Frantz Fanon: A revolutionary life explored in Adam Shatz’s compelling new biography

style="font-weight: 400;">The Battle of Algiers, depicting three decisive years in the FLN’s struggle for independence; its outstanding cinematography make it perhaps one of the most realistic depictions of an anti-colonial uprising and the savage response it elicited from a wounded France. 

In the definitive history of that struggle, historian Alexander Horne called it A Savage War of Peace, and given that conflict’s historical significance it’s strange how little it is remembered or studied by activists today. After all, Algiers was the fulcrum in which many of Fanon’s beliefs about the struggle against colonialism, and his prescient warnings of revolutions to be betrayed, were formed.

Activists ignore history at our peril.

Read more: The Dea(r)th of history and the price we pay in the present 

But as much as it is about a battle of arms, it is the battle of ideas that really captivated me.

In its depiction of Fanon in France at a time when it was leading the world in a ferment of thought, The Rebel’s Clinic offers up a captivating recreation of the intellectual and political milieu in which some of the strands of pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism were being forged. In a kind of intellectual ping-pong we see the bounds and rebounds of ideology, the different threads of thought and action. 

Whether in the rebound or by embrace, Fanon’s thinking and practice was shaped by intellectual engagement with people as diverse as the poet-politicians Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire; the writer activists James Baldwin and Richard Wright; the revolutionaries Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba; not to mention Siegmund Freud and all mid-twentieth century thinkers on psychiatry, the original coalface for Fanon’s practice of what became known as “disalienation”. 

Quite a broth.

Iron in the soul 

His on-off relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre is a sub-plot in itself. 

In August 1961, as Fanon’s leukaemia was worsening, he spent a weekend with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Rome. The conversation that filled their hours together feels like it could provide the raw material for a play by Samuel Beckett. 

Shatz comments how De Beauvoir “likened it to a scene from an anti-colonial version of Sartre’s play No Exit, whose three characters find themselves locked in a room together for eternity.”

“In Rome, Fanon gave the performance of a lifetime: the monologue of a young, dying black revolutionary, delivered in front of an older white man who shares his convictions yet declines to sever ties with the society he condemns.” 

A few weeks later Sartre wrote the Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, delivered literally days  before Fanon’s death. Said Sartre: “the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice”. But while that might be seen as a coup for a then relatively unknown writer, according to Shatz, Fanon didn’t like it. 

Finally — in its depiction of the battle of/for ideas The Rebel’s Clinic should prompt contemporary social justice activists to appreciate the intellectual work that must underlie activism, the interrogation of ideologies and the search for a critical theory of what is happening in society on which to base strategy and tactics. It should also remind us of the way in which the genesis of truly revolutionary activism is not a superficial process, but often draws its inspiration from writing, culture and even medicine.

Shatz, for example, points out how the poet Derek Walcott, from the nearby island of St Lucia, was a contemporary of Fanon’s and how, in his early years, “Martinique’s writers — Cesaire above all — would supply him with a vocabulary for thinking about what it meant to be black and colonised in a white-dominated world.”

A thought too about how we write! Fanon’s writing was dictated to people who were close to him, supporting Shatz’s conclusion that “Fanon’s writing, which is often cited by French language rappers, is a record of what were essentially spoken-word performances.” 

Fanon died of leukemia on 6 December 1961. He was only 36 and a few months old. 

Like Bob Marley, another Caribbean island boy who 20 years later would die at exactly the same age, by then Fanon had launched ideas about rebellion and freedom that would spread across the world after his death. The passion and urgency that exudes from The Wretched of the Earth (a copy was put into his hands only days before his death) is the passion of a man who knew he was dying and was in a race against time to express his ideas and present an alternative world view. But, says Shatz, when told about one of the first positive reviews, his response was: “It won’t give me back my bone marrow.”

Fanon’s 100th birthday would have been on 20 July 2025. Had he lived another 50 years, he would have witnessed a domino effect as one “national bourgeoisie” after another betrayed the freedoms promised by decolonisation in Africa. For me, the Fanon of the future hinges less on his remarkable prescience, than his life’s example of determination and fallibility, willing the revolution to succeed and fear of its betrayal. The Wretched of the Earth would certainly not have been his last word. DM