‘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.
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