Page 181 - BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASK

142 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS

progressive infrastructure, in which it will be possible to discern
the Negro on the road to disalienation.
When there is no longer a “human minimum,” there is no
culture. It matters very little to me to know that “Muntu means
Power” among the Bantu —or at least it might have interested me
49
if certain details had not held me back. What use are refl ections
on Bantu ontology when one reads elsewhere:

When 75,000 black miners went on strike in 1946, the state police forced
them back to work by fi ring on them with rifl es and charging with fi xed
bayonets. Twenty-fi ve were killed and thousands were wounded.
At that time Smuts was the head of the government and a delegate to
the Peace Conference. On farms owned by white men, the black laborers
live almost like serfs. They may have their families with them, but no
man is allowed to leave the farm without the permission of his master.
If he does so, the police are notifi ed and he is brought back by force and
whipped. . . .
Under the Act for Native Administration, the governor-general, as the
supreme authority, has autocratic powers over the Africans. By proclamation
he may arrest and detain any African deemed dangerous to public order.
He may forbid meetings of more than ten persons in any native residential
area. The writ of habeas corpus is not available to Africans. Mass arrests
without warrants are made constantly.
The nonwhite populations of South Africa are at an impasse. All the
modem modes of slavery make it impossible for them to fl ee from this
scourge. In the case of the African especially, white society has smashed
his old world without giving him a new one. It has destroyed the traditional
tribal foundations of his existence and it blocks the road of the future after
having closed the road of the past. . . .
Apartheid aspires to banish the Negro from participating in modern
history as a free and independent force. 50
I apologize for this long quotation, but it permits me to bring
out some possibilities of black men’s mistakes. Alioune Diop, for
example, in his introduction to La philosophic bantoue, remarks
that Bantu ontology knows nothing of the metaphysical misery

49. Reverend Tempels, La philosophie bantoue.
50. I. R. Skine, “Apartheid en Afrique du Sud,” Les Temps Modernes, July, 1950.

4/7/08 14:16:53
Fanon 01 text 142 4/7/08 14:16:53
Fanon 01 text 142