Responding to the call of your responsibilities, you then joined the FLN’s foreign delegation.
Résistance algérienne and then El Moudjahid then benefited from your precious help, characterized by your vigorous and accurate analyses.
Various international conferences, and especially those in Accra, Monrovia, Tunis, Conakry, Addis-Ababa and Léopoldville provided you with an opportunity to make known the true face of our revolution and to explain the realities of our struggle. The many messages of sympathy that have been sent to the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic since the announcement of your death bear testimony to the profound influence you exercised as you performed your duty.
Because of the brilliant qualities you displayed in all these activities, the Algerian Government designated you as its representative in Accra in February 1960.
Frantz Fanon!
You devoted your life to the cause of freedom, dignity, justice and good.
Your loss causes us great pain.
In the name of the Provisional Government of Algeria, I offer your family our most sincere and most fraternal condolences.
I also offer our thanks to the representatives of those friendly and fraternal countries who, by being present at our side, have expressed their wish to join us in our mourning.
Frantz Fanon!
You will always be a living example. Rest in peace. Algeria will not forget you.5
The speeches made at Fanon’s funeral provide an accurate picture of how he was viewed by his Algerian comrades at the time of his death. Both Krim and the unnamed commandant (the rank is equivalent to that of a major in the British army) were speaking in all sincerity, but they had known Fanon in only one context. They never knew the child who was born in Martinique in 1925, and who was always marked by the experience of being born in that place and at that time. They knew the dedicated revolutionary, but not the equally dedicated psychiatrist. They were familiar with a polemicist, but not with the young man who once wanted to write plays. Fanon was always reluctant to talk about himself, and it is by no means certain that he told his Algerian brothers that he had fought with the French army during the Second World War and had been decorated for bravery.
Granting Fanon his last wish – to be buried on Algerian soil – had not been an easy task. It had involved some delicate negotiations with the Tunisian government, with the US State Department and even the CIA, whose agent Ollie Iselin was present at the funeral. The border crossing itself was made with the help of local people, without whom it would have been impossible for the funeral party to evade French patrols. Three days after the burial, ALN intelligence officers learned that most of the French officers responsible for the sector had been relieved of their functions: ‘Fanon had won his last victory.’6 For those who knew Fanon, the revenge must have been sweet; on the very day that the news of his death had reached Paris, the publisher’s stock of Les Damnés de la terre had been seized by the police on the grounds that it was a threat to national security.7 This did not prevent it from becoming an international bestseller and making Fanon the most famous spokesman of a Third Worldism, which held that the future of socialism – or even of 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.
Fanon was buried a mere 600 metres inside Algerian territory because French static defences made it impossible to take his coffin further into his adopted country. On 25 June 1965, his remains were exhumed and reinterred in the martyrs’ cemetery in the hamlet of Ain Kerma, where a tombstone was at last erected.8 His family’s requests to have Fanon’s body returned to his native Martinique have always met with a negative response from the Algerian government. After the suicide of his mother on 13 July 1989,9 Fanon’s son Olivier requested permission to have his father’s remains interred with hers in Algiers, where she was buried as ‘Nadia’, the name she had used when she and Fanon were living in semi-clandestinity; she could not be buried in a Muslim cemetery under her Christian name Josie. This time, the refusal came from the people and local authorities of Ain Kerma; in their view, Fanon is their martyr and his grave is inviolable. Fanon’s body still lies in the far east of Algeria.
There is a memorial to Fanon in the town where he was born. The white-walled Cimetière de la Levée in the Martinican capital of Fort-de-France is the resting place of many of the town’s notables, and is known locally as the ‘cemetery of the rich’ – the poor are buried in the Cimetière du Trabaud on the other side of the Canal Lavassoir. French cemeteries are urbanized cities of the dead, and have none of the verdant charm of the traditional English graveyard. The Fanon family grave stands at the intersection of two asphalted paths and contains the remains of his parents, his brother Félix and his sister Gabrielle. Their photographs appear on the memorial plaques on the plinth inside the white marble construction. Frantz Fanon’s memorial is in the form of an open marble book. The left-hand page bears a photograph and the inscription: ‘To our brother Frantz Fanon, born 20 July 1925 in Fort-de-France, died 6 December 1961 in Washington (USA).’ The facing page is inscribed with the final words of his first book: ‘My final prayer: make me always a man who asks questions.’10 The grave is well tended, but it has not become a place of pilgrimage.
Over seventy years after his death, Fanon remains a surprisingly enigmatic and elusive figure. Whether he should be regarded as ‘Martinican’, ‘Algerian’, ‘French’ or simply ‘black’ is not a question that can be decided easily. It is also a long-standing question. Just four years after his death and a year after Boumédienne’s coup, a Swiss commentator could write with some justification that
The men who run Algeria today would have little use for Fanon’s exhortations; and the Algerian ‘masses’ would make a Martinican negro feel foreign in ways he would never have experienced in Paris. The prophet of Algeria’s national revolution would have found himself an exile from his chosen homeland, in search of another revolutionary war with which to identify himself.11
Despite Krim’s assurance that Algeria would never forget him, Fanon has never really become part of the pantheon of Algerian nationalism, even though he was posthumously awarded the Prix National des Lettres Algériennes in 1963, and even though copies of Les Damnés de la terre were given as school prizes in 1964.12 The standard history books studied by Algerian schoolchildren contain photographs and short biographies of the heroes of the FLN’s revolution, but Fanon is not counted amongst their number.13 In 1965, a group of Algerian students complained that it was impossible to find Peau noire, masques blancs in any bookshop in Algiers.14 The hospital where Fanon worked in Blida bears his name, and an Avenue du Dr Frantz Fanon (formerly the Avenue du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny) was inaugurated in Algiers in March 1963. There is a Lycée Frantz Fanon on the edge of the city’s Bab El Oued district, and yet in 1982 a group of teachers at the University of Algiers could complain that it was still necessary to ask ‘Who is Fanon?’ because there had been nothing on either the radio or the television to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death.15 For the youth of Algeria, ‘Fanon’ was no more than a name inscribed in capital letters on public buildings or street signs.16 The names of streets and institutions do not necessarily indicate that the memory of their eponyms is still alive. Even when Fanon is remembered in Algeria, the memory can be clouded by partial amnesia and ignorance. Fanny Colonna, who taught at the University of Tizi-Ouzo until she was forced by the rising tide of violence and xenophobia to leave for France in the early 1990s, recalls meeting school students who had read Fanon in their French class but did not know that he was black.17
The reasons for Fanon’s partial eclipse in Algeria are political and ideological. The insistence that, as the old slogan put it, the revolution had ‘only one hero: the people’, is designed to play down the role of specific individuals, as well as to mask internal divisions behind a façade of unity. The Algerian historiography of the war was for a long time designed to legitimize the one-party rule of the supposedly monolithic FLN, and the appearance of revisionist studies that began to show that it was a murderously divided party that killed some of