Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on the twentieth of July 1925. He served in the Free French Forces during the Second World War — earning the Croix de Guerre — completed his medical degree at the University of Lyon in 1951, and took a psychiatric residency under François Tosquelles in southern France. He was appointed head of psychiatry at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in French Algeria in 1953.

The Algerian War of Independence began the following year. Fanon's psychiatric practice quickly forced him to see both sides of the colonial relationship: he treated French paratroopers who tortured Algerians by day and could not sleep at night, and Algerians who had been tortured by the same paratroopers and could not function. He resigned his post in 1956 with a letter of unprecedented political precision: he could not, as a physician, work for a colonial state.

He joined the Front de libération nationale and served as its spokesman, ambassador to Ghana, and theorist. His four major works appeared in seven years. Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — written while he was still a medical student — analyzed the psychology of colonized consciousness. A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Toward the African Revolution (1964) documented the politics of the Algerian struggle. The Wretched of the Earth (1961), composed in the last ten months of his life, became the most translated political theory text of the twentieth century after Marx — read by Che Guevara, Steve Biko, Bobby Seale, and the political generations of the global South.

He died of leukemia at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, on the sixth of December 1961, age thirty-six.

He is honored here as the psychiatrist whose books taught the colonized that liberation begins in the mind.