Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, then a French colony, in 1925. He fought with the Free French Forces in the Second World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre, then studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, where he wrote Black Skin, White Masks (1952). In 1953 he became head of a service at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria. He resigned in 1956, was expelled in 1957, and joined the FLN in Tunis, writing for its newspaper and serving as an envoy to Ghana. He dictated The Wretched of the Earth while ill with leukemia and died near Washington in December 1961. He was buried in Algeria.

Fanon became one of the most influential thinkers of decolonization and postcolonial studies. The Black Panther Party put The Wretched of the Earth on its reading list, Steve Biko drew on his ideas in the Black Consciousness Movement, and his analysis of the psychological effects of racism and colonialism remains widely read. Jean-Paul Sartre's preface helped make the book famous, and the French government censored it on publication. Critics, including Hannah Arendt in On Violence, argued that he and his readers glorified violence, and later commentators have debated how far his ideas encouraged armed movements. Admirers reply that he described colonial violence and warned clearly against the new elites and one-party states that later emerged in many African countries.