The Wretched Of The Earth Homepage
Four weeks before his death, Fanon writes to a friend;
"....Roger, what I want to tell you is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own.
What shocked me here in my bed when I felt my strength ebbing away along with my blood was not the fact of dying as such, but to die of leukemia, in Washington, when three months ago I could have died facing the enemy since I was already aware that I had this disease.
We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty. I want you to know that even when the doctors had given up, in the gathering dusk I was still thinking of the Algerian people, of the peoples of the Third World, and when I have persevered it was for their sake."