Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who had fought for the Free French in the Second World War, he was to emerge after his death from leukaemia in 1961, at the early age of thirty-six, as one of the most enduring influences on the newly emerging Third World, a visionary who believed that violent revolution was not only justified but necessary.

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