They were out to get him. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian revolutionary, but he was also a psychiatrist, and he knew how emotions could be linked with their opposites.

In May 1959—to choose one consequential incident—he was being driven near a base that Algerian insurgents had set up on the Moroccan border when the driver lost control of the car and Fanon was hurled from it, badly injuring his back. Some suspected that the road had been mined, others that the vehicle had been sabotaged.

He was flown to Rome for medical treatment. Another close call: his confrères in Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN) arranged for a car to pick him up at the airport—a car that their adversaries rigged with explosives. Fanon was spared only because a child’s errant ball triggered the bomb prematurely. Then a local newspaper reported on the arrival of an injured FLN official to whom the explosion was seemingly connected, even naming the hospital that was treating him—where, sure enough, two armed men burst into the room he had been assigned. They drew their guns on an empty bed, Fanon having stealthily had himself relocated.

A year later, he was at an airport in Monrovia, Liberia, awaiting a flight to Conakry, Guinea, when he and his FLN companions were told that the plane was full. Marvelously solicitous employees of Air France assured him that the airline would book them on a flight leaving the next day and cover their overnight expenses. Fanon was on his guard: everyone remembered how the FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella had been captured four years earlier when his French-crewed Rabat-to-Tunis flight made an unscheduled stop in Algiers. As Fanon and his comrades set out for Conakry by car, the flight on which they had been rebooked was diverted to Abidjan and searched by French security. Yet another close call.

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