Who was Frantz Fanon?
Born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, then a French colony, Frantz Fanon fought with the Free French in the Second World War and won the Croix de Guerre. He then trained as a doctor and psychiatrist in Lyon and wrote Black Skin, White Masks in 1952. From 1953 he ran a ward at the Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria. He quit in 1956 and was forced out of the country the next year, then worked for the FLN in Tunis as a newspaper writer and as an envoy in Ghana. Already ill with leukemia, he dictated The Wretched of the Earth. He died in a US hospital in December 1961, and his body was taken to Algeria for burial.
Political views
- Held that colonial rule could only be broken by force, which he saw as freeing people in body and in mind.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Judged negritude to be a backward-looking return to Africa's past, though he gave it credit for changing how Black people saw themselves.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Warned that the new national middle class would act as a go-between for foreign firms and simply inherit the old colonial privileges.Source: marxists.org
- Described the one-party state as the bourgeois dictatorship in modern form and attacked the cult around the national leader.Source: marxists.org
- Wanted trade brought under democratic public control through cooperatives, with government spread out away from the capital.Source: marxists.org
- Told freed peoples not to copy Europe, but to invent new social forms and a new humanism.Source: marxists.org
Legacy
Fanon became a central thinker for decolonisation and postcolonial studies. The Black Panthers read The Wretched of the Earth, Steve Biko drew on him for Black Consciousness, and his work on the mental harm of racism and empire is still read widely. Sartre's preface boosted the book, and the French government banned it when it came out. Hannah Arendt and other critics said that he and his followers glorified violence, and people still argue over whether his ideas fed armed movements. His defenders say he was describing the violence of colonialism and warning early about the new rulers and single parties that appeared after independence across Africa.
In their own words
“The masses should know that the government and the party are at their service.”