Frantz Fanon

In 1961 a book was published that became the inspiration for liberation movements around the world. It was called The Wretched of the Earth, and it was written by a Martinican psychiatrist named Frantz Fanon.

"Fanon struck a blow for freedom and he put a blow on the mythology of colonialism — the colonial project — that it has never recovered from. Until that point, there was never any voice like Fanon. Fanon's work was so powerful that you couldn't think: well do I agree or do I disagree. It just swept you up and swept you along. It really was an existential experience of an extraordinary kind. His courage, and most of all his fantastic honesty will always be a beacon for people struggling for freedom anywhere in the world." - Robert Hill

"As a teenager growing up in Toronto in the 1980s, Third World Bookstore on Bathurst Street was central to my political awakening.

It was in that bookstore that I and many other young women and men, were exposed to the richness of literature by Black and Third World writers and political figures. Angela Davis, Walter Rodney, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Malcolm X, and C.L.R. James are just a few of the authors I discovered on those bookshelves, all of which helped to shape my thinking during those formative years. Perhaps the most important of all the writers I encountered under the watchful eye of Mr. Johnson, the bookstore’s proprietor, was Frantz Fanon. Fanon’s penetrating analysis of the traumatic effects of colonialism and racism; of their inherent violence, and the violence they engender; and his prescience about the failures of post-colonial regimes, left an indelible mark on me.

And today, as I, like so many others, continue to grapple with the world around me, and reflect on how it can be changed for the better, I continually return to Fanon."

– David Austin