Frantz Fanon

Early life

Frantz Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, then a French colony, into a Black middle-class family. As a teenager he encountered the négritude ideas of Aimé Césaire, Martinique's leading critic of colonialism. In 1943, at 18, he left the island to join the Free French forces. He fought in the last years of the Second World War, was wounded in the Alsace campaign, and was decorated.

Psychiatry and Black Skin, White Masks

After the war Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, where he faced anti-Black racism. That experience fed Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). The book examines how colonial racism is absorbed into the minds of colonised people. Its central image is the "white mask" that Black people are pushed to wear in a white world.

From 1951 he trained at the Saint-Alban hospital under François Tosquelles. There he learned "institutional psychotherapy," which tried to turn the hospital into a community in which patients took an active part.

Algeria

In 1953 Fanon became one of the heads of psychiatric services at Blida-Joinville, a large hospital in Algeria. After the war of independence began in 1954, he treated both French soldiers and Algerian fighters. In 1956 he resigned with a sharply worded letter, arguing that psychiatric care was impossible in a system built to dehumanise. He then worked full time for the National Liberation Front (FLN).

Based in Tunisia, he treated Algerian refugees, trained nurses, and edited the FLN paper El Moudjahid. He also served the provisional Algerian government as a diplomatic representative in Ghana. L'An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) argued that the struggle was transforming Algerian society, including the place of women.

The Wretched of the Earth and death

Fanon was diagnosed with leukaemia and wrote Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) during his final illness. It was published in 1961 with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book argues that colonialism is founded on violence and that the colonised answer it. It warns that independence can fail if a native elite simply replaces the colonisers, and it also catalogues the psychiatric harm of colonial war. He died in Bethesda, Maryland, on 6 December 1961 and was buried in Algeria.

Legacy and debate

Fanon's work became a touchstone for 1960s liberation movements, including the Black Panthers. It remains central to postcolonial thought through writers such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Paulo Freire and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Readers still argue over his treatment of violence. Martin Evans notes that he described anticolonial violence in almost purifying terms. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that reading him as simply endorsing insurgency is too crude, since his point is how colonialism structures violence. Feminist critics have also faulted his treatment of women in Black Skin, White Masks. Psychiatrists today return to his work on the psychological effects of racism.