Frantz Fanon's uneven legacy
George Fish
Platypus Review 185 | April 2026
HISTORY HAS NOT treated Frantz Fanon well as of 2025, the 100th anniversary of his birth. The apostle of violent, no-holds-barred revolution, even terrorism against uninvolved civilians, as a necessity for true independence for Africa from the yoke of European colonialism has been belied by the fact that most former African colonies achieved independence by peaceful means. Nor did violent revolution spare the former African colonies from adverse outcomes, as his own Algeria proves. The somewhat socialist National Liberation Front (FLN)[1] regime of Ben Bella was overthrown by a military coup from his Right led by Boumediene, and today Algeria is an Islamist hellhole, with Algerians leaving Algeria for France as essentially economic refugees. Nor did independence, achieved violently or otherwise, spare the new African nations from neoliberalism and even dictatorial dominance by indigenous elites, many of which thrived on the neoliberalism of their former colonial masters, as well as the United States. Resource-rich Africa remains impoverished, uneducated, and underdeveloped even after over 60 years, for the most part, since European colonialism ended. Even the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique have been independent since the mid-70s, black Zimbabwe triumphed over formerly white-ruled Rhodesia, and South Africa freed itself from white domination and apartheid in 1999. All of Africa now is independent, yet it remains the failed stepchild among former colonial empires. All this makes the Frantz Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth (1961), his most famous work, a failed prophet.
To commemorate Fanon’s centenary, I read (or re-read) Fanon’s four books in English published in paperback by the U.S.’s Grove Press in the 1960s, his entire book-length literary corpus: his most widely-read work, of course, The Wretched of the Earth (1961); Black Skin, White Masks (1952); A Dying Colonialism (1959); and the posthumously compiled Toward the African Revolution (1964). While Wretched is divided into five parts and a conclusion, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sarte, only the first part, which is Fanon’s defense of violent, mayhem-inducing revolution as a sine qua non of any real liberation struggle, is widely referred to. Indeed, even that part owes more of its popularity (or nefariousness, if you will) to Sarte’s preface in its defense, with its militant European Leftist self-abasement and guilt-tripping masochism celebrating the Third World as the new seedbed of revolutionary struggle. The second, third, and fourth parts of Wretched are abstract and uneven, but what seems implicit in Fanon’s arguments is his denial of Pan-Africanism or a particular African culture in favor of the uniquely situated “nationalisms” of each particular African colony struggling for independence (“nationalisms” is Fanon’s chosen word). However, Wretched’s quite notable fifth part, “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders,” has Fanon speaking as the trained psychiatrist he was. It scrupulously demonstrates how the violence and use of torture during the Algerian Revolution distorted and debased the mental states of both victim and perpetrator, and in many cases, led directly to mental disorders — an insight that Fanon conveniently ignored in his celebration of all-out violence by the colonized in the first part. Such violence, although it may provide immediate and temporary catharsis, debases the perpetrator, and as Fanon shows in the fifth part of Wretched, may lead to mental disorders.
Further, for Fanon, the revolutionist of the first part, it is not the organized proletariat of the colonized countries that will be the vanguard of the revolution, as they are too privileged and sold out, and dependent on European-style trade-union structures. No, the revolutionary vanguard of the anticolonial struggle is the “lumpenproletariat” (Fanon’s very word) of the peasantry and the urban shantytown poor, as they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And though the conclusion states boldly, “Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe,”[2] Fanon actually embraces as universally valid the European humanism he imbibed as a student from Martinique in France. He sees this humanism, flawed and often — especially in the colonies — not put into practice, as still needed for true colonial liberation; and needed in tandem with a vision of the new independent society as quasi-socialist, where his colonial brethren will at last exercise genuine self-determination.
This last theme is also part and parcel of A Dying Colonialism, where Fanon, the ideologist of revolution, also takes on the mantle of activist sociologist of revolution, delineating how involvement in the revolutionary struggle led to positive transformations of both traditional society and the individuals involved. Fanon discusses the adoption of the veil among colonized Algerian women as a way of affirming a rejection of French Enlightenment-based colonialism by self-conscious adoption of the traditional Muslim way of female dress — an adoption, Fanon pointedly notes, that is also “reactionary.” Fanon further affirms how the traditional society and social norms were undermined by both men and women in the struggle against colonialism. His flaw in A Dying Colonialism, though, is that he merely asserts what he needs to actually demonstrate.
The FLN was formed to lead the Algerian independence struggle in 1954, and Fanon joined it in 1956, leaving his psychiatric post in Algiers to move to Tunis, and become a publicist for the FLN. He now adopted the identity of an Algerian, whereas previously he’d considered himself a Martinican, from the French West Indies, who were considered “better” than the colonized Africans, even as Fanon chafed at the discrimination he suffered because he was not fully a “Frenchman.” In the last days of his life, his identity shifted again, and he saw himself as an African. Albert Memmi’s most illuminating essay “The Impossible Life of Franz Fanon” gives an excellent and informative overview of Fanon’s shifting identities.[3]
The FLN consciously adopted terminology and norms taken from traditional Islam in support of its avowedly secular and modernist aim in the fight for independence. To Fanon, though, independence is enough. Fanon sees the struggle for independence from colonialism as sufficient for achieving a broader social transformation. Here he was clearly wrong, as independence by itself did not guarantee a broader social transformation for liberation. “We were liberated from the foe, that’s all,” the Who sang in their song of revolution and betrayal, “Won’t Be Fooled Again.”[4] One thinks here of independent Tunisia and other newly emancipated Arab states declaring themselves Islamic ones.
Peter Hudis, in an essay in the U.S. socialist magazine Against the Current, writing in defense of the Frantz Fanon who penned Wretched (all save two of his direct quotes from Fanon are taken from Wretched), tries to make the case that Fanon’s formulations here are still directly relevant to revolutionary socialism today.[5] He fails in this regard as presented in my critiques of Fanon above. Hudis’s essay is based on a lesser biography of Fanon prepared for this 100th anniversary of his birth, rather than the definitive biography of Fanon prepared by Adam Shatz, U.S. editor of the London Review of Books.[6] But an important point about Fanon that Hudis does address is, although the FLN was becoming more hierarchical and authoritarian — even killing Fanon’s own mentor in the FLN, the “secular socialist” (Hudis’s term) Ramdane Albane — Fanon remained an uncritically loyal foot-soldier and publicist for the FLN. And while Fanon had caveats about one-party rule after the struggle for independence was achieved, he advocated for one-party rule during that struggle.
Fanon had joined the FLN in 1956, and remained absolutely loyal and unquestioning of it until his death from leukemia in 1961. The bulk of Toward the African Revolution consists of articles he published on behalf of the FLN. Here he states baldly that independence achieved nonviolently would only be a victory for the former colonialists, who would impose neoliberalism on the newly emancipated nations. The reality is, of course, that neoliberalism came to the newly emancipated states whether they achieved independence nonviolently or not, and that many former African colonies did achieve independence nonviolently. This is to confuse a political process with economic arrangements. Further, not only is Africa today exclusively capitalist (no socialist regime exists in Africa today, not even a bowdlerized one such as that of the Bolsheviks from 1917 on), it is also ruled overwhelmingly by dictatorships, or by regimes that may preach tolerance and respect for rights on the outside, but which have little or no tolerance for independent opposition parties or trade unions within. As for African socialism, Irwin Silber’s Socialism: What Went Wrong?[7] critiques the varieties developed, which have little or no basis in Marxism or even its Bolshevik degeneration, but which borrowed wholesale from the Bolsheviks the practice of one-party rule, as so many other revolutionaries of the global South have done.
Such is the legacy of Frantz Fanon the revolutionist 64 years after his death. As I’ve shown above, it is an empty one for the most part, stunningly irrelevant to Africa today in 2025, the continent that Fanon adopted as his own as an initially colonized person from the West Indian French colony of Martinique. But is there another side to Fanon’s legacy? Yes, there is, and it’s a positive one! It is the legacy of Fanon, the trained psychiatrist, who used the analytical tools of psychiatry to analyze the plight of the “better-off” colonized, as in his native Martinique; those who were “guests” in France, notably as either students or workers; and those of Africa, and pointedly notes how they were played off against each other. The colonized of Martinique were “better” than the colonized of Africa, and those colonized who were students in France, or who were workers in France, were better off than those who remained in the colonies. Fanon also tellingly critiques the rationalizations of psychiatry toward these colonized, presenting them as naturally inferior, and beset with mental incapacities. All this is well delineated in Black Skin, White Masks, the two essays published in L’Esprit and Esprit at the beginning of Toward the African Revolution, and the fifth part of Wretched. Tellingly, when Black Skin, White Masks was published in English, it was openly attacked by 1960s New Leftists, principally because it was praised by “reformist” Civil Rights leaders. This was, of course, the same New Left that uncritically praised the Black Panther Party and its vaguely anti-capitalist “revolutionary nationalism” and “taking up the gun.” This analysis is also upheld by an excellent article by Tim Black in Spiked titled “Frantz Fanon’s struggle for freedom.”[8]
This othering of the colonized has a broader applicability for the Othering of all marginalized people, be they women, racial and ethnic minorities, the LBGTQ community, the disabled, or immigrants. Also relevant is psychiatry’s complicity in rationalizing this othering by pseudo-medical arguments that the others are others because of inherent faults and limitations. Think of Freud’s exasperated question, “What does a woman want?” It never occurred to Freud that perhaps what she wants is equality with men, not subordination to them! Thanks to Fanon, we have all this presented before us eloquently.
Lastly, while Fanon was a nationalist, he was not a national chauvinist. He praised the Europeans who supported the Algerian Revolution or joined the FLN, even the Algerian pieds-noirs[9]who did. He also speaks positively of the Jews who backed the Revolution. While Sartre, in his preface to Wretched, mocks those such as Algerian-born Albert Camus, who called upon us to be “neither victims nor executioners,” he blindly and arrogantly fails to understand Camus, who wrote his famous short book Neither Victims Nor Executioners (1946),[10] precisely because he knew all too well that victims themselves could become executioners. Though Sartre does not mention Camus by name, he disparages the whole notion of “neither victims nor executioners.”
The above makes Camus’s tome an excellent additional read to any reading of Fanon, especially as to the use of unbridled violence. (Camus, while a supporter of Algerian decolonization, was most uneasy about the FLN’s use of terrorism, pointedly sharing that his own grandmother could be a victim of such.) Also relevant as a supplement to Fanon is Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957),[11]which is far more nuanced and perspicacious. But then, one should always read more, read all that one can find that is relevant, and never take one book or one author as holy writ infallible for all cases, for all times. But unfortunately, that is not the way much of the Left reads Fanon, or ever will read him. This, then, sums up the uneven legacy of Frantz Fanon. |P
[1] Front de libération nationale, the main nationalist movement during the Algerian War (1954-1962), is currently a political party in Algeria.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 252.
[3] Albert Memmi, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” The Massachusetts Review 14, no. 1 (Winter 1973).
[4] The Who, “Won’t Be Fooled Again,” in Who’s Next (London: Track Record, 1971).
[5] Peter Hudis, “Frantz Fanon in the Present Moment,” Against the Current 238 (September–October 2025), <https://againstthecurrent.org/atc238/frantz-fanon-in-the-present-movement/>. Hudis’s essay reviews Nigel Gibson, Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing (Hoboken: Polity Press, 2024).
[6] Adam Shatz, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).
[7] Irwin Silber, Socialism: What Went Wrong? An Inquiry into the Theoretical and Historical Sources of the Socialist Crisis (Boulder: Pluto Press, 1994).
[8] Tim Black, “Frantz Fanon’s struggle for freedom,” Spiked (July 20, 2025), <https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/20/frantz-fanons-struggle-for-freedom/>.
[9] [French] Literally, “black feet”; these were people of European descent who were born in Algeria during the period of French colonial rule (1830–1962).
[10] Published in November 1946 as a series of essays in Combat, a French Resistance newspaper founded during World War Two.
[11] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965).
