Decolonization / Liberation through Violence

Colonial peoples of Africa often resorted to violent measures in overcoming colonial rule. This is unsurprising on several counts. First there is a simple human equation, legitimized to some degree as philosophy in the writings of Franz Fanon, that violence begets violence. “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”: Fanon presumes that violence done to the violent will provide a catharsis from which a non-violent situation may finally emerge. Second, violence is to some degree a matter of perception: tens of thousands of indigenous “insurgents” sent to internment camps or killed by colonial government forces versus mere tens of white settlers killed albeit brutally: which is the greater violence? The extremity of the killings committed to by the Mau Mau in Kenya accelerated the process of decolonization in fact.

The equation that violence begets violence has a correlate: that violence tends to escalate. The violence of colonialism did not taper off through time, but was transmuted into other forms. The agencies committing violence might not be de jure colonialists, but corporations and banks controlling production and finances may also commit and engender violence. Race prejudice and ethnic unrest existing from before, or created during the colonial period, also foster physical and affective violence. When those experiencing physical or moral violence, inequities of law, and so on, have little investment in the state or in commerce, have the notion that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain by committing violence, “terrorism” may become a fact of daily life.

But although some kinds of violence can have silver linings for capital, “terrorism” tends to disrupt production and close markets. So, the agents of those with investment in the state and commerce, whether they be police or revenuers or soldiers, take as their mission the suppression of insurgency. Soon, even if they begin intending not to take violent measures, they are infected by the dialectic of violence begetting violence. Presumably, this ends in a synthesis wherein violence is either eliminated or contained, but this synthesis may require sacrifice of violent impulse, which is a major demand to place on those who having been robbed see the opportunity to win back what had been theirs.