The Psychiatrist in the Colony

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, a French citizen. He fought for France in the Second World War. He trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon. In 1953 he took a post in Algeria, and the following year the war against French rule began.

He treated Algerians. He also treated French soldiers, including men whose work was interrogation.

Everything he wrote comes out of that position, and it is the part most reliably dropped from accounts of him.

Black Skin, White Masks appeared in 1952. Its argument is that colonial rule does not merely constrain the colonised from outside; it installs itself inside them. The categories of the dominant become the categories through which the dominated understand themselves, so that a person can come to measure their own worth using a scale built to place them at the bottom.

That is a claim about psychology, made by somebody with patients, and it is not a metaphor. It also connects directly to the previous chapter: Du Bois described the doubled consciousness, and Fanon is describing the mechanism by which it is produced and maintained.

The Wretched of the Earth appeared in 1961, shortly before he died of leukaemia at thirty-six.

Its treatment of violence is what he is famous for and most often misread on. The argument is not that violence is good, or purifying in some simple sense. It is that colonial rule is itself violence, maintained continuously, and that describing the situation as peaceful until the colonised respond is a description available only from one side of it.

On that reading the question is never whether violence enters the situation. It is who is permitted to name it as violence, and that permission tracks power rather than events.

You can disagree with this, and many have. What is harder to do honestly is disagree with a version of it that does not exist, which is the usual approach.

Here is the part nearly every reading omits, from both his admirers and his critics.

The same book contains case notes about what the war did to the people conducting it. French soldiers with symptoms produced by what they had done. That material sits alongside the famous arguments, written by a doctor professionally obliged to treat whoever was brought in.

It complicates the picture considerably. He is describing damage running in both directions through a single relationship, and he is doing it from a position almost nobody else has ever occupied.

The last claim worth stating is the one with the longest reach.

Political independence is not sufficient, because the categories remain after the administration leaves. A state can change hands while the measures of worth inside people's heads do not, and a country can be free in international law while its educated class still evaluates itself by a standard imported from the people who left.

That is a claim about what has to change for a change to be real, and it applies well beyond the colonies he was writing about.