TheQuestionofViolenceinContemporaryAfricanPoliticalThought

TheQuestionofViolenceinContemporaryAfricanPoliticalThought

byKwasiWiredu

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3/1986,pages:373381,onwww.ceeol.com.

POLITICAL CHRONICLE

THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Kwasi Wiredu Although most African countries are now independent, there is still an important portion of Africa in the South that remains unliberated. The problem here is aggravated by a specially entrenched racism. Naturally, the question of how best to dislodge racial domination from that portion of Africa has agitated the minds of many people. A most urgent question relates to violence. Should the oppressed Africans resort to armed struggle or should they use only non-violent methods? The question is relevant to the struggles of the peoples of the Third World generally and indeed to struggling peoples everywhere. Two well-known positions about the question of violence are Gandhis philosophy of non-violence as the only morally acceptable mode of struggle and Fanons view of violence as the most worthy mode of anti-colonial struggle. Gandhi maintained that violence was in itself a moral evil while Fanon argued that violence as practiced by the colonized against the colonizer had some important virtues. Both views have influenced the thought and practice of contemporary African political leaders. Interestingly, both influences have sometimes operated in an obscurely dialectical way in the thought of individual African leaders. Gandhis influence is, of course, of longer standing than Fanons. Non-violent resistance was being practiced under Gandhian inspiration before Fanon was born in 1925. From 1906, when Gandhi personally led a non-violent campaign in South Africa until the late fifties, non-violent resistance in the manner of Gandhi was the principal mode of struggle in that country. The high watermark of this form of struggle in South Africa was reached in 1956 when the African National Congress (ANC) under the leadership of Albert Luthuli in concert with the Indian Congress and the Coloured Peoples Organisation and even some white-supported organizations issued a Freedom Charter which demanded a Bill of Rights and a democratic government for the country as one multi-national community. Luthuli, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1960, was perhaps, the best respected black leader to have emerged in South Africa. He was an explicit admirer of Gandhi and had a faith in non-violence which was unshaken until his death in 1967. Despite his international prestige and moral stature he was a somewhat more saintly figure than Desmond Tutu, the irrepressible black divine, who has recently won the Nobel Prize for Peace and become the first black ever Bishop of Johannesburg, a man who seems

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destined to play a substantial role in the fight against racial oppression despite his immense merits, in other words Luthulis efforts were met with little else than a strengthened repression. Understandably certain sections of the ANC became disillusioned with Gandhian methods, which led to the formation in 1959 of the break-away militant nationalist organisation known as the Pan-Africanist Congress under Robert Sobukwe. Both organizations were soon banned by the South African government for their campaign against the Pass Laws, a most hateful aspect of apartheid, which required blacks entering a white city to carry identification cards. That was in 1960, the year in which South African police in Sharpville opened fire on a large crowd of unarmed black people protesting against the Pass Laws and killed 67 of them. It gives some idea of how much value it was customary for a white man to place on the life of a black man to note that a minister of state could openly blame the police for disposing of only a small number of the large crowd of Africans involved. I was at this time a graduate student at Oxford, and I still vividly remember the effect of this unspeakable atrocity upon African students. Our anguish was indescribable. The most significant consequence of the Sharpville massacre in terms of African attitudes to violence was the formation of a movement known as The Spear of the Nation by Nelson Mandela in 1961. In its manifesto the movement did not hide its disenchantment with the policy of non-violent struggle:
Refusal to resort to force has been interpreted by the government as an invitation to use armed force against the people without any fear of reprisals. The methods of Umkhonto We Sizwe [the Spear of the Nation] mark a break with the past . . . The Government policy of force, repression and violence will no longer be met with non-violent resistance only! The choice is not ours; it has been made by the Nationalist Government which has rejected every peaceable demand by the people for rights and freedom and answered every such demand with force and yet more force! . . .

Notice the sequence of events. An effort in non-violent agitation is met with violent repression. The process alters the perception of the appropriateness of that mode of struggle on the part of the victims. There is revealed here what appears to be a two-sided limitation of the Gandhian approach: it seems to avail little against incorrigible oppressors. Besides, its hold on the minds of ordinary, or even fairly extraordinary, mortals tends to be weakened by harsh reprisals. It seems evident from the wording of the above quotation that Mandelas attitude was not born out of any innate distaste for non-violent methods. It would most likely be an aid to consistency of thought and behaviour in relation to the question of violence if all critics, high and low, who are not themselves dedicated to absolute non-violence, would bear vividly in mind the point made by Mandela to the effect that the choice of violence is, in fact, antecedently made by the oppressor not the oppressed. Nevertheless, it has to be conceded that this is not a perfect answer to the true Gandhian. If the violence of the oppressed is evoked by that of the oppressor, it still does not

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follow that that is the morally right way for the latter to react to the former. Neither, it might be argued, does the fact that success does not quickly accrue to Gandhian methods serve as proof of their eternal futility. It is of interest to note that for all the loss of faith in non-violence expressed in the quotation under study, there was still discernible in the policy of the movement, at any rate in the initial stages, a certain residual Gandhiism. The policy was one of violence against things such as installations, rather than against human life. Let us now make some distinctions concerning violence. There is quite a crucial difference between the two forms of violence just mentioned, namely, violence against things and violence against human life. Both go beyond the mere application of physical force; they involve additionally an intent to cause pain or a sense of loss or blockage of will to some human beings. Now, it would be quite intelligible to base a kind of pacifism on the notion of the sanctity of human life. Such a pacifism would exclude all forms of violence, involving the international taking of human life such as war, while not foreswearing other forms, such as police use of limited physical force in civic correction. When people call themselves pacifists this is probably the kind of abstention from violence they most often mean to commit themselves to, although they do not always realize the need to add the rider indicated, a circumstance which often lends the impression that pacifism as such is self-contradictory. Certainly pacifists are not uniformly known to disapprove of every kind of police violence. The term police violence in this context may sound a little incongruous due to the fact that the word violence is not infrequently used to refer to the illegitimate use of force. We may quickly note that we are not concerned in this discussion with violence in this sense, otherwise, there would be no issue to discuss. Nobody would normally represent himself (or herself) as advocating the illegitimate use of physical force. To return to the two forms of violence mentioned earlier, it might almost be said that whereas Gandhiism self-evidently prohibits all violence involving the taking of life, it does not necessarily rule out the sort of violence which abjures that intent. It is, perhaps, not often enough noted that Gandhis method was not one of comfortable inactivity, but on the contrary, one which could require infinitely more physical courage than the method of armed struggle. It could be part of a Gandhian campaign, for instance, for a group of unarmed individuals to sit right in the way of an armed or even armoured column of security forces with the intent to stop them, damn the consequences. This kind of action might in some sense be said to involve violence, for certainly, placing your bodily weight in the path of another is, in effect, to try to check his motion and consequently block his will by means of a counteracting force. It does seem that, in the end, the real difference between the Gandhian method of resistance and a policy of violence against such things as government installations is that the former is passive while the latter is active in a purely descriptive sense. This, then, and not any total absence of violence is what explains the designation passive resistance by which the Gandhian approach is known. We ought, I think, always to remember that in describing that approach as non-violent, we are using the term Violent5 in quite a narrow sense to mean active violence.

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I would like to recall here my own former lack of comprehension in this respect. I used to be greatly puzzled by Martin Luther King in the hey-days of his campaign. On the one hand, he advocated a policy of absolute non-violence. On the other hand, he persisted in a program of action which he must have known would lead to violence through police intervention. The problem was that it did seem to be inconsistent to preach absolute non-violence and at the same time pursue a course of action known to be such as to issue forth in violence in one way or another. It was only in the light of the point just made in connection with the distinction between passive and active violence that I understood that the great black follower of Mahatma Gandhi was not, in fact, being inconsistent. We observe at this point gradations of violence, namely, passive violence, limited active violence and untrammelled violence. I am using this last, somewhat inelegant expression, to refer to policy involving violence which does not stop short of the taking of a human life, if need be. Various groups in South Africa have felt constrained to employ all of these grades of violence at some point in the struggle against apartheid. Nelson Mandelas program of what we may now call limited active violence whose avoidance of homicide was, I believe, a kind of homage to Gandhiism, was soon superseded by a campaign of full-blooded, though not very large-scale, guerrilla violence by both his organization and others. In the upshot, Mandela was arrested, tried and put in prison, where he has remained since 1964. The current South African aparthied leader, no apostle of non-violence himself, now dangles before Mandela the prospect of freedom in exchange for a disavowal of violence. From the look of things, the legendary black leader remains untempted. Nevertheless, it is not to be supposed that the progession I do not say progress from passive resistance to more uninhibited forms of resistance has been a linear process, signifying the triumph, once and for all, of the policy of armed struggle in the thought of black South Africans. Indeed, a most significant phase of the struggle against apartheid was the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko. This leader was both a theoretician and a man of action. He sought to develop a sense of identity, a cultural self-confidence, in black South Africans and thereby galvanize them into action for their own liberation. In all this, however, he envisaged a non-violent mode of struggle. But the South African apartheid government, not touched by any remotely Gandhian compunction, set upon Biko and locked him up. He died in 1977 as a result of police interrogation with eloquent marks of injury to body and brain. Steve Bikos influence, however, remains operative. One group that was definitely galvanized into action by Bikos teaching was the school children of Soweto. The immediate cause of their leaping into the fray was the governments order in May 1976 that Black children were thenceforward to take their lessons in geography, mathematics and history in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors. There were also, of course, countless factors of poor living conditions. But at all events, the inspiration of Biko was decisive. The children embarked upon a series of boycotts and demonstrations which was progressively transformed into

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relatively more substantial forms of violence through police brutality leading to the deaths of some hundreds of youth. We note again how a philosophy of non-violence taking hold of a large mass of human beings is apt to lead, by some sort of situational logic, to violence in actual practice. Gandhian methods have had a more uncomplicated sway in the struggles of African peoples against colonialism in those parts of the continent where the situation was not bedevilled by the settler factor. In Ghana, for instance, as distinct from, say, Kenya where there was a very significant settler population, the incidence of violence in the struggle for independence was quite negligible. Apart from the regular beating up of nationalist crowds by the colonial police (a practice I myself was once a victim of), the only deliberate taking of human life occurred quite early in the struggle when a white police officer opened fire on a group of unarmed Ghandian ex-servicemen who were marching to the residence of the British Governor of the country to present a list of grievances and demands, and killed one of them. The action arose out of panic rather than a premeditated policy of armed repression. It has sometimes been said that Gandhian methods can prosper only where the struggle is against a relatively gentlemanly regime such as the British colonial administration in Ghana or India, for that matter.1 Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Ghana (then known as the Gold Coast) to independence in 1957, and certainly the most remarkable and influential African leader of this century, drew his inspiration from Gandhi during his pre-independence phase. He consistently advocated a policy of what he called positive action which, as he explained in his autobiography, meant legitimate political agitation, newspaper and education campaigns, and, as a last resort, the constitutional application of strikes, boycotts, and non-cooperation based on the principle of non-violence, as used by Gandhi in India. It is, however, important to note, as became clear later, that Nkrumahs belief in non-violence was pragmatic rather than doctrinnaire. In this he differed quite radically from Gandhi, his original inspirer, or even from Martin Luther King. Given the imbalance in the resources for violence between the colonial authorities and the indigenous people and in view of the latters inexperience in suitable armed tactics, it seemed to him imprudent to resort to active violence. When, however, conditions seemed ripe for armed methods in the African liberation struggle, he yielded ground to no one in his advocacy and even sponsorship of armed struggle. Witness the title of his book called Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution.2 By contrast, Martin Luther King, for example, remained doctrinally committed to non-violence to the end, despite manifold incentives to the contrary. In the book just mentioned Nkrumah argued that violence was, in itself, neither good nor bad. The important question for him was its historical context. Our armed struggle, he said, is neither moral nor immoral, it is a scientific historically determined necessity. If pressed to say whether it is morally right to do what is a scientific and historically determined necessity, the advocate of such a view can hardly remain permanently neutral. It is

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arguable that the fact that something is necessary does not render it inaccessible to moral evaluation, as the widely received notion of a necessary evil positively suggests. This is an interesting issue which we cannot pursue here to its logical conclusion. Suffice it to point out that Nkrumahs view contrasts with the views of both Gandhi and Franz Fanon, both of which are of course to be contrasted with the more commonsense view that while violence is in itself an evil it may be embraced in some circumstances as the lesser of two evils. Certainly, for Gandhi such a views errs on the side of indulgence, while for Fanon it errs on the side of pusillanimity. In his enthusiasm for anti-colonial violence, Fanon seems to have left little room in his heart for even the most hypothetical moral reservation about violence. One standpoint which is eminently worthy of attention in this connection is that any genuinely humane outlook, any outlook, that is to say, which is born out of respect and sympathy for human beings as human beings, must evince some vestiges, at least, of regret about violence, however unavoidable it may be thought to be. A strong point of the Lusaka Manifesto, the Manifesto on African relations with South Africa, the then Rhodesia and Portugal, which was agreed to by fourteen East and Central African States on the 16th of April 1969 under the influence of President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, another great admirer of Gandhi, (subsequently approved by the Organization of African Unity (1969) and the United Nations General Assembly) is that it very perceptibly displayed just such a sense of moral discomfort about the necessity, which they felt to be real, for armed struggle in the African liberation process. To return to Gandhi, the point about his position with regard to violence is that it goes far beyond any such moral soul searching. For him there is absolutely no room for violence (i.e. active violence) in human affairs; violence is intrinsically brutish. To quote him, Non-violence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute. It must be obvious that Gandhi cannot here be referring to an empirical law of our species; he is, presumably, referring to a moral law of some kind. What, then, is there about violence that is responsible for this allegedly irreducible illegitimacy? Presumably, not the fact that it frequently involves the infliction of pain on others. It is plausible to maintain that pain is intrinsically evil, but it takes but little imagination to conceive of cases, such as medical treatment, in which pain may be acknowledged by both its sufferer and author as a legitimate means to some greater good. A somewhat more probable hypothesis is that Gandhi finds violence so morally obnoxious because it involves trying to get a human being to do or refrain from doing something in disregard or violation of his own will. But this will ultimately not do, for Gandhis own methods often did exactly this in bending a recalcitrant will to his wishes. It cannot be said either that what is so unalterably wrong with violence is that it always involve harm to human beings, because, as we have seen, not all forms of even active violence involves this. Certainly, what we have called limited active violence dispenses with the intent to harm human beings. In the end we might simply have to note that perhaps Gandhis view of violence had a mystical dimension, and that the law of our species he

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refers to is a moral law founded upon what some might call a spiritual insight. If so, it would not be incompatible with certain well-known traditions of his oriental homeland. Turning from Gandhi to Fanon a transition not very much unlike jumping over an unbridgeable chiasm it is fair to point out, as has often been done, that he over-romanticized violence. It is not that it is false as Fanon held, that violence on the part of the colonized against the colonizer could invest their characters with positive and creative qualities, but in omitting to note the negative effects that violence does sometimes have on the psychology of its practitioners, colonized or not, he gave a one-sided view of an important matter. One of the most negative side-effects of violence is its tendency to develop an authoritarian mentality in its practitioners. It should be quite easy to understand the causation since, by its very nature, violence entails the overriding or blocking or even the abolishing of some human will. On the basis of this consideration about the authoritarian potential of violence, it would be possible to build a libertarian argument to the effect that, although some limited purposes (such as colonial liberation) can be attained through violence, any real approximation to the Good Society is bound to elude violent methods. Nevertheless, it has to be noted that if such a thing as colonial liberation is attainable through violence, then it is a large enough objective, however limited it may seem in comparison with more Utopian perspectives. (I do not, by the way, use the word utopian here with any pejorative intent.) Fanon says that at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force (The Wretched of the Earth). As implied above, this is true with a modification. At the level of individuals, violence sometimes is a cleansing force. Fanon was thinking here of the effect of violence on the violent activists themselves. But we can go further and say that, even with respect to those against whom violence is applied, violence can be a cleansing force.3 It can, for example, lead, more specifically, compel an oppressor to reappraise his position and, consciously or half-consciously, realize its moral untenability. This is what often happened in the anti-colonial liberation struggles of recent times. Freedom fighters have, on a number of occasions, won national freedom through armed struggle; but it has rarely been by way of direct surrender of the armies of the colonizing countries on the battlefield. What has frequently happened is that the armed struggle of the colonized has precipitated the formation and/or strengthening of anti-colonial opinion in the metropolitan countries themselves, which has contributed in various ways to the yielding of self-determination to the colonized peoples. Certainly a victory of this sort, bringing moral reappraisal in its trail, is preferable to a direct military victory which leaves previous attitudes intact. If, as seems hardly deniable, the present world-wide climate of opinion against colonialism has not emerged independently of the struggles, both violent and non-violent, of the colonized peoples, then it might be said that violence can sometimes be morally educative. This is contrary to Gandhis philosophy of the intrinsically brutish nature of violence. There is no suggestion here that Gandhis position on the question of

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violence can be wholly dismissed. That there is a large measure of truth in it has been acknowledged already in conceding that the Good Society can never come about through violence. It is relevant to note that even in Marx and Engels, frequently regarded as apostles of violence, there is at least an implied realization that the ideal society will not materialize through violence. Violence, apparently, can only result in the dictatorship of the proletariat; the millennium of the classless society will have to await a time when, in the words of Engles, society has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.4 Still, historically, absolute faith in non-violence has rarely been able to sustain large scale movements and political organizations indefinitely. In India itself the Indian National Congress adherence to Gandhis methods was notably pragmatic. Subsequently, accession to power on the attainment of independence in India brought even more radical departures from the philosophy of non-violence. The Congress government inherited all the resources of state violence from the erstwhile colonial government and soon found itself committing them into action against Pakistani invaders. Gandhi was disconsolate. One lesson is obvious. Absolute non-violence is incompatible with governmental power. Total Gandhiism leads to some form of anarchism. Nor was this implication lost on Gandhi. It has also not been lost on Kaunda, probably the most fervent Gandhian among contemporary African rulers. But while it led Gandhi in the direction of anarchism, it has led Kaunda to become a reluctant advocate of violence. Kaundas religiously tinged view of violence is that although violence can never be justified, it can be forgiven forgiven only by the Lord Almighty.5 It is remarkable that in India, Africa and the United States periods of non-violence were succeeded by periods of violence.6 On the other hand, violence can hardly be a permanent policy regardless of changing circumstances. There seems to be little justification for an exclusive disjunction between violence and non-violence as policy options. Given the gross inequalities and injustices of the contemporary world, reflective men must countenance a selective combination of violent and non-violent methods. This, in effect, has been the case in contemporary African thought and practice. NOTES
1 Incidentally, one should not hastily suppose that this gentlemanliness was an invariable attribute of British colonialism, for, of course, where the interests of British settlers were at stake, as in Kenya during the Mau Mau struggle, the British could hold their own in armed repression. 2 Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare: A Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution (London: Panaf Books, 1968). 3 President Kaunda has expressed eloquent reservations about this claim that violence can have a cleansing effect on those against whom it is practiced in his book Kaunda on Violence, Colin M. Morris, ed. (London: Collins, 1980). What cleansing is there to be done, he asks in effect, if the violence leads to the death of its target? Considered in terms of individuals, this objection is, I think, final. But the violent struggles that are particularly relevant for our

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discussion are struggles between large groups, and although many individuals do perish, the groups, as units, survive to learn the lessons. 4 F. Engels, Anti-Dhring (Moscow and New York: Progress Publishers), p. 132. 5 See, Kaunda on Violence, op. cit; Ali Mazrui, Mahatma Gandhi and Black Nationalism, in: Political Values and the Educated Class in Africa, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978). 6 For an extended documentation of this fluctuation in the struggles of the Blacks of America, see Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. by A. Meier, E. Rudwick and F. Broderick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).

Praxis International Vol 6 No 3 A Philsophical Journal October 1986 redigitized by Central and Eastern European Online Library - www.ceeol.com