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A remarkable life
MARJORIE MAYO is enthralled by a new biography of the Martiniquan anti-colonialist and psychiatrist
REVOLUTIONARY: Frantz Fanon (standing sixth from left) and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956
[Public Domain]
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Frantz Fanon
by James S Williams, Reaktion Books £12.99
FRANTZ FANON (1925-1961) was a phenomenon, as this new biography sets out to explain.
In his short life (cut off by leukaemia at the age of 36) Fanon had been a soldier, fighting fascism in the second world war, a militant in North Africa during the Algerian war of Independence (1954-1962), an innovative psychiatrist, an ambassador, a journalist, a pan-Africanist internationalist and one of the most influential thinkers on anti-colonialism of his time.
Growing up in colonial Martinique, Fanon imbibed the assumption that French education would enable black students from the colonies, like himself, to become assimilated – and to think of themselves as being culturally white. He was only to discover the reality of racism when he reached France and experienced this for himself.
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