Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary from the French Caribbean island of Martinique who became one of the most influential critics of colonialism. In Black Skin, White Masks he analysed how racism damages the minds of both colonised and coloniser, and in The Wretched of the Earth, written as he was dying, he argued that colonised peoples must liberate themselves, by violence if necessary, and warned of the new elites who would betray them after independence. He took part in the Algerian war of independence and died at 36, but his books became essential reading for anti-colonial and Black liberation movements across the world.

Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, then a colony of France, into a middle-class family of mixed African and European descent. At the Lycée Schoelcher he was taught by the poet Aimé Césaire, a founder of the Négritude movement, which celebrated Black African culture and identity against French claims of superiority.

During the Second World War Martinique was ruled by the Vichy regime. In 1943, aged eighteen, Fanon left to join the Free French forces. He served in North Africa and then in the Allied landings in Provence in 1944, was seriously wounded by shrapnel in eastern France and received the Croix de Guerre. The racism he met in the army, from white officers and from Europeans he had come to help liberate, shook his belief that he was simply a Frenchman.

After the war Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon, while also attending lectures in philosophy and literature, including those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1952 he published Peau noire, masques blancs, Black Skin, White Masks, written in part as a rejected medical thesis. Drawing on psychoanalysis, phenomenology and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, it described what it feels like to be Black in a white-dominated world. A Black person, he wrote, is "overdetermined from without": seen through stereotypes before he can speak, and so made to experience his own body as an object of fear or contempt. The colonised may respond by trying to become white in language, manners and desire, but the attempt cannot succeed in a society structured by racism. Fanon admired Négritude but warned that it, too, could become a trap if it simply turned the colonial picture of Black people upside down.

He trained in psychiatry at Saint-Alban in southern France under the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles, a pioneer of "institutional psychotherapy", which treated the hospital itself as a social environment that could heal or harm.

In 1953 Fanon became head of a ward at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in French Algeria. He reformed its treatment, adapting it to his Muslim patients' language and culture, and found that colonial psychiatry, which claimed that North Africans were naturally impulsive and violent, served to justify domination. When the Algerian war of independence began in November 1954 he treated both Algerian victims of torture and French policemen who carried it out, and he secretly aided the National Liberation Front (FLN).

In 1956 he resigned with a public letter stating that it was impossible to treat mental illness in a society that systematically dehumanised most of its people. Expelled from Algeria in early 1957, he moved to Tunis, where he worked for the FLN's newspaper El Moudjahid and continued to practise psychiatry. His essays from these years were collected in L'An V de la révolution algérienne (1959), translated as A Dying Colonialism, which described how the struggle changed Algerian family life, the veil and attitudes to radio and medicine, and in the posthumous Toward the African Revolution (1964).

In 1960 the Algerian provisional government sent him as its ambassador to Ghana, newly independent under Kwame Nkrumah. He travelled across West Africa and attended pan-African conferences in Accra and elsewhere, hoping to build solidarity between the independence movements and to open a southern supply route into Algeria through the Sahara.

Late in 1960 Fanon learned he had leukaemia. He wrote Les Damnés de la terre, The Wretched of the Earth, in about ten weeks; it was published in 1961 with a preface by Sartre, whom he had met in Rome that summer. The book's first chapter argues that colonialism is itself a system of violence, imposed and maintained by force, and that the colonised regain their humanity by resisting it, by armed struggle where necessary. This argument made the book notorious; critics read it as a celebration of violence, while defenders stress that Fanon also wrote at length about its psychological costs, in case studies of patients on both sides of the war.

Just as important were his warnings about what comes after independence. Fanon predicted that a "national bourgeoisie" of educated, urban nationalists would simply take the place of the colonisers, enriching itself, imitating Europe and leaving the peasants and the poor no better off. He argued instead for a genuinely popular, decentralised politics and for a new humanism not modelled on Europe.

Fanon was flown to the United States for treatment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where he died on 6 December 1961, aged 36. At his request his body was returned to Algeria and buried in a cemetery near the Tunisian border, behind FLN lines. Algeria won its independence seven months later.

During the decolonisation of Africa and after, Fanon's books were read by liberation movements from Angola and South Africa to Palestine, and by the Black Power movement in the United States, including the founders of the Black Panther Party. His influence runs through postcolonial theory, critical race theory and psychiatry. He is now regarded as a founding figure of African and Africana philosophy, and his analysis of how racism is lived in the body and in everyday perception remains central to continental philosophy and phenomenology. In Algeria the hospital at Blida where he worked now bears his name.