A psychiatrist from Martinique, he diagnosed colonialism itself as a form of mental illness imposed on the colonized.
Frantz Fanon was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1925, a French colony in the Caribbean. He served in the Free French forces during World War II, then studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, where he encountered racial discrimination that shaped his intellectual trajectory.1
In 1952, at the age of twenty-seven, Fanon published Black Skin, White Masks, a study of the psychological effects of colonialism on both colonizer and colonized. He argued that the colonial system forced Black people to wear white masks, adopting the language, values, and self-image of the colonizer as conditions of advancement.2
Fanon was posted to the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria in 1953, where he treated both Algerian patients traumatized by colonial violence and French soldiers traumatized by the violence they had inflicted.3 The experience radicalized him. He resigned from his position in 1956 and joined the Algerian independence movement.
His work connected labor and identity in ways few others had attempted. Colonial systems did not merely extract labor from subject populations. They restructured the inner life of the colonized, creating what Fanon described as a zone of non-being, where the colonized person existed only as a function of the colonizer's economy.4
In 1961, dying of leukemia, Fanon dictated The Wretched of the Earth in ten weeks. The book analyzed the mechanics of colonial control and the psychological process of decolonization. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote its preface.5
Fanon died on December 6, 1961, at the age of thirty-six, in Bethesda, Maryland, where he had sought treatment. He did not live to see Algerian independence, which came seven months later.6 His argument that economic systems reshape the psychology of those who labor within them anticipated later research on internalized oppression, workplace identity, and the hidden costs of assimilation.