The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Even some storied philosophers have made the mistake of confusing freedom for liberation. In actuality, freedom is a miniature of what liberation is in its exalted magnitude.
My favourite illustration of the huge difference between freedom and liberation is the example of how the political independence of countries of the Global South did not necessarily mean their liberation. Political independence delivered some freedoms and even certain levels of power for former colonised polities but the freedoms and powers failed to amount to liberation. Even some great revolutions of the world in their total effect failed to deliver liberation except some changes, reforms and powers that did not graduate to liberation. Hannah Arendt described these failed revolutions that deliver change but no liberation as “deformed revolutions” in that they lost shape and size, and became only shadows of what they were supposed to be. There are many free, independent and powerful peoples and places of the world that are fundamentally not liberated. I am tempted to stretch the argument to that there are, in veracity, some peoples and places of the world that are liberated but are not free or are they independent. Liberation can exist in the absence of freedom. The gist of my argument is that liberation is a far deeper and far higher vocation than freedom and even power itself. In the history of the world there have been many independent, free and powerful regimes and people that have however, been bereft of liberation in its exalted veracity. Fundamentally, it is far better for humanity to possess and be possessed of liberation than to hold power because in actuality power and the privileges that come with it may prevent liberation and get stuck in the enjoyment and celebration of some freedoms. Only power that comes after liberation and is itself liberated and is liberating is meaningful, true and durable power. This is not just true in the theological sense where total liberation in the spirit is higher than worldly power and wealth but it is also true in politics.
The Limits of Power
Power that might be accompanied by freedom and some reforms but is not ordered by liberation quickly collapses into tyranny. This is not only illustrated in the lives and works of politicians but that of philosophers themselves, those self-appointed prophets of freedom and happiness. When it comes to thought and deep reflection on freedom Jean-Paul Sartre was stainless, pure and robust to a fault, I argue. The fault was that he was in his power and privilege awake to freedom and blinkered to liberation. Power and privilege can be blinding. For Sartre, freedom meant the difference between “being and nothingness” in the life of humans. Humans were naturally “condemned to freedom” from their birth to their death. Freedom and freedom for itself and its sake was to Sartre the goal of all goals of the human being. Anyone that even dreams of questioning or critiquing Sartre and his philosophical take on freedom, existential freedom, must begin with the admission that he was a compelling, if not the most compelling philosopher of existentialism. His strength became his poverty and weakness.
He thought so high and so deep and wide about freedom so much so that he forgot that there was unfreedom. He thought and wrote so much about colonialism and the colonised but had not experienced the domination and conquest that came with them. He thought about and did not think with the colonised, and that made him a tourist that visited the experience of the colonised and did not live it. Such thoughts as that freedom begins with the individual and that man has his full agency to choose and achieve freedom are thoughts that can only come from one who does not know domination and therefore may not know liberation. My point is that only the oppressed, dominated and wounded may understand that freedom is nothing but a small passage to liberation, a higher and deeper destination than individual happiness.
In short, the difference between Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon became the difference between a philosopher of freedom and a philosopher of liberation. Sartre thought from the power and the privilege of a white man in Europe while Frantz Fanon, even when he was physically in France, thought from that dark hole of the colonised and the oppressed. Sartre loved wisdom, a luxury, while Fanon had the wisdom of love, a struggle. Those that fight for freedom may very easily collapses into “freedom fighters” in the sense of those people that fight freedom, yet fighters for liberation go for the totality, travel the thorny road. Sartre, bless his soul, did not travel but imagined the thorny road.
Freedom to be Free
That a people need freedom from fear and freedom from poverty in order to even begin imagining liberation, which is a collective and not individual goal, is an opinion that belongs to Hannah Arendt. She called it the “freedom to be free.” People that are afraid and that are poor and in want cannot clearly imagine liberation; they are most likely to compromise themselves picking up concessions, accommodations, gifts and food handouts from the oppressor. The fearful and the poor may enjoy taking liberties and not going for liberation par excellence. Yes, freedom may grant liberties, small instalments and slices of it, not full liberation and the re-humanisation of the oppressed. Liberation is the realisation of what Arendt called “things never seen and thoughts never thought” because it is a revelation of a new humanity and a fresh world that is not tainted by pasts of conquest and domination. It has been easy for may societies, communities and regimes of the world to fight so hard for independence and be satisfied with the achievement of freedom, forgetting that liberation is still ahead. It is telling that whenever freedom was mentioned, the ultimate pragmatist, Vladimir Lenin would ask “what freedom and freedom for what?” What Lenin understood is that freedom is only a tool in the war for liberation, and it is as good as what it is used for, otherwise it quickly collapses to license and a taking of liberties that may be a benefit for a few elite individuals and organisations.
Liberation Otherwise
For instance, when apartheid in South Africa had become unsustainable and very bad for business and life the Boers seem to have made a plan. They “bribed” the those that were fighting for liberation with freedom and democracy. The oppressor can give freedom to silence the fighter for liberation so that oppression may continue by other means. Once they have freedom those that hold it may use it to become new oppressors and exploiters. Liberation as a totality eliminates the possibility of new victimisers and victims, and creates a new universe where oppression and domination of one by the other is not feasible. In closing, it is a tempting illustration to note that, otherwise the freedom of the Israelites from Egypt was not their liberation, Canaan remained a distant destination but a reality. It is a political and philosophical mistake to confuse freedom for liberation. Liberation is, otherwise, that perpetually unfinished political business that such tokens as freedom and democracy do not really fulfill.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Hogsback, in the Eastern Cape. [email protected]
