Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, on the twentieth of July 1925, a son of the French Caribbean under colonial rule. As a young man he crossed the ocean to fight for a France that did not yet see him as its equal, enlisting with the Free French Forces during the Second World War. He was wounded in the Provence campaign and earned the Croix de Guerre for his service — an early lesson in the distance between the ideals a nation proclaims and the treatment it extends to those of African descent.

After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon, completing his medical degree in 1951. There, alongside his clinical training, he immersed himself in philosophy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis. In 1952 he published Black Skin, White Masks, a searching examination of how colonialism wounds the inner life and racial consciousness of the colonized.

In 1953 Fanon took charge of the psychiatry service at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria, where he witnessed firsthand the psychic toll of colonial violence. He joined the Algerian National Liberation Front, resigned his hospital post, and gave himself to the independence struggle — writing for the FLN paper El Moudjahid and serving as an ambassador for the provisional Algerian government.

Stricken with leukemia, he completed his final and most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. He died on the sixth of December 1961 in Bethesda, Maryland, at thirty-six. His body was returned to Algerian soil. May the healer who diagnosed the sickness of empire, and gave the colonized world the language of its own liberation, be forever honored.