Locating Frantz Fanon in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Mabogo Percy More, Journal of Asian & African Studies

There is a huge re-emergence of Frantz Fanon’s ideas and an equally huge interest in his work in post-apartheid South Africa, both in the academy and social movement and organizations. Contrary to some commentators, particularly his biographers, this article aims to locate Fanon within the South African struggle for liberation. It is argued here that Fanon, throughout his life, as evidenced by his writings, was highly concerned about apartheid just as he was about French Algerian colonialism. For him, the paper claims, apartheid was synonymous with colonialism and therefore his critique of colonialism was just as much a critique of apartheid. The resurgence of his name and ideas in the country is a consequence of this critique.

Frantz Fanon: A Spiritual Biography

by Patrick Ehlen, 2001

This brief, informative biography of the West Indian philosopher, psychiatrist, writer and Third World revolutionary explores Fanon's widespread influence on human and civil rights leaders on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1950s and `60s. Using Fanon's own writings, interviews granted by his family, and secondary sources, psychologist and poet Ehlen, a professor at the New School, paints a complete portrait of a thinker and activist driven by a deep political and philosophical commitment to freedom from colonial oppression and fascism, who was profoundly shaped by his cloistered middle-class upbringing in the French colony of Martinique and his service in WWII, for which he was awarded the coveted Croix de Guerre. As a psychiatrist, Fanon (1925-1961) became intensely interested in Marxist thought and the political plight of the oppressed in Africa and America, ultimately writing three seminal guides for those seeking social change (Black Skins, White Masks [1952], A Dying Colonialism [1959] and The Wretched of the Earth [1968]), which won him prominent friends and supporters like Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir and Richard Wright.

Frantz Fanon: A Portrait by Alice Cherki

"Fanon was consummately incapable of telling the story of himself. He lived in the immediacy of the moment, with an intensity that embodied everything he evoked. Fanon’s discourse pertained to a present tense that was unburdened by its narrative past. The little we knew about his personal life had been gleaned from passing allusions, brief glimpses that vanished as quickly as they appeared. . . . Fanon had a profound talent for life; he was a man who wanted to be the subject and actor of his own life, and it was for this reason that he was so engaging and disarming—so alive."— from the Introduction