América Latina: ¿clase media de las naciones?

lation .of the Latin. American schoo1 of dependency may not be aH thatfarremoved from the ideological formulation of Frantz Fanon, !1nother .Latin American benefactor of Africa. Fanon, a Martiniquan, whoimmersed himself in the Algerian war against France and for. mulatea briUiant theories on the O!ecessity of bloody revolution, was destined to capture the imagination of young radkals in much of the b.lack world. French.speaking AfrÍCans were among the Eirst to res~ pond to. Fanon's stimulation. Some of the observers of the rebellion in Zaire (then known as the Congo) in 1964.65 even suspectea that FanoTIja:long with the Algerians and the Chinese, constituted part of the total external influence on the techniquesof that rebeHion .. Roger. J\.nstey, theBritish historian, put it in the following terms: 7 "P.erocity in of war is known well enough in' Afriea, buí the con. tinuing cakulated murderousness of the rebellion seems to have about it sorne imported. revolutionary method... 1t is at ·least credible that such methods should stem from Chinese and AIgerian techniques of re:volution, whilst it may.also be relev.ant to recall the vogue currentIy enjoyed in some French.speáking cirdes by tbe -late Frantz Fanon..." In Fanon we have the attempt to formulate strategies of national liberation and revolution. Unlike Marx and Engels, Eanon. put his faith not in the proletariat but in the peasantry. But from an African point of view, Farion's success in reinstating the· peasantry in the mainstream of history has to be put alongside Fanon'sachievement in reinstating r.ace into the mainstream of radical sOCial analysis. Fanon wants us to look at Marxism agaín agaiost the backgroUnd of the salience of race in the colonial experience. After aH, within the .coloÍüa:l situation, "it is neither the act of owning fac~ tories nor estates, nora bank balance which distinguishes the gover– ning dass, the governing race is first and foremost those who'come from e1sewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, 'the others' ". 8 .·Panon goes on to argue that the colonial wodd is divided into compartments inhabited by "two ¿ifferent species". There were ¡ndeed economic realities, in tel'ffiS of who owned what, hut there. were . alSQ human' realities in terms of· who was what. 9 . "When yoo examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is ~vident that .what parcels out the world begins. Wiith the fact of belon. ging or not belonging to a given race, a given species.. In the colonies ~onomic sub.structure is aIso a super.structure. The cause is the con- 7 Anstey, "The Congo RebelUon", The World Toda,. (Chatham I{ou– .se), Vol. XXI,. N9 4, april 1965. Fanon's most influentialwork has of course been The Wretehed of .the Earth (TraJlslated· jnto Eng~ish' by Con!/tanceFarrlngton). (New York: Grave ~ss,W6;l.) .. . .. 'The Wretehed 01. the El.\rth, ibid., p. 38.. ! 9 IMd,. ;p. 32. 77