Analysis: Frantz Fanon at 100: Class Struggle and the Future of African Liberation

Read Time: 14 minutes

Chinedu Chukwudinma, Christopher J. Lee and Bettina Engels introduce special issue 186, Volume 52 of the journal, dedicated to honouring the centenary of the Martiniquais-Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925–1961). The issue brings together a wide range of original contributions celebrating his radical life, work, legacy and continued relevance for African liberation.

Chinedu Chukwudinma, Christopher J. Lee and Bettina Engels January 9, 2026

In retrospect, it should not be surprising that Frantz Fanon is cited in the first editorial of the inaugural issue of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in 1974. In fact, he is quoted in the first paragraph with his vivid description, drawn from The Wretched of the Earth (1961), of postcolonial African leaders as the ‘spoilt children of yesterday’s colonialism and of today’s national governments, [who] organise the loot of whatever national resources exist’ providing a critical perspective on the political orientation of the journal (ROAPE 1974, 1). Although other intellectuals and political theorists are later cited, including Amílcar Cabral and Mao Zedong, Fanon’s statement summarised the founding editorial collective’s belief that Africa’s challenges remained entrenched in material conditions of wealth inequality created by centuries of European colonial extraction and sustained by postcolonial elites who remained beneficiaries of these systemic features. Furthermore, Fanon provided a paradigm of the engaged activist-intellectual, in contrast to the insulated and staid academic, that ROAPE aspired to in terms of its editorial team and its contributors. ROAPE aimed to confront the pressing challenges of its time, including ongoing forms of capitalist exploitation in Africa, the importance of political solidarities across the Third World and the late decolonisation of southern Africa. ROAPE pursues similar ambitions today, with Fanon remaining a model of scholarly commitment sharpened with activist intent.

It is also worthwhile recognising that Fanon, if not unknown at the time of his death, had still not achieved the level of canonisation he has attained today. Following his death in 1961 and the translation of his work in the years shortly after, his reputation had certainly accrued momentum. Two biographies of Fanon had appeared – Peter Geismar’s Fanon (1971) and Irene Gendzier’s Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1973) – by the time of ROAPE’s founding, though, more significantly, his ideas had been circulating among activists around the world. Ruth First’s lengthy study of military coups in postcolonial Africa, The Barrel of a Gun (1970), draws heavily from The Wretched of the Earth for its understandings and arguments about elites, class hierarchies and military power. The early writings of Steve Biko that preceded the Soweto Uprising of 1976 and were later posthumously collected in I Write What I Like (Biko 1987) display the influence of Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks (2002 [1952]), with its emphasis on the psychological impact of apartheid and colonialism, not exclusively its political and material effects. Finally, Huey P. Newton described the deep impression Fanon made on the Black Panthers in his memoir, Revolutionary Suicide (Newton 1973), an inspiration further manifested when the Panthers established a provisional embassy in Algiers during the late 1960s.

Fanon achieved this standing despite numerous obstacles. His early passing at the age of 36 from cancer, his lack of a leadership role in Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) and the relative obscurity of his writing prior to his death – especially in the anglophone world – would all seem to prognosticate an obscure reputation at best. The writing of similar figures like Cabral, Biko, Newton and Kwame Nkrumah had gained attention from the stature and leadership they achieved in their respective revolutionary movements. And yet the exact opposite happened for Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as his second book, A Dying Colonialism (Fanon 2007 [1959], originally published with the title Year Five of the Algerian Revolution), sealed Fanon’s importance, despite the brevity of his life. They established an unparalleled and protean philosophical worldview through their wide-ranging ideas and insistent reflection on his extensive life experiences, including his childhood in Martinique, his medical education in France, his psychiatric work in Algeria and Tunisia and his time as a diplomat for the FLN. Each of these books published in his lifetime is different from the others in terms of intellectual reference, writing style and political approach, revealing a man who was constantly attentive to his surroundings while also committed to his own personal evolution.

Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are also urtexts for the genres they effectively established. While the psychology of racism and colonialism had been previously addressed in Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1998 [1950]), Fanon stridently criticised its condescension toward the views of the colonised on this matter in Chapter Four of Black Skin, White Masks. Similarly, though Albert Memmi had published The Colonizer and the Colonized (2016 [1957]) several years before The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s text elaborated more fully the systemic features and structural challenges – not simply the identity politics – of colonisation and decolonisation. The complexity of Fanon’s interventions has further lent them to wide-ranging interpretation over time – an ongoing practice started almost immediately with Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous and controversial preface to The Wretched of the Earth, which has been taken as both an astute distillation and a grave misreading of Fanon’s intentions. The canonisation of Fanon within academic circles that started in the 1980s, through readings by Edward Said (1983), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1991), Cedric Robinson (1993) and Homi K. Bhabha (1994), helped to establish the interpretations and debates that shape ‘Fanon studies’ today. The canonised Fanon that emerges in these postmodern and postcolonial currents is a decontextualised Fanon, removed from history. In this scholarship, Fanonian concepts are invoked, often uncritically and excessively, to address abstract questions of identity. Yet there remains a need to understand Fanon’s insights within the historical context of the African and Third World liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, for only then can we grasp how his politics might be generalised to illuminate and address the conditions of our world today.

Most surprising is how new information about Fanon’s life and thought continues to be uncovered. New biographies and critical studies almost constantly appear (for example, Gordon 2015; Hudis 2015; Zeilig 2021 [2016]; Marriott 2018; Gibson 2024; Shatz 2024; Williams 2024; Haddour 2025). His medical research has recently been collected and translated into English, allowing for a more complete understanding of his aims and insights in the field of psychiatry (Fanon 2018). The involvement of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in enabling his cancer treatment at the end of his life has also been proven true after decades of speculation (Meaney 2019). These translations and revelations have contributed to the enigma of Fanon, who already possessed numerous contradictions, among them being a veteran of the Free French who ultimately turned against the French later in his life, a Black man from Martinique who threw his political lot in with a liberation struggle in Algeria, and a middle-class intellectual who sought to speak for the peasantry and lumpenproletariat, his titular wretched of the earth. These paradoxes do not so much undermine him as point to his contingent transformation over time, demonstrating instances of instinctive movement from one point to another, geographically but also politically and intellectually. This quality of progression in turn has imbued his ideas with flexibility and endurance, which, for numerous reasons, have remained relevant from his lifetime into the present.

Fanon did not seek to canonise himself through his work; he sought to better understand the world he encountered, with the purpose of making it more equitable, just and humane. The contributions to this special issue embrace a similar mission.

* * *

Fanon and the politics of decolonisation

There is something unsettling about celebrating Fanon’s centenary at a moment when the very meaning of decolonisation has become muddled and is often given the most peculiar interpretations. The rise of postcolonial theory and its decolonial turn have shifted decolonisation away from a critique of political economy and towards a discursive exercise aimed at denouncing Eurocentric symbols, knowledges, attitudes and cultural forms (Okoth 2023). While questioning and criticising the Eurocentrism and colonial legacies embedded in institutions, universities and museums is valuable work, decolonial theory ultimately locates this exercise in a problematic worldview. It advances an idealist account in which the human mind is trapped within a matrix of power and knowledge – the so-called ‘coloniality of power’ – where race becomes the organising principle of all global hierarchies (Grosfoguel 2010; Quijano 2010). In doing so, decolonial theorists frequently reify race by detaching it from the social relations that produced it, and then endowing race with the power to organise those very relations. Decolonial theorists, therefore, do not push us towards a historically grounded analysis of race as a product of capitalism, nor do they encourage us to interrogate the material structures that sustain race as an ideological instrument of class division in the hands of the ruling elite. Instead, they urge us to focus on ‘delinking’ our minds from coloniality by drawing on non-Western bodies of thought and elevating thinkers from the global South, with Fanon often placed at the centre of this canon (Mignolo 2007).

But the task of excavating and celebrating suppressed non-Western traditions has itself produced its own essentialism, frequently nativist in orientation, and one that mirrors the very colonial binaries it seeks to dismantle. Non-Western knowledges are treated as pure, fixed and timeless, while Western thought – including the Enlightenment and even its radical currents – is cast as inherently colonial and racist. This reductionist view often casts a romantic glance toward the precolonial past, despite the social inequalities, including patriarchal norms and class divisions, that animate that past. More significant and specific to the subject of this special issue, this decolonial perspective also forgets the extent to which Fanon’s own thinking unfolded in creative dialogue with Hegel, Marx, François Tosquelles and Jean-Paul Sartre (Macey 2000; Zeilig 2021 [2016]). Furthermore, the decolonial preoccupation with discourse obscures the essential, materially grounded dimensions of Fanon’s politics – dimensions that cannot be fully understood in Oxbridge or Ivy League seminar rooms, even when led by decolonial scholars. A far better starting point is the courageous Palestinian resistance and the international solidarity confronting Israel’s settler-colonial genocide in Gaza, which together reveal the concrete meaning of decolonisation and the cutting edge of Fanon’s insights.

Fanon’s importance lies precisely in his insistence that decolonisation is a genuine political project situated in political and economic structures, not simply intellectual ones. It is, fundamentally, a project aimed at liberating the oppressed from capitalist imperialism through a critical analysis of this system, together with a clear focus on the strategy and tactics required to drive collective action and build international solidarity. It is a project in which ordinary men and women, people who once suffered from what E.P. Thompson called an ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, step into the light and begin to make their own history as active subjects rather than as mere effects of power and knowledge (Thompson 1966, 7). The articles in this issue never lose sight of this fact. Although they emerge from different disciplinary and political traditions, they share a commitment to the spirit of Fanon’s project: to think creatively about the politics of decolonisation and to connect theoretical arguments to their practical implications for the anti-imperialist struggle in Africa and beyond.

Onni Ahvonen, for example, draws our attention to the role of temporality in Fanon’s critique of colonial violence. He argues that Fanon exposes how colonialism erases the past, immobilises the present and forecloses the future of the colonised. For Ahvonen, Fanon’s critique of Aimé Césaire’s négritude points towards an alternative he terms temporal defiance: a practice that resists colonial temporal orders by rooting struggle firmly in the present as the ground from which genuinely liberated futures can emerge.

This connects with Peter Hudis’s argument that a central aspect of Fanon’s thought is his rejection of transhistorical accounts of race in favour of understanding racism as a sociogenic product of capitalist modernity. Hudis challenges the claim that Fanon had little to say about political economy, showing instead that Fanon closely analysed the sociogenic foundations of racial domination in Black Skin, White Masks and the transition from national liberation to socialism in The Wretched of the Earth.

No issue on Fanon would be complete without engaging his radical psycho-politics. In her essay, Sarah Jilani argues that Fanon’s reworking of psychoanalysis as a tool of anti-imperialist liberation shows that decolonisation requires both external resistance and an inner break from the coloniser’s recognition. For Jilani, this dual struggle rests on the dialectic between material conditions and consciousness that shapes the possibilities of liberation in today’s neocolonial world.

Christopher Hill reminds us that even in the neo-colonial or postcolonial world there remains a need to overcome fragmented readings of Fanon. Tracing Fanon’s influence on the Japanese left from the late 1960s, he shows how two distinct interpretations emerged: one reading Fanon as a theorist of insurrection, the other as an analyst of the mechanisms of colonial domination. Hill’s account highlights not only how Fanon’s work travelled globally but also the challenges facing activists as they attempt to forge new paths that connect Fanon’s anticolonial insights to our present conditions, in which capitalism and racism are deeply intertwined.

The tragic pitfalls of national consciousness in Africa

The next pieces in this issue turn directly to the question of African liberation, reminding us of a dimension of Fanon’s politics that has been largely overlooked in many centenary commemorations. Fanon remains relevant today not only because he exposed the violence of colonialism, but also because he foresaw, from his deathbed, the tragic failures that would come to define national liberation at the dawn of Algerian and African independence (Fanon 1963 [1961]). He warned with striking clarity that decolonisation would become a curse if it passed into the hands of a national bourgeoisie willing to betray the people and to work with both old and new forms of imperialism in the ongoing exploitation of Africa’s labour and resources (Fanon 1963 [1961]).

Fanon’s chapter on the pitfalls of national consciousness remains a crucial point of departure for understanding why north African nations today have been unable or unwilling to offer meaningful solidarity to Palestinians in the face of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their responses are shaped above all by the interests of their ruling classes. Nowhere is this failure more evident than in Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s Egypt. Since the end of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule in the 1970s, Egypt’s military elite has increasingly acted as an accomplice in the suppression of the Palestinian struggle in exchange for the economic loans, aid and military support it receives as a subordinate partner of the United States. As Anne Alexander argues, the Sisi government functions as an enforcer of the siege on Gaza, seeking to prevent Palestinian refugees from crossing into Egypt out of fear that their arrival would trigger economic, political and military instability in a country where the majority of the population supports Palestinian liberation (Alexander 2022).

Egypt is one of many examples in Africa that mark the tragic concretisation of Fanon’s cautionary tales regarding the reactionary behaviour of the postcolonial ruling elite that continue to haunt the present. Drawing on Fanon’s ideas in his debate piece on Africa’s Deferred Liberation, Mebratu Kelecha argues that anticolonial liberation movements have inherited state forms that reproduce the logics of colonial oppression. This problem is further compounded by a global capitalist order in which debt and structural adjustment have entrenched a ‘choiceless democracy’ since the 1990s. For Kelecha, genuine liberation requires decolonising knowledge alongside the democratisation of political economy, and the creation of participatory, pan-African structures capable of wealth redistribution and real justice.

Nigel Gibson delves into the apocalyptic reality unfolding in Sudan, which, alongside Congo, reveals more starkly than almost anywhere else the worst of Fanon’s fears of stolen liberation. The country has been recently torn apart by a neo-colonial, counter-revolutionary civil war waged between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces. Yet Gibson’s article leans towards hope, asking how Fanon’s thought might assist Sudanese revolutionaries in the present moment. In doing so, he reminds us of the inspiring days of the Sudanese revolution of 2019, when grassroots resistance committees and democratic forms of organising emerged, embodying Fanon’s call for popular sovereignty. Gibson insists that Fanon’s revolutionary humanism acts as a vital resource for shaping Sudan’s future from below.

It is in illuminating concrete examples of Fanon’s revolutionary humanism that Richard Pithouse offers an insightful interview with Mqapheli Bonono, the current deputy president of Abahlali baseMjondolo – a shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa that has been engaged since 2005 in struggles for land, housing and community-building. In the conversation, Bonono discusses the building of the Frantz Fanon School in Durban and the movement’s evolving approach to political education, drawing lessons from Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra.

Breaking the bounds of Fanonism

In celebrating Fanon’s life and work, this special issue avoids uncritical hagiography. Honouring Fanon, we believe, requires learning not only from his analytical insights but also from his limitations. Several articles therefore examine where his analyses of class and revolutionary strategy fell short in the context of African liberation. Muriam Haleh Davis’s historiographical briefing portrays the intense debates over building socialism in post-independence Algeria under Ben Bella. She explains how Bella’s suspicion of syndicalists and communists shaped the way Algerian leftists read Fanon’s writings in the 1960s, often leading them to critique Fanon’s emphasis on the revolutionary peasantry and his tendency to overlook the need for organised political mobilisation centred on the African working class.

This shortcoming in Fanon’s thought is also brought out in Chinedu Chukwudinma and Baindu Kallon’s article, which draws on archival materials from the Walter Rodney Papers and beyond to examine Fanon’s influence on the political development of the Afro-Guyanese Marxist historian and revolutionary, Walter Rodney. They argue that although Rodney initially embraced Fanon’s ideas on revolutionary violence and the national bourgeoisie, he gradually outgrew these positions, recognising their limits in the face of the pitfalls of anti-imperialist struggles. More importantly, his turn to Marxist theory and his reflections on workers’ struggles in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania led him to diverge from Fanon and appreciate the centrality of workers’ strikes and occupations in the anti-imperialist struggle.

Along similar lines, Ken Olende’s article challenges Fanon’s argument that workers in colonial settings occupied a privileged position which made them unreliable allies of the oppressed peasantry and lumpenproletariat. Olende counters this by demonstrating the central role played by the organised working class in the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion. These critiques of Fanon’s understanding of class, which highlight the importance of the African proletariat, matter not only because they prompt us to revisit past moments of anticolonial resistance, but also because they speak to a world in which more than half of humanity now lives in cities and engages in some form of wage labour (ILO 2018). They help us understand where real power lies in Africa and globally: in a working class that holds immense social weight as the producer of vital goods and services in capitalist society (Dwyer and Zeilig 2012). And although this working class revealed glimpses of its power during the north African revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt (2010–12) and later in Algeria and Sudan (2019), its full potential remains largely untapped (Alexander 2022).

Many articles in this special issue have highlighted Fanon’s deeply humanist appeal to international solidarity. For Fanon, the significance of the Algerian liberation lay in its demonstration that genuine freedom requires mutual recognition of humanity across borders (Fanon 1963 [1961], 2002 [1952], 2004 [1964]). How can any of us be free, he would ask, while there is a genocide in Palestine? A crucial step, in Fanon’s view, was for French workers to recognise the struggle of their Algerian brothers and sisters. Yet even more importantly, he called on all the wretched of the earth to recognise one another, to assist one another and to carry each other’s struggles forward in a shared, meaningful movement (Fanon 1963 [1961]). Fanon understood this mutual recognition and active solidarity as the cornerstone of African liberation and, ultimately, of humanity’s liberation.

–

Acknowledgements

We thank the ROAPE Editorial Working Group for providing such a supportive home for this Special Issue, as well as all the contributors and peer reviewers for their professional collaboration and patience throughout the process.

 References

1. Alexander A. 2022. Revolution is the Choice of the People: Crisis and Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa. London: Bookmarks Publications.
2. Bhabha H. 1994. Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial ConditionColonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. Williams P, Chrisman L. p. 112–123. Abingdon: Routledge.
3. Biko S. 1987. I Write What I Like: A Selection of his Writings. Stubbs A. Oxford: Heinemann.
4. Dwyer PD, Zeilig L. 2012. African Struggles Today: Social Movements since Independence. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
5. Fanon F. 1963 [1961]. The Wretched of the Earth. Farrington C. New York: Grove Press.
6. Fanon F. 2002 [1952]. Black Skin, White Masks. Markmann CL. London: Pluto Press.
7. Fanon F. 2004 [1964]. Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays. Chevalier H. New York: Grove Press.
8. Fanon F. 2007 [1959]. A Dying Colonialism. Chevalier H. New York: Grove Press.
9. Fanon F. 2018. Alienation and Freedom. Khalfa J, Young RJC; Corcoran S. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
10. First R. 1970. The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’État. London: Penguin Press.
11. Gates HL. 1991. Critical Fanonism. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 17(3):457–470.
12. Geismar P. 1971. Fanon: The Revolutionary as Prophet; A Biography. New York: Grove Press (Black Cat book B-350).
13. Gendzier IL. 1973. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Pantheon.
14. Gibson NC. 2024. Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing. Cambridge: Polity (Black Lives series).
15. Gordon L. 2015. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. New York: Fordham University Press.
16. Grosfoguel R. 2010. The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Mignolo WD, Escobar A. p. 65–77. London: Routledge.
17. Haddour A. 2025. Frantz Fanon: Gender, Torture and the Biopolitics of Colonialism. London: Pluto Press.
18. Hudis P. 2015. Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades. London: Pluto Press.
19. ILO (International Labour Organization). 2018. Global Wage Report 2018/19: What Lies Behind Gender Pay Gaps. Geneva: ILO.
20. Macey D. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Life. London: Granta.
21. Mannoni O. 1998 [1950]. Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor Paperbacks).
22. Marriott D. 2018. Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
23. Meaney T. 2019. Frantz Fanon and the CIA Man. The American Historical Review. Vol. 124(3):983–995.
24. Memmi A. 2016 [1957]. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Greenfeld H. Paperback edition. London: Souvenir Press (Independent Voices).
25. Mignolo W. 2007. Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality. Cultural Studies. Vol. 21(2–3):449–514.
26. Newton HP, Blake JH. 1973. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Random House.
27. Okoth K. 2023. Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics. London: Verso.
28. Quijano A. 2010. Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality Globalization and the Decolonial Option. Mignolo WD, Escobar A. p. 22–32. London: Routledge.
29. ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy). 1974. Editorial. Review of African Political Economy. Vol. 1(1):1–8
30. Robinson C. 1993. The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon. Race & Class. Vol. 35(1):79–91.
31. Said EW. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
32. Shatz A. 2024. The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. London: Head of Zeus (an Apollo book).
33. Thompson EP. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books.
34. Williams JS. 2024. Frantz Fanon. London: Reaktion Books.
35. Zeilig L. 2021 [2016]. Frantz Fanon: A Political Biography. 3rd edition. London: I.B. Tauris.

–

This article was first published by ROAPE.