By Jenny Farrell
Born on July 20, 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Frantz Omar Fanon grew up in a society that was formally part of France but in practice shaped by a colonial hierarchy in which the Black majority was politically disenfranchised and culturally disadvantaged. Although the people of Martinique formally held French civil rights following the Haitian Revolution — such as access to education — economic pressure and structural discrimination prevented many from full participation. Fanon, son of a wealthy Black family, utilised these rights and saw himself as French — an heir to the Enlightenment and universalism, to which he remained committed throughout his life.
World War II marked a turning point in his life. In 1943, the 18-year-old secretly left Martinique to join the French forces. During the war, he experienced the contradiction between France’s rhetoric of freedom and its colonial reality. His initial enthusiasm quickly gave way to disillusionment as he encountered open racism from white soldiers and officers — a reality he faced throughout his military career. In North Africa, he encountered a racist caste system within the army: Antilleans were placed above African soldiers while remaining second-class citizens. His disillusionment culminated on the front lines in Alsace. In 1945, he wrote that he had risked his life for a system that upheld colonial oppression. His belief in France’s promise of equality was shattered — a decisive impulse for his later radically anti-colonial stance. These experiences explain why, in Algeria, he later saw armed liberation struggle as ultimately the only way out of colonial dehumanisation. The young man had given up everything to fight against a murderous racial ideology, only to face discrimination within his own ranks.
The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon’s works Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) bear clear traces of this experience. After the war, he studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon. Alongside this, he engaged with philosophy, particularly the works of Hegel, Marx, Sartre, and other anti-colonial thinkers. His dissertation already addressed psychological disorders among colonised peoples. With the publication of Black Skin, White Masks, he presented a groundbreaking analysis of colonial racism. In 1953, he became chief physician at a psychiatric clinic in Algeria — a turning point. Contact with torture victims of the colonial regime radicalised him. Fanon and parts of his medical team established connections with the resistance, particularly the Algerian Maquis.
Repression soon followed: Several individuals were arrested, including one of Fanon’s doctoral students, who died as a result of severe torture. Facing increasing danger, Fanon left Algeria in 1955 with some colleagues and went into exile in Tunis, where the Algerian government-in-exile was based. There, he worked intensively to build psychiatric care for war-traumatised individuals and organised corresponding therapeutic structures. He primarily worked in a therapeutic capacity with the independence movement FLN. Simultaneously, he took on political tasks for the exiled government, including as a journalist, spokesperson, and diplomat with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. From 1957, he was co-editor of their magazine El Moudjahid. In 1959, he narrowly escaped two assassination attempts by French intelligence—in Morocco and Rome. Already gravely ill with leukemia, he dictated his final and most significant work, The Wretched of the Earth, to his wife Josie in 1960. He died in 1961 in Maryland, USA, without living to see Algerian independence in 1962.
The Wretched of the Earth, available only in Irishwoman Constance Farrington’s English translation until 2004, is one of the most influential works of postcolonial theory and anti-colonial liberation movements. In it, Fanon analyses the profound cultural, psychological, political, and social consequences of colonialism and outlines a vision of radical decolonisation. The work remains relevant today as it addresses systemic violence, racism, and the necessity of comprehensive liberation. It reveals that colonialism, war, and violence — contrary to common claims — are by no means inherent to human nature. Fanon refutes this notion both theoretically and through poignant case studies that demonstrate how extreme violence psychologically destroys people. Yet, given the omnipresent structural and physical violence of colonialism, the colonised often have no choice but violent revolt. Fanon does not justify violence abstractly but as a response to a violent colonial system that permits no peaceful change. His position is thus not bellicose but emancipatory: violence serves liberation when no political avenues exist.
Before Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, there were already pioneering precursors: José Martí (“Nuestra América”, 1891) and W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903) addressed cultural alienation and the “double consciousness” of the colonised. Psychoanalysts like Octave Mannoni (Psychologie de la colonisation, 1950) and Albert Memmi (The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1957) examined the dynamics between oppressors and oppressed but remained Eurocentric (Mannoni) or reform-oriented (Memmi). Fanon radicalised these approaches: as a psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, he combined clinical case studies from Algeria with a systemic critique that exposed colonialism as a relationship of violence. Fanon, who supported counter-violence only under extreme conditions, always sought ways to avoid it. Yet he saw liberation from a total order of violence — where no democratic communication was possible — not in reform or adaptation but in the revolutionary dismantling of colonial power structures. For him, violence was also an individual psychological act of liberation. As a psychiatrist, Fanon describes the destructive psychological effects of colonialism on both sides: the colonised, as victims of racism, develop inferiority complexes and internalise submission, while the colonisers are trapped in a dehumanising mindset of superiority.
In the context of the liberation struggles of the 1960s, The Wretched of the Earth became a guide for anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. His work also exposes the contradiction between Europe’s professed values and its simultaneous practice of colonial oppression — a critique that continues to shape debates on Western hegemony today.
Another central point is Fanon’s critique of the postcolonial elite. He warned that the national bourgeoisie, after independence, often merely perpetuated the power structures of the colonisers instead of breaking with them — a prognosis that proved true in many African and Asian states, as well as in Ireland. His plea for a “new humanity” calls for radical societal transformation that overcomes colonial thought patterns and enables genuine political and cultural self-determination.
The power of storytelling
Fanon advocated a critical reappropriation of cultural traditions — combined with humanist ideas. His universalism aimed at a shared humanity beyond mutually exclusive identities. The dichotomy of “European” and “African culture” is itself a product of colonialism. His vision was the liberation of all people from racist structures — not the entrenchment of victimhood. Identity politics defined solely by injury, he considered limiting. For him, liberation meant creating something new beyond the suffering experienced. In this sense, he did not reject colonial languages categorically either, but saw them as pragmatic tools of communication.
While Fanon fought and wrote in Algeria, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe developed similar convictions — through literature. His novel Things Fall Apart (1958) shows how colonialism not only destroys indigenous society but simultaneously distorts the self-image of the colonised. Where Fanon emphasises psychological liberation through revolutionary violence, Achebe — like his compatriot Wole Soyinka — relies on the power of storytelling to create a counter-narrative to colonial discourse. Thus, modern literature in Africa emerged as a response to colonial oppression and became a tool of cultural and political liberation.
As an epic chronicler of the African experience, Achebe’s African Trilogy explores the trauma of colonialism: the collapse of indigenous social orders, the psychological disempowerment of the colonised, and the subsequent neocolonialism manifest in the rule of corrupt local elites and multinational corporations. Things Fall Apart illustrates this total loss of a world from which no new order emerges — only chaos. Yet, despite the unflinching portrayal of violence and loss, Achebe always leaves a glimmer of hope — such as the symbolic ritual of rebirth at the end of Anthills of the Savannah (1987), hinting at an egalitarian, socialist-inspired future.
Achebe’s literature is thus more than just an indictment: it is an instrument of memory and self-empowerment. That his works were celebrated in the West without an awareness of their political explosiveness illustrates the irony of this reception — and the power of a literature that resonates even when its radical message is underestimated. Quoting the African proverb, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,” Achebe emphasised the need to reclaim one’s own narrative — as a prerequisite for cultural and political self-determination.
This literature is not only an artistic but also a political project: it documents profound upheavals —colonisation, independence movements, and disillusionment with postcolonial realities, where old power structures persist under new guises. Achebe makes visible how external and internal domination intertwine — while opening narrative spaces where the future can be reimagined.
While Fanon and Achebe laid central foundations for postcolonial literary theory, the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o expanded their ideas — particularly in Decolonising the Mind (1986) and in his fiction. For him, language is not merely a means of communication but a bearer of history, culture, and power. Those who think in the coloniser’s language unwittingly adopt its value system — a form of mental subjugation that Ngũgĩ consciously countered by deciding to write only in Gĩkũyũ. This linguistic self-empowerment is, for him, a prerequisite for cultural emancipation. In doing so, he builds on Fanon’s call for decolonising the mind and Achebe’s literary anchoring of African perspectives while going beyond them: not only content but language itself must be decolonised. The goal is African literature in African languages — as resistance, collective memory, and engagement with the neocolonial present. In this way, it aligns with Fanon’s demand not to look backward but to emerge from struggle.
Edward Said also profoundly shaped this discourse: in Orientalism (1978), he analyses Western cultural hegemony and shows how the “Orient” was constructed in European discourses as backward and exotic — a process Fanon had already described in 1952 for anti-Black racism.
Together, these thinkers form an intellectual tradition demonstrating that decolonisation does not end with political independence — it must continue in minds, literature, and language. Their writings remain relevant because they not only explain the past but also point the way to a liberated future. In this sense, they are not solely African but world literature — part of a global struggle for decolonisation and human dignity.
Fanon provides a key understanding of enduring postcolonial power structures — economic dependency through debt or resource exploitation. Systemic racism and police violence are expressions of the dehumanisation Fanon analysed as a consequence of colonialism. His call for mental decolonisation is reflected today in debates on cultural appropriation, representation, and empowerment. Simultaneously, authoritarian regimes in postcolonial states and global migration movements as consequences of unfinished decolonisation confirm Fanon’s grim prognoses.
The theories of decolonisation, shaped in the 20th century primarily by African and Caribbean thinkers like Fanon, Memmi, and Ngũgĩ, also find resonance in Europe — nowhere more clearly than in Ireland. The Irish biologist and author Tomás Mac Síomóin — writing from a fully postcolonial perspective — transferred these ideas to his homeland, showing how British colonial rule deformed not only Ireland’s political but also its psychological and cultural landscape. His works — particularly The Broken Harp (2014) and The Gael Becomes Irish (2020) — demonstrate that decolonisation is not complete but an ongoing struggle against the invisible remnants of imperial rule.
Mac Síomóin explicitly builds on Fanon and Memmi by analysing the psychopathology of colonisation. While Fanon described the psychological destruction of the colonised in Algeria, Mac Síomóin examines how the systematic erosion of the Irish language (Gaeilge) and culture left a collective trauma persisting across generations. Like Ngũgĩ, he emphasises that losing one’s mother tongue means losing an independent worldview. The Irish, Mac Síomóin argues, internalised the English perspective so deeply that many still exhibit a “cultural Stockholm syndrome”: they identify with the language and values of their former oppressors while rejecting their own heritage as backward.
A thought already present in Fanon becomes central in Mac Síomóin: he addresses not only the psychological but also the epigenetic consequences of colonial violence. The Great Famine (1845–1849), as a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing, left a transgenerational trauma that persists today. Mac Síomóin’s solution resembles Ngũgĩ’s: true decolonisation requires a return to one’s own language. Yet while Ngũgĩ switched to Gĩkũyũ, Mac Síomóin faced a dilemma: writing in Irish and reaching only a small readership or writing in English to address broader circles. His decision to translate parts of his work reflects such pragmatic challenges.
The decolonisation of language and literature
It is understandable why these authors saw the colonisers’ language primarily as an instrument of indirect, cultural and mental oppression — especially when they had suppressed mother tongues at their disposal. A further aspect is the relationship of this literature to the “second culture” — the oppressed culture within the colonial centres themselves, such as that of the working class. To reclaim the humanist heritage, often in the colonisers’ languages, liberation movements also translate classical texts into their own languages. Julius Nyerere translated Shakespeare into Swahili, the Portuguese communist Álvaro Cunhal secretly translated King Lear into Portuguese in prison, Pablo Neruda made Blake accessible in Spanish, and Nazım Hikmet translated Tolstoy into Turkish while imprisoned.
As Fanon foresaw and Ngũgĩ confirmed, Mac Síomóin also showed that decolonisation does not end with political independence. Neocolonial structures persist — perpetuated by an Irish bourgeoisie that, after formal independence, fell back into dependency on British power and, from 1973, increasingly facilitated EU policies rather than resisting them. Thus, Ireland lost economic and political sovereignty; the dominance of Anglophone media accelerated cultural self-abandonment — not only in Ireland. Here, Mac Síomóin connects with global discourses, such as Portuguese postcolonial theory (Boaventura de Sousa Santos), to show that Ireland is not an exception but part of a worldwide pattern.
Mac Síomóin’s work is proof that postcolonial thought is not confined to the Global South. Ireland, Europe’s first colonised and last — incompletely — decolonised nation, becomes in his writing a laboratory for a European decolonisation theory. He demonstrates that the wounds of colonialism still bleed in Europe. His work is a call to overcome inner cultural colonisation — those mental barriers preventing the Irish from reclaiming their own language, history, and identity. In this sense, he is not only Fanon’s heir but a pioneer of a transcontinental decolonial thought linking Africa, Ireland, and other parts of the world.
Thus, The Wretched of the Earth remains a key work. It explains the past and illuminates the present. Fanon’s radical critique of oppression, his call for self-liberation, his warning against neocolonial traps, and his vision of a new humanity keep the book as relevant today as in 1961. It urges us to complete decolonisation not only politically but also in culture and in thought — and to understand and support the violent resistance of colonised peoples, such as the Palestinians, in their world-historical context.
