Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon was born on 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, then a French colony in the Caribbean, into a middle-class family that identified strongly with French culture and citizenship, a background that shaped his early education under the assumption of French assimilation before his later intellectual and political trajectory would fundamentally challenge that very framework. He left Martinique in 1943 to join the Free French Forces fighting against Nazi Germany, an experience that exposed him directly to the racism he encountered even while serving in the French military, despite his formal status as a French citizen.

Following the war, Fanon studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, France, and became increasingly engaged with philosophy, particularly existentialism, and with the emerging body of thought examining race, colonialism and psychological identity. In 1952 he published his first major work, Black Skin, White Masks, a psychoanalytically informed examination of the psychological damage inflicted on colonised Black subjects by internalising white colonial values and standards of beauty, intelligence and worth — a text that became foundational to later postcolonial theory and critical race studies.

In 1953 Fanon took a position as head of the psychiatric department at the Blida-Joinville hospital in French Algeria, where he directly treated both French colonial soldiers and Algerian torture victims during the escalating Algerian War of Independence, an experience that profoundly radicalised his political views as he witnessed firsthand the psychological toll of colonial violence on all its participants, coloniser and colonised alike.

In 1956 Fanon resigned his hospital position in a public letter directly denouncing French colonial policy in Algeria, and joined the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the organisation leading Algeria's independence struggle, working as a writer, diplomat and political theorist for the movement, and eventually being expelled from Algeria by French authorities before continuing his work for Algerian independence from Tunisia and other locations.

Fanon's most influential and widely read work, The Wretched of the Earth, was completed shortly before his death and published in 1961, featuring a preface by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The book presented a systematic analysis of colonialism's psychological and political violence and argued forcefully that decolonisation, given the fundamentally violent nature of colonial imposition, would necessarily and legitimately involve violent struggle by the colonised to achieve genuine liberation — a controversial thesis that became enormously influential across anti-colonial and liberation movements worldwide, from Algeria itself to sub-Saharan Africa, the Palestinian liberation movement, and Black Power organising in the United States.

Fanon was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1960 and died on 6 December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, while seeking medical treatment in the United States, just months before Algeria achieved independence in 1962. He was buried in Algeria at his own request, honoured as a martyr of the Algerian revolution despite never having been Algerian by birth. His work has remained enormously influential across postcolonial studies, critical race theory and liberation movements globally in the decades since his death, and he is widely regarded as one of the most significant political philosophers of decolonisation in the 20th century.