Fanon. “On National Culture.” From, The Wretched of the Earth.

In this excerpt, Fanon explores the issue of national culture, what he calls “the legitimacy of claims
to a nation,” and notes at the outset how intellectuals from various countries have felt the need to
defend their national culture from the onslaught of colonial projects to rob people from knowledge
of their past, to distort their view of themselves and each other. As Fanon sees it, the impulse to
defend, re-discover, and tout their cultural roots is both essential to creating a national culture in
the present, but also to the well-being of the individual person.

In the case of Africa (and people of African descent), though, fighting colonial lies has necessarily
taken on a continental character rather than a national one (even including African-Americans in the
first gathering of the African Cultural Society in 1956), and a Pan-African movement was born. But
Fanon sees this cultural movement as limited, first because it is too diffuse to respond to the quite
different local struggles occurring simultaneously in Senegal vs. the U.S., for instance.

Fanon then turns to the stages of development in the cultural worker: 1st stage is to show they’ve
assimilated the dominant culture. 2nd stage is to rediscover their heritage. 3rd stage, the fighting
stage where they try to awaken the people to struggle. But, Fanon critiques, you show culture
through the struggle itself, not through trumpeting culture of the past. In so doing, artists and
intellectuals miss the seething present out of which real movement is born and enacted. Cultural
struggle without political support and out-in-the-streets struggle is empty. This point contradicts
Cabral’s more doctrinaire Marxist position that sees the leader as a cultural-awakener akin to
Fanon’s third stage.

In the second half of the essay, Fanon turns to consider the reciprocal position between the actual
struggle for freedom and the expression of national culture. Fanon asserts that culture grows as the
movement toward struggle grows, as the awakening of a sleeping giant may be evidenced by an
increased stirring and a quickening of the heart rate. The pinnacle of this cultural expression is in the
struggle for nationhood itself.

Fanon closes by asking us to guard against those who would say that the time for nation claims has
long past; he urges us to consider that it would be detrimental to skip the nationhood phase, as the
more you become yourself, the more you’re able to open to others.

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