Fanon on the Pitfalls of National Consciousness

Frantz Fanon completed 'Les Damnés de la Terre' shortly before his death in December 1961, the same year Algeria secured independence from France. The book is composed of five chapters of varying length, written under operating conditions that limited the time he could spend on revision. The third chapter, 'The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,' is among the most-cited and remains the most analytically sharp statement of the limit case Fanon saw in the African independence movements of his era.

The chapter's argument is that national independence is not a sufficient political achievement. The independence movements that brought the European powers' direct rule to an end did so on the basis of an alliance between an educated colonial-trained native class who would assume the administrative positions formerly held by Europeans, and a peasant and worker mass whose labor and bodies made the movements possible. The compositional terms of that alliance, in Fanon's analysis, contained the conditions of subsequent political failure. The educated class, once in power, would not transform the underlying economic relations the colonial period had established. It would inherit those relations and operate them on its own behalf. The peasant and worker mass would discover, in the years following independence, that the change of personnel had not produced the change in conditions the liberation rhetoric had promised.

Fanon's term for the inheritor class was 'national bourgeoisie,' though he used it with discrimination. The African national bourgeoisie, in his analysis, was not a productive bourgeoisie in the European historical sense; it was a comprador class whose function was to manage the extraction of value from the country on behalf of external capital. It did not control the means of production; it administered the offices through which production was controlled. Its consumption was ostentatious, its political vision narrow, its commitment to the masses that produced the independence whose fruits it enjoyed minimal. He was specific that this was a typological description, not a moral condemnation of individual members of the class, and that the typology described a structural position that individuals would occupy regardless of their personal intentions.

The corrective Fanon proposed was sustained mass political work after independence. The liberation movement could not dissolve into the new state apparatus and expect the inherited colonial economic structure to transform itself. It had to continue as an organized political force outside the state, building the political education and organizational capacity of peasant and worker constituencies, and translating that capacity into pressure on the new state to undertake the structural transformations that the political settlement had postponed. Where this work was not done, or was done weakly, the comprador inheritance would consolidate, the national consciousness would harden into a narrow ethnic or regional chauvinism, and the social and economic situation of the majority of the population would deteriorate.

The diagnostic value of the chapter has been tested against subsequent African political history. The outcomes have varied across countries, but the broad pattern of comprador consolidation and structural continuity with the colonial extraction model is well documented across the African post-independence experience. The chapter's analytical framework has extended beyond Africa to Caribbean, Asian, and Latin American post-colonial settings where comparable patterns appeared. Fanon's prediction was specific enough to be testable and has held up sufficiently well that the chapter remains a working analytical text rather than a historical document.