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. He was expelled from Algeria in 1957 by the French government for his participation in an Algerian nationalist strike, and served briefly as the FLN’s ambassador to Ghana. Fanon survived a couple of assassination attempts, but fell ill with leukemia in 1961. During his last year he battled the fatal disease while writing, in a fury of anger and passion, The Wretched of the Earth.
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