Frantz Fanon’s detailed explanation of what he called “national bourgeoisie,” and their rather adverse impacts on the development of several colonies rang home to me in so many ways.
Ghana, the then Gold Coast, is well known for its colonial past. As a Ghanaian, I had always wondered why despite being the second sub-Saharan African country to have gained independence and a country well blessed with natural resources of all sorts could still not develop as anticipated.
“But the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle, are the cause of tragic trials and tribulations,” Fanon writes. This statement encapsulates the very thought I had always had in mind about our historical leadership(s), and their failed persistent efforts in living up to the very promises they made to their people, the promise of redemption from oppression, economic and social.
Growing up as a child, I always heard my grandparents and the elderly in my community constantly lambast the ways of the pioneering fathers of the country, and by pioneering fathers I mean those that fought for our independence. “Oh, how I wished the White Men were still here to make the country better,” they would say casually anytime there was a conversation about the state of the nation.
The level of ignorance is astonishing, right, but it goes to show the level of work the colonizers did to leave a clean image behind in the colonies they robbed off their future. The “pioneering fathers” who are described by Fanon as the National Bourgeoisies, are the ones who are constantly blamed for the perceived failure of the country.
“In an underdeveloped country, the imperative duty of an authentic national bourgeoisie is to betray the vocation to which it is destined, to learn from the people, and make available to them the intellectual and technical capital it culled from its time in colonial universities,” Fanon argues. I took great exception to the premise of Fanon’s argument in the above topic sentence which I believe does not really speak fairly to the exact position the national bourgeoisies were left in.
The national bourgeoisie knows nothing and the very education he or she had was granted by the colonizer, who had their own interest at heart. Fanon mentions how “their (the national bourgeoisies) knowledge is purely academic and approximate.” It is baffling how the colonizers pride themselves on the level of “education” and “liberation” they brought to their respective colonies without acknowledging the fact that it was in fact another strategy used to further cripple their targets.
The very educational systems and other institutional structures of the colonies were curated by the very same colonizers. They drafted laws, syllabi used in schools and demarcated lands all in further pursuance of their own benefits.
Colonization, in my opinion, never ended but only took a different turn. Independence, sovereignty, and other terminologies are used as a build up to the new world of colonization/imperialism we have today. The colonized are trapped in the very systems they were curated by their colonizers. We, most of the time, fail to talk about such systems and how it affected generations of the colonized states. Ghana, for instance, still uses the academic syllabus drafted by the British before independence!
One may argue that why can’t they (Ghana) just change it? Yes, they can change since Ghana is independent of any colonial power. However, the very same imperial powers of the colonial age have become the powerhouse of the world today. Internationalization and globalization have become a strategy with which these powerful nations exuded their imperialistic nature on other countries; instituting standards that favor themselves in the long run.
“We will see, unfortunately, that the national bourgeoisie often turn away from this heroic and positive path, which is both productive and just, and unabashedly opt for the anti-national, and therefore abhorrent, path of a conventional bourgeoisie, a bourgeois bourgeoisie that is dismally, insanely and cynical bourgeois,” Fanon says.
The national bourgeois is sometimes left with no other option than to neglect his or her positive path because the ideas and plans they come to the table with are overturned by these imperial powers. Ghana, in the year 2012 to 2016, on the “advice” of the International Monetary Fund, could not employ undergraduates in any of the government offices. Such powerhouses in the world, which are largely managed by a sect of Western countries, do have their way with agendas that serve their national interest and hence oppresses other marginalized nations.
In as much as I reckon the fault of the national bourgeoisies in their perverted ways, I deem it fit to equally consider the various structures in which they were left in to manage the colonies: structures which were, and still are, controlled largely by the imperial Western powers.
