A reader familiar with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Letre et le neant will be surprised to find how much Frantz Fanon is indebted to this existentialist in writing Black Skin, White Masks. Most of the key words in Fanon’s first book, such as freedom, creation, responsibility, choice-making, are also those of Existentialism. Sartre is not the only European thinker Fanon draws on in Black Skin, White Masks. From Hegel, Fanon borrows notions like dialectics, master-slave relationship, and gaze in formulating a new ontology for blacks. This list, of course, does not reflect Fanon’s heavy indebtedness to European psychology and psychoanalysis. This paper brings to light the way Fanon makes use of Hegel and Sartre, the object of his virulent criticism, in exploring an anti-colonial politics; and it discusses the limitations and self-contradiction Fanon ends up embracing. In particular, this paper revisits the controversy over the issue of the universal that took place between Negritude and Sartre and later between Sartre and Fanon. Thus this review elucidates the complexities that beset Fanon’s attitude towards the Negritude Movement and, in so doing, proves that despite his fierce critique of the universalist tendency in both Negritude’s essentialist philosophy and Sartre’s socialist position, the Martinican critic himself ends up espousing another universalism.