Sixty years ago, in December 1961, Frantz Fanon, gravely ill with leukemia, died in a hospital in Washington, D.C. The circumstances of his passing there were odd, even ironic: After all, he had branded the United States “that country of lynchers.” Of his fellow Blacks there, he added, in his posthumously published book The Wretched of the Earth (1963), “The whites in America had not behaved any differently to them than the white colonizers had to the Africans.”

Perhaps strangest of all the circumstances surrounding Fanon’s death was the fact that he was brought to Washington from Algeria, willingly, by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. Given that 1961 stood at the apex of the Cold War, and given that Fanon was a committed if not uncritical Marxist, one wonders at the unusual alliance. Did the CIA hope that Fanon, once cured, would return to Africa to continue his anticolonial activism with an eye to turning the newly independent nations there toward friendship with a country that, though a superpower and racist to the core, had never established colonies there?

We’ll never know. What we do know is that with his books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon established himself as not just the period’s foremost critic of European colonialism but also the most perceptive student of the psychology of oppression. The road to those positions had been difficult. Born in 1925, he was a young teenager when Vichy (pro-Nazi, that is) French forces occupied his native Martinique and imposed an openly racist regime atop one that previous French colonists had expressed a touch more subtly. Fanon was still a teenager when he joined the Free French forces, suffering wounds in battle in 1944.

Recovering in Martinique, Fanon began to read medical textbooks. He returned to France, becoming a psychiatrist. He began to analyze the settler mentality of the European colonialists in Africa. Joining the bloody fight for Algerian independence, he observed that the French colonialists were as psychologically wounded by the experience as those whom they oppressed. At the same time, he insisted that, given that “direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm,” the colonized were utterly justified in responding with violence as a “cleansing force.”

But there’s a rub, Fanon wrote: Having thrown off their oppressors, colonized people too often flocked to the nationalist strongmen who rose in their wake. Moreover, the people who were politically dominant in multiethnic nations were jealous of the strongmen’s power. This was the tragedy of colonialism, the very thing that George Orwell had warned of just a few years earlier in his political fable Animal Farm. Fanon stripped the allegories bare, urging that colonized and subjugated peoples find a better, different way to live. Those people are less politically than economically colonized these days, their resources stripped away around the world by global powers that include the United States and China, caught up in a new Cold War. Their race for extracted riches makes Frantz Fanon’s books urgent reading today.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.