Franz Fanon, Martinique Psychiatrist

On 6 December 1961, Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist, anti-colonial philosopher, revolutionary and writer, died of leukaemia aged just 36.

Just three days prior, his influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published at the height of the Algerian war of independence, in which Fanon played an active role. He had dictated the book to his wife, Josie, over the course of 10 weeks while terminally ill. As soon as it was released, it was banned in France, and copies of it were seized from bookshops.

In the book, Fanon argues that:

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

As well as on a political level, from his psychiatric experience, Fanon also believed that through liberatory violence, a colonised person “discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world in a very necessary manner.” For Fanon, anti-colonial “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self‑respect.”

However, as researcher Muneerah Ab Razak explains:

“Despite this, Fanon does not think that violence is an end in itself. He constantly expresses the physical and human cost of violence. He also stressed that mere violence, without a clear plan for decolonisation, would only reproduce the power relations of the coloniser. In addition, he claims that despite reclaiming land and power, violence will not be able to ease the creation of a new national identity after overthrowing the colonisers.”

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