First published by Socialist Party, April 30th, 2002
In the late 1960s, the name of Frantz Fanon became associated with the idea of an armed revolution in the ’Third World’. In the words of his biographer, David Macey, in his new book, ’Frantz Fanon: A life’, “Fanon came to be seen as the apostle of violence, the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism”, and “the spokesman of a Third Worldism which held that the future of socialism — or even the world — was no longer in the hands of the proletariat of the industrialized countries, but in those of the dispossessed wretched of the earth”.
Review of ‘Frantz Fanon: A Life’, by David Macey. Published by Granta Books, London, 2000 (paperback edition, 2001).
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