Nonto managed the project and Mwelela took responsibility for finding and working with a translator. I proposed three criteria for finding the right translator:

1. The translator should be committed to producing a text that could be understood by Zulu speakers without high level academic expertise in the language. It should be as accessible as an article in Isolezwe.
2. The translator should understand the national liberation struggle, ideally from within.
3. The translator should have poetic gifts and discipline given Fanon’s fully realised aspiration to touch his readers “irrationally, almost sensually” with the “magic of words,” to pour on them a “bewildering lava of words”.

Mwelela consulted widely and carefully investigated possibilities. He returned with the recommendation that our first choice should be Makhosazana ‘Khosi’ Xaba, a poet and former political militant and soldier in the exiled African National Congress. In a remarkable parallel with Fanon’s life, she was also a trained psychiatric nurse.

Mwelela’s proposal was warmly embraced, and, after some exploratory discussions, mutual commitments were made.

In August 2019 I found myself in an Intensive Care Unit with meningitis and encephalitis. The medical situation was serious. A doctor told me that I had a one in three chance of making it and that I should put my affairs in order. I then spent a year either at home or in hospital. During this year I could not read more than two pages at a time without being overcome with a blinding headache. My doctors thought that I would not be able to work again and the process of putting in a claim for permanent disability insurance was begun. Mwelela and Nonto were among those who were very kind, and they took the translation project forward.

When I had recovered enough health to be able to travel I accepted an invitation to teach at the Frantz Fanon School at the eKhenana Commune, a land occupation in Durban. It was the first time I had visited the occupation and the school.

At the airport I kept the flight waiting after confusing the seat number on the ticket with the number of departure gate. My balance was still a little unsteady and arriving at the occupation Mqapheli Bonono had to help me across the bridge over the stream as if I were a frail old man. I had largely recovered the capacity for English pronunciation but when I tried to begin my remarks on Fanon with a few lines in Zulu I had to stop halfway through the first sentence. My mouth could no longer make the necessary sounds.

The insurgent achievement of building and sustaining a political school on a land occupation under constant violent attack from both the state and party thugs is no small thing. Meeting Lindokuhle Mnguni, the leader of the eKhenana Commune, for the first time it was immediately apparent that he was an extraordinary young man. He was thoughtful, soft spoken and humble, a deeply ethically serious person with lots of humour and none of the life denying dogmatism or pomposity that can come with trying to do the right thing. He was a communist with a wonderfully democratic vision, a vision that he was working to realise as a land occupation was developed into a commune. He had a gravitas that I had never seen in such a young person.

When I got back to Johannesburg I tumbled down the aircraft stairs and onto the tarmac. When I got home I realised that I had lost my ID card after showing it to board the plane. I was still a mess and Nonto and Mwelela were still carrying the translation project.

Lindokuhle had nurtured a passion for books and ideas since he was in high school. When he was jailed I received a request to put a parcel of books together for him. The first book that I took from my shelf was The Wretched of the Earth. Lindokuhle spent six months in prison. On the day he came out seven of us shared a meal. As we were leaving the Musgrave Spur he took my hand for a moment, smiled and said “Fanon, that’s the book I was always waiting for”. I nodded. There was no need to say anything.

The time to begin publishing books through the new press, which we had named Inkani Books, was coming closer. It was clear that we needed someone with technical expertise in the work of putting a book together as a material object, organising distribution, and so on. We brought in Efemia Chela, a gifted writer with considerable publishing experience.

Nonto, Mwelela and I no longer work with the Tricontinental Institute and Inkani Books is now run by Efemia and Vijay. Efemia has brought the project of translating The Wretched of the Earth to fruition from the publisher’s side. The book is a beautiful material object, elegantly typeset and with a wonderful cover design by the Venezuelan artist Kael Abello. The translation has been uniformly welcomed as superb.

The arrival of Izimpabanga Zomhlaba on the scene is a major moment in Fanon’s African afterlife, a significant moment for the Zulu language and an important political intervention.

Lindokuhle was assassinated on 20 August 2022. The next time I visit his grave with my comrades I will take him a copy of Izimpabanga Zomhlaba. He had known it was coming and knowing that it was coming had made him happy.