Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary from Martinique whose writings became foundational texts of decolonization movements worldwide. Born in Fort-de-France in 1925, Fanon grew up in a middle-class family under French colonial rule. He volunteered to fight with the Free French Forces in World War II, experiencing the racism of the military despite fighting for French liberation. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, where he wrote his first major work, "Black Skin, White Masks" (1952), a phenomenological analysis of the psychopathology of colonization — how racism deforms both the colonized and the colonizer. As head of the psychiatry department at Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria beginning in 1953, Fanon treated both Algerian victims of torture and the French soldiers who tortured them, an experience that radicalized him completely. He resigned his position in 1956 and joined the Algerian National Liberation Front, serving as editor of its newspaper "El Moudjahid" and as ambassador to Ghana. His masterwork, "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961), published the year of his death from leukemia, provided a comprehensive analysis of colonial violence, the psychology of liberation, the pitfalls of national consciousness, and the role of culture in revolution. Fanon argued that colonialism was a system of total violence — economic, political, cultural, and psychological — and that the colonized had the right to meet that violence with counter-violence as an act of self-creation. His analysis of the national bourgeoisie who inherit colonial structures without transforming them remains devastatingly relevant. He insisted that decolonization must be total: not merely political independence but the creation of new human beings freed from the Manichean categories colonialism imposed.