Kargosha in Hamburg, with the objective of publishing the writings of the much-admired former prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, who was overthrown by a CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup in 1953. The Mosaddeq Press was established by Banisadr and Hasan Habibi (1937-2013), along with two fellow activists, Engineer Houshmand and Dr. Īccording to Banisadr, the first part was published in 1966-7 and the second one, which I have been able to independently verify, in January 1969. The translation was originally published in two parts by the Mosaddeq Press, which was sent to Iran and subsequently printed as a single volume, though the evidence of its having been split in two continues to mark the contents page and book’s pagination in some early pre-revolution editions.

He would ultimately emerge as the Islamic Republic of Iran’s first president from January 1980 until his untimely fall from power in June 1981.

1933), who was a politically active student studying in Paris during the second half of the 1960s, with a handful of other activists in a secondary supporting role. But, in fact, the first translation of The Wretched of the Earth ( Les Damnés de la Terre) was completed under the title of Duzakhiyan ruye zamin by Abolhasan Banisadr (b. It has emerged as something of an urban legend that it was Ali Shariʿati (1933-1977), who first translated Fanon’s classic anti-colonial tome. There has, however, been much confusion over the identity of The Wretched of the Earth’s first Persian translator, which has remained shrouded in uncertainty. Fanon and his prominent role in the Algerian Revolution represented a lodestar for countless Iranian dissidents and revolutionaries. During the 1960s and 1970s, Iran was no exception in this regard. Apart from furnishing a powerful lexicon for describing the colonial condition, the book has also been brandished as a kind of “handbook” on how best to resist, fight and overturn it. It has acted as a source of inspiration for myriad intellectuals in the Global South, but by no means exclusively such. Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), translated into English as The Wretched of the Earth, is an incontrovertible classic in the literature of anti-colonial insurgency.

The wretched of the earth author