From Algiers to Gaza: Frantz Fanon and the unfinished decolonisation

On the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, Algiers hosted an emotionally charged conference on 6 December that gathered scholars, psychiatrists, and activists from Algeria and beyond. The event came just weeks before Algeria adopted a landmark law officially classifying French colonialism as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This historic act seemed to restore Fanon’s spirit at the heart of political life.

When we entered the unexpectedly trendy conference hall in the unassuming district of Mohamed Belouizdad in central Algiers, the room was already overflowing. A portrait of Frantz Fanon hung on the stage, making it feel like the Martinican psychiatrist was staring out at the crowd with his familiar intense gaze.

Fanon’s thoughts and analysis on decolonisation was the subject of the programme, yet the emotional temperature of the room was set by the present: the ongoing colonisation of Palestine, Congo, and Western Sahara. These are territories where the machinery of empire never disappeared but merely changed form.

His sentences, written for another age of torture centres and counter-insurgency, felt as if they had been drafted for Khan Younis or Goma.

This is the very reason that Fanon’s centenary should not be a nostalgic homage. It is a stress test for Algeria’s own unfinished decolonisation - and for the region’s willingness to confront Fanonian questions about violence, complicity, and what kind of “new human” we are prepared to become.

Indeed, Fanon’s name is splashed everywhere in Algeria — on streets, schools, hospitals, and even psychiatric institutions. Yet, as Raouf Farrah - co-founder of Twala and organiser of the centenary - notes, “his intellectual legacy occupies remarkably little space in contemporary debate.”

The conference, he explains, was designed not to sanctify Fanon but to “move him away from being a totem and back into the terrain.”

It was inside the Algerian revolution that Fanon’s thoughts were forged, in its ethics of solidarity and sacrifice. As the leading psychiatrist at the Blida-Joinville Hospital during French colonisation, his proximity to his colonised patients gave him profound insight into how domination invades both body and psyche, how violence becomes internalised, and how the colonised resist not only externally but psychologically.

Gaza and beyond

Throughout the event it was impossible to ignore Gaza - at once a black hole where international law collapses, and a moral compass.

The genocide compelled a return to Fanon’s central intuition: colonialism is neither abstraction nor metaphor, but “an architecture of domination that dehumanises Indigenous peoples and governs their life and death.”

Fanon’s words from The Wretched of the Earth (1961) echoed through the discussions: “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip; it turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”

Speakers connected Gaza to a continuum of imperial violence stretching across the Global South – from Western Sahara’s occupation to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo - where extraction and dispossession remain the engines of power.

Sociologist Professor Fatma Oussedik pushed further Fanon’s desire to unsettle power. His legacy, she explained, is not only political but anthropological, and he forces us to confront the coloniser inside ourselves.

“Leaving the posture of the colonised, is the only way to make the coloniser within us disappear,” she added.

Drawing on Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Oussedik argued that the colonised internalise the voice of domination, carrying its violence into postcolonial societies. The task, she insists, “is to abolish those relations of domination — not only intellectually or culturally, but geopolitically.”

This is why Algeria passing the historic law officially classifying the 132 years of French colonisation as war crimes, has echoed with so many populations around the world who have been impacted by imperialism and colonialism. It has marked a rupture for those nations and leaders who assumed the oppression and abuse waged in the name if their empires has been somehow forgotten.

Beyong its legal symbolism, the measure echoes Fanon’s warnings about the dual nature of colonial violence - both physical and psychological - and the danger that the colonised, through fear or assimilation, might be coerced into internalise the coloniser’s methods.

By naming colonialism itself as a crime against humanity, Algeria has, in effect, turned Fanon’s diagnosis into law, asserting that liberation must confront not only historical atrocities but also their lingering psychic imprints.

That also means confronting postcolonial order everywhere, in whichever form it takes, and certainly in Africa we must be pointing the finger at multinationals like French nuclear fuel group Orano, that generate huge profits from natural resources while Niger sinks into misery.

And lest we forget that the Sahara remains partitioned by imperial convenience.

The West must learn from Fanon

The centenary also revealed how Fanon’s work is too often misread in Western academia.

Dr. Latefa Abid Guemar, based at the University of East London, lamented the neglect of Fanon’s essay Algeria Unveiled, often reduced in Western academic spheres to a debate about veiling rather than an analysis of colonial power over women’s bodies.

“Fanon explained that Algerian women used the veil strategically, to join the resistance, to carry messages or explosives,” said Abid Guemar, author of Algerian Women and Diasporic Experience. “His essay was not about culture; it was about control.”

Certainly, it was a significant symbolic moment that global thinkers and scholars gathered in Algiers following over two years of the Gaza genocide during which academic freedoms and free speech on colonialism, occupation and solidarity across the West have been under attack. But it was also crucial in clarifying the direction of travel and reminding us about important lessons from past struggles that will serve in the oppression and repression we face today.

By naming colonial violence as war crimes and crimes against humanity, Algeria reclaims its narrative not as perpetual victim but as moral witness. Yet Fanon would remind us that liberation is never legal alone. It must dismantle the hierarchies of humanity that persist within us.

The law gestures toward that renewal, translating memory into sovereignty. For Algerians, Palestinians, and all peoples still trapped in colonial continuities, the task is to build Fanon’s “new human,” capable of healing without reproducing domination.

Rachid Sekkai is a journalist, media coach, and PhD researcher in identity and belonging.

Follow Rachid on X: @RachidSekkai

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.