Fanon << fah NAWN >>, Frantz Omar (1925-1961), was a political theorist who became a leader of Algeria’s struggle to gain independence from France. A Black man, he also supported other African independence movements and helped strengthen ties between Arabs and Black nationalists of Africa.
Fanon was born on July 20, 1925, in the French colony of Martinique, one of a group of Caribbean islands called the French West Indies. As a young man, he studied psychiatry and medicine in France. He later worked in a hospital in Blida, Algeria. In 1956, Fanon joined the Algerian independence movement. For a time, he represented the movement as a diplomat in Ghana.
Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), is a psychological study of problems Black people face because of racism. In L’ An V de la revolution algerienne (1959)—published in English in 1965 as Studies in a Dying Colonialism—Fanon described the Algerians’ struggle for independence as both a social revolution resulting in changes in society and a nationalist movement. Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth (1961) made him famous. In it, Fanon argued that Algerians could achieve independence only through violent revolution. He died on Dec. 6, 1961.
