The Wretched of the Earth

Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925 to a middle-class mixed-race family, Frantz Fanon grew up in a French assimilationist environment. His early experiences with racism and colonialism were related to the Nazi collaborationist French regime that occupied the island during World War II. Fanon fled Martinique at age 17 to join General De Gaulle’s Free French Forces and fought in Morocco, Algeria, and France, where he was wounded at the battle of Colmar. After the war Fanon returned to Martinique for a brief time and helped the political campaign of his former school mentor Aimé Césaire, the writer and founding father of the Négritude movement. After completing his baccalaureate Fanon returned to France to study psychiatry. It is during this time that he began writing. His first book, White Skin, Black Masks (1952), intended to be his dissertation but ultimately rejected by the university, explores colonialism’s negative psychological effects on Black people.

After finishing his studies in 1953, Fanon was sent to the Bilda-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, where he worked as a psychiatrist. During his time there, he became involved with the Algerian Nationalist Movement. After the outbreak of the Algerian revolution in 1954, he joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). His firsthand experiences treating French soldiers forced to torture natives and Algerian torture victims, and his direct participation in the revolutionary struggle, shifted Fanon’s thinking from preoccupation with Blackness to a wider, more universal theory of anticolonialism.

Feeling unable to remain part of the French system given its atrocious treatment of Algerians, Fanon resigned from his position at the hospital in 1956 and dedicated his time and efforts to helping out the FLN. He traveled extensively across Algeria to study the life conditions of the local population and to aid revolutionary efforts. Because of these activities, he was expelled from the country in 1957 and relocated to Tunisia. He continued his anticolonial work, both theoretical and practical, until his death from leukemia in 1961.