Guerrilla History - Concerning Violence - Review, From the Archives

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

This From the Archives episode was originally a patreon-exclusive episode from November 2021, where Adnan and Henry discuss Fanon and the documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense.  This was a really fun and thought provoking conversation, and something that you will be able to hopefully get something out of whether you've seen the documentary or not.  Hope you enjoy! Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally, we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues, and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history.

We've decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence, and all the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share

these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, Solidarity. You don't remember Din Van Booh? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on.

Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. Guerrilla history is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. Just to remind you, if you're listening to this, intelligence briefings are roughly twice monthly bonus episodes that we do, half of which go on as Patreon exclusive episodes like this one. So you'll only hear this episode on our Patreon or early release on Patreon, where you'll get early access to the episode before it goes out on our general feed.

I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki, joined by one of my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. Great to be with you. Yeah, it's nice to see you too. Unfortunately, we're not joined by our co-host, Brett O'Shea, who, as the listeners all know, is host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. But today we have, it should be a very interesting episode, and it's another one of our documentary reviews. This will be in the same vein as our review of Exterminate All the Brutes, the Raul Peck documentary miniseries that we did, what, a few months ago anyway, maybe five months.

ago. And we had a good response to that. So we decided that we would look at another documentary today, which is concerning violence. I had referenced this documentary when I was a guest host on Revolutionary Left Radio with Brett when we were interviewing Torkelowson about his new book, writing the wave Sweden's integration into the imperialist world system. Because this this documentary does really fit into that theme. And the documentary really is based on Franz Fanon's opening chapter of Wretched of the Earth concerning violence. So why don't we open the discussion now or not?

I'll turn it over to you because as patrons of our show know, you have done several posts on our Patreon regarding Wretched of the Earth, including I believe on concerning violence itself. So why don't I have you introduce the text? and the ideas that are going to be explored here within this documentary that we'll talk about. Sure. And I also just should note that I believe it's a, that there is a good episode of Red Menace or Revolutionary Left Radio. I can't remember which one, but Brett has done a really good piece on Franz Van der Leyen's ideas.

So listeners can go back and get that background on the work overall. But it's his last work. France Van Nuas, people may know, died very young at age 36 in 1961, and he was born in the Caribbean island of Martinique, lived under French colonial rule. They were part of France on some level, and he trained as a psychiatrist and was posted to Algeria before his kind of radical, political activities when he joined the FLN led to his expulsion and exile from the country. So he continued to work for the Algerian, FLN's anti-colonial resistance and liberation of Algeria from Tunisia, where he wrote for al-Mujahid, which was the kind of written newsletter, newspaper, opinion journal for the FLN in Tunisia.

But then he contracted cancer and came to the U.S. where he died. But in the several weeks, a couple of months before his death, he put together and orally dictated the wretched of the earth, his last work. He had written black skin, white masks about the psychoanalytic kind of perspective on racism and the internalization and consequences. of internalization of racism among its victims. And he had been writing, of course, for El Mujahid. But the wretched of the earth really is the suma, you might say, the final statement of his theory of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance based on his understandings and life experience, waging liberation struggle and being involved in it.

And the most contrary, and that was published in 1961 right after his, you know, right about the time of his death. And this is a really amazing work. Most people don't get further than the first chapter, which is called On Violence or Concerning Violence, that lays out his thesis that violence can be a revolutionary force. that, you know, the colonized need to redirect the endemic violence of colonialism against colonialism in order to liberate themselves. And it sketches out, you know, the way in which violence is ever-present and part of colonialism, both in its foundation, the violent expropriation of the land, but in its maintenance and continuance in creating a kind of split and divided society of colonizer and colonized.

And, of course, he's speaking principally about settler colonial context, but you could say that in many cases, the overall expropriation of the land and control of peoples around the world, whether there were settlers or not, you know, involved violence. But he's very specifically, I think, engaged with the situation. in parts of Africa and, of course, in Algeria. The rest of the book is about some of the consequences of how a liberation movement can achieve victory, but also some of the warnings that he has, for example, in a chapter pitfalls

of national consciousness about how militant third world nationalist movements can be betrayed because, you know, the bourgeois indigenous can inhabit in some ways the place within the global world order of the colonizer in a new post-colonial nation and formation. And so he was very concerned, and I think already in the 1960s, late 1950s, early 60s, was aware of how a broader global transformation was necessary in order to actually get rid of, you know, the colonial and imperial world order. That's a chapter that's not often, you know, discussed very much. But he also has a chapter that's really interesting about colonialism and mental disorders and the way in which colonialism and anti-colonialism have all

kinds of psychological consequences. And he was a working psychiatrist, and he treated many people and also tried to help people recover from the devastating consequences of colonialism and of violence on both sides. That included colonizers. He also had, you know, famous cases that he told us about, about, you know, a police officer and diagnosing the way in which, you know, the person's family life was affected by the suppression of indigenous Algerians and how that violence Islands was brought home. And so it's a real important coda. And the end point of it is really looking towards a new humanism, a humanism that would be global and actually value humankind no matter where, no matter whom, and a critique of, you know, the lack of universality of European

ideas, that the kinds of philosophical ideas about democracy and, um, you know, politics and so-called Western values that those couldn't be imitated. They had to be overcome and a new kind of humanism had to be developed and generated and that the participation of Europe and North America was needed, but it was needed not to provide the model, but to provide support and aid and not to be an impediment in the post-colonial future, of the development of these new philosophies, new ideas, and a new global order that valued humanity. So it's an amazing work. And it's been studied a lot, and it was very, I guess you could say, influential and inspirational for liberation movements around the world. And that

included in, you know, the black liberation freedom struggle, liberation struggle in the U.S. as well. And so it had a global impact, but a lot of times people focused just on this first chapter and the controversial thesis, the way they read it, about, you know, violence. And when it was published, initially it came with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre who really kind of framed the whole thesis around this question of violence and really ignored the rest of the book. That's seem to be what Sartre was interested in in thinking through and thinking about the nature of political violence. And as a result, I think there's been some distortion in the reception of his work. And it'll be interesting to see in the documentary how this has been balanced by

the filmmaker's interpretation. Yeah. So that was an excellent introduction. And I'll introduce the documentary now and then we'll try to tie these threads together. So the document again is called Concerning Violence, Named After the First Chapter of the Wretched of the Earth, with the subtitled Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialist Self-Defense. It was made by Goran Hugo Olsen, who was a Swedish documentary filmmaker, who, among other things, has made, for example,

the Black Power mixtape, which came out a few years before this documentary did. This came out in 2014, narrated by singer and actress Lauren Hill, who her entire contribution to the film is by reading excerpts from the wretched of the earth and again particularly the chapter concerning violence she does a very fantastic job of this reading

and very powerful but one thing that I saw just as an aside something that I had read interestingly was that when she first read the excerpts that she was reading she read them about twice the speed that she, that you hear in the, uh, in the film because she had actually read the Ret of the Earth several times previous to making this film. And so she knew all of these lines, uh, some of them almost by heart. And so when she was reading it, she was reading it at the pace that she was

going in her head. And the filmmakers were having to go to her and they're like, Lauren, this is great. But we cannot keep up with it. Like you're reading it so fast. The, the, the scenes in the background, you know, they can't keep up with it. The, the words that were putting up on the screen because most of what she was narrating was also being depicted on the screen as well, we cannot keep up with it. So they had to have her re-record it at about half the speed that she was reading it at, which I found entertaining. In any cases, the subtitle says it's nine scenes from the anti-imperialist self-defense. And I'll just take you through those scenes very quickly. So first, there was a preface, which was made by the Indian professor,

Gayatri, let me get the pronunciation right, Gayatri at Chakra Vorti, Spivak, and after that introduction, where she introduces Phenon in a brief introduction to the film, and she does include some discussion of this preface that Jean-Paul Sartre made of the book, where she essentially says that he was misinterpreting

the chapter concerning violence in his preface. He wasn't reading between the lines, as she said, to understand that this violence that we're seeing is also a degrading experience to the colonized person, this inherent violence that is being brought out from them. After that, we have Chapter 1 decolonization with the MPLA in Angola in 1974, which essentially is what it sounds like. They followed, and I should mention, before I get into this, this is all. archival footage, and most of it is from previously made Swedish documentaries, and that'll

come into play in what we'll say in a little bit, but archival footage. So the first chapter is with the MPLA and Angola, they're following this guerrilla group who is going to be carrying out an action against a Portuguese army base. Then we have chapter two indifference interviews with Tandarai Makoni, Ph.D. Rhodesia slash Zimbabwe conducted in Stockholm, 1970. It talks to this individual who was jailed for five years and talks about the struggles of people in Zimbabwe to South Africa and how Britain and the United States are related to that. Moving on, we get to the third scene titled Rhodesia, where this is a very interesting scene. I see it not smiling. The listeners can't see that. But this incredibly racist white settler in Rhodesia is lamenting the fact that the

independence movements are gaining some strength. And he thought that they would at least have the time to burn everything on the way out to essentially, you know, ruin everything for the Africans as they were taking over. But the liberation movements were gaining strength so quickly that he might have to leave without even being able to turn the lights out on his settled property that he was owning there. But unbelievably racist scene, I mean, very shocking to see. chapter four is a world cut in two which shows basically African servants serving these rich white people lounging poolside talking about the despair and the dismay that they have seeing that the Africans are beginning to stand up for themselves again a very shockingly racist scene we have chapter five Lamcoe, Liberia, which was very interesting for me. It was about the Lamco, which I believe stands for the Liberian American mining company or corporation. It's this actually Swedish mining

company that was in Liberia. And they were looking at a strike action that was taking place by Lamco employees. And eventually what happens in this scene is one of the striking individuals gets fired from his job, gets kicked out of his company house, his family gets taken, basically confiscated by the police, driven out to the middle of the bush, and then our left roadside with nothing but the clothes on their back and whatever they could carry in their hands. Absolutely heartbreaking scene, and we hear this Swedish CEO of the mind speaking in this documentary footage with absolutely no remorse for these individuals that they're literally dropping off in the middle of the bush with nothing but the clothes on their back.

Chapter 6 is the poverty of spirit. This also was a very shocking scene for me. Swedish missionaries that were in Tanzania talking about their mission in Tanzania, why they were there, how religion was very important. And I'll have a few things to say about this scene a little bit later, but I mean, the disconnect between these Swedish. missionaries and the material conditions of the people that they were being missionaries for was was really really shocking chapter 7 the fiat g 91 with the frelimo in mizambique

1972 it is a scene that portrays some of the female liberation fighters in mozambique as well as injured individuals from Portuguese bombing raids including individuals who had amputated arms, a baby that had lost its leg in this bombing run. Very, again, shocking scenes. I think it goes without saying at this point, considering how many times I've said it's shocking. This is not a documentary for the faint of heart.

So anyway, chapter 8 is called defeat, and it is actually following Portuguese soldiers who are, I believe that this one was in Guinea-Bissau. Am I remembering correctly, Agnan, that chapter A was in Guinea-Basau, the one where they were showing. These Portuguese soldiers who were mortally wounded, you know, missing multiple limbs and blood covering them. And it was a scene with almost no words. It was just zooming in on the faces of these Portuguese soldiers trying to tend to their dying. fellow soldier and then chapter nine is raw materials which talks about the why this

colonization is happening from the perspective of raw materials solely on raw materials and it includes discussion that Thomas Sankara was having with a journalist a few months before his assassination in the coup that took place and then there is a conclusion which I'm sure that we'll talk about in a little bit. So that's my longer explanation of what the documentary is than probably needed at this point. But I suggested that we watch this movie for this review because there definitely is some interesting things

that are brought up in this documentary, but it's not a perfect documentary by any means. So I'd run this back over to you now. And let's see how you want to go with this conversation. And we'll just kind of go with the flow from here. What were your thoughts when you first watched? that. Well, I thought the opening with Professor Spivak was a little odd. I think it was a useful and interesting point to make, to set up the idea that there had been misinterpretations of

Fennell's work, particularly around this controversial question about the role of violence in liberation struggle. But it was like she was reading an academic paper and she literally was reading what she had written. And you don't see that in documentaries, typically. So it was almost like a formal opening. And it wasn't short. It was six minutes long. Yeah, it was long. She read like part of a paper, basically, about, you know, Fennell's ideas on violence, Sartra's misinterpretation, the important role of gender as well to incorporate gender, which of course is a very great interest of her academic work. I mean, she's the one who coined, you know, the understanding, you know, of imperial feminism as, you know, saving brown women from brown men, you know, and famously wrote this work, Can the Subaltern Speak? So she's thought a lot about these issues of literature, philosophy, post-colonialism, Fanon's ideas. But it just seems like such a strange, very sort of formal opening. It's almost as a

if the visual, because it was also very, it's visually interesting because she's got a crazy office with books and papers everywhere, but compared to what we then get into with the enumerated sections and segments and all the file footage, archival footage that is so visually arresting and affecting, it was a kind of strange choice. And I'm not sure if there might have been other ways to achieve that, but it was an interesting choice. So I don't know if it worked for you or what you thought was really accomplished there, but that was initially kind of interesting. But overall, what I would say about the other portions is it was almost like it was a visual accompaniment to words of phenol without interpreting them in words, but

using the visuals and some of the interviews that are from the file footage or the archival footage to provide some kind of commentary for how colonialism works and where the violence is coming from and to, you know, maybe put images to the words of phenol to, and also to put most of this emphasis not on the revolutionary violence that's necessary, although the interview with the women fighters of Frelemo fighting in Mozambique, very interesting because that really does kind of talk about the revolutionary violence and the kinds of transformations that Fanon suggested would be possible when people were politically organized and engaged in their own liberation struggle, equality of men and women, developing these new institutions,

the kind of confidence about the future and what kind of society they wanted, the empowerment of women. So that was a difference, and I think that was one of the really strong parts. But the rest of it was kind of emphasizing really the way in which the colonizers have embedded violence either through direct or systemic kind of ways to give some backing to that idea that that's really what Fenna is talking about. That he's not talking about initiating violence for its own sake, but rather it is the circulation of colonial violence that needs to be reoriented for liberation. I think the filmmaker really wanted to make that point. So it evoked a lot of the ambiance of that. But I didn't always understand why we moved from one segment to another or why

they were ordered the way they were. So I felt like it was much more an impressionistic and unsettling. Like it was a very interesting way to evoke this history without a lot of context, without a lot of, you know, introduction of elements or putting things in some kind of temporal order to see how it's unfolding. They work, different facets and different components of a whole phenomenon described in Wretched of the Earth, given visual manifestation. But what I would ask, and I would wonder, I've suggested what I think, maybe the argument was, I was wondering, did it come across to you? What is the argument of the film, right? In some ways. I was left thinking that there's a lot of ambiguity about exactly, you know, what the filmmaker wants to say other than that colonialism is devastating, you know, has had devastating consequences for people. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there, Adnan. I mean, I don't think that there was much more of a message inherent to the film itself.

Beyond that colonialism is violence inherently, and it instills violence in the colonized people, I think that it was more of a vessel, I mean, pure and simple, I think that it was just a vessel for the text itself and these quotations from the text. As you said, like a video montage to kind of accompany the text, I think the text was far more important than any sort of narrative that you're trying to get out from the text. film itself, because like you, I also found the ordering a bit odd. I mean, like, there's some parts of it that I would have grouped together that were not grouped together, like the Lamco section, the Swedish missionaries, and the raw material section. I grouped all three of those together because those were the three sections that spring to the top of my mind that didn't have explicit violence in them, but that were, you know, implicitly highlighting the inherent

violence of the colonial process. Those, to me, seemed like they would have flowed very strongly together, either at the very beginning or at the very end, in terms of, again, showing that colonialism inherently is a violent process, even when the violence itself is not explicit. It is implicit violence. But they were kind of interspersed between, you know, the MPLA carrying out this raid and the Frelimo guerrillas, you know, being having amputated arms and legs and the Portuguese planes dropping the bombs on the villages. And yeah, it was, it was a bit, you know, like you said, disjointed. I almost feel like the entire point of that. was to unsettle you in a way.

And I think that, you know, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. I don't mean unsettling in a way that is like off-putting or without merit. I think that in some ways, like keeping you unsettled or on your toes, perhaps, is a better way of saying it, allows the text, the words that were being used and narrated by Lauren Hill to really carry what you're actually doing. but the visuals just kind of heightening that because you really have no idea when the scene is going to cut. I mean, some of the scenes cut extremely abruptly. Like in the section where, I believe it was the Frulino section,

the last thing that you see is a woman whose arm was, you know, torn off during this Portuguese bombing, breastfeeding a baby whose leg was torn off during this bombing, and then it immediately cuts to the raw material section where they're showing these Swedish-owned, you know, mining vehicles, tearing up the ground to go look for precious metals. Like it was a very unsettling transition, seeing this, you know, bloody stump of an arm and then all of a sudden seeing industrial equipment.

I think maybe that is the point for, I think maybe we have to think about the audience for the film and what the director and filmmakers possible project and goal was, because I think maybe it only makes sense in that context, because as you point out, you have got this very deeply disturbing image of Portuguese bombardment on, you know, Mozambican peoples, this incredible, you know, image there. And then there's immediately an almost an association of that with more contemporary, even though it is still probably from the 80s or

something, I'm not sure when that footage is from about the Swedish kind of mining and companies and the earth movers doing their work, but is to try and implicate

his audience in the because they might say, well, I I'm not, you know, I wasn't in favor of the Portuguese doing that. That was wrong, you know. But to say, hey, this is really part of the same phenomenon and you are implicated, you know, as a consumer from the global north in all of the exploitation of the raw materials that is the reason or one of the reasons why this kind of violence was taking place on the African continent. And so if you feel so, terrible and shocked by this, you know, horrific consequence of Portuguese colonialism, suppressing the attempt to liberate them, you're somehow in, you're involved. And maybe that was kind of that it couldn't be done by just trying to articulate that thesis, but in trying to update the relevance today of Fanon's ideas,

even though it didn't go through, you know, those intermediate. immediate chapters that I mentioned are very important for seeing how the post-colonial nation will face real problems working within the global capitalist and imperialist system that will not really free the people because of the bourgeoisie kind of working as this go-between. I mean, that's what we saw with the mining company. The Liberian government was suborned by the capitalist interests of the Swedish mining company to suppress the work and were quite willing to do so to use its police and military, now not colonial police and military of the British, but are basically working on behalf of a multinational or a Swedish,

you know, a foreign company to suppress and create the same kinds of conditions that would have existed under colonialism in a free Liberia. So I think the idea there may have been to try and implicate, not by tracing the argument directly, but through these visual, you know, kind of provocative and affecting visual associations to see how the process continues to work to produce a colonial condition even in the present day and that we, you know, the European audience, the North Global North audience for this film are directly implicated in this. And that's the unsettling part. Is it unsettles with the images, but then it unsettles by kind of bringing it back to how we're responsible and

involved in it. Yeah, I think you're dead on Adnan, and I have a few things to say on this, but first, since you brought up the Liberian president, I'm curious if you noticed this as well, because it was something that I noticed. In the Liberian episode, the Lamco episode, with the Swedish mining company, they interviewed several of the striking workers, they interviewed the president of Liberia, and they interviewed a police officer who was responsible for breaking up the crowd. And something that stood out to me that, you know, I didn't really consciously think of it, but it stuck in the back of my mind.

Both the president and the police officer had very distinct American accents. The Liberian president and the police officer had very distinct American accents, whereas all of the striking workers, including the guy who was being dropped off in the bush that they were interviewing, had very distinct West African accents. You know, fluent English, but like very distinct, you know, West African accent versus the police officer particularly, even stronger than the president, had a very, very American sounding accent. Well, whether you notice that or not?

I actually, it didn't occur to me, but when you're saying it now, it really makes sense because what do we know about Liberia, its history, and it's... Yes, of course. I mean, the capital of the country is Monrovia, you know, James Monroe. Exactly. And, you know, that maybe they've received training and education, you know, in the United States as well. That's something that could be verified by looking into it. But I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, some of the intelligentsia and elites that are part of the governing class there are

very closely connected and have been historically, you know, especially during the Cold War with, you know, U.S. training, policy support. And so that's another interesting case. I mean, Sierra Leone and Liberia, these are strange projects of a kind of settler colonialism of a new kind, you know, that Mahmoud Mamdani, for example, talks about when, you know, when, you know, victims become killers, you know, he looked at the problems of the, you know, of settler colonies that are established by oppressed peoples. And what happens? So like, for example, you know, Israel Palestine, like the Zionist movement, you know, as a response to anti-Semitism, becoming a settler colonial movement that dispossesses indigenous Palestinians. Similarly, you have

African form, you know, people of the African diaspora, former slaves in the Western Hemisphere, particularly U.S. and Caribbean, being sent as settlers, you know, to West Africa, as missionaries and settlers to establish these new kind of national homelands that a lot of abolitionists hoped, you know, all the sort of black people who would be freed would go back to Africa and settle, you know, there and be an instrument for, you know, Christianizing Africa, but have their own separate homeland. And it created all of these kinds of problems of an oppression by an oppressed people who now turn into oppressors of another indigenous population. Walter Rodney writes about that. And in the grounding stuff with my brothers,

he hits that point pretty, pretty firmly. But I loop back to the point that I, that I, that I was going to make before I got distracted with accents was, as you mentioned, they're almost implicating the audience in this film in a way. And they literally use this quote from Fanon in the film. Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The wealth which smothers it is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped people. And they're saying this during, I believe that that was in the section with the white people, the white settlers lounging around the pool with the black, the African servants carrying their things for them. And then intercut into that section were scenes from the slums of the same city with, you know, the residents of the city

walking barefoot in these slums. And then it would cut back to these white settlers around the pool. Then it would look at the servants carrying the beers for them. them, and then it would cut back to the slums and have, you know, people scrounging on the ground for food or whatever. So I do think that that was one of the subtexts here is that by intercutting it, they were almost implicating you in it in a way. But something else that I want to say that is, I'm also curious as to your take on it, and I think that we're just going to keep bouncing these ideas back and forth off of each other, is that this film is almost made for two audiences. both of which are European or, you know, Western-based, one of which is the group of people that have the historical knowledge

of these anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggles within Africa, because Vesantilm has no narration other than the Lauren Hill quotations from Wretched of the Earth and the occasional intercut interview that was done, or the narration from some of the archival footage was used. So there was very little explanation of what was going on in most of these. Like, they would tell you, okay, here's Frelimo guerrillas in Mozambique, and that was the entirety of the explanation outside of what the guerrillas were saying in their interview, which mostly was predicated on the idea that,

women were a leading part of the struggle. Forlimo, for those who don't know, and like I said, this is something you have to have this historical knowledge of. Frelimo was one of the few guerrilla groups in the African liberation struggles where women commanders not only existed, because there was many guerrilla struggles where women commanders existed, but in most of the other struggles, women commanders only presided over women's soldiers. Like there was units of women soldiers, whereas,

Within Frileimo, the women commanders were commanders of both men and women, male units and female units. And that was something that distinguished it from many other guerrilla groups within the African liberation struggles. That was not something that was said within the film. They were just talking about how important it was that the women were leading this struggle. And there was no extra narration. There was no words on the screen that would give you this additional information. So for people who have this information, you're able to try to connect why he's using the specific quotation from Phelon that he's using at the time that they're showing the specific scene that they're showing at the time. Because, obviously, he picked that quotation to go along with that visual at that time for a reason, and it allows you to try to put those two things together.

But the other audience is for people who don't have this knowledge of the historical goings on in each of these instances. You know, some of the people might not have even known who Thomas Sankara was who watched this film. And so you see him and you hear this brief interview with him. And then there's a few words at the end that say he was killed in a coup five months after this was taken. And that's the only words that are written there other than a translation of what Sanker is saying. for people who don't know what was happening historically, you don't get that opportunity to try to piece together how the historical narrative of that scene ties in with the quotation.

Instead, all you are able to do is tie in the quotation with the visual element itself separate from the historical narrative of that, which I think also can be, you know, but I'm curious as to what you think, if that's also an effective way of presenting Fanon without having the historical narrative available to you and only having this visual representation of what the words are, but that's kind of what I'm seeing is that there's two distinct audiences

that can, you know, look at this film and get different things out of it because they're not presenting that historical backgrounding almost at all in the film. Yeah, I think this is a very interesting issue. I mean, even methodologically for guerrilla historians, like what is the way to really analyze and present history so that it's kind of useful and struggle? You know, this is really, I think, a big problem. And I think it's also a problem in general for film and film documentaries. What is it that film is good at? can be effective. And I think this was really a kind of radical choice to evoke a feeling, evoke a mood, and let the words of fennel come to, you know, marinate in the audience's sort of consciousness while also evoking some sort of feeling about how horrific colonialism has been, decolonization, to be in order to free people and also how the work is continuing. It's an unfinished process

because these effects are going on. The Sankara interview is after Burkina Faso as an independent country. The Liberian situation, the Swedish LAMCO company, is part of the post-colonial exploitation of, you know, the continent and so on. And so it was sort of without really talking about all of the history and getting people bogged down in details of analysis that wanted to convey some kind of mood and feeling of those horrors are continuing and that we are kind of implicitly, well, we are complicit in them. And so, I mean, I don't know what that leads to, right? I mean, I think that's kind of the question. I mean, it's ending with this call, which is such a powerful call, and I did read it not as well as

Lauren Hill, you know, read it, at least on her second try at a slower pace, you know, listeners can go back and listen to it. It is a very powerful call, but it also is so situated in its moment because, you know, all the subsequent history really kind of undermines what he was hoping for and advocating. It's like very, you know, when I read it, I'm both inspired, but then as a historian, I feel, you know, so, you know, here in the 21st century, so sad and depressed that there clearly were this, you know, there was this optimistic hope and belief that this struggle could lead to a better world. And if it had, you know, fulfilled Fanon's vision, we would be in a completely different place now, but we're not because of all of the

things that the film ends up showing that in the 70s and 80s and that decades after this long process of decolonization itself has not fundamentally under the global capitalist system buttressed by, you know, empire has not managed to achieve that. And it's interesting that the film doesn't really engage. That question wants to maintain in some way, some sense of that optimistic kind of present of Fanon's words and relevance for us now. And maybe we need that because we can't be, you know, it would be too pessimistic to feel that it's impossible. We're all, you know, people involved and engaged in justice struggles in the hope for a better

world. And if we feel that it's impossible, you know, where do we go with that? So I almost feel like it was just trying to evoke that mood. It wasn't really history filling in the gaps between these pieces, but trying to evoke some kind of feeling that is possible with the visual nature of film. And that maybe you can't expect a film to provide all of that or would have been less effective as a film, you know,

and wouldn't have achieved that emotional response that unsettling, you know, feeling of complicity. And I think in a way it was trying to make the whole question of political violence and struggle less a controversy framed by European ethical kind of concerns about, you know, oh, is it legitimate or is it allowed to say, How can you ignore the ever-present systemic and continuing violence? You want to talk about like, oh, Frilemo shouldn't be doing this?

Well, look what Frilemo, who these people are and what they were fighting against. How can you not have solidarity with that and recognize your complicity with the forces that are suppressing them? So it's a very, it's a conundrum. I mean, maybe in some ways what I'm saying is it was a very effective film because it left these kinds of concerns and questions. And different questions, I guess, you know, I was, of course, familiar with a lot of these situations and histories. So it was kind of hard to imagine or think, how would somebody who's not familiar or aware of that history, what would their reactions be? And it seems that a lot of people were very positive about the film and felt it accomplished something. Maybe they weren't well-versed in all of these subjects.

So maybe it was a good choice to leave out the Algeria, leave out the history of Fanon's ideas in their situation and try and elevate them to a broader global point at the affective level for its audience. Yeah, I'm going to put my thumb on the Algeria question for just one second, because I want to loop back to that after this next point that I'm going to make, which isn't really a point. I'm going to be asking you for your input. As we know, the Samaris Adnan is the director of the School of Religion at Queen's University, and one of the, I mean, there was no humor in this film at all, right? I mean, like, it's just brutality after brutality after brutality, but there's almost a sense. of perverse, like, implicit humor at one point in this film, which is with these Swedish

missionaries in Tanzania. They, you know, zoom in on this husband and wife couple, the Swedish missionaries. And they're in, you know, they're nice. The woman is in her nice sundress. The guy is, you know, in his dress shirt, his short sleeve dress shirt tucked in nice. And they have these Tanzanians digging trenches to put in a new church. And this archival documentarian, a Swedish documentarian, asks them a few questions. And the looks on their faces for how to respond to these questions was absolutely hysterical in a perverse way. So he would ask them things like, you know, what are, what were the people like before you came here? And the guy first tries to catch it.

oh, you know, they are how they always have been. They say, well, you're a missionary. You're here to make some sort of change. Like, what kind of change have you seen? And he's like, well, I guess, you know, we're trying to change them spiritually and morally. And the woman says, for example, our parishioners are explicitly banned from practicing polygamy. They are allowed to have one wife and one wife only. And they can't get divorces.

They can't take a second wife. They can't take a third wife. have to be happy with one wife. And the documentary, it says, is that a Christian point of view or a European point of view? And they both paused. And there's dead silence for five or six seconds. The woman's eyes get very big. And she looks up at the guy, her husband, who would be the pastor missionary at this church.

He shakes his head. And she looks back at the documentary and it says, it's in the Bible. It's in the New Testament. And the Bible is the Bible isn't it? Isn't it? That was exactly what I was going to say. Isn't it? And the documentarian says, oh, and she looks back at her husband.

And her husband shakes his head again. She goes, well, it must be in the New Testament. And he goes, and the documentary says, oh, is it? And they have no idea, no idea what to say. The documentary, fortunately for them, lets them off the hook by asking, another question. He says, so you're looking at installing a new church here, assuming they already had one in the area. Again, there's no real background information provided. But assuming that they already had a church and they're digging this trench, you're putting a new church in there.

He says, absolutely, we see a tremendous need for a new church. We need to expand our reach to as many people as possible. The documentarian asks them, well, what about a school in a hundred, hospital. Surely there's a need for those as well. And the male missionary says, well, we don't know. That'll come second at any case. We see a much more pressing need for a church. In rural Tanzania, which all of these people digging in these trenches, putting in this church for this missionary, as him and his wife are wearing their nice sun dresses and, you know, dress clothes and these people are toiling out in the heat, they ask them, do they need a school in a hospital? They say, we don't now, but less important than a church in any case.

But, Nan, I mean, I know that there's absolutely no question here, but, you know, you're the director of the school of religion. What can we make from this? Well, I mean, I think you can, I mean, Fenna himself actually did identify very clearly that the whole problem of morals and values is really the use of Christianity as a universalist kind of ideology, but that edict. in fact, actually is, at least as it's been interpreted and developed, as, you know, very local and specific to Europe and it's just part of advancing the aims of colonialism. And, you know, you can just see as being so illustrated by this awkward Swedish couple that doesn't have a, you know, they were so inarticulate about pretty much everything from. you know, what's changing in the country, this, you know, kind of, they were first asked about, you know, what's changing in the country or how, you know, are the people the same, you know, this is, you know, in terms of comparing colonial era conditions to post-colonial issues. So he says, well, there's been a new independent government, but he doesn't have any sense of like what that means, you know, what that cost the people.

terms of, you know. Didn't the documentarian ask him what, what, what is that changed? Like, he said there's a new independent government. If I remember, the documentary says, what is that changed? And the guy just shakes his head. He, he, really, this couple is like the two stooges. I mean, it was really, really funny in this just terrible way. Yeah, the only thing that they were kind of clear and emphatic on was that the, you know, they had to reform the people's cultural practices according to their idea of what was religiously based morals and the need for a church. Like they were clear about that, but nothing else could they really talk about, you know? And it was so strange because, you know, when I saw them walking out, the scene of them walking out in this dry sort of uncultivated plot of land and with like black laborers digging, like doing this terribly different.

work in the hot, hot sun, and they're just sort of walking around on the surface layer looking down and surveying, you know, the work that's taking place. And it's like they could have been on some plantation, some kind of work farm in the settler colonial colonies of Rhodesia or, you know, South Africa. And it's only when we end up talking to them that we realize that they're here as missionaries. But it takes a while to really sort of distinguish. And it's hard to see what is different, other than that they're not actually very clear and articulate the way the racist Rhodesian, you know, was, you know, about, you know, what's at stake for them. But, you know, so put aside the racial ideology, all the same conditions seem totally present

and are being achieved through this kind of use of European-supported missionaries and missionization, that, of course, is going to contribute nothing to the development, social enhancement of the people, but just this moral policing and, you know, kind of using their money to build a new church. It was very bizarre. Yeah, as you said, the inarticulacy, I don't know if that's a word, but the hope that it is,

versus the racist Rhodesian. I mean, the racist or Odysian knew exactly what was at stake. This is the guy that said he, you know, didn't know if he could turn the lights off on a way, out, he was talking about the ethnic makeup of Rhodesia versus South Africa in like very concrete terms. It says, yeah, there's in Rhodesia where he was a settler, it's 36 to one, black to white. Whereas in South Africa, it's only four to one.

If I was in South Africa, I know I could take out four Africans before they take me out, but there's no way I can take out 36 Africans before they'd take me out. You know, there's no gamble. It's just risk. like this guy, I mean, unbelievably racist, but like also he knew exactly what was going on from, you know, this incredibly racist perspective, but he knew what was going on. Whereas I think these missionaries were just so disconnected with any sort of reality, racist or otherwise. I mean, they were like on a completely different planet. They had no idea what they were in. Well, it's like they were clueless about the stakes that are involved because they think it's just a spiritual venture, right? I mean, They don't see the material dimensions. They're not concerned, particularly with the material, concrete dimensions, the power dynamics, the economic and social problems and issues. For them, it's this kind of culturalist, moral, spiritual, and thus it's abstracted from those conditions.

And they can be good people who just are spreading their beliefs. You know, they can acclude those realities and their role within them. in the way that the white settler in, you know, what would become Zimbabwe cannot. And there's just a clear contest. I mean, that was really as if Fennell was, you know, his description of the colonizer's mentality and theory was very clear, direct, unobfuscated. That's what it is, as the violent suppression of this other people. He knows it and he knows he's losing it. And that's for him really sad, but he's not abstracting this into some kind of, I mean, you know,

he probably would come up with some racial superiority kind of ideology. They're not fit to rule by themselves. It's all going to go to hell and back into the Middle Ages, which is, again, a kind of line from Phenon, that this is the settler's sort of condemnation that they need us because otherwise this would be a barbaric, like, you know, place. And of course, it is barbaric because the common. is introducing barbarism in the suppression of these people, but it's very clear that that's the power dynamic and that's the relationship. Now, we're almost at a time, so I'm going to turn to our last subject here, which is

things that were missing from the documentary, and this is why I said I'm going to put my thumb on the Algeria question for a second, because of course, Retch of the Earth was written in the thick of the Algerian context, whereas this film, which again, I said, the subtitle of it is nine scenes from the anti-imperialistic self-defense is entirely based in sub-Saharan Africa. There's no mention of Algeria, well, it seemed like it would have been a very obvious point to have included within the spell. This isn't, you know, nine scenes from the sub-Saharan African defense.

It's nine scenes from that anti-imperialist defense and is based in Africa. The book was written in the Algerian context. There's certainly a lot of things that could have been said regarding the Algerian context. You know, the only thing that struck me is why this would have been left out, and it's not a great excuse. And in my mind, is that, again, they're using all archival footage, and most of it was made by Swedish documentarians, which, an interesting aside, I had seen written by the director of this film, that the reason why there was so many of these Swedish documentary archival footage pieces to take, is that around this time, the social democratic government of Sweden increased its funding

for the arts and actually had like state subsidizing of documentary films. And therefore, a lot of documentary filmmakers from Sweden would go down to report on what was happening at the Lam coal mine in Liberia, whereas, you know, previously they wouldn't have had, you know, they wouldn't have had any money to go and undertake that project and they wouldn't have been able to get any return on their investment because how many people are going to watch a documentary about a mine in Liberia. You know, at this period of time, though, the social democratic government allowed there to be some grants for kind of social benefit for these documentary films. And that's why there was so many. The only thing that I could think of

is that perhaps there was not much in terms of archival Swedish footage that the documentary, that the filmmaker of this documentary would have had access to in those same files because one, maybe there just wasn't that many Swedish documentary filmmakers there at the time or two that could have been before that funding was really increased to allow for the documentary filmmakers to go down there. So that was something that was like very glaringly obvious that should have been in this film, the Algerian context, and was completely absent

from it, which I thought was interesting. But I know, Adnan, you and I were having conversation before we hit record about some of the things that were kind of missing from this narrative. So why don't I just turn it over to you to kind of close us out with your thoughts on what was missing from this film? Well, I think that's one of the big ones as any kind of historically situating a phenon's career and ideas in the Algerian context. I mean, I think that's, as you pointed out, a big, you know, miss. Now, that has been done by a lot of other people and people are somewhat familiar with it. But I feel like that has always been less sympathetic, you know, like to the kind of global North audience, because that is the key

case of violent confrontation with the settler colonial population. And of course, many, many times more Algerians died, but there were enough French. There were some cases in, you know, the capital city of Algiers of, you know, bomb attacks by the FLN on civilian populations in the French side of the city that got a lot of attention and really caused a lot of. lot of this sort of questioning whether this kind of violent resistance was legitimate or not and so on. So I feel like in some ways that was less palatable in some ways to a European and North American audience to really tell the story or show scenes, sympathetic scenes of resisting colonialism in Algeria. There's just so much history there.

and controversial history. The other part of it, of course, is those interconnections we were talking about about the post-colonial conditions that maintained this economic subordination of the global South, often through these collaborations

between police and military forces, often trained in, you know, the global North or supported with funds in order to maintain property rights, capitalist relations, and the exploitation of, you know, global southern workers. I would refer, you know, people to, you know, there's several episodes, a couple of episodes we've had with Emmanuel Ness and his work about how significant and important this is in the kind of contemporary globalized form of capitalism still. So those pitfalls of national

consciousness, I think, are important. They could be filled in. It would be useful to focus on that. A lot of analysis is missing when you do that. I think maybe, you know, Sweden's support, like in the late 60s for decolonization efforts against the Portuguese, explains why partly there was interest and journalists who went down to Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Basau, and, you know, that there was a tension because Sweden had a particular connection with some of these struggles by actually on the world stage saying at the UN, yes, you know, Portuguese should, you know, end their colonial rule. They sponsored a resolution calling for self-rule of Portuguese colonies in Africa, for example, I think, in late 60, in 1968 even.

So there's that kind of history, and that might be why this was available for this, you know, and then also with the socialist government's subsequent support and patronage for, you know, the arts, this may have been a natural kind of global affairs kinds of orientation. But it means that we don't see anti-colonial struggle except through the lens of, sub-Saharan Africa and particularly the Lucophone Portuguese colonies. So nothing about Vietnam, nothing about Algeria. So I think, you know, those are big misses, but maybe you can only do so much in a film and they had these materials to hand and they did, you know, the filmmaker did do something very interesting and powerful with what was available, I think.

Yeah, I think that that's all things that I would agree with. And we're just about out of time. In fact, we are out of time. We're already over what we were planning on doing. So, uh, agnan, last thing, do you recommend this film for people? And if so, who do you recommend it for? Well, I would recommend it, um, really for anybody who's interested in, you know, thinking about, uh, anti-colonialism then and anti-imperialism today in, you know,

combating the ravages of capitalism. You will learn quite a bit, you know, of the scenes, I would say, of where this struggle has happened and it will, you know, reinforce your sense of the crimes of colonialism and also reorient and think about how these calls for justice and global redistribution are really just reparations. You know, they are not, you know, some kind of radical demand. I mean, so I think that's a useful, that's a useful thing. But it's very art house and boutique. So I don't know if like a wider audience would have the patience to sit through the first Spivak kind of disquisition. And the fact that there's not much context, but there are just these, you know, scenes sort of take in a separate kinds of episodes may be disorienting. But I

think if somebody watches through it, they will gain some kind of larger sense of what's at stake that is very effective and certainly very affecting. So I guess I would recommend it, but I would also recommend that you go read about some of these different episodes. Learn a little bit more once you get a sense of what's at stake. Learn about Thomas Sankara, Amilkar-Kabral. Read the rest of Phenon's book. Listen to other episodes that talk about his theories and ideas. in their greater totality and their, you know, that contextualize his ideas, I think you'll get a lot out of it. But I think it's a good gateway to opening up consciousness about our complicity in colonial and post-colonial violence and the continuing ravages of primitive accumulation.

I mean, it's still just going on, basically, just under a different form, even if these are independent countries. Colonialism basically has an end and I think that's something that although not explicitly discussed is something that you can get out of the film in a very powerful visual way. Yeah. From my perspective, I also do recommend this film. Again, you do have to be in like a certain mood for this film because there is no background explanation. There is no narration other than quotations from a book that is not directly applicable to what's going on, but is like connected to it. So you have

to do a lot of thinking here to draw these threads together yourself. They're very brutal scenes. So if you're not in the mood for, you know, seeing somebody missing an arm or a leg, this is, you know, you're not going to be in the mood for this film because that's what you're going to see.

You have to be in the mood for like, academic speak, for just this introduction alone. You have to be in a very certain mood for it. But I think that if you aren't in that mood. This will be an effective film for you. But

also, one of the things that I liked about the film, and I had seen it before, that was why I had recommended it on Rev Left previously and then rewatched for this conversation. It reminds me of all of many of the things that I had been planning on having us do

on guerrilla history, including talking about like the NPLA, for example. Like the MPLA versus Unita in Angola is such an interesting case because Unita was still portrayed as like, you know, left-wing rebel movement.

But it was backed by the United States and apartheid South Africa as well as Mao's China. Like, actually this would have been just post-Mao? Yeah, I think right around the time that Mao died, in any case. Like,

China, the United States and a Partite South Africa were supporting this, you know, left-wing rebel group. And on the other side, you had the Cuban and Soviet Union supported MPLA fighting against, you know, each other as well as the Portuguese. Like, it was a very, very interesting context that was playing out there, which you get none of the flavor of in this film because they only mention the MPLA. They don't mention Unita whatsoever. They don't tell you that there even was another side. They don't tell you who was back in the MPLA or you need to end this film.

But it reminded me that that's something that I absolutely want to cover. We talked about Frelemo, another movement that I absolutely would love to cover, and particularly this feminism aspect within Frelemo, would be an excellent episode of guerrilla history. We had Cabral in this film, whom we've talked about sporadically in the past, but deserves an entire episode unto himself. As well as, you know, the organization that he was leading, we had Sankara, who deserves an episode unto himself, as well as the changes that he affected within Burkina Faso.

I do know that Brett has an episode of Rev Left devoted to Sankara, but I do think that we should also have something related to him. I mean, there's a lot, a lot in this film that reminded me of things that I had been planning. us doing in the future and, you know, they tie in with the previous episode that we did with Leo Zieg on the overview of African revolutions and decolonization. Like, diving into these individual struggles is something that we should really look in this next year of guerrilla history because we just wrapped up year one. We should look at diving into some of those individual things in year two. But again, it's such a strange film because you have all of these super interesting episodes going on, but you don't know that they're interesting episodes

unless you knew that they were interesting episodes coming into the film because you don't get told any of it during the film. Like, it's a very, very strange film, but I also find it to be an effective film nonetheless, whether you have that foreground, for knowledge or not. So I recommend it. I would suggest people check it out and whether you, you know, know about the MPLA and for Limo and Annelcar Cabral and, you know, missionaries in Africa and LAMCO, whether you know about it or not, I think that it's something that is worth checking out if you can find it. It's a little bit harder to find than a lot of other documents, even though that this did win awards. You would have thought that it would be easier to find, but Adnan, why don't you tell our listeners

how they can find you in your other podcasts? We wrap up. Well, you can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein. H-U-S-A-I-N, and at Weekly Marks, also, that's an account I run. And listen to my podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S, if you're interested in things related to the Islamic world, Middle East, Muslim diaspora, issues of Islamophobia, and so on. We cover those sorts of topics and experiences globally. And this episode will be going out on Patreon today, and it's a

Patreon exclusive. So for the 150 people that we have on Patreon, what is the next thing that we should expect to see on the Mudge list? And what are you reading for weekly marks right now? Because real time, might as well let them know. Oh, yeah. Weekly marks, we're in the midst of Capital, Volume 2. So the less edited and less well-written, but very hardcore and necessary continuation of the project of the critique of political economy and understanding capitalism. We're continuing to read that and we're, you know, about in chapter 12, 13, 14 around that. Everyone's welcome to join and certainly to follow on Twitter. We have posts on it. As far as the Mudgellis, I've been thinking about doing an episode on Dune in popular, you know,

kind of representations and portrayals of Islam in popular culture. But we also have graduate student research projects coming up on intersections between Kashmir, indigenous resistance in Kashmir and indigenous activism and solidarity here in Toronto. We have a student, a graduate student who's working on a thesis that tries to connect these and in her own activism also. So look forward to a couple of different kinds of episodes in the the much listen coming in the coming month. Yeah. And well, since you mentioned students, and there's going to be almost nobody listening at this point anyway, let us know in the comments if you hear this part. This is the fun story.

Adnan, I'm just going to tell this story quick. I had been looking through some publishers catalogs, book publishers catalogs for some material for us to look at in terms of like brand new things that are coming out. And in one publisher's catalog, I saw a book that seemed like It was very much up the Mudgellus's route, more so than guerrilla history, which was anarchism and Islam. And so I send Adnan's this picture of this book. I say Adnan, this sounds like absolutely perfect for the Mudgellis podcast. You should contact the author because it fits right within the theme of your other show. And Adnan, why don't you tell the listeners what you told me in response?

Oh, I said, yeah, I'm really looking forward to have the, you know, have this on the Mudgellis since the author is, my PhD student who I supervised and who finished just a year, year and a half ago. So definitely when the book comes out, we will have Muhammad Abdou, the author of this book coming out with Pluto Press on. But so I think that was very funny that you saw this forthcoming title and thought it would be good for me, and it turns out it's something I've been dealing with and responding to for about a decade, basically. Yeah, yeah. I thought that, I mean, it was really, really funny when I saw the message come back, like, oh, yeah, I'm already familiar with this, considering that he was my PhD still. I was like, ah, okay, well, at least you already know about it. Maybe I didn't actually, you know, help you in any way, but it was funny nonetheless.

Well, it was a nice reminder that when it comes out, I definitely want to have him on. Yeah, I think it's coming out in like February or something like that. Yeah, I think February. Something like that. Anyway, listeners, let us know in the comments if you heard that story, whether it was funny at all. Okay. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck1995. You can follow this show on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. I'm not going to tell you where you can find us on Patreon because that's where you are. So, we'll wrap this up now with Non. It was a very fun conversation. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed it. See if you can find this documentary. It was very interesting. And until next time, Solidarity.

Thank you. Thank you.