Anti‐colonialism, post‐colonialism and the ‘new man’

Abstract

The question of writing a different history of ‘Man’, the creation of the New Man, is a project that is found in the writings of such intellectuals as C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. In this article an attempt is made to develop some thoughts on the ways in which anti‐colonialism, and later post‐colonialism, seeks to think about the creation of, and problematise, the New Man, and the place of collective subjectivity in this project.

Notes

∗ Suren Pillay is a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Chatterjee describes the inability of colonial rule to ‘civilise’ its subject as based on the paradox of the rule of colonial indifference. Colonialism, argues Chatterjee, was based on a clear distinction between the coloniser and colonised, often marked by ‘race’. ‘The British in India could never fulfil the normalizing mission of the modern state because the premise of its power was a rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group’ (1993, p. 10).

See Steve Biko's I Write What I Like (1978), a collection of writings in which the influences of Césaire and Fanon is apparent.

African is used here in the diasporic sense, the way in which, for example, Bob Marley lyricised, and Peter Tosh wrote it: ‘No matter where you come from, as long as you’re a black man, you're an African.'

It was of course Fanon's insights into ‘neo‐colonialism’ which are very influential on later Marxist‐inspired scholarship from Africa, among diverse intellectuals figures like Samir Amin and A. M. Babu, to Mahmood Mamdani and Dan Nabudere, Issa Shivji and I. B. Tabata.

For example ‘If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat’ (Fanon, 1963, p. 200).

The idea of the New Man is not something unique to Fanon or Césaire, of course. We find it in many totalising projects, within certain religious discourses, and political ideologies. Ché Guevara wrote a paper on the New Man in Cuba. See Anderson (1997). In a seminal text, Cheikh Anta Diop (1974, p. 115) argued that it ‘then devolves on us Africans to rewrite the entire history of mankind for our own edification and that of others’.

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Notes on contributors

Suren Pillay ∗

∗ Suren Pillay is a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape.