Frantz Fanon

It was 1953, in Blida, Algeria.

A young Black psychiatrist took charge of a ward at the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital. His name was Frantz Fanon.

He had come a long way.

He was born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique. His father was a customs officer, his mother a shopkeeper. He was the third of four sons, in a family of eight children.

At the Lycée Schœlcher, he discovered Négritude. Aimé Césaire taught there. He was never Fanon's teacher directly, but he became a guide.

In 1943, after the June uprising in Martinique, Fanon enlisted to fight with Free France.

In March 1944, he sailed for Morocco. There, in the Free French Forces, he met racial discrimination. It shocked him.

Later that year, near Montbéliard, in the Doubs, he was seriously wounded. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

After the war, he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. He qualified as a doctor in 1951.

He also trained at Saint-Alban, under the psychiatrist François Tosquelles. Tosquelles insisted on the role of culture.

In 1952, Black Skin, White Masks appeared, a book he had written in Lyon.

Then came Blida.

Fanon turned to sociotherapy to reach his patients' cultural world. He trained the nurses and the interns.

In November 1954, the Algerian war began. Fanon joined the National Liberation Front.

He treated French soldiers. And Algerians who were victims of torture.

In November 1956, he wrote his letter of resignation to the Resident Minister. One sentence from it has endured:

In January 1957, he was expelled from Algeria. He settled in Tunis and wrote for El Moudjahid, the FLN's newspaper.

In 1960, the Algerian provisional government named him ambassador to Ghana. That same year, he learned he had leukemia.

Treated in the Soviet Union, he went into remission. He then dictated one last book: The Wretched of the Earth. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote its preface. The book appeared in 1961.

Frantz Fanon died on December 6, 1961, in Bethesda, in the United States. He was thirty-six.

An Algerian honour guard carried his body to the martyrs' cemetery at Aïn Kerma, in eastern Algeria.

Fanon did not speak of Ubuntu. But his outlook echoes that wisdom without merging with it: you do not heal a person by tearing them away from their own people.

A doctor from a Caribbean island lies in another people's soil, among its martyrs.