Below is a brief outline of Fanon’s life. My extended version as thesis Introduction is here.
Nigel Gibson’s 50 Years Later: Fanon’s Legacy is worth a look as well
The spectre of Frantz Fanon
DURBAN, South Africa — July 20 is the 75th anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s birth but his spirit lives on. A few days after McDonald’s opened its first branch here, some large and bold graffiti appeared on the restaurant’s perimeter wall. It instructed customers to “Read Frantz Fanon Now!” and posed the question, “Would Che Guevara, Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon chow here?”. Somebody had hurled a chunk of meaning so hard it had lodged in Babylon’s teflon face.
Across town in the Winston Pub, which is the legendary heart of Durban’s underground rock culture, somebody had carved deep into the plaster above the urinal, “Rage Against the Machine and Fugazi are good bands but Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara were good men so Wake The Fuck Up!”.
At the equally legendary Sunrise Cafe in Overport, people dropping in for roti — which in Durban follows a jol (party) as inevitably as the sun rises over the Indian Ocean — were picking up copies of the mysterious underground magazine Bunnychow. It carried an explicitly Fanonian review of the South African rappers Prophets of Da City’s latest album, printed over a shadowy picture of Steven Biko.
Fanon’s writings have inspired our best people, including Biko. Fanon’s status as both an heroic Che Guevara-style icon of resistance and a celebrated intellectual is unique.
Fanon was born as the fifth of eight children into a prosperous black family on the small Caribbean island of Martinique on June 20, 1925. Martinique was a French colony and his family saw themselves as French. A sensitive and gifted child, Fanon was enrolled at the prestigious Lycie Schoechler where Aime Cesaire — the Communist leader, poet and founder of Negritude (black pride) — taught language and literature. Fanon later became critical of Negritude but Cesaire was a potent influence.
When he was 15, 10,000 French sailors loyal to the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime were stationed in Martinique. Suddenly, Martinicans who had seen themselves as French realised that neither their class nor their education made them French in the eyes of French racists.
Three years later, in 1943, the Free French Forces were assembling on the neighbouring island of Dominica and Fanon managed to row there to join them. Before he left, a friend tried to dissuade him from risking his life for a “white man’s war” but Fanon famously replied that: “Each time liberty is in question, we are concerned, be we white, black or yellow; and each time freedom is under siege, no matter where, I will engage myself completely.”
When his battalion finally reached France, Fanon was disgusted by the racist response of the French people to the black and Arab soldiers amongst their liberators.
After the war Fanon returned to Martinique to finish high school. In 1946 he threw himself, with typical vitality, into Cesaire’s successful election campaign.
The following year he decided to study in France. He registered for a degree in psychiatric medicine in Lyon where he was one of 20 black students in a class of 400. He moved in Trotskyist circles and made time to read philosophy, edit a black student newspaper called Tam-Tam and write three plays. In 1952, he began his internship in a small local hospital and a year later published his first book, Black Skin, White Masks.
Black Skin, White Masks is an analysis of being black in an anti-black world. In the autobiographical section of the book, Fanon explained that he wanted to “come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together … I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man”. But his ambitions were thwarted by his blackness. He found himself “Sealed into … crushing objecthood”. “Since the other hesitated to recognise me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known … to assert myself as a Black Man.”
Fanon then trained under the progressive psychiatrist Francois Tosquelles, who insisted that patients must be understood in the context of family and community.
In 1953, he took up a post as the head of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria. On his first day at work, he found more than 2000 patients crammed into a small, racially segregated medieval-style institution with a staff of only six doctors and a patient waiting list of 850. Patients were often straightjacketed and chained to their beds and Fanon’s first act was to release the restrained patients. He set about rooting the hospital in Algerian culture and changing it from a prison to a community.
When the Algerian war of liberation began in 1954, Fanon secretly provided medical supplies and training to the National Liberation Front (FLN).
He found that his official duties required him to treat both the Algerian victims of torture and their French torturers. He realised that colonial society was insane and that his patients’ problems were a consequence of social rather than a personal pathology. He could not continue to treat the symptoms of disease while ignoring its causes and in 1956 he wrote a letter of resignation.
It was answered with an expulsion order and Fanon left for Tunisia. He worked in mobile medical centres on the Algerian border, headed a psychiatric clinic and lectured at the University of Tunis. He edited the FLN newspaper el Moudjahid and a number of his editorials were published after his death in a book called Towards the African Revolution.
Fanon was also involved in dangerous reconnaissance work. In 1959, 12 of his vertebrae were shattered and the lower half of his body paralysed when his jeep hit a land mine. He was sent to Rome for treatment where he narrowly avoided two assassination attempts but substantially recovered.
Later that year he published A Dying Colonialism, a study of the Algerian revolution. It included a chapter on the role of Algeria’s European minority that showed, through the use of case studies, that “Algeria’s European minority is far from being the monolithic block that one imagines”. Some Europeans had, even under severe torture, “behaved like authentic militants in the struggle for national independence”.
Fanon asked to be appointed as the FLN’s ambassador to Cuba but was instead appointed ambassador to Ghana in 1960. He survived another assassination attempt, this time in Liberia, before arriving in Ghana where he discovered that he had leukemia. He moved to the Soviet Union for treatment. Fanon was appalled by the Soviet psychiatric hospitals. His health improved enough for him to return to Tunis early in 1961 where he threw himself into writing The Wretched of the Earth.
The book, completed in just 10 weeks, opens with an analysis of revolutionary violence. Fanon argues that colonialism is built on systemic structural violence which eventually triggers a violent reaction. In his view the violent nature of that reaction is tragic but cathartic. Its catharsis lies in its ability to dissolve the inferiority complex of the colonised and to release the tension of a lifetime of violent oppression.
The second chapter deals with political spontaneity. Fanon argues that African political parties have tended to model themselves on European structures, have a bias to the urban and are unable to speak to the rural peasantry. He suggests that in the colonial situation the urban proletariat is relatively privileged and that, as with the Mau Mau in Kenya, spontaneous rural uprisings are more likely than organised urban insurrections.
In “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, the celebrated third chapter, Fanon argues that at the time of independence the national bourgeoisie will, in the name of nationalism, become the rapacious agent of Western capital.
He famously insists that “nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise up against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed. Nationalism is not a political doctrine, nor a programme. If you really wish your country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness.”
Fanon finally sought medical treatment for his cancer in the USA. He arrived in Washington on October 3, 1961. The CIA confined him to a hotel room where he was interrogated and denied access to medical treatment for eight days. He was finally admitted to hospital, where he was able to look over the first publishers’ proofs of The Wretched of the Earth. He died on December 6, 1961. He was 36.
His body was flown back to Tunisia and smuggled into Algeria where it was buried, in accordance with his wishes, at sunset on a battlefield. Three months later Algeria achieved its independence and the Blida-Joinville Hospital was renamed the Frantz Fanon Hospital.
The graffiti on the perimeter wall of Durban’s first McDonald’s was painted over after a few days. Bunnychow never got past issue seven and a cigarette advert was bolted over the message in the Winston Pub. But once you’ve encountered Fanon’s spirit you keep stumbling across it. It might be in one of Ashwin Desai’s columns in the Durban local paper, in a tiny philosophy class at university, in a trade unionist’s impassioned attack on neo-liberalism or in a bleary eyed zol- (marijuana) and sunrise-fuelled conversation at the end of a crumbling pier.
BY RICHARD PITHOUSE
[Richard Pithouse teaches philosophy at the Workers’ College and the University of Durban-Westville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He writes on politics, media and music for underground Durban publications.]