Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinique-born French West Indian psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and pan-Africanist, renowned for his seminal works on the psychological and sociological effects of colonialism and racism. His writings, particularly Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, are cornerstones of anti-colonial and anti-racist thought, influencing fields like post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.
Remembering Fanon A Hundred Years On
Verne Harris, July 2025
There is an irony in remembering Frantz Fanon on the centenary of his birth. For it was Fanon who dedicated the final chapter of his Black Skin, White Masks to a powerful, poetic enjoining of those who fight for freedom to let go of pasts and let the dead bury the dead. Fanon opens that chapter with an extended quote from Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire:
“The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all its superstitions concerning the past. Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.”
And there’s a particular poignancy to remembering Fanon within what could be called a ‘Nelson Mandela rubric’, for the two great freedom fighters came within a whisker of meeting but missed each other through a cruel twist of fate. Through the last year of his life, as a member of the National Liberation Front of Algeria (FNLA), Fanon spent most of his time between Tunis and Accra. In previous years he had frequently been to the FNLA’s National Liberation Army (NLA) forward points on the border between Algeria and Morocco. But leukemia struck him down in 1961, and he died on the 6th of December, just as Mandela was engaged in final planning for his 1962 journey through the African continent. Mandela reached Tunis in the last week of February 1962 and spent most of the month of March in the NLA’s forward points. He visited Accra at the end of April.
Mandela received instruction and was trained by many of Fanon’s comrades. But it’s intriguing to imagine what Mandela might have learned directly from Fanon. Would he have been better equipped, for instance, to anticipate and counter the ways and modes in which erstwhile revolutionaries so easily succumb to greed, to neocolonial agendas and to other allures of power? Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, first published in French in 1961, sounded a warning against these dangers loudly and profoundly.
Black Skin, White Masks (first published in 1952) is a devastating critique of colonialism and white supremacy and a call for Black liberation. But I want to return briefly to that final chapter. And here I’m quoting from my own book Ghosts of Archive:
“Fanon’s final chapter is an analysis of what he calls ‘enslavement to the past’ and an injunction to Black people to transcend history by seeking the meaning of their destiny in the present and the future. ‘I have not the right,’ he says, ‘to become mired by the determinations of the past. I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.’ … [And yet earlier in the chapter, he says]: ‘I am a black man, and tons of chains, squalls of lashes, and rivers of spit stream over my shoulders.’ In other words, I cannot forget. And yet: ‘In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilisation unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.’ In other words, I choose to forget. But, unlike a Marx … Fanon is not dismissing the ghosts of the past, or advocating that they be dismissed. The slaves in the ships of the middle passage or in the cotton fields of the South. The Fred Hamptons. Rosa Parks. He hears them. But he chooses to listen more closely to the ghosts of the present and the future – the living ghosts of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the wretched of the earth; and the ghosts of those not yet born. We honour those who have gone before not by erecting statues of them, or by writing biographies of remembrance, or by invoking their names over and over again, but by making a liberatory world for the wretched of the present and for the generation to come.”
We honour Fanon not by referential repetitions but by our commitment to continuing struggles for justice. A luta continua.
Verne Harris
Madiba in Morocco for training with members of the National Liberation Front of Algeria.
Three extracts from Madiba’s 1962 diary.
Professor Verne Harris heads the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s leadership and knowledge development processes. He was Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013, directed the Foundation’s archives programme for 15 years and the dialogue and advocacy programme for 5 years. He is an adjunct professor at the Nelson Mandela University.
READ MORE