Frantz Fanon

Biography

Frantz Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in the French Caribbean — a Black man who was technically a French citizen, educated in French schools, and who grew up believing in the values of the French Republic. That faith was shattered by encounters with racism during his service in the Free French Army in World War II, where he discovered that despite his French education and French uniform, he was still seen first as a Black man. He trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon, writing his first book 'Black Skin, White Masks' (1952) — a devastating psychological analysis of the damage done to colonized people's self-image by racism and colonial culture. Assigned as a psychiatrist to the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in 1953, Fanon found himself treating both French soldiers traumatized by the violence they inflicted and Algerian victims of torture by those same soldiers. The experience convinced him that colonial psychiatry was itself a form of violence — an attempt to make the colonized person accept their own oppression as 'normal.' He secretly began assisting the FLN in 1955 and was eventually expelled from Algeria by French authorities in 1956. He then moved to Tunis, where he worked openly for the FLN, writing for its journal El Moudjahid and serving as an ambassador for the GPRA. Fanon's greatest work, 'The Wretched of the Earth' (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961), written as he was dying of leukemia, became the bible of Third World anticolonialism. His argument — that the violence of revolution was not merely a tactic but a psychological necessity, allowing the colonized to reclaim their humanity through action — was electrifying and controversial. The book was prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre and was immediately banned in France. It would inspire liberation movements from the Black Power movement in the United States to revolutionary movements across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia in 1960. He insisted on traveling to the United States for treatment at the National Institutes of Health, seeing his presence in America as a political act. He died in Bethesda, Maryland on December 6, 1961, aged 36, just months before the independence he had worked to bring about. At his request, his body was returned to Algeria and buried with military honors by the ALN.

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