by Frantz Fanon

Born in 1925, Frantz Fanon grew up in a middle-class black family in the French West Indian colony of Martinique. He was one of the 4 percent of black Martinique children whose families could afford to send them to lycée for a European-style secondary education. During World War II, when Martinique was occupied by the Nazis, Fanon fought for the Free French in Europe (the exile forces led by General Charles de Gaulle after France fell to the Nazis in 1940). He later studied psychiatry in Lyon, France. Fanon first went to Algeria as a member of the French colonial administration and, in 1953, became one of the directors of a French psychiatric hospital there. Finding his sympathies turning toward the Algerian Nationalist movement, Fanon joined the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which sought to end French colonial rule...