A few words on Frantz Fanon's centenary. And a conversation on music production.
This month, some anti-colonial inspirations from the Caribbean to Cameroon.
Dear readers,
2025 marks Frantz Fanon's centenary. He was born in Martinique on 20 July 1925, and this week, the first French film on the anti-colonialist writer and revolutionary psychiatrist is out… Before other events celebrating the author and pioneer in May then in July.
I myself studied the whole work of Fanon in 2017-18 for a project that was, sadly, parked by another filmmaker. But I learned so much, I’m only grateful for such an opportunity to dig deep into the extraordinary life of this courageous man.
I will soon dedicated a podcast episode to how Fanon changed Africa, but first, a piece of writing on the film: interview with the director, Jean-Claude Barny.
As our world is more and more impacted by racist leaders like Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Victor Orban, Fanon’s ideas sadly sound so timely…
'Fanon': A first French film on the legacy of the psychiatrist and anti-colonial writer
Jean-Claude Barny's film Fanon is released in France on 2 April, and the centenary of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is celebrated this year, with multiple events coming up. I caught up with the Caribbean filmmaker to discuss his motivation on making this film, which took over a decade to produce.
Born on 20 July 1925, in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Frantz Fanon died on 6 December 1961, in a military hospital in the suburbs of Washington in the United States, at the age of 36, after spending most of his short and intense life not in the Caribbean or in metropolitan France but in Algeria.
The African nation was still France's largest colony when he and his wife Josie arrived in Blida, 45 km south-west of Algiers, the national capital, in 1953. This was a few months before the start of the "events", now known as the Algerian war in France and the Revolution in Algeria.
From the Caribbean to Africa via France
With his film, the Guadeloupe-born French director Jean-Claude Barny chose to focus on this period of Fanon's life, between 1953 and 1960, when Fanon worked as the main psychiatrist of the small Algerian hospital of Blida, 150 km west of Algiers.
"I started reading everything I could get my hands on and looking at everything I could about Fanon. I had a kind of bulimia of curiosity, of information, of pedagogy, to be able to understand what I was going to do with it and why," Barny told me, before the film's release.
The key Fanonian concept that inspired Barny was the one of alienation.
"Society prepares us to digest, to learn, to function as it needs to. And I know very well that if I wanted to get rid of that, I also had to de-alienated myself," Barny added, "and that took ten years."
To write the film, with his co-writer, he said he had to understand who he was, his Caribbean culture, his Western culture, his African culture, but also as a human being, "who is capable of absorbing all cultures", and of detaching from them all.
This journey was what Fanon had to do himself, as a black soldier in the French liberation army fighting the Nazis, then in the early 1950s, as a young doctor in training in Lyon, France, in highly racist environments. This experience led him to pen his first major book, 'Black Skin, White Masks', published in 1952.
Focusing on Algeria, while filming in Tunisia
Barny soon realised while reading and re-reading Fanon's texts and biography that the key transformational phase of his life was his time in Algeria's hospital in Blida.
"My challenge was that people like Fanon. So, to make people like him, he had to be attractive, he had to have all the ingredients that make a character an attractive film. People need to know there will be an adventure. And Fanon's adventure, in my opinion, began with the arrival of Blida."
Fanon had already been sent to Morocco and Algeria during World War II, before being sent to Provence in 1944.
But it is by returning to Algeria, almost a decade later, that he discovered the population and the system of colonisation.
"With the film, viewers are going to discover them too," said Barny.
Everything about the Algeria of this time is seen through the eyes of Fanon, when he arrived, as an outsider, a middle class doctor, and a black man, facing another system of alienation and oppression, Barny added.
"And they will also understand what will bring Fanon the personality that we now still know. That's why I chose to start when he came to Blida as a chief psychiatrist at this hospital."
The film was shot in Tunisia, to recreate a similar local environment, while the film's team would have had to wait much longer to film in Algeria.
Alexandre Bouyer plays Fanon, Deborah François his wife, and Arthur Dupont his closest intern. Most of the rest of the cast are Algerians.
Cinematic experience
Barny was inspired by multiple codes of mainstream cinema, from the American 'Western' to the peplum, to approach Fanon's story not only with the intellect but through his action. "So, we looked for a talented actor, powerful sets and costumes, movements, a camera style, and lighting that also provide a strong ingredient."
The film retells how Fanon changed the conditions, almost prison-like at the time, of detention of patients, and applied new, revolutionary treatment through talk therapy, group activities and outdoor meetings.
It also shows how Fanon continued writing, almost daily, even while working long days and starting to help FLN combatants, fighting the French rulers.
"He writes very, very well," Barny said. "He's very precise with his words. He has a poetic talent. So how do you put that into images? I asked myself. Our approach was to show that through, not ideas, but facts and events, of his life."
Barny also made very visible through beautiful visual metaphors the presence of Martinique, Fanon's birthplace, and Africa, where, before his diagnosed cancer in 1960, Fanon became an ambassador of the FLN (the Front of Liberation of Algeria).
The film is also being released in Martinique, from 5 April, and the team hopes it'll get to travel far beyond France, as 2025 marks Fanon's centenary.
"This film is in huge demand abroad," Barny admitted. "It's because Fanon was a character who knew how to take risks for the world. So the world is waiting and asking for more about him. He belongs to the whole of humanity today."
Black Paris
Fanon, like James Baldwin, is also at the centre of the ‘Paris Noir’ exhibition currently on at Centre Pompidou.
I wrote a review for RFI recently.
And here is also a little video, with the British photographer Johny Pitts, who has toured Europe for years to capture portraits of ‘Afropeans’:
Podcast
Music production in Africa for Africans
Meanwhile, this week, in my podcast Spotlight on Africa you can hear African musicians determined to produce their music more and more at home and not only in Europe or further afield, and to help other artists doing so.
In Africa, most musicians find that their means of success rely on producing, recording and touring abroad, especially in Europe.
But some musicians believe production could return to Africa.
In Paris, on 28 March, at the AfriCapitales festival, academics from the revue Volume! discuss their findings on music recording from the major global centres of phonographic production.
The roundtable brings together authors as well as professionals from the African music field to analyse the range of new configurations due to new technologies and computers of the world, "in a diversely globalised space."
Our first guest to expand on this research is the Cameroonian singer songwriter Blick Bassy.
Drawing on his experience as an African artist who has found international success, Bassy put in place a festival in Cameroon for other young music makers. The first edition took place in November 2024.
Billed as the first festival in Africa to offer training in production, Africa Prod Fest aims to encourage those starting out in the music industry to move forward with their own projects.
"The idea of the festival in Cameroon came from the process I went through myself to understand the structures of the music business," Bassy told me. "And now I would like to share this experience with my people in Africa."
You will also hear from the sound engineer Bey-K, who is part of the organisation of the 'Jambulance', a moving recording studio traveling between Senegal and Guinea, and from the Nigeria singer Cill.
Listen from here from Tuesday 1st April: https://www.rfi.fr/en/podcasts/spotlight-on-africa/20250401-bringing-the-beat-home-african-musicians-push-for-local-music-production
Or on Apple Podcast.
Spotlight on Africa is produced by Radio France Internationale's English language service.
Thanks for reading, as always.
I’m taking a short break to check other shores…
I’ll be back soon, best, take care, stay strong,
melissa