I bought The Rebels Clinic, The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Head of Zeus, 2024), by accident proof for me that sometimes must read books have a way of finding their way to you even if you dont intend it. So it wasnt a waste of money.

Fanon was Africas Che Guevara, and as much of an enigma. Like Guevara, as well as being trained in medicine and leaving a riveting history of revolutionary skirmishes, his legacy includes a substantial body of written work and ideas. Two works in particular, Black Skins, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) are still essential reading for those who campaign for racial equality and freedom.

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Quoting snippets of Fanon remains de rigueur on the left. 

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it, is a quote one still hears fairly frequently. But I wonder how many of those who quote from Fanons writings really know the life and times of the man from whence those words came?

Adam Shatzs meticulous political biography can change that. 

After reading its 380+ pages the words that came to my mind to summarise Fanon and his age of revolutionaries are commitment, complexity and contradiction, mingled with admiration at the way history plays cruel tricks with humankind and society, proving to quote another oft-used platitude that History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. (Karl Marx.)

The Rebels Clinic is a wonderful work of research, connection and then storytelling. In doing so it creates a composite picture of Fanon, his lives (plural) and his afterlife, the man and his milieu and how he eventually became one of the primary colours that defined that milieu. 

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Its neither hagiography or take-down: it shows us a man continually wrestling with identity and mission from his youth in Martinique, grappling with complexity, but nonetheless taking the right side of justice sometimes to the cost of the integrity of his own beliefs. 

Theres an eddy off the main current of Fanons life that has bearing on contemporary laments about wholesale degeneration of Africas liberation movements once they were in power. What do we say of the good men and women, who are incorruptible and self-sacrificing, but who in what they consider to be the best interest of the revolution stay silent in the face of early signs of political intolerance or moral corruption. 

Fanon, for example, chose to overlook the murder of FLN leader Abane Rabane by his own comrades; he closed his mind to the theocratic threads within the movement that would manifest much later; he turned his back on Patrice Lumumba, because support for Lumumba had become inconvenient geopolitically at a point when the FLN was gaining support from the US.

In this regard, although I doubt this aspect will be much commented on, The Rebels Clinic becomes a very real depiction of the difficult decisions and choices that have to be made in the thick of real life and death struggles. Not that many people, it seems, pass that perilous test. In South Africa, I think of Chris Hanis revolt before the ANCs Morogoro conference , or the fate of the Marxist Workers Tendency of the ANC .

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Larger than his short life

Flowing from the research of Shatz, Fanons life proves to be much larger than I imagined. Its the story of an age, as much as an individual; the biography of a sensitive struggling soul, buffeted about by ideas and people, and the souls transformation in response to the intellectual and political currents that raced through him.   

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I must admit I had no idea of his life story: born in former French colony of Martinique in the Carribean; leaving home at the age of 18 to fight with the Free French forces against facism at the end of World War 2; stung by rejection and racism in post-war France; changing the paradigms of treatment and psychoanalysis as a psychiatrist; moving to Algiers to practice psychiatry and joining the liberation struggle; then, exile from his adopted country in Tunis; becoming the FLNs envoy to Africa at the height of Nkrumahism; witness to the betrayal of Patrice Lumumba; instigator of a fruitless but brave attempt to open a corridor from West Africa to Algiers to smuggle weapons; and his very early death from leukemia in the country of the lynchers  (the US) at the age of 36.

In telling Fanons story The Rebels Clinic also offers fresh insights into the Algerian peoples uprising against France, in which Fanon was a freedom fighter and became a recognised leader of the FLN. 

This struggle was a definitive point in the twentieth century struggle against colonialism. 

Many years ago, my activist upbringing included watching the 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers , depicting three decisive years in the FLNs struggle for independence; its outstanding cinematography make it perhaps one of the most realistic depictions of an anti-colonial uprising and the savage response it elicited from a wounded France. 

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In the definitive history of that struggle, historian Alexander Horne called it A Savage War of Peace , and given that conflicts historical significance its strange how little it is remembered or studied by activists today. After all, Algiers was the fulcrum in which many of Fanons beliefs about the struggle against colonialism, and his prescient warnings of revolutions to be betrayed, were formed.

Activists ignore history at our peril.

Read more: The Dea(r)th of history and the price we pay in the present  

But as much as it is about a battle of arms, it is the battle of ideas that really captivated me.

In its depiction of Fanon in France at a time when it was leading the world in a ferment of thought, The Rebels Clinic offers up a captivating recreation of the intellectual and political milieu in which some of the strands of pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism were being forged. In a kind of intellectual ping-pong we see the bounds and rebounds of ideology, the different threads of thought and action. 

Whether in the rebound or by embrace, Fanons thinking and practice was shaped by intellectual engagement with people as diverse as the poet-politicians Leopold Senghor and Aim� C�saire ; the writer activists James Baldwin and Richard Wright ; the revolutionaries Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba ; not to mention Siegmund Freud and all mid-twentieth century thinkers on psychiatry, the original coalface for Fanons practice of what became known as disalienation. 

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Quite a broth.

Iron in the soul  

His on-off relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre is a sub-plot in itself. 

In August 1961, as Fanons leukaemia was worsening, he spent a weekend with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in Rome. The conversation that filled their hours together feels like it could provide the raw material for a play by Samuel Beckett. 

Shatz comments how De Beauvoir likened it to a scene from an anti-colonial version of Sartres play No Exit, whose three characters find themselves locked in a room together for eternity.

In Rome, Fanon gave the performance of a lifetime: the monologue of a young, dying black revolutionary, delivered in front of an older white man who shares his convictions yet declines to sever ties with the society he condemns. 

A few weeks later Sartre wrote the Preface to The Wretched of the Earth, delivered literally days  before Fanons death. Said Sartre: the Third World finds itself and speaks to itself through his voice. But while that might be seen as a coup for a then relatively unknown writer, according to Shatz, Fanon didnt like it. 

Finally in its depiction of the battle of/for ideas The Rebels Clinic should prompt contemporary social justice activists to appreciate the intellectual work that must underlie activism, the interrogation of ideologies and the search for a critical theory of what is happening in society on which to base strategy and tactics. It should also remind us of the way in which the genesis of truly revolutionary activism is not a superficial process, but often draws its inspiration from writing, culture and even medicine.

Shatz, for example, points out how the poet Derek Walcott , from the nearby island of St Lucia, was a contemporary of Fanons and how, in his early years, Martiniques writers Cesaire above all would supply him with a vocabulary for thinking about what it meant to be black and colonised in a white-dominated world.

A thought too about how we write! Fanons writing was dictated to people who were close to him, supporting Shatzs conclusion that Fanons writing, which is often cited by French language rappers, is a record of what were essentially spoken-word performances. 

Fanon died of leukemia on 6 December 1961. He was only 36 and a few months old. 

Like Bob Marley, another Caribbean island boy who 20 years later would die at exactly the same age , by then Fanon had launched ideas about rebellion and freedom that would spread across the world after his death. The passion and urgency that exudes from The Wretched of the Earth (a copy was put into his hands only days before his death) is the passion of a man who knew he was dying and was in a race against time to express his ideas and present an alternative world view. But, says Shatz, when told about one of the first positive reviews, his response was: It wont give me back my bone marrow.

Fanons 100th birthday would have been on 20 July 2025. Had he lived another 50 years, he would have witnessed a domino effect as one national bourgeoisie after another betrayed the freedoms promised by decolonisation in Africa. For me, the Fanon of the future hinges less on his remarkable prescience, than his lifes example of determination and fallibility, willing the revolution to succeed and fear of its betrayal. The Wretched of the Earth would certainly not have been his last word. DM

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