Fanon's critique of Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban found in his first work, Masks, is important to an understanding of Fanon's theory of decolonisation. This relevance is suggested by the proximity of the two works in terms of both subject matter and methodology. In fact the purposes of Masks and Prospero are strikingly similar: each represents an attempt to provide a psychology of colonialism dealing with both parties to the colonial experience; to explain how colonial rule is both possible and necessary; and finally, to uncover the psychological, and by implication the political, preconditions for the development of an independent personality. Although Fanon and Mannoni deal essentially with what are individual cases, Fanon with the Antilles and Mannoni with Madagascar, both are willing to claim that the results of their research are applicable to the situation of all colonised peoples.

The bitterness of Fanon's attack upon Prospero, and the repeated asides directed against Mannoni which appear in all of Fanon's major works, cannot be adequately explained in terms of an ideological conflict over nationalism. Fanon's antipathy toward Mannoni was part of the contempt for what he believed to be the covert project of most social science in the colonial world. However, Mannoni represented a far more formidable opponent for Fanon than either his predecessors, such as Porot, or his contemporaries, such as Carothers.