Frantz Fanon by David Macey

Author:David Macey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

9

‘We Algerians’

Fanon’s clinical work at the Manouba, the reforms he instituted at Charles-Nicolle and his collaborative work with Lucien Lévy are indicative of his full professional commitment to psychiatry and medicine. He was also fully committed to the cause of Algerian independence, and the double obligation soon resulted in a punishingly hard schedule of activity. The spokesman who now began to represent Algeria on the international stage in sub-Saharan Africa would return to his clinical work and to El Moudjahid’s office whenever he was in Tunis. He was now acquiring new responsibilities, and he assumed a new identity to go with them. In the summer of 1958, Fanon was issued with a passport by the Tunisian consulate of the United Kingdom of Libya. Delivered on 10 August and valid for all countries, passport number 018728 identified him as Omar Ibrahim Fanon, born in Tunis in 1925, 165 centimetres in height, with black eyes and black hair, and domiciled in Tunis.1 The document was what has come to be known in French as un vrai faux passeport – a ‘real false passport’ – or a genuine document issued under a false identity as opposed to a forgery. It was valid until August 1963. The adoption of the somewhat transparent pseudonym was obviously a security precaution. FLN members often used aliases for security reasons but the practice also had symbolic overtones: they were the anonymous servants of a revolution without a face. Fanon’s adoption of a new name also had unexpected long-term repercussions when his mother died in 1981. Her property and the proceeds from the sale of the house in Redoute were bequeathed to her children and Frantz’s share should have automatically gone to his only son. The bureaucratic French état civil, however, held no record of the death of Frantz Fanon and, even though knowledge of his father’s demise was very much in the public domain, Olivier therefore had to provide documentary proof that he was no longer alive before he could inherit the small amount of money involved.2

The passport was first used on a mysterious trip to Rome in September 1958. An entry stamp in it indicates that Fanon landed at Elmas airport in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari on 14 September and then travelled on to Rome. No details have emerged about this visit to a city which Fanon would come to know well, but the circuitous route he took suggests that secrecy was a priority. It can, however, be safely assumed that the trip to Rome was not unrelated to the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria (GPRA).

At 13.00 (Algerian time) on 19 September 1958, the same statement was read out in both Arabic and French in Tunis, Cairo and Rabat:

The CEE . . . has resolved to form a Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria. The GPRA will take over the executive powers of the Algerian State until the liberation of the territory and the establishment of its definitive institutions. Answering

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