Decolonizing the mind: the life and work of Frantz Fanon

The work — and life — of Frantz Fanon could not be any timelier than right now. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, and his ideas continue to resonate into our time, and in places all over the world. 

Fanon was born in the Caribbean nation of Martinique, and went on to become an outspoken supporter of Algeria's war of independence from France, while his books have become must-read classics.

Like most people, I imagine, when they read Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) for the first time, I was gripped by the piercing reason and his vivid, poetic and dramatic writing. I was a high school student in Toronto (Scarborough) trying to find my way in the world and Fanon, along with Walter Rodney, bell hooks, Malcolm X, and of course C.L.R James, were among those who served as my guiding light.

It was only some years later that I discovered the scope of the Fanon's influence, not only on anti-colonial movements, but also the New Left, Quebec nationalists and North American Indigenous activists. At the time, he was actively engaged in the Algerian liberation struggle, serving as the Front de libération nationale's (FLN) ambassador to Ghana.

The FLN was at the forefront of Algeria's grueling battle against French colonialism, and Fanon had earned the respect of the FLN during his tenure as chef de médecin at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in the mid-1950s. There he put his life at risk by treating FLN fedayin who had been tortured by the French.

He would often finish treating an Algerian, and then move on to a French police officer or official suffering from nervous exhaustion or trauma, a direct result of the demands of enforcing an oppressive colonial order. Unable to keep up the delicate balancing act, Fanon submitted his letter of resignation to the Resident Minister, Governor General of Algeria. 

Facing colonial racism 

In retrospect, Fanon's destiny appears to have been tied to Algeria from the beginning. As a Martinican medical student specializing in clinical psychiatry in France in the 1950s, he treated impoverished Algerians as he himself both experienced and diagnosed colonial racism.

Prior to this experience, he had also trained for combat in Algeria in the French army during the Second World War. It was during this first visit to Algeria that he encountered the virus of racism that somehow, seems to have eluded him in Martinique.

White French troops were separated from Black West Indians, who were supposed to be French. Black African soldiers were also segregated from French troops, as were Arab Africans, who the French reviled and treated like pariahs on their own soil.

Fanon lived this experience at the very moment that the French army set out to confront German fascism, with its notions of racial purity. The irony of this situation was not lost to him, and it was this accumulated experience that led to his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs, or in English: Black Skin, White Masks.

The Second World War shaped Fanon's understanding of politics and the uses of violence. He entered the war as an adolescent. But its endless carnage and bloodletting served as his rite of passage to adulthood. It shook him to the core and purged him of the idealism he harboured when he joined the Free French Army.

The war represented Fanon's 'moment of vision' and this experience shaped the direction that the rest of his life would take.

Fanon's final attestation

Les damnés de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth) is Fanon's last political will and testament. He literally wrote the book on his deathbed, ravaged by leukemia as his body teemed with an excess of leucocytes.

It's a prophetic work in which Fanon dissects colonialism's violent, destructive social and psychological impact on the colonized, and the colonizer (he was treating Algerian patients who were engaged in a life and death struggle against French settlers who had tortured and killed Algerians).

And while both Fanon's supporters and detractors have exploited this chapter in order to support their causes, it is important to note that Fanon was writing about concrete anti-colonial freedom struggles which, in the case of French Algeria and other anti-colonial struggles (America's war in Vietnam comes to mind), engaged in armed struggle against the savagery and dehumanization of French colonial rule and its use of violence as a means of subjugation. 

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.- Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth

Today, despite claims that Fanon 'has receded into history' like a festering wound that refuses to heal, the inequalities that Frantz Fanon so vividly denounced are still with us today.

The ghost of Fanon continues to haunt us, not as an apparition, but as a challenge to imagine that another world is possible, and as an inspiration to bring that world into being.

Guests in this episode:

France-Lyne Fanon is the niece of Frantz Fanon.

David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) was a historian, biographer and translator. He wrote Frantz Fanon: A Biography

Françoise Vergès is a political scientist and historian in Paris, France.

Alia Al-Saji is an associate professor of philosophy at McGill University in Montreal.

Alice Cherki is a psychiatrist who worked as an intern with Fanon during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s. She is the author of Frantz Fanon: A Portrait.

Robert Hill is Professor Emeritus of History and Research at the University of California in L.A.

Ato Sekyi-Otu is the author of Fanon's Dialectic of Experience. He retired as Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Thought at York University in 2006.
 

*This 2006 documentary series by IDEAS contributor David Austin originally aired in 2006. It was produced by Jane Lewis.