‘If I’d died in my thirties, what would be left behind?’ is the question that keeps coming to mind reading this timely new biography of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and philosopher who became an icon to leftist revolutionaries across the globe. ‘Would I want history to judge me by what I wrote at 36?’ For that was the absurdly young age at which Fanon died of leukaemia in 1961, leaving two key works to his name: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Not a huge legacy, then, in sheer numbers of words.
But it was enough to seal his reputation as both a chronicler of one of the 20th century’s most important independence movements and a thinker whose examination of the damage done by colonial racism influenced decades of activists, from Che Guevara in Cuba to Steve Biko in South Africa and the Black Panthers in the US. His star did not burn long, but it burned bright.
Before he died, Fanon was becoming the rallying voice for anti-colonial movements across the developing world
The Black Lives Matter movement makes his ideas more topical than ever, so it is strangely jarring to be reminded that Fanon’s own reference points were Freud and Hegel, and that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the contemporaries he met and sought to impress. Theirs feel like voices from another era; he seems a man of our time.
Fanon made up for his short lifespan by trying out new roles at breakneck speed. Within a few years of leaving his native Martinique to fight Nazi Germany – a loyal young Frenchman inspired by Republican values – he was registering the impact of systemic racism at medical school in Lyon and psychiatric clinics in southern France and French-occupied Algeria. That understanding fed his decision to embrace the FLN liberation movement as his own.
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