“The Wretched of the Earth,” “Black Skin, White Masks,” “A Dying Colonialism” and “Toward the African Revolution” are four major literary works by Frantz Fanon, and they have been called the “bibles of the decolonization movement.” He was one of the pre-eminent theorists of the anti-colonialist movements in the 20th century. Fanon was born in Martinique (an island in the West Indies, colonized by the French), in 1925, the same year as Minister Malcolm X. (His writing juxtaposed his life’s work philosophically between Marcus Garvey and Mohandas Gandhi on one hand, and Minister Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the other). Though he was labeled a “theorist,” his pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on Black people were not theories; they were borne out of his experiences as a victim of colonialism.

Fanon grew up in Martinique, the descendants of African slaves who worked on the island’s sugar plantations. He received a conventional colonial education at the Lycee Schoelcher in Fort-de-France; Aime Cesaire (a fellow Martinican, poet and politician, who inspired Fanon but whose concept of Negritude—that a person’s status depended on his/her economical and social position—Fanon rejected) was one of his teachers. By that definition, Negritude would foster a caste-like system which was also adamantly rejected by Gandhi in India as a colonial (British) tool used as a method of controlling the colonized. Fanon traveled to other Caribbean islands where he discovered rampant oppression—a bastion of colonialism.

Cesaire’s “Discours sur le Colonialisme” introduced Fanon’s first book and Fanon’s writings became commonplace among fellow anti-colonialists in the West Indies including C.L.R. James, Dr. Eric Williams and Edouard Glissant. Also it is important to note that all of Fanon’s writings were originally done in French, his first language (and though France, and indeed Europe, had colonized an inordinate share of the world’s peoples of color), his books had to be translated into the languages of other indigenous peoples of the colonized world to whom Fanon had intended to be the recipients.

Leaving Martinique as a teenager, Fanon went to France where he studied medicine and psychiatry from 1945 to 1950. He received his degree from the University of Lyons and passed his “Medicat de Hopitaux Psychiatrique” in 1953. He participated in the guerilla struggle against supporters of a pro-Nazi faction of the French government and got his first glimpse of metropolitan racism. Then he took a position at a psychiatric hospital in Algeria, a French colony in Africa, and became involved in the Resistance Movement of the Algerian Civil War. While fighting for the Resistance, Fanon began searching for his own identity in a white colonial environment which led to him studying the dynamics of racism and its effects on the individual.

Out of that experience—a Black man, searching for himself in a White world—he wrote “Peau Noire, Masques Blancs” (“Black Skin, White Masks”) originally published in France, in 1952; it was Fanon’s first published work. “It should be read by every Black man with a desire to understand himself and the forces which conspire against him,” said Floyd McKissick, an American civil rights activist and attorney. It represented the philosophy of the state of being Black and the warping of the “Negro” psyche by a “superior” White culture, and the effect of colonial subjugation on the human psyche. For though Fanon was an intelligent Black man, with a French education, he was rejected in France by the (White) French because of his skin color.

Published in : News, Legends

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