Is Freedom Essentially Inaccessible to Peoples Without Culture?
Abstract
Must freedom be learned through scholarly culture, or can dominated peoples recognise and pursue it through historical experience?
Philosophy, freedom and decolonisation · Full reading edition
Freedom, thought and philosophical culture
Commenting on Hegel, Marcien Towa associates freedom with thought and, at its highest level, philosophy. Human beings possess reason and freedom in themselves, but would become truly free only by attaining consciousness of what they are.
This thesis risks turning freedom into the privilege of a cultivated minority. It also inherits a philosophical history in which Black people were repeatedly denied full humanity and in which allegedly ‘historical’ peoples claimed a natural right to conquer others.
The right to doubt the master’s definition
The fact that such doctrines were written, taught and defended does not require Black readers to accept them as the compulsory road to knowledge. They have the right to question a definition that makes freedom depend on standards established by those who denied them freedom.
If literacy were a prerequisite, the Haitian revolutionaries, Algerian nationalists, the Mau Mau, Frelimo, the ANC and many other liberation movements would become philosophically unintelligible.
Those who fought already knew freedom
The movements that conquered freedom for dominated peoples were often led and sustained by men and women without academic culture. Cameroonian peasants of the 1950s pursued independence—the kundè—to the point of sacrifice, while many educated people opposed it or remained cautious.
Their struggle does not prove that reflection is useless. It demonstrates that people can recognise freedom by distinguishing it from domination, without first passing through a faculty of philosophy.
Fanon and practical intelligence
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon rejects the claim that illiterate masses cannot understand complicated matters. During the Algerian war, peasants grasped mechanisms of scarcity, speculation, usury and capital accumulation through their direct experience with village shopkeepers and the black market.
A wrong answer may reveal not ignorance but a question phrased in a language inaccessible to those being questioned. When political and economic relations are explained through lived experience, people identify causal connections with precision.
Freedom is not awarded by culture
Literacy and philosophy can deepen the understanding of freedom, but they do not create the first experience of it. People know freedom because they experience constraint and recognise what must be overcome.
Making scholarly culture the gatekeeper of freedom reproduces the colonial claim that uncultivated peoples are not ready for independence. History shows the opposite: practical intelligence, collective memory and struggle are themselves forms of knowledge.
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