FRANTZ FANON was born in 1925 in Martinique, a French colony where formal citizenship masked systemic racial inequality. Though raised in a prosperous black family and steeped in Enlightenment ideals, Fanon became disillusioned during World War II. Joining the Free French forces in 1943, he encountered severe racism within the military, particularly a racial hierarchy placing Antilleans above Africans and below Europeans.

His experience of risking his life for a system that still oppressed him marked a decisive shift towards anti-colonial thought. In Algeria, he would later conclude that only armed struggle could break the violence of colonialism.

After the war, Fanon studied psychiatry in Lyon and read philosophy — Hegel, Marx and Sartre. His groundbreaking book Black Skin, White Masks (1952) examined colonial racism’s psychological toll.

In 1953, he became chief psychiatrist in Algeria, where contact with torture victims deepened his radicalism. Fanon and his team aided the resistance, and increasing repression forced him into exile in Tunis in 1955. There, he treated war-traumatised patients and served the FLN, writing, speaking and acting diplomatically, particularly across sub-Saharan Africa.

In 1960, gravely ill with leukaemia, Fanon dictated his final work, The Wretched of the Earth (1962), which became a foundational text for liberation movements. It analysed colonialism’s psychological, political, and social effects and justified revolutionary violence not abstractly, but as a forced response to a violent system that allowed no peaceful change. Fanon’s critique was not militaristic but emancipatory.

Before Fanon, writers like Jose Marti and WEB Du Bois had already examined the cultural alienation of the colonised. Psychoanalysts Octave Mannoni and Albert Memmi also explored these dynamics. Fanon radicalised their insights, grounding his critique in clinical case studies and revolutionary philosophy. He exposed colonialism as a violent system, showing how it psychologically damaged both the oppressed, who internalised inferiority, and the oppressors, who became trapped in superiority complexes.

The Wretched of the Earth became a guidebook for anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Fanon’s work highlighted the contradiction between Europe’s values and its imperial practices — an insight that continues to inform critiques of Western hegemony. A key theme is his warning about postcolonial elites: that new ruling classes often replicated colonial structures rather than dismantling them — a reality seen across former colonies.

Fanon’s vision called for radical societal transformation beyond identity politics or victimhood. Liberation meant forging something new, a new humanity. He embraced a pragmatic approach to colonial languages — not rejecting them outright. He believed in reclaiming cultural traditions while embracing universalist humanist values.

Parallel to Fanon’s political writings, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe offered literary resistance. His 1958 novel Things Fall Apart portrayed how colonialism destroyed indigenous societies and distorted self-perception. Unlike Fanon, who focused on violent resistance, Achebe used storytelling to counter colonial narratives and recover cultural memory. His African Trilogy explores colonial trauma and the postcolonial disillusionment that followed. Achebe’s writing became a vehicle of self-empowerment. Echoing the proverb, “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter,” Achebe emphasised the need to reclaim narrative agency as a path to political and cultural autonomy.

Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o further developed these ideas. In Decolonising the Mind (1986), he argued that language carries cultural power: adopting the coloniser’s language perpetuates mental domination. He turned to writing exclusively in Gikuyu, asserting that true cultural liberation requires linguistic self-determination. Building on Fanon and Achebe, Ngugi expanded the decolonial project by insisting that language itself must be reclaimed.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) added another dimension by exposing how Western discourse constructed the “Orient” as backward, echoing Fanon’s earlier critique of anti-black racism. Together, these thinkers argue that decolonisation is not just political — it must occur in minds, literature and culture.

Fanon’s relevance endures. His analysis of systemic racism, economic dependency and cultural alienation remains central to understanding today’s global inequalities. His call to decolonise thought resonates in debates on representation, cultural appropriation and resistance to authoritarianism in postcolonial states. Migration crises and neocolonial economic structures prove that colonial legacies are far from over.

Postcolonial theory also applies to Europe, especially Ireland. Tomas Mac Siomoin, drawing on Fanon and Memmi, applied decolonial critique to Ireland. He argued that British colonialism psychologically distorted the Irish through suppression of language and culture. Like Ngugi, he saw the loss of the mother tongue, Gaeilge, as erasure of a unique worldview. Many Irish, he contended, adopted English values while viewing their own heritage as inferior, a “cultural Stockholm syndrome.”

Mac Siomoin went further, exploring the epigenetic consequences of colonial trauma, particularly the Great Famine, which he described as ethnic cleansing with long-term psychological impact. Translating some of his writing into English to reach broader audiences, he underscored the dilemma of decolonial literature in suppressed languages.

Ireland’s continued dependence on Anglophone media and EU policy, Mac Siomoin maintained, shows how neocolonial structures persist. Connecting with the other thinkers on decolonisation, he placed Ireland within global decolonial discourse. His work illustrates that decolonisation is not limited to the global South: Europe, too, must confront its colonial past.

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth remains a key text — explaining the past, confronting the present, and illuminating paths toward a liberated future. It calls for the completion of decolonisation not just in political terms, but through culture, language, and consciousness. His legacy continues to shape global resistance movements, including support for the Palestinian struggle, which Fanon would have understood as part of the world-historical fight for liberation.