Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon (Fort-de-France, Martinique, 1925 – Bethesda, Maryland, 1961) was a psychiatrist, philosopher and essayist from Martinique whose work became central to the decolonization struggles of the twentieth century. Drawing on existentialism, psychoanalysis and Marxism, he approached colonialism not only as political and economic domination but as a psychological and cultural wound affecting both the colonized and the colonizers. His writings remain a foundation of postcolonial studies and critical theory, and they still shape debates about race, identity and power.

Born into a family of modest means in a Martinique that was then a French colony, Fanon grew up watching the everyday humiliations of colonial racism. When France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, forces loyal to the Vichy regime took control of the island, and their openly racist conduct left a deep mark on him. In 1943 he escaped to the British colony of Dominica to join the Allied side, and he later fought in Europe, where he was wounded and decorated. At the end of the war, however, he and other non-white soldiers were removed from their units, an experience that left him disillusioned.

Back in Martinique and then in metropolitan France, he studied medicine and philosophy in Lyon, where he occasionally attended lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and qualified as a psychiatrist in 1951 under François Tosquelles, who emphasized the role of culture in mental illness. His first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), examines how colonialism acts on identity: the colonized person absorbs the language and values of the colonizer, which can produce insecurity and a sense of inferiority. Fanon argued that the relation between white and Black is dialectical, and that only a society free of discrimination could free both from that dependency.

In 1953 he became head of service at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, where he introduced social therapy and paid attention to the cultural background of his patients, both French and Algerian. When the Algerian War of Independence began in 1954, he secretly joined the National Liberation Front. After being expelled from Algeria in 1957, he settled in Tunisia, where he worked for the FLN's newspaper and represented the provisional Algerian government in several African countries. His writings from this period, collected after his death, reveal his role as a strategist of the movement.

In 1961, already ill with leukaemia, he completed The Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before he died in the United States, where he had gone for treatment. Its central claim is that colonial violence dehumanizes the colonized and that decolonization requires a deep political, economic and psychological transformation. His influence extends to the liberation movements of the twentieth century, to postcolonial studies and critical theory, and to currents such as liberation theology.