When Frantz Fanon looked at colonialism, he didn't just see stolen land or broken laws. He saw broken minds, broken identities (what Homi K Bhabha said to be "in-betweenness").
Fanon was not a philosopher, he was a doctor, a soldier, a Black man in a French colony. Above all, for many Africans he was a revolutionary figure who died young, writing until the end of his life.
More than 60 years later, Fanon's work is still relevant for many countries around the world, not just in Africa, that were once colonised.
In a world where racism, war, and neocolonialism still persist, his words are very important for intellectuals, politicians and the general public.
Fanon had not just challenged colonialism or imperialism; he exposed its lies.
The making of a rebel thinker
Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 on the island of Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean.
Although a French citizen, he lived in a world that told him, from childhood, that Blackness meant inferiority. The white French were "civilised", the Black islanders were "primitive", even though their language was French and they studied Voltaire, and saluted the same flag as well.
Fanon was from a well-off family, and like many other middle-class families of that time, they believed that success came from mimicking the coloniser, by speaking proper French, wearing French clothes, earning French approval.
But Fanon could see the illusion the coloniser was creating in front of the colonised.
He left the island to fight in World War II, joining the Free French forces against Hitler.
But even there among his allies, he faced racism and humiliation.
He put his life at risk for France, only to be treated like a second-class soldier.
That bitter experience, abroad and at home, shaped his life's mission.
After the war, Fanon studied psychiatry and philosophy in France. But the real turning point in his life came when he moved to Algeria in the 1950s. He started working in a psychiatric hospital when Algeria was fighting for independence from French rule. There, he saw the cruellest form of colonialism – people were tortured, silenced, driven mad.
Fanon didn't just observe the situation. He joined the Algerian resistance and became one of its leading voices.
He started writing in support of the Algerian war against French colonial rule as he knew his time was limited. He was suffering from leukemia.
Edward Said, while speaking about Fanon, said, "Fanon is the most powerful voice of Black anti-colonialism in the twentieth century. His legacy is foundational for any understanding of race, resistance, and freedom."
Black Skin, White Masks: living inside a lie
Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), isn't just about racism. It's about what racism does to your soul. It's about what it feels like to grow up in a world where your skin is seen as a problem, and where success means pretending to be someone else.
The book's title says it all -- Black Skin, White Masks.
Fanon is talking about black people from colonised societies, especially the educated ones, who are forced to wear a mask to survive.
The mask is the language, behaviour, and values of the white coloniser.
Fanon knew this mask well. He had worn it.
He had seen others being interested in it, believing that it would bring respect, dignity, and love.
Instead, the mask brought alienation. You speak perfect French, you quote Rousseau, you dress well, but you're still a "Negro", Fanon writes.
Man becomes "mimic man" in search of respect, dignity and love, but in this process, they lose themselves.
He explores how this dynamic infects everything - education, relationships, desire.
Fanon's biographer David Macey said, "In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon takes us into the mind of the colonised subject with a rare blend of rage and rigour. No one who reads it can forget the wound it opens."
And in terms of language, Fanon says, this is where the lie begins.
"To speak is to exist," Fanon writes.
But for the colonised person, to speak is to borrow someone else's existence.
Black Skin, White Masks is a deeply personal cry for freedom, not just from external domination, but from internal prisons.
Fanon dares to imagine a human being beyond the colonial binary, not White, not Black, but free.
As Homi K Bhabha, in the introduction to the 1986 edition of Black Skin, White Mask, wrote, "For Fanon, colonialism is not just a political regime but a state of mind. His greatness lies in showing how deeply the empire poisons both the body and the soul."
The Wretched of the Earth: revolution, rage, and renewal
If Black Skin, White Masks was about the psychological wounds of empire, The Wretched of the Earth is about unmasking the empire.
This book, written in the last months of his life, is Fanon's revolutionary manifesto.
He had seen too much to believe that colonialism would end politely.
Colonisers never handed back power out of kindness. They ruled by violence, and Fanon argued that only violence could dethrone them from the rule.
"Decolonisation," he famously wrote, "is always a violent phenomenon."
For Fanon, this wasn't a call for thoughtless bloodshed. It was a recognition of the colonised people who had been stripped of their humanity.
He saw violence not just as a political tool, but as a cleansing act.
When the peasant picks up a weapon, he becomes more than a victim. He becomes a subject of history, a builder of a new future.
Fanon's revolution wasn't just about ousting the colonisers. He warned against the rise of a new class of elites, the post-independence "national bourgeoisie", who would take over colonial institutions but will follow the rules and regulations left behind by the colonial rulers.
"They have nothing better to do than take the place of the former European settlers," Fanon wrote. And this was the great betrayal of many independence movements, he said.
Fanon argued that true liberation had to be radical. It had to transform not just the governments, but economies, cultures, values.
As he believed, the revolution had to be led by the peasants, the unemployed, and the forgotten ones.
Fanon imagined a world that would not imitate Europe or the coloniser, but something new, a postcolonial humanity.
The Wretched of the Earth is not just about the end of colonialism. It is about the beginning of a new humanism, one forged in struggle, not inherited from empire.
Fanon lives on
Fanon died aged just 36 in December 1961. But his ideas and words have inspired anti-colonial fighters across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, from the Black Panthers in the USA to revolutionaries in South Africa, Palestine, and the Caribbean.
Today, his insights are studied in universities around the world, from postcolonial studies to psychology, literature, and political science.
But more importantly, his voice still echoes in the struggles of people resisting injustice.
His questions still matter - What does freedom really mean? Who defines it? And what are we willing to do to reclaim it?
His work reminds us that colonialism didn't end when the flags came down. It lingers in our economies, our institutions, and in our desires. Fanon calls for resistance against those infected ideas and thoughts.
Unmasking the lie, reclaiming the future
Frantz Fanon had not offered a comfortable solution to resist the colonial rule. He showed us how colonialism works. He unmasked the lie that the colonized should become like the colonizer.
He taught us that freedom is not mimicry.
His message is relevant even today. It does not matter whether you live in Dakar or Detroit, Dhaka or Delhi, Fanon's voice still urges you to ask - Whose mask am I wearing? Whose language am I speaking? Whose dreams am I dreaming?
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