Fanon’s continuing presence and revolutionary Sudan

Nigel C. Gibson revisits Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary thought in light of the Sudanese revolution and its counter-revolution. This essay was originally published by the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE).

Introduction

Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it.

– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1968

I do not come with timeless truths … Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time.

– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2008

Fanon was very aware of his time. And yet one hundred years after his birth, he remains strangely present, as if we are repeating the same history, the long durée of the unfinished anticolonial revolutions (see Gibson 2021). Published in 1961, Fanon’s last book, The Wretched of the Earth, is a product of his experience and reflections on Africa’s anticolonial struggle, including its first crisis in the Congo in 1961. Written as an intervention and addressing the readers as comrades, Fanon introduces the colonised challenge to the colonial world not as a rational confrontation of points of view, ‘but the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute’ (Fanon 1968, 41). Aware that colonialism carved up the continent into colonial fiefdoms, Fanon recognised that while the social struggle takes on a national form, it would inevitably degenerate into the regional, ethnic and racial lines often promulgated by colonial rule if it did not put into practice a ‘minimum humanist’ programme (Fanon 1968, 163).

Challenging the imperial countries who speak of humanism but kill human beings wherever they find them, Fanon ends the book returning to the question of rehumanising the world, ‘For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new [hu]man’ (Fanon 1968, 316). This was his idea of African liberation. Yet, on the hundredth anniversary of Fanon’s birth, not only has Africa become proportionately poorer and more unequal over the past 30 years but the post-independence ‘wa-Benz’, the newly embourgeoisified African ruling elites or simply ‘new whites’ (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2012, 40) – the ‘little greedy caste … with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it’ (Fanon 1968, 175) – keep reappearing.

While often dismissed as an advocate of violence rather than a thinker of African liberation, what is often elided in discussions of Fanon’s thought is the connection between the necessity of violence against settler colonies and Fanon’s criticisms of the military and the need for demilitarisation. This article focuses on what an engagement with Fanon’s thought could offer Sudanese revolutionaries. Understanding such an engagement dialectically, Fanon emphasised the importance of subjectivity in the ‘situation’ (and what Fanon also called the ‘lie of the situation’ (see Fanon 2018, 525)), which takes on a specific perspective because the Sudanese revolution involved millions of people in a non-violent revolution against military rule. It is this movement for life and liberation that must not be forgotten in the face of the reality of a counter-revolutionary military civil war that has led to daily human catastrophe for the Sudanese people.

While the Sudanese revolution began as a rejection of military rule, regional and world powers, including the United Nations (UN), have played a significant role in supporting the so-called civilian partnership of the Transitional Military Council, established in 2019, and have continued to support the armed forces following the 2021 military coup. The repeated failure of ‘international diplomacy’, notes Muzan Alneel (2023a), ‘is mainly due to the counter-revolutionary doctrine that animates its participants’.¹

The first section of this article discusses Fanon’s idea of demilitarisation and decolonisation. The second section, on the Sudanese revolution, discusses the importance, and legacies, of the resistance committees, while the final section returns to Fanon’s idea of revolutionary humanism in the praxis of anticolonial organisations.

National military or African solidarity through a corps of volunteers?

Fanon’s idea of an African legion was proposed in his speech delivered in December 1958 at the First All-African People’s Conference in Accra, Ghana. In an article in the Algerian National Liberation Front’s El Moudjahid, Fanon explained that the principle adopted in Accra was a ‘concrete response of the African peoples to the will to colonial domination of the Europeans to create a corps of volunteers’ to manifest ‘solidarity with one another, thus expressing the realisation that national liberation is linked to the liberation of the continent’. Such a corps of volunteers, Fanon added, was already being organised in popular meetings: ‘in Ghana, in Ethiopia, in Nigeria, hundreds of men have pledged themselves to come to the aid of the Algerian or South African brothers whenever these manifest such a wish’ (Fanon 1967c, 157).

Fanon continued to agitate for such a corps over the next few years. At the Positive Action Conference in Accra, just a few weeks after the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, his speech, ‘Why we use violence’, focused on the violence of settler colonialism experienced in ‘the soul, the muscles [and] the blood’ of the colonised in ‘apartheid in South Africa, forced labour in Angola, racism in Algeria’ (Fanon 2018, 654–655). Fanon called it ‘a web of three-dimensional violence, a meeting point of multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences’. They are ‘Violence in everyday behaviour, violence against the past that is emptied of all substance, violence against the future, for the colonial regime presents itself as necessarily eternal’. These ‘multiple, diverse, repeated, cumulative violences’ he concludes, are ‘logically confronted by the problem of ending the colonial regime by any means necessary’ (Fanon 2018, 654). Furthermore, the first role of the political party ‘is to curtail this violence and to channel it by providing it with a peaceful platform and a constructive basis’ by fighting ‘violence … with the language of truth and of reason’ (Fanon 2018, 655).² But, commending ‘the efforts of those volunteers who spontaneously have formed a volunteer corps to fight for that cause’ (Positive Action Conference 1960, 13), the conference resolved that the next African States conference ‘consider the formation of an African volunteer corps to fight side by side with their Algerian brothers’ (Positive Action Conference 1960, 13).

The idea of the African legion was undoubtedly in Fanon’s mind as part of the project to open a new front in the war against the French in the south-west, which formed the basis of his reconnaissance mission in late 1960. As he wrote in notebooks at the time, ‘The Congo, which constituted the second landing beach for revolutionary ideas, was caught in an inextricable network of sterile contradictions’ (Fanon 1967a, 178). In Fanon’s view, the ‘network of sterile contradictions’ had deepened with Patrice Lumumba’s call to the UN for military assistance after Belgium sent troops to the Congo following the army’s mutiny and the subsequent secession of Katanga province. In Fanon’s mind, the question was how to hold on in Congo while the multidimensional plots against it unfolded. Fanon says something about Lumumba that is often said about Fanon, that ‘he had an exaggerated confidence in the people. The people, for him, not only could not deceive themselves but could not be deceived’ (Fanon 1967a, 193). Lumumba was wrong to reach out to the UN for help and should have instead called on his friends, outlined Fanon in his last newspaper article, published in Afrique Action in February 1961, ‘Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?’ He should have called on his friends for help because, in Fanon’s opinion, ‘they alone can really and totally help us achieve our objectives because, precisely, the friendship that links us is a friendship of combat’ (Fanon 1967a, 196). Instead, African leaders were too quick to send support ‘under the cover of the UN’ rather than sending troops directly to Lumumba.³

Fanon’s warnings about the pitfalls of national consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth are based on his participation and analysis of the revolutionary movement and are also immediately connected to Lumumba’s murder. According to Fanon, ‘The imperialists decided to do away with Lumumba’, and Lumumba’s removal was endorsed by African leaders who ‘have served as intermediaries, have sponsored the activities and the odd silences of the UN in the Congo’ (Fanon 1967a, 196–197).

Decolonising and demilitarising

Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth that the military must be demilitarised, politicised and democratised, which is very much akin to his criticism of the national party. Rather than taking over the colonial machine in urban areas, the party needs to be decentralised and connected to where the majority of the population resides, in rural areas and shack settlements. He makes the same argument about the military. Fanon’s notion of the military is not one based on the model of a standing army, but rather one involved in the work of political education, of ‘detribalisation’ through social projects that raise ‘national consciousness’ (Fanon 1968, 201–202). Here Fanon quickly pivots, adding a ‘humanist principle’ that

every effort is made to mobilize men and women as quickly as possible; it must guard against the danger of perpetuating the feudal tradition which holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element over the feminine. Women will have exactly the same place as men, not in the clauses of the constitution but in the life of every day: in the factory, at school, and in the parliament. (Fanon 1968, 202)

This is the struggle that the Sudanese people have been involved in as the post-independence period quickly became a military-dominated politics undergirded by Sharia law.⁴

Fanon’s critique of the nationalist military is based on his Algerian experiences, including the principle from the National Liberation Front (FLN)’s 1956 Soummam platform that the political cadre should assume strategic leadership in the politico-military relationship. The political education of the military is a central theme in The Wretched of the Earth. It is an education grounded in the school of the struggle and on the aims of the liberation programme (a programme, Fanon argued, that in orientation popularly expressed the goals of liberation). Thus, the importance of addressing not only what he called ‘the absence of ideology’ (Fanon 1967b, 186) but also the nature of the ideology that becomes essential to political education. Of course, Fanon adds that education is not something learned through the coloniser’s language nor in the schools and institutions of colonialism. Instead, in Fanon’s view, the national military should become a ‘school of civic and political education’ where the soldier becomes a ‘citizen-soldier’ with the people. The question of raising ‘the level of national consciousness’ is connected to being part of local political meetings where the language spoken is one everyone understands, where each person has time to speak, and where decisions are collectively made (Fanon 1968, 201–202).

Unlike soldiers in the West, shut up in barracks, these demilitarised citizen-soldiers can become, in Fanon’s opinion, socialised into the community to become defenders of the freedom, democracy and rights that the national liberation struggle has brought. The best way to guarantee this, he continues, is to have recruits become part of national works projects that ‘stimulate stagnant regions’ and get the ‘greatest number of citizens to learn of the country’s realities’ (Fanon 2004, 142; Fanon 1968, 202). The citizen-soldier’s connection to the nation’s ‘reality’ thus becomes a barrier to the military becoming an ‘autonomous body that sooner or later, finding itself idle and [aimless], will “go into politics”’ (Fanon 1968, 202). To avoid this the military needs to be deprofessionalised – its composition has to be subverted by deconstructing a military based on professional soldiers and career officers who are recruited from ‘the university class’ and represent ‘the crystallization of the caste spirit’ (Fanon 1968, 161). Here, Fanon warns, the caste spirit of ‘the university class’ can metastasise into a military caste that takes over state power for its interests. In short, military coups d’état have tragically repeated history, most recently in Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea, Mali and Niger, and also notably in the counter-revolutions against movements for genuine social change that overthrew authoritarians in Egypt and Sudan.

The necessary armed resistance against these repressive military regimes must, as Sudanese revolutionary socialist Muzan Alneel argues, ‘stand on a foundation of envisioning democratic organising of the oppressed, and it must also take into consideration preventing a set up that centralises violence, for this will only recreate the rule of a new armed minority’ (Alneel 2024, 4).

A significant linkage to Fanon’s idea of decentralising and demilitarising the military, as well as the arguments against the military hierarchy and its leadership, is connected to the threatened withdrawal of capital if it does not immediately create socio-political calm and ‘restore order’ (see Fanon 1968, 104). An early adopter of structural adjustment policies, the national military leadership in Sudan also became its beneficiary through enforcement (see Cross 2025).⁵ The global financial sanctions imposed on the 2019–21 government, which included the end of food and bread subsidies, again raised the question of how the military’s foot soldiers could be persuaded to join the revolution.

The Sudanese revolution

The revolutionary project in Sudan is one of the most significant movements for change in the world today – it’s not just anti-authoritarian, but anti-colonial at heart. This is because Sudan has been governed since independence by elites from the Nile Basin regions of the country, who prey on other regions and uphold a national hierarchy based on region, class, gender, and ethnicity.

– Sara Abbas and Andreas Bohne, “In Sudan, the Revolution Is Caught in the Crossfire”, 2023

While ‘the territory of what is now Sudan and South Sudan has been home to an impressive human diversity for at least half a millennium’ (Osman and Jungfer 2024) it was also at the heart of the Islamic empire from the destruction of the ‘feudal’ order to capitalist penetration in the period of Turco-Egyptian rule (see Spaulding 1985). In contrast, Mamdani (2022) argues that British indirect rule meant tribalising southern Sudan, creating barriers between people who, though culturally different, had always associated together. This was done by investing ‘these differences with political meaning’, by creating borders and new forms of patronage chiefly to rule ‘to prevent the colonised from developing solidarities beyond the tribal’ (Mamdani 2022, 197). In doing so, the colonists would, in Fanon’s terms, break down cultures and ways of life and ‘distort, disfigure, and destroy’ cultures of the past and the future (Fanon 1968, 210). In Sudan, the pragmatics of indirect rule, which holds a ‘people in its grip and empt[ies] the native’s brain of all form and content’ (Fanon 1968, 210), has an important logic, justified by the idea that the South was backward and the Arab North open to development, and thus privileged those areas and their interests. In the North, the colonial regime developed a school system; in the South, this was left to Christian missions. In the North, British interests also became entwined with the establishment of the Sudanese Defence Force which, alongside a Khartoum-based Arab elite, was linked to systems of patronage and privilege.

This system carried over into independence, where power and wealth were based in the urban centres in the North and where, in Fanon’s view, ‘the nationals who live in the more prosperous regions realize their good luck, and show a primary and profound reaction in refusing to feed the other nationals’ (Fanon 1968, 159). This was the ‘dialectic of history’ that would become central to The Wretched of the Earth and its insistence that the liberation organisation be decentralised and the national works programmes ‘stimulate stagnant regions … [and] learn of the country’s realities’ (Fanon 1968, 142). In Sudan, class and region played a determining role in nationalist development, particularly in large-scale agricultural projects. Comprised of lower echelons of service workers, whose labour and land relations significantly influenced the social contract in Sudan, these projects exhibited both progressive and regressive aspects.

Post-independence Sudan has been dominated by the military, with brief interruptions by popular revolutions. The first military coup took place in 1958, two years after independence. The first revolution, in October 1964, which led to the end of General Ibrahim Abboud’s dictatorship, began when riot police stormed the University of Khartoum, where students and faculty had congregated to discuss the ‘Southern Question’. Quickly, a popular united front demanded the establishment of a constitutional government. But a year after the transitional government was formed, the Communist Party, which had played an important role in the revolution, was banned. In 1966–67 the prime minister was Sadiq al-Mahdi, the grandson of the Mahdiyya, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal.⁶

The second coup, which occurred in 1969, was led by Colonel Jaafar Nimeiry, who, after 1971, led the country under the name of the Sudanese Socialist Union. It was ousted by a military coup that ended with the 1985 revolution, which threatened the ruling elites with a general strike and mass demonstrations against rising prices and Sharia law. Two years before Nimeiry was ousted, the South Sudan People’s Liberation Army began the Second Sudanese War against Nimeiry’s government.⁷ The war would continue for another 22 years. Brigadier Omar al-Bashir led the third coup in 1989. He was ousted by a revolution in 2019.

Now almost forgotten in the Western media, whose lament over another genocide is framed by discourses of long-standing ethnic hatred, the Sudanese revolution has commonality with the 2011 Egyptian revolution not only because of the historical connection between both countries, not only because of military rule, but also because the genuine possibilities of democracy, freedom and self-determination were raised. Having learned lessons from Egypt, the Sudanese revolution deepened these possibilities. As Abdelsalam Mindas⁸ reminds us:

Since its start on December 6, 2018, the Sudanese revolution has provided an exceptional framework. It has provided an accumulation of struggle, gifted the revolutionary educational space new tactics, added a new chapter of knowledge and redefined the concepts of revolution, resistance, people, power, struggle, forces, interests and allies. (Abbas and Akram-Boshar 2022)

The revolutionary moment needs to be underscored since it has become overshadowed by what Fanon would have recognised as a ‘veritable Apocalypse’ (Fanon 1968, 251) now taking place in Sudan as a result of a war between two militaries, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The RSF emerged in 2013 from the Janjaweed militias, which the al-Bashir regime had organised in the name of Jihad against uprisings in the South.⁹ The RSF, responsible for the Darfur genocide, was then used by al-Bashir’s regime to kill and rape protestors in the ‘Khartoum massacre’ of June 2019. After the fall of al-Bashir, the RSF became part of a ‘unified’ military, with both the SAF and RSF retaining control of their economic interests (‘hospitals, real estate, land, gold mines, construction companies, even entire industries’ (Abbas and Bohne 2023)),¹⁰ supported by regional and imperialist powers such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Russia.

The military civil war (2021 onwards) immediately brought death and destruction but did not immediately break the people’s will to resist and continue the revolution. But as the civil war brought an uninhabitable land, it made even the hope of a future impossible. Writing of the effects of colonial war on mental disorders, Fanon describes the ‘bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, and the firm impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse’ (Fanon 1968, 251). He notes that ‘a whole generation of Algerians, steeped in wanton, generalized homicide with all the psycho-affective consequences that this entails, will be the human legacy of France in Algeria’ (Fanon 1968, 251n). The same can be said of Sudan. But what of the Sudanese revolution?

The revolution first began in late 2018 on the periphery of major towns and cities, with demands for bread and water. As popular demonstrations spread across Sudan political demands developed. The movement’s slogan, ‘Just fall, that’s all’, was realised with the fall of al-Bashir in April 2019, ending 30 years of brutal Islamist rule. However, the establishment of a military/civilian council indicated how much the military remained in control.

Often called a women’s revolution, women’s praxis expressed the ‘radical mutations in consciousness’ that Fanon wrote about in A Dying Colonialism (1965), referring to women in revolutionary action, as women in Sudan, demanding freedom, led revolutionary actions and protests and created new ideas and images of what Sudanese women looked like.

The revolution was preceded by the 2013 uprising. By 2018, the Sudanese Professional Association (SPA), which had formed in 2012, was demanding wage reform. Alongside the SPA, ‘resistance committees’ developed. Both included professionals in their political structures, and both would play important roles in the revolution. The resistance committees, often comprising many women, unemployed young people and university students, formed grassroots and local organisations based on deliberative discussions, organising disobedience and graffiti campaigns, and spreading radical literature. When the revolt began in 2018, the resistance committees were reanimated and, spreading across the country, became an important grassroots democratic formation that brought a new generation of young people from the ‘peripheries’ into decision-making. Coordination among the groups included planning mass demonstrations and actions, and mutual aid after 2023. In short, they were democratic forms of resistance and spaces of education that emerged in communities and workplaces, among them the resistance committees, which are grassroots organizations that are deeply based on the principle of mass democracy, along with the recognition that there is no traditional leadership within the committees. Decisions are taken with the participation of everyone in a way that is similar to the general assemblies of trade unions, such that the assembly is the highest authority within the organizational structure of the resistance committee. (Abdelsalam Mindas in Abbas and Akram-Boshar 2022)

In early 2019, the discussions, coordination and democratic decision-making of several groups, including the SPA, No To Oppression against Women Initiative and the resistance committees, led to the Declaration of Freedom and Change Charter,¹¹ which called for al-Bashir’s removal. Later, during the transition, this alliance (of traditional civil society groups and resistance committees) would fragment as the SPA would mainly side with the elite, which included the military. During this period, facing the military crackdown, the resistance committees resolutely stood against any partnership with the military, represented by the popular slogan ‘Going back is impossible’ (see Osman and Jungfer 2024), and were essential to the success of the ‘million-man march’ against military rule on 30 June 2019. The military council’s deputy president, RSF leader Mohammed Hamdan Dagolo, was responsible for killing 100 or more demonstrators that day. It was this genocidal leader who would launch a military civil war against the SAF in April 2023.

Certainly, the charters released in March 2022, the Revolutionary Charter for People’s Power and the Charter for the Establishment of the People’s Authority, reflected the continued importance of the resistance committees’ dedication to an inclusive process (see Alneel 2022; Abdallah 2024). As Mohamed Abdelrahman put it, ‘The Revolutionary Charter for People’s Power is a reminder that resistance committees have changed the way politics is done in Sudan’ (Alneel and Abdelrahman 2022). The demands included democratisation framed by the redistribution of Sudan’s immense mineral wealth. Clauses in the charters opposed the extractive industry in general, which, operating in ‘the periphery’ (and based on layered levels of exploitation of formal and informal workers; see Alneel 2024), clashed with the politics of peacebuilding. This meant limiting military leaders’ access to money and control of the economy, especially gold mines and oil, which had been central to the war with the South. As a mineral-rich impoverished country, the transitional government, it was argued, was subservient to regional and great powers, including those of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. However, the West’s strangling of the transitional government (which included the militaries) with its insistence that it ‘pay its debts’, resulting in further indebtedness, also played an important role in legitimising the Sudanese militaries (see Cross 2025), while the revolution, strikes and mass demonstrations threatened the militaries’ sources of income; for example, control of oil, with China as a recipient and a supplier of military equipment.

‘From the beginning, the war was more than a war between two generals’, argue Osman and Jungfer (2024),

It was a war against the revolutionary spirit, and a war against the social fabric of revolution. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) stood for a renewed nationalist Islamist military regime, for the old liaisons with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the old commercial trade networks. Whereas the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stood for a ‘neoliberal privatized version of an army in the third world’.

Echoing Fanon’s critique, warlordism, resource extraction, land grabbing, militarised ranching and Arab racism described the ‘violent transnational extractive economy [with] links [to] the Horn and the Gulf States’ (Duffield and Stockton 2023).

The resistance committees remained active during the early period of the civil war, working on grassroots medical support, soup kitchens, schools and evacuation routes, as much of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed. This changed as the increased massacres and atrocities led to population flight. Some members of the resistance committees who remained had to collaborate with the military regime to survive. In areas controlled by the RSF, women’s independent action was suppressed, while in SAF-controlled areas, women were recruited into the military. Quickly, ‘the former revolutionary crowd [was] being sentenced to life in camps’, observe Osman and Jungfer (2024). After the military, they add, the NGOs and humanitarian actors ‘will be the winners of this war’.

The resistance committees embodied the democratic and decentralised nature of the Sudanese revolution, echoing Fanon’s critique in The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1968, 108–146). They were often urban, reflecting diverse localities, classes, politics and ideologies. The answer is not simply the need for a revolutionary party, but as Abdelrahman argues, in a Fanonian vein, proletarianising the party through real connections and work, connecting the resistance committees and the peripheral masses in theoretical clarification, as they engage in ‘battles over the definition of terms such as “national unity”’ (Alneel and Abdelrahman 2022).

A radical humanism?

For nearly three years, I have been trying to bring the misty idea of African Unity out of the subjectivist bogs of the majority of its supporters. African Unity is a principle on the basis of which it is proposed to achieve the United States of Africa without passing through the middle-class chauvinistic national phase with its procession of wars and death-tolls.

– Frantz Fanon, ‘This Africa to Come’, 1967b

Fanon knew that the struggle against racial alienation is an unending duel, one that constantly returns to the beginning, not unlike the needed ‘second phase of total liberation’ against colonialism (Fanon 1967d, 126). In the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon speaks of the ‘countless and sometimes indelible wounds’ (Fanon 2004, 181) inflicted on the colonised people; the memory of past humiliations, losses and terror, even when seemingly forgotten, continues to cause trauma expressed by new symptoms. This is no less true today, as the continuous work of mental health is connected with the need to radically rehumanise the world.

Rehumanisation is at first a critique of the dehumanisation wrought by colonialism and racism. In Fanon’s view, the body’s daily experience of this world is expressed most visibly by a person’s gait, expression and muscular tension. It is a freedom of movement that continues to be denied by neocolonial structures. A new humanism can emerge as these structures are broken down.

Opening Black Skin, White Masks with a critique of this UN-inspired discourse on race, and concluding The Wretched of the Earth by dismissing Europe, which talks about human beings while murdering them everywhere, Fanon was consistently critical of humanism as an abstract discourse. Fanon’s notion of a new humanism, in contrast, is based on human needs.

The anticolonial struggle is initially conceptualised in Manichean terms. The hegemony of colonial Manichaeism, namely that the colonised are evil and not fully human, is first challenged by an anticolonial inversion: the coloniser is evil. But the new reality of the possibility of independence demands, in Fanon’s view, a liberatory ideology, as it becomes clear that some of the colonist population prove to be much closer to the struggle than ‘certain sons of the nation’ (Fanon 1968, 146). Thus, it is the practice of the struggle itself that needs theorisation as it becomes clear that ‘not every [black or Muslim] is automatically given a vote of confidence.’ The development of national consciousness is complex because ‘Consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited, and unstable’ (Fanon 1968, 146). It requires both organisational and intellectual work to make sure that ‘the force of intellect increases and becomes more elaborate as the struggle goes on’ (Fanon 1968, 146).

Often separated from the impoverished masses and the reality of the nation, the national leadership can play both important and retrograde roles. They represent the first pitfall of national consciousness in pure class and regional terms. Concerned with their own narrow financial interests, they become ‘incapable of triumphantly putting into practice a program with even a minimum humanist content’ (Fanon 1968, 163). Reflecting on some of his experiences in West Africa, this form of nationalism often degenerates into regionalism and racism, Fanon argues, imprisoning ‘national consciousness in sterile formalism’ (Fanon 1968, 204).

Fanon’s argument is politically straightforward. The idea of nationalism put forward by nationalist organisations based in the colonial citadels is ideologically threadbare and devoid of concrete detail. In contrast, Fanon insists that the idea of national liberation must be ‘made explicit’ and ‘deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words, into humanism’. Making humanism explicit is connected with including everyone in ‘enlightened and fruitful work’. It is only then, he argues, ‘that form and body are given’ to national consciousness (Fanon 1968, 204). The fruitful work of making national consciousness explicit is connected to the praxis of including everyone in discussions and decision-making. The resistance committees’ political charters (see Abdallah 2024; Alneel 2024) expressed the beginnings of such an alternative, inclusive and implicitly revolutionary humanistic form that needs to be critically articulated.

Fanon gives an example of such as explicit articulation speaking about time in The Wretched of the Earth and the importance of involving all in the political-economic discussions even when that seems to be tedious and time consuming: ‘Experience proves’, he argues, ‘that the important thing is not that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan and decide even if it takes them twice or three times as long’. Expressing a conception of workers’ control, he continued:

[t]he fact is that the time taken up by explaining, the time ‘lost’ in treating the worker as a human being, will be caught up in the execution of the plan. People must know where they are going, and why. (Fanon 1968, 193)

Fanon’s directive that the nationalist party should be decentralised addresses another important problem. The nationalist party or organisation needs to be with the people where they are (and thus remains an important challenge to and critique of the politics of African nationalism in power). The idea would also shake up the geography of the nation state constructed by colonialism and continued under neocolonialism, where the export of raw materials and cash crops was the primary concern around which infrastructure, rails, roads, ports and business districts served the political economy of the metropole.¹²

Sudan’s resistance committees are also suggestive of Fanon’s call to decentralise the political organisation. The resistance committees, as an example of decentralised power-making and real practice of democracy, were, for a short time, the type of ‘organism through which they as the people exercise their authority and express their will’ (Fanon 1968, 185). Such an organism (party, organisation, committee), Fanon suggests, requires a philosophy of what is being fought for and an understanding of the enemy. Rather than the party as a political elite playing a leading, indeed, an assumed vanguard role, this new organism must actively promote political education, explaining what is being fought for and how it will be undertaken as it engages in and encourages changes in social relations and consciousness. As Fanon puts it, ‘Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand’ (Fanon 1968, 189).

Fanon provides an example from the war in Algeria when peasants could not easily go to towns. The FLN intervened and introduced a rationing system, but the black market continued to thrive. Political education about economics allowed people to understand ‘that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery’ (Fanon 1968, 191). Production for need and daily rations increased. People could be deceived and to challenge that, Fanon argued, ‘the more the people understand, the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion’ (Fanon 1968, 191). This can be considered a basic Fanonian principle.

Though Fanon does not use the term, there should be no doubt that uprooting the colonial state is very much required. He is certainly thinking about this when he argues in The Wretched of the Earth that:

The theoretical question that for the last fifty years has been raised whenever the history of underdeveloped countries is under discussion – whether or not the bourgeois phase can be skipped – ought to be answered in the field of revolutionary action, and not by logic. (Fanon 1968, 175)

Understanding that a new Sudan must be built from the ground up, Alneel describes the work of housing and residential area councils in achieving revolutionary goals. How to deal with weapons, they ask, and answer in a Fanonian way: ‘Through the Housing Council model, we address the economically and socially poor and oppressed young soldiers’ (Alneel 2023a) and convince them by social activity how those who run Sudan systematically exploit the poor and are unable to achieve justice and a decent living for all Sudanese residents (Alneel 2023b). And thus, they should take the side of ‘those who share the same problems and interests, abandoning weapons and the institutions that hold them’(Alneel 2023a).

Conclusion

And the war continues, Fanon writes in the final chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders. And for years to come, ‘we have to bind’ the countless wounds, physical and mental, that the war has brought (Fanon 1968, 249). The contempt and violence inflicted upon the people sets off autoscopic processes, he argues, generating the constant wondering about their humanness, ‘Because it is a systematic negation of the other …, a furious determination to deny the other … all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?”’ (Fanon 1968, 250). What happens to someone’s sense of themselves when they have been brutalised, when their communities have been destroyed and those who have survived have been forced to flee? Fanon argues that the triggering factor is ‘principally the bloody, pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, and the firm impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse’ (Fanon 1968, 251). Considering Sudan, we still have much to learn from Fanon’s prognosis of the legacies of a war, which features as an apocalypse for the people. What he argues is ‘the important theoretical problem’, in that last chapter, is how consciousness could be helped. And thus, the first task of the newly independent nation and indeed a revolutionary organisation is, in Fanon’s opinion, ‘to give back dignity to all citizens, to fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things, and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign [inhabitants] dwell therein’ (Fanon 1968, 205). From this space, new spirits of resistance can emerge, informed by the knowledge that avoiding repetition of past failure can be aided by a critical engagement with Fanon as a revolutionary theorist.

Notes

For purposes of brevity, notes can be found on the original article.

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