Blida

The Algerian town where Fanon ran the psychiatric hospital, treated both torturers and their victims, and resigned to join the revolution.

Fanon was appointed head of the Blida-Joinville hospital in 1953 and set about dismantling its colonial practice, unlocking wards and treating Algerian patients as people with a culture rather than cases of native pathology. Then the war began. He found himself treating French officers who tortured by day and could not sleep, and Algerians they had tortured, in the same building. He resigned in 1956 in a letter to the resident minister saying that the Arab is permanently alienated in his own country, and joined the FLN.