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Frantz Fanon
In this month of June we have already remembered the Enmore Martyrs and Dr Walter Rodney who contributed to the liberation of Guyana.
In this International Year for people of African Descent, we can do worse than remember an intellectual giant who contributed to the liberation of oppressed people all across the world. That this liberation was in the sphere of the mind is even more noteworthy. His name was Frantz Fanon and on December 6 this year, it will be fifty years since he passed away.
Who was Fanon? In the words of Richard Pithouse of Pambazuka, he was born in Martinique after WWI in 1925 and had the great fortune of coming under the tutelage of Aimé Césaire, the great poet and anti-colonial intellectual, as his high school teacher.
When in the beginning of WWII France was overrun by the Germans and pro-Nazi French forces took over his island, the teenaged idealistic Fanon escaped to join the Free French Forces. He was imbued with the assimilationist philosophy of the French that claimed if one adopted French culture and language, one automatically became fully “French.”
But the Free French Forces did not deliver on this commitment to its black soldiers. Fanon was awarded the Croix de guerre for heroism in battle but black soldiers were always treated as second class and were even denied their place on the field of final victory.
After the war Fanon studied medicine in France where he specialised in psychiatry. He became further radicalised and published his first book, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, in 1952, at the age of twenty-seven. The book deals with the lived experience of being black in an anti-black world.
It begins in Martinique and moves to France examining language, sexual desire, embodied presence in the world, psychology and the politics of recognition in the light of the social fact that blackness assumes in a racist society. It is an extraordinary book, simultaneously beautiful and searing, that sustains an absolute fidelity to an idea of humanity as freedom.
It’s now widely recognised amongst serious academics that racism has been fundamental to the constitution of the modern world and that ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ is one of the great books of the modern world.
In 1953 Fanon took up a post at a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, a country where the racism of the French was blatant. In November 1954 an anti-colonial insurrection began and Fanon began covertly working with the Algerian national liberation movement, the FLN, early in the following year.
Two years later he wrote a letter of resignation from the hospital declaring, in effect, that colonial society was more insane than his patients.
In 1960 Fanon was appointed as the ambassador of the FLN to Ghana and he travelled to many of the newly independent countries south of the Sahara to represent the Algerian movement. At the end of that year he was diagnosed with leukaemia.
He immediately decided to write a new book, his last. That book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, was written in ten weeks. It begins with an account of the colonial city as ‘a world divided into two’, moves on to describe what he called the mutations of consciousness that develop as struggles against colonialism unfold, and then examines the crisis of post-colonial states in which the people that bought new regimes into power are expelled from active political life as former liberation movements become an instrument to contain popular aspirations and to organise and legitimate the machinations of an new elite more predatory than redemptive.
In Fanon’s view the promise of national liberation struggles could not be redeemed if national consciousness did not give way to social consciousness. He saw a second struggle, a struggle to realise what he called a human prospect, as essential.
In his last book, as in his first, he retains an absolute fidelity to the value of human freedom. It was immediately banned on publication and Fanon was dead within weeks. He was just thirty-six.
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