Fanon, Frantz (1925–61)

Fanon’s views (and often various misinterpretations of them) on the nature of colonialism, racism and the role of violence in Third-World revolutions were enormously influential. The main themes of all his writing are the critique of ethnopsychiatry and the Eurocentrism of psychoanalysis, the critique of négritude and the development of a political philosophy for Third-World liberation.

Frantz Fanon was born in the French Antilles on the island of Martinique and was educated there and in France. He served in the Free French army during the Second World War, both in north Africa and in Europe. He went on to study medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyons between 1947 and 1951. In 1953 he was appointed chief of service of the psychiatry department of a hospital in Algeria (which was then still a French territory). He joined the Algerian liberation movement in 1954 and began to work for its underground newspaper El Moudjahid a few years later. His political activities caused him to leave his job, after which he moved to Tunisia where he practised psychiatry from 1957 to 1959. In 1961 he was appointed ambassador to Ghana by the Algerian provisional government. He died of leukaemia in 1961.