The Contribution of

Frantz Fanon to the Process

of the Liberation of the People
by Mireille Fanon-Mends France, translated by Donato Fhunsu

ANON, whether the issue is insanity, racism, or

"universalism" hijacked by the powerful, does
not, really, cease to posit the possibility of a "living together" in the form of a translation into
tangible acts of the situation in which both those
who dominate and those who are dominated have
aU to lose if the current orders and disorders continue. Fanon, that indomitable spirit, that rebel
who stubbornly and without respite struggled
against the domination exercised by the powerful
on the powerless, enlightens us today concerning
the fundamental articulation between the right to
rebellion against a social, political, and economic
system that sinks the world into disorder and a
new type of colonization. Thus, colonial violence
seems to have given way to an indirect violence,
the colonial order has contaminated the land of
the colonizers. Through a paradox of which history holds the secret, the "indigenous" is omnipresent, not only in his place of origin, but also
in what Fanon used to call the "forbidden cities"
where the renewed forms of discrimination are
implemented. In The Wretched of the Earth, he re-

marks that:
[T|he world of the colonized is a world divided in two
(...). The area inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the area inhabited by the colonizers.
These two areas are opposed but not in the service of a
superior unity (...). This world, compartmentalized in
two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that the economic realities,
the inequalities, the enormous difference in lifestyles,
never manage to mask the human realities.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of his

death, which occurred on the 6th of December
of 1961, we should note that, despite the progPage 8 THE BLACK SCHOLAR

Symposium keynote speaker, Mireille Fanon-Mends

France, the daughter of Fanon and president of the Fondation Frantz Fanon in Paris. (Photo by Rylanda Nick-

erson)

ress that the world has thus far made. Fanon is

astonishingly current, even though colonialism
in its old forms has disappeared and many states,
freed from colonial oppression, have come into
existence.

OES THIS mean that dispossession, alienation,

and injustice have disappeared from the
world? On the contrary, in many respects, an impartial observer could say, in light of the bloody
imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya,
and also the colonial war in Palestine, that the
politics of the canon, on which the colonial empires are founded, has returned to active service.
Fanon's action and work took shape in the
aftermath of World War II when the world was
marked by an ideological struggle, with a clear
demarcation, between the Western bloc and the

VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

socialist bloc. It is in this context that a Third

Worldwhich had affirmed its political existence during the Bandung Conference in 1955
emerged in the 1950s and 1960s and claimed its
place in internadonal relations as well as its share
of the planet's resources by rejecting the bipolarizadon of the world.
It is in this context that Fanon worked out his
reflection on the role of violence in the process
of liberation and on the risks incurred by the
former colonized nations once they had become
independent.
Fanon's intellectual producdon has gready influenced revolutionaries throughout the world, in
Africa but also in Asia and in the Americas. His
writings cannot be dissociated from the historical circumstances in which they were produced,
but their relevance is intact, and they condnue to
inspire new generations of militants and intellectuals in the global south as well as in the north.
The leading perspectives that Fanon developed
remain effective tools for analyzing the currency
of a world in which domination and exploitation
have changed appearances but are stiU run by
mechanisms that have remained, fundamentally,
unchanged.
To give an account of Fanon's contribution to
the process of the liberation of the people consists in presenting the various stages of his ufe,
the positions he took, and the development and
formuladon of his thought. His work matches his
densely short life, both being marked by a staunch
revolt against injustice, as well as the reality principle and the ethics of commitment.
Political Awakening

HE SECOND WORLD WAR was the event that

triggered the political awakening of the
young Fanon. Spontaneously anti-fascist and
already transladng his rejecdon of Nazism into
a concrete commitment. Fanon left the family
home and secredy went to join, as a volunteer,
the Free French Forces who were fighting Nazi
Germany.
Decorated by the French colonial army, he really never had the feeling of being part of the liberators. In a letter to his parents, written in 1944,
he expressed the extent of his disillusionment
this way: "I made a mistake. Nothing, absolutely
nothing, justifies the hurried decision that I took
to defend the interests of the land lord: whether I
Page 9 THE BLACK SCHOLAR

defend him or not, he doesn't give a damn."

Fanon must have noticed that the forces mobilized against Nazism were harboring their own
racist ideology and were semi-officially practicing
racial and ethnic discrimination. The uniform,
which was supposed to represent the equality
among the soldiers, hardly masked the intolerable inequalities in the treatment between blacks
and whites.
After he was discharged, he returned to Mardnique and then went back to France where he enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Lyon, where,
besides his courses, he attended the lectures given
by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, read
Sartre's magazine, Les Temps Modernes, and took a
special interest in Freud and Hegel.
In hisfirstbook. Black Skin, White Maskswhich
was supposed to be his doctoral thesispublished
in 1952, Fanon invoked this inidal collision with
European racism that he discovered precisely in
the anti-fascist army of de Gaulle. His intellectual understanding of a racism that encompasses
both the body and the discourse is remarkably
current, especially in light of the "decomplexed"
resurgence of racist discourse in Europe. This
phenomenon has, today in France, reached the
football schools for young children, all born in the
same country, but who, through a racist nodon of
"pure stock," have provoked an undignified debate on quotas based on skin color, origins, and
supposed "specific" physical aptitudes.
Black Skin, White Masks is a fundamental milestone in the struggle against racism, in the decoding of the mechanisms of segregation and
racism's political stakes. Analyzing the inner
workings of racism and its impact on those who
are dominated. Fanon contested the concept of
Ngritude developed by Senghor and Csaire in
ardculadng the struggle against racism into a universal movement for the de-alienadon of both the
victims of racism as well as the racists themselves.
As a psychiatrist, he revisited the therapeutic
methods based on the coercion and violence built
into tradidonal hospital psychiatry.
Algeria and the
African Liberation Struggles

N 1953, at the age of twenty-nine, he arrived at

the Psychiatric Hospital of Blida and was
scandalized to observe that the psychiatric school
of colonial Algeria classified the Algerian Arabs

VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

as "primitive," affirming that their cerebral development was "retarded." Thus, for the colonial psychiatrists, the pathological behaviors of
the indigenous people were due to genetic causes
and thtis were incurable. Fanon, being close to his
patients and their families, discovered then the raw
manifestation of a hierarchy of races and of a violent segregation comparable to apartheid.
The start of the war of national liberation on
the first of November of 1954 naturally had an
impact on the hospital, since the installation was
caring for those who were traumatized by the violence, those who were tortured, as well as the
perpetrators of those tortures (some case are mentioned in The Wretched of the Earth).

Through the intermediary of the militants of

the Algerian national cause, of the physicians and
activists who cared for the wounded muhajadin, he
entered into direct contact with the National liberation Front (NLF). In 1956, when the government
adopted a policy of generalized brutal military repression, he resigned his position at the hospital,
stating that, as a psychiatrist, he could not release
his patients into a society that fundamentally alienated and dehumanized them. Expelled from Algeria by the colonial authorities in January of 1957,
he went to Tunis, the external headquarters of the
Algerian Revolution.

E RESUMED his professional activities in Tunis

while at the same time immersing himself in
the political actions of the NLF. He was a journalist for El Moudjahid and was named itinerant
ambassador in Africa by the Algerian government
in exile. He successively traveled to Ghana, where
he met Kwame Nkrumah and studied the problems posed by the constitution of an independent
African state; to the Congo, where he met Patrice
Lumumba, to Ethiopia, to Liberia, to Guinea, and
to Mali. His goal was to popularize the struggle of
the Algerian people through the consolidation of
aUiances With the peoples of Africa and the implementation of the internationalism that characterized his vision of the emancipation struggles.
Thus Fanon's talks with the leaders of MaJi led
to the opening, in 1960, of a new front in the south
of Algeria and to which Guinea provided weapons.
He even played an important role in the shipment
of Soviet weapons to the Western front, secured
thanks to the solidarity of President Skou Tour.
In 1959, the French publisher Franois Maspero published Fanon's second book. Year 5 of
Page 10 THE BLACK SCHOLAR

the Algerian Revolution. This book not only accused

France of mass crimes against the Algerian population (nearly fifty years after the independence
of Algeria, France has difficulty acknowledging
its crimes, just as it has difficulty accepting its
heavy responsibility in the systematic plundering
of Africa and finds it impossibledespite a law
that acknowledges slavery and the slave trade as
crimes against humanityto fully open the pages
of this dark chapter of French history), but it also
was an analysis of the inner workings of the Algerian revolution and the transformation that the
revolution triggered in a society that was dominated, humiliated and pauperized. Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution was banned in France, but the ban
only made people in Africa and the Third World
want to talk more about Fanon. He was invited to
international conferences, where people carefully
listened to what he had to say, and this made him
a target of the French authorities.
In the spring of 1961, he was set to deliver
a manuscript to his publisher. It was the manuscript of The Wretched of the Earth, which deals
not only with Algeria, but also generally with the
Third World in the process of decolonization. On
December 3, 1961, he received the book at the
Bethesda Naval Hospital, in Maryland. Three
days later, he died of leukemia.
In 1962, Maspero published a tribute to Fanon
in the literary magazine Prsence Afcaine; he also
sought to publish his complete works by looking
for the texts that Fanon had published, usually
anonymously, in the clandestine newspaper of the
NLF, El Moudjahid. The book was Toward the African Revolution,finallypublished in 1964; Ernesto
Che Guevara translated it into Spanish.
Fanon's Postcolonial Vision

N 1961, WHEN FANON WROTE The Wretched of the

Earth, he thought that the colonial era was irrevocably left behind, and what was then at issue
was the evolution of the freed states. For Fanon,
the construction of a just and prosperous society
required that its men and women undergo an integral liberation from the colonial yoke, so it was
vital to identify the deficiencies and eliminate the
sequels of the devastating colonial presence.
One of the chapters of The Wretched of the
Earth, "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,"
is a call to the peoples who had been freed from
the colonial enterprise to promote productive

VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

elites, endowed with political conscience and motivated by a sense of public interest. If the newly
independent countries did not manage to educate their eutes, then what would prevail would
be a culture of racketeers who would simply be
the caricature of their Western mentors, in their
behavior and their patterns of consumption. The
liberation movements would become one-party
regimes, and we would see a "modern form of
bourgeois dictatorship, without mask, v\dthout
make-up, without scruple and cynical." In the absence of truly national perspectives, the path to
"tribalist dictatorships" would open; in playing up
the ethnic divisions and the borders "inherited"
from colonialism, these new powers, supported
by the masters of yesterday, would end up causing the disintegration of the new states. These
warnings were pronounced at the dawn of the
independences, which had been celebrated with
enthusiasm and fervor. The alarm that Fanon's
clearheaded analysis sounded was an astonishing
premonition of the abuses that could befall the
postcolonial states. He described, years in advance, the neocolonial pathology, the domination
by submission to the interests of the former colonial mtropoles that the corrupt and anti-popular
national governments perpetuate. If the colonial
structures do not explain by themselves the failure
of the African independences, this half a century
has seen a merciless demonstration of the time
bombs handed down by the colonial powers. The
independence of the colonized countries was, for
Fanon, a preliminary and necessary step, but was
in no way the end of the process of liberation.

ANON WAS one of the thinkers of the Algerian

Revolution, which existed beyond any
dogmatic reduction or doctrinal interpretation.
He was a progressive and anti-imperialist without
any "theological" reference to Marxism, close,
but without any allegiance to the socialist camp.
As the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein noted
in a lapidary but very accurate formula, "Fanon
read Marx with the eyes of Freud, and read Freud
with the look of Marx."
The liberation and de-alienation of the human being were for Fanon the ultimate goal of
political struggle, without pathos, without rigidity,
but without concession either.
He was an indivisible man who could not be
reduced to any particular dimension of his struggles; he was an anti-racist in the name of universality and an anti-colonialist in the name of justice and liberties. In him there existed neither the
Page 11 THE BLACK SCHOLAR

will for revenge nor for the stigmatization of the

whites, despite the way some would like to present
him today, those mock theorists of existentialism
and of the so-called clash of civilizations. His detractors, who emerge from the camp of neo-conservative "intellectuals," have attempted to subject
him to a watch hunt under a supposed apology of
violence, thus demonstrating their ignorance of
Fanon's work and their own racist fad faith. The
violence that Fanon did defendas a last-resort
means that those who have been negated, exploited, and reduced to slavery have for reconquering
the selfwas the violence of legitimate defense of
the oppressed who are subjected to the still major
violence of domination, dispossession and contempt.
This breadth of reach has survived him beyond
generations. His analysis of social pathologies and
' racial politics is astonishingly current; his political,
psychological, and social analysis reaches beyond
the context in which it was done, thus manifesting
an outstanding freshness and relevancy.

IS clear-headedness and his independence,

far from isolating him, despite the challenge
from "orthodox" Marxists who were prisoners to
dogma, have allowed him to win the esteem and
the respect of fighters for freedom and independence. Fanon was a major reference for infiuential
militants, such as Commandant Che Guevara,
Amilcar Cabrai, Agostinho Neto, Nelson Mandela, Mehdi Ben Barka, and many others.
In Africa and in Europe, Fanon seems today
more relevant than ever. He makes sense for the
African advocates of freedom and human rights;
he makes sense also for all the Africans and Arabs against whom are expressed, in the media as
well as in the words of the elites of some states,
a shameless racism, thus violently unleashing a
thoughtless racism also in the masses.
This makes sense because emancipation is always the first goal of those generations who reach
the age of political maturity. Many Africans have
learned that this struggle for freedom, democracy, and human rights is carried out against local despots but also against the sponsors of the
neocolonial orders who protect them, use them
to plunder local resources and reject them when
they have served their time.
Fanon's thought continues today to inspire those
who fight for the progress of humanity everywhere
on the planet. In a world where the system of oppression and of annihilation of all that is human

VOLUME 42, NO. 3-4

continues to adapt and renew itself, his thought is

an antidote against giving up. That thought is the
weapon of a clear passion for the unending fight
for freedom, justice, and dignity for all men and
women. The liberation of peoples and individuals
from enslavement and alienation is still a goal, and
fuU emancipation still remains a future attainment.
If Fanon were stiU alive today, he certainly
would not have wanted to be considered a
canonical authority outside the context of his
struggle and his written testimony.

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