Frantz Fanon

• 1. Introduction

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  Frantz Omar Fanon was born on the 20th of July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. He died on the 6th of December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of 36, admitted to a hospital under the false name Ibrahim Omar Fanon. He was buried in Algeria. Between those two dates, he became what scholars have called the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time. His books were banned by the French government. Revolutionary leaders on four continents kept them in circulation anyway. The Black Panther Party made his final book required reading for every new member. How did a psychiatrist from a small Caribbean island become that? What did he see, and what did he feel, that turned a man trained to heal minds into someone who argued that violence against colonizers was a human necessity? And what exactly was he saying about the psychological wound that colonialism leaves behind?

• 2. War and Disillusionment

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  In January 1943, Fanon slipped out of Martinique during a family wedding to join Allied sympathizers on the British colony of Dominica. He was 17. The island he left had been under the collaborationist Vichy regime since the fall of France in July 1940. An American naval blockade imposed in April 1943 was causing severe shortages. The local Vichy governor, Admiral Georges Robert, repressed anyone sympathetic to the Allied cause. Fanon later described the regime as stripping away its mask to reveal itself as composed of "authentic racists".

  After a local uprising overthrew Robert's regime in June 1943, Fanon returned eagerly and enlisted in the 5th Antillean Marching Battalion, newly raised under the Free French. He boarded a troopship for Casablanca in March 1944. What greeted him in Morocco was immediate and brutal: racial discrimination within the Free French Forces themselves. Transferred to a base in Bejaïa, Algeria, he witnessed the antisemitism and Islamophobia of the pieds-noirs, many of whom had supported Vichy's racist laws.

  In August 1944, as part of Operation Dragoon, Fanon came ashore at Saint-Tropez. He fought near Montbeliard in the Doubs region and was seriously wounded by shrapnel, spending two months in hospital. Colonel Raoul Salan awarded him the Croix de Guerre. In early 1945 he rejoined his unit for the Battle of Alsace. Then, after Allied forces crossed the Rhine into Germany, de Gaulle ordered all non-white soldiers removed from their formations and sent south to Toulon. Fanon was transferred to Normandy to wait for repatriation.

  From Europe, he wrote to his brother Joby: "I've been deceived, and I am paying for my mistakes... I'm sick of it all." The war he had volunteered for with enthusiasm had shown him exactly how the colonial system valued him. Back in Martinique in late 1945, he completed his baccalaureat and then left for Lyon, intending to become a psychiatrist and understand what he had seen.

• 3. The Book That Changed Its Title

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  At the University of Lyon, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry while also attending philosophy lectures, including those of Merleau-Ponty. He wrote three plays during this period, of which two survive. In 1951 he completed his medical degree and began a residency at Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole under the Catalan psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, a radical thinker who pushed Fanon to see culture as inseparable from mental health.

  The doctoral dissertation Fanon submitted at Lyon was titled Essay on the Disalienation of the Black. It was rejected. Rather than revise it to pass academic review, he converted it into his first book. The manuscript reached Francis Jeanson, a left-wing philosopher and senior editor at Editions du Seuil in Paris, who led the pro-Algerian independence Jeanson network. Jeanson read it, praised it, and invited Fanon to an editorial meeting. When Jeanson complimented the book, Fanon reportedly responded: "Not bad for a nigger, is it?" Jeanson threw him out of his office. Fanon later said that reaction earned Jeanson his lifelong respect. Jeanson proposed the new title, Black Skin, White Masks, wrote the epilogue, and the book appeared in 1952.

  In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argued that the colonizer's language traps the colonized person in a permanent double bind. When a Black person speaks the colonizer's French fluently, the colonizer reads it not as mastery but as predation, an attempt to steal something that doesn't belong. Fanon drew on his own experience of being scolded as a child for using Creole French instead of what was called "real French" or "white French". His conclusion: mastering the colonizer's language in order to be recognized as an equal reflects a dependency that actually undermines the Black person's humanity rather than securing it.

  The book has also attracted serious criticism. It contains statements about women and rape that scholars have described as sexist, and a claim that "the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual" that queer theorists have extensively contested. The English translation itself introduced distortions: the chapter Fanon titled "The Lived Experience of the Black" became "The Fact of Blackness" in Charles Lam Markmann's rendering, erasing the chapter's debt to phenomenology and contributing to a reductive reading of Fanon as simply an advocate for violence.

• 4. The Psychiatrist at Blida

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  From 1953, Fanon served as chef de service at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria. His methods shifted quickly. He began introducing socio-therapy, attempting to connect patients' treatment to their own cultural backgrounds rather than applying standardized European frameworks. He trained nurses and interns. He organized football matches for patients and staff, a game he had played since childhood in Martinique.

  When the Algerian revolution broke out in November 1954, Fanon made contact with Pierre Chaulet at Blida in 1955 and joined the Front de Liberation Nationale. He was now in an impossible position. As a French hospital employee, he was responsible for treating the psychological distress of French soldiers and officers who carried out torture to suppress the uprising. He was simultaneously treating Algerian torture victims. He made extensive trips through the Kabylia region to study the cultural and psychological life of Algerians. Some of these trips served as cover for clandestine activities; his visits to the ski resort of Chrea, which concealed an FLN base, were one example.

  By the summer of 1956, Fanon concluded he could no longer provide even indirect support to the French effort through his hospital work. In November he submitted his resignation in the form of a letter to the Resident Minister, which became an influential text in anticolonial circles in its own right. "There comes a time," he wrote, "when silence becomes dishonesty." He was expelled from Algeria in January 1957 and settled in Tunis, where he joined the FLN openly and wrote for its journal, Al Moudjahid, until the end of his life.

• 5. The Wretched of the Earth

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  Fanon's final book was not written. It was dictated. When he was well enough, he spoke the words. His wife Josie wrote them down, edited them, and in some passages contributed to them. Fanon had been diagnosed with leukemia after an exhausting journey across the Sahara to open a southern supply front for the FLN. He traveled to the Soviet Union for treatment and experienced a remission. Back in Tunis, he delivered lectures to Algerian National Liberation Army officers at Ghardimao on the Algerian-Tunisian border.

  He also traveled to Rome for a three-day meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, who agreed to write a preface to the book. Sartre's influence on Fanon was deep and long-standing, though Fanon's intellectual roots were plural: he drew on Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Marxism, and the Negritude movement of his teacher Aime Cesaire.

  The Wretched of the Earth appeared in 1961, shortly before Fanon died. The French government banned it. Fanon's central argument was that colonized people are not bound by the ethical frameworks that apply within humanity because colonizers have refused to treat them as human in the first place. Violence against the colonizer is therefore not a choice but a condition imposed by the colonizers themselves; it is the only language they have established as operative. The book also warned against the dangers of neocolonialism: the replacement of formal colonial rule by local elites who reproduce the same structures. In a passage from the conclusion, Fanon wrote: "Comrades, have we not other work to do than to create a third Europe?"

  The book's reach was immediate. Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, and Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba each drew on it, though for different reasons. Guevara focused on Fanon's theory of violence; Shariati was drawn to the idea of a new human being emerging from decolonization; Biko took up the concept of Black consciousness.

• 6. Death in Bethesda

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  With his leukemia worsening, Fanon's Soviet doctors and his FLN comrades pressed him to seek treatment in the United States. In 1961, the CIA arranged the trip, framing it as a covert journey for treatment at a National Institutes of Health facility. During his time in the US, Fanon was handled by CIA agent Oliver Iselin. Lewis R. Gordon, who has studied the period closely, has written that what became accepted as fact is that Fanon "was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia."

  Fanon died on the 6th of December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, of double pneumonia. He was 36. He had been admitted under the name Ibrahim Omar Fanon, a Libyan alias he had used to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco on a mission for the FLN. His body lay in state in Tunisia before being buried in Algeria. It was later moved to a martyrs' graveyard at Aïn Kerma in eastern Algeria.

  His wife Josie survived him by nearly three decades. She grew disillusioned with the Algerian government and died by suicide in Algiers in 1989. Their son Olivier became president of the Frantz Fanon National Association, founded in Algiers in 2012. His daughter from an earlier relationship, Mireille, became a professor of international law and conflict resolution and now serves as president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation.

  The Black Panther Party's 1970 book by Chairman Bobby Seale, Seize the Time, records Huey P. Newton receiving a copy of The Wretched of the Earth at one of their first meetings. The party's Ten-Point Plan contained six points that either directly or indirectly drew on Fanon's ideas. The Caribbean Philosophical Association now awards the Frantz Fanon Prize for work that advances the decolonization and liberation of people. Kenya's Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o argued in Decolonizing the Mind in 1992 that understanding African writing is impossible without reading The Wretched of the Earth.