Introduction

Abstract

For Frantz Fanon, the experience of colonial rule was the experience of a kind of madness. To be colonized was to be alienated from oneself and from one’s environment, in just the same way as the person suffering from a psychiatric illness was said to be alienated from his or her self. For Fanon colonialism was synonymous with the violence of racism. Racism, he argued in Black Skins, White Masks and elsewhere, inflicted profound psychic damage, denying the colonized person the very possibility of subjectivity. Madness, in the old sense of ‘alienation’ was the result. Fanon was a practising psychiatrist, and his observations of his Algerian psychiatric patients were fundamental to his understanding of the workings of colonial rule more generally. For him there was a direct relationship between the generalized ‘madness’ of colonialism and the psychiatric disorders encountered in his practice.¹

Madness is one of the ways in which man can lose his freedom … I can say that I have come to realise with horror how alienated the inhabitants of this country are. If psychiatry is a medical technique which aspires to allow man to cease being alienated from his environment, I owe it to myself to assert that the Arab, who is permanently alienated in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation … The status of Algeria? Systematic dehumanisation.

(Frantz Fanon, Studies in a Dying Colonialism)