The ‘Black Motion’ of Fanonism: Black Skins, White Mask

IN the early hours of Thursday 22nd of December 2016 — Fela Ransom Anikulapo Kuti of Nigeria rose to flesh — incarnating the masses rocked by some Black Motion wave from Azania.

The city could not get any rest that night, as it had to confront the usual festive season’s frenzied and ecstatic commemorative mood. The South Africa-based house music outfit (Black Motion), had their act intact.

Their electro-percussion sound rooted in deep Fela Kuti Afro-beat likeness was not so far from the creative precision of Fela’s legendary master drummer, Tony Allen. Black Motion got their audience dancing with no bounds. Surely, Black Motion’s perfected craft of fusing Afro-beat and the South-African popular culture rhythm got this exultant crowd forgetting about 2016’s despairs, griefs, glooms and dejections. Even some preachers of the bond notes doom gospel temporarily forgot that what they once called paper money bought them admission to this international show.

Yes, this international show! A site of musical nationalisms of South-Africa represented by Black Motion and the complimentary host of Zimbabwean DJs who rocked the crowd with some Zim Dancehall tunes.

While others forgot about the doom gospel of bond notes (they had vowed not to use/accept as legal tender); this percussion driven groove got my mind out of the mourning mood clearly explained in my recent articles. Remember, the last piece I wrote in this weekly section of literature review; it was a tribute to Fidel Castro from the lens of Frantz Fanon’s decolonial interventions.

A week prior, I reflected on how Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) offers broader themes of liberating the psyche of the colonised.

The series explained how Fanon’s work articulates a prophetically manifesting condition of imperialism in Africa’s supposedly post-colonial status in the globe’s Western constructed/imagined periphery. Therefore, the series of this December’s submissions have been all about mourning and remembering decolonial greats such as Fanon and Fidel Castro who was elevated to glory on the earth on the 25th of November, 2016.

However, the Black Motion show held at Bulawayo’s Hartsfield Stadium produced a personal mood swing which offered a temporary unthinking of the sorrows I expressed in the last two articles. The Black Motion show got the young and the old thronging the stadium for nothing, but fun and fun alone.

For a fact, the Black Motion crowd was much more enormous than the handful who took part in the #Tajamuka and #ThisFlag pandemonium which sold an elusive idea of shutting-down Zimbabwe. Indeed the crowd was much more than that of hired activists who took part in a series of demonstrations used to outperform the resounding success of the Zanu-PF One-Million Man March held on the 25th of May — that sacred day in the African calendar.

In my head I assumed an imagination of myself as a political commissar of some revolutionary party. In this state of imagination (Disclaimer: Trust me, I was not high) as the beat commanded my feet to dance with no pause a biblical verse echoed from the backyard of my memory “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few” (Luke 10 verse 2, Mark 9 verse 37, Matthew 9 verse 38).

Off to Godlwayo, Fusi and Marisha turn right up to Nket(h)a-Munyoro

As my former Gloag Mission School headmaster and mentor in Bubi District, Mr Gamuledu Ncube would warn us back then, “the young calf must not break its legs before the dance”. Around 4pm, I had to join the multitudes finding their way to eGodini and other CBD public transport pick-up points to catch kombis to their various high and low density suburb destinations.

On my way home, I took some time to reflect and have some introspection just to assess if attending this show was worth it. Did it really matter, if I had not attended the show? It was really important to attend this kind of event, just to encounter naked elements of how the future of Africa — the youth is under objecthood of drug abuse, Zimbabwe and South-African music genres borrowing their influences from Nigerian Fela’s Afro-beat and the Caribbean “Back to Africa” ethos epitomised through Zim Dancehall — mimickry of Jamaican Reggae/ Dancehall. It is on public record that Fela and the Caribbean groove have posed as vehicles of revolutionary mobilisation since the anti-colonial era.

Then today, we have music concerts which ride on the mobilisation effect of the Afrorevolutionary music genres to mobilise the youth into drug use, violence and lack of self-consciousness. Imagine if such spaces were used to promote dissemination of revolutionary decoloniality to the future of Africa — the youth.

Imagine, if this current mobilisation of youth to such galas was similar to efforts invested in ideological grooming. Would we be a nation sceptic of the transfer of the button from the nationalist generation to this breed of prospective future leaders? We have a continental tragedy of seeking Afrocentricity in Eurocentricity.

We are only producing a national ideological “House of hunger” through superficial celebratory rather than progressive “Black Motion” notions. After all the drinking, smoking, dancing, stripping and throwing empty alcohol bottles on stage we all go back home to the old conditions we temporarily forget in such mass mobilisation platforms. But mobilisation for what? Drinking, smoking, dressing to kill, lustful indulging and then what? Then expect Africa to be a genuine awakening giant. Really!

What does the Black man want? From that irresistible bewilderment of nausea Fanon sets his ultimatum:

. . . the black man wants the objectifying confrontation with otherness; in the colonial psyche there is an unconscious disavowal of the negating, splitting moment of desire. The place of the Other must not be imaged as Fanon sometimes suggests as a fixed phenomenological point, opposed to the Self, that represents a culturally alien consciousness.

The Other must be seen as the necessary negation of a primordial identity — cultural or psychic — that introduces the system of differentiation which enables the “cultural” to be signified as a linguistic, symbolic, historic reality. If, as I have suggested, the subject of desire is never simply a Myself, then the Other is never simply an It-self, a font of identity, truth, or misrecognition.

Fanon’s socio-diagnostic psychoanalysis is inclined to clarify the fragmented turns and returns of the subject of colonial yearning, its deception of western man and the “long” historical perspective.

It is as if Fanon is fearful of his most deepseated insights: that the space of the body and its identification is a representational reality; that the politics of race will not be entirely contained within the humanist myth of man or economic necessity or historical progress, for its psychic affects question such forms of determinism; that social sovereignty and human subjectivity are only realizable in the order of Otherness.

It is as if the question of desire that emerged from the traumatic tradition of the oppressed has to be denied, at the end of Black Skin, White Masks, to make way for an existentialist humanism that is as banal as it is beatific.

Richard Runyararo Mahomva is an independent academic researcher, Founder of Leaders for Africa NetworkLAN. Convener of the Back to PanAfricanism Conference and the Reading Pan-Africa Symposium (REPS) and can be contacted on rasmkhonto@gmail.com