Franz Fanon

Frantz Fanon, one of the biggest intellectual supporters of de-colonization, sought to figure out how psychopathology affected - and was affected by - the process of colonization. What was interesting to me about this, was that I found that his mentor, and one of his life's greatest influences was Aime Cesaire.

Aime Cesaire, a descendant of African slaves who lived most of his life in Martinique, was both a Communist politician, and a re-knowned poet and writer. More impotantly, he, and others, founded the political and literary movement known as "negritude," which was the equivalent of the Harlem Renaissance that took place in the United States. Negritude is especially apparent in one of Aime Cesaire's plays, La Tempete, that is essentially a parody of Shakespeare's The Tempest. In it, Cesaire uses African culture to ridiculize and mock the sense of entitlement the Europeans had to the rest of the world.

The most interesting thing about negritude and Frantz Fanon, though, is that Fanon was able to use this idea of ethnocentrism on the European's part, and cultural retaliation on Africa's part, when dealing with patients in Algeria. Fanon eventually became a psychiatrist, and developed his own version of negritude: that human consciousness is based in racism and racial differences.

Using this idea, a translation of one of the principles of a literary movement to psychology, he was able to identify many "mental illness" as simply problems that arose due to racism, and repression. And this, in turn, definitely helped the cause of decolonization out, and was able to raise awareness of the bad effects decolonization had on peoples all over the world.