“Decolonization,” wrote Frantz Fanon (born today in 1925) at the beginning of his revolutionary-philosophical text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), “is always a violent event.” He knew what he was talking about. Born in the West Indian French colony of Martinique, Fanon studied in France to be a psychiatrist and published the pioneering work of racial consciousness, Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Stationed at a hospital in Algeria during the civil war, he witnessed up close the effects of torture. Fanon joined the Algerian liberation movement the FLN and began writing of the need for violent overthrow of the French colonial system. Published the year he died of leukemia, The Wretched of the Earth called in stark terms for colonized peoples to not replicate Europe but instead to “turn over a new leaf … and try to set afoot a new man.”