What Am I Doing Here? (30 page)

 

The events in Marseilles showed that France had run into real trouble with her Algerian minority, and relations with her ex-colony took a further downward turn. Many Frenchmen were upset to be labelled ‘racist', and there was considerable heart-searching in the press. The French have a long-cherished belief that they are not, as a people, racist; that racism is an Anglo-Saxon malady they do not happen to share. They will admit to cultural chauvinism, even to the cruelty of, say, the Foreign Legion; but the idea of a colour-bar is alien to them. French colonists always wanted their ‘natives' to become brown Frenchmen – and to a degree they were successful. No African leader is going to pay England the compliment of Leopold Senghor: ‘Lord, among the white nations, place France on the right hand of God the Father.'

But France had no such luck with Islam – and this time the Government in Algiers was really angry. It was bad enough the coffins coming off the Marseilles boat, and the trite police denials, and the murderers running free. But when we crossed to Algiers, six weeks after the death of Monsieur Gerlache, officials were still howling about an editorial in the right-wing Marseilles newspaper,
Le Meridional.
‘We have had enough,' it said. ‘Enough of Algerian thieves. Enough of Algerian vandals. Enough of Algerian loudmouths. Enough of Algerian syphilitics. Enough of Algerian rapists. Enough of Algerian pimps. Enough of Algerian madmen. Enough of Algerian killers.' All of which might make you think the average Marseillais had never heard of a gun, a whore or syphilis.

The days are over when Frenchmen could use this kind of language and get away with it.
Algérie française
is no more and the new Algeria is in capable hands. Its President, Houari Boumedienne, is a self-effacing man, ascetic, difficult and proud; and he has pulled his country out of the fratricidal aftermath of the revolution and the hysteria of Ben Bella's rule. He has the air of a man who is horror-struck by the past, and determined it will not be repeated. The regime has its ghosts of course – but these are apparently sleeping.

The 730,000 Algerian passport-holders in France are the children of the detested colonial marriage, and are shunted to and fro between their divorced parents. When Algerian bureaucrats talk about them, they stiffen with wounded pride and you hear the words ‘respect' and ‘dignity' repeated and repeated. The events in Marseilles drew from Boumedienne a characteristically sharp reaction. On 19 September he blocked the passage of all future emigrants to France, and added that if the French Government did not protect innocent Algerians from reprisals, he would bring everyone home regardless of cost. He knew he could rightly blame their presence in France on colonial injustice – but not indefinitely. He also knew that the onus was on him to remove the pressures that force a Salah Bougrine to leave his wife and children - and eventually murder a bus driver.

We met Bougrine's father on the chalk-white mountain where he was born. The old man saw our car had broken down, and he left his sheep and came up the hill to help. He had a distinguished manner, with a droopy moustache and scratched-over spectacles. He wore a rather raffish yellow headcloth but his chest was concave; he was coughing badly, and death was perhaps not far away. Yes, yes, his boy was the murderer all right. They had come from town to tell him, and he seemed quite pleased about it.

He did not want us to visit the family farm: but we could see it up the valley, the land bleached and thorny and covered with white dust, the barn that was walls and no roof, and the pile of brushwood for the winter. Trees would not grow on old Bougrine's side of the mountain: only over the pass, on the north flank, there were orchards and poplars for shade. He did have a spring or two, that dribbled moisture all year round, enough to keep the sheep and mules alive. But the cows were in a bad way, quietly complaining, with leathery skin and hollow rib-cages.

‘I think they're going to die,' said old Bougrine's neighbour. ‘We're in a prison here.'

 

The
fellah,
or small farmer, is the gut of the Algerian nation.

To the east of Algiers itself are the Kabyles: Berber mountaineers, an ancient people with long faces and hazel eyes; and if you look at their overloaded villages and their cramped, stony terraces of olives and fruit trees, you understand why a third of the men are always away in France. If you look closer at other villages, you will see they are still ruined shells, after the French bombing: another third died in the war.

In the south-east of the country are the Chaouia of the Aurès Mountains. This is wild country, even poorer than Kabylia. It grows cedars and live-oaks, but most of it is bare and rocky, and the snows come early. Then, on the gloomy uplands from Sétif to the Tunisian border, there are the Arabs.

When the colons took the best land a century ago, the free farmers retreated to farms of a few stony acres, or to the margins of the
chotts,
or salt-lakes, where the wind drives saline scum ashore and blows off the topsoil. People mistook their poverty for poverty of spirit: but in fact the harsh, dry climate refined the complexity of their emotions. Many, it was true, were sucked into the French towns and entered into the process of becoming good bourgeois. The ones that stayed recalled, in folk memory, a time when the fat lands were theirs, and never lost the hope of their recovery. French Algeria enjoyed periods of uneasy calm, but the colons always lived under the threat of peasant revolt. Unlike Tunisia or Morocco, Algeria had no great cities of her own, and no feudal aristocracy worth the name. The
fellah
was Algeria. He made the revolution. It released in him destructive energies he had neither known nor suspected.

The colons, more than a million of them, have been so pilloried, and their recent history is so unfortunate, that they now deserve an apologist. Nicknamed ‘
pied noirs
', or ‘black feet', they were frontiersmen by temperament and circumstance : refugees from an ungrateful Europe who had landed in Africa with nothing – and were hardly even French! A government report of 1912 revealed that one in five settlers was of French origin. The exodus of 1962 was not a homecoming but another displacement. Algeria was la
patrie.
The colons were suspicious of metropolitan France and devious in their dealings with her. They did not understand the changes in post-war Europe and were stranded, morally and socially, in the Empire of Napoleon III. They longed to be loved by a France they did not know. Any attempt to give Algerians control of their affairs drew from them hysterical outbursts that ended in their collective suicide. De Gaulle shouted from the balcony
Vive l'Algérie française!'
– and then betrayed them. Understandably, they are bitter.

The colons loved their country but they loved too much of it. There were, of course, poor honest families, like that of Albert Camus, who had ‘never exploited anyone'. But on the eve of the revolution, nine tenths of the country's wealth was in the hands of one tenth of the population. Everything of value belonged to the settlers: or to a residue of ‘men devoted to France' – toadying
bachagas
or
caïds
who taxed the peasants to the limit.

You can see their great farms, stranded in wheatfields like half-sunk ships, the grim houses with machine-gun turrets, and the farm-workers' with the roofs caved in. Many look plague-stricken, for the Algerians have left them to the storks and crows, and the orchards are dying for lack of water. It is a usurped, bitter country. On the hills there are many Christian cemeteries, the walls with ragged holes, the tombs upturned, and a shroud of black cypresses. In Algeria you are always aware of cemeteries.

 

The Night of the Long Knives — literally knives, because the FLN possessed only antique firearms and valued silence – took place at Arris in the Aurès Mountains on 1 November 1955: within two years the revolt had spread all over the country. The FLN chose well in the Aurès. The mountains were the traditional refuge of outlaws, and — for all the French helicopter landings – the rebels never lost control. What followed became the most bloodthirsty of colonial wars. There is a mass of documentation on the behaviour of the French Army; about its inferiority complex over Vichy and Dien Bien Phu; how officers told their men: ‘You may rape but discreetly'; how they deflowered Djamila Boupacha with a bottle; how they cleared a million
fellah
from the villages, to cut them off from the FLN and leave the country clear for
la chasse
; and how they massacred whole villages, faked the evidence and blamed the FLN. Then there is the black side of the FLN – very black – and it is still argued in Algiers if those means were needed to achieve that end.

The war still scars the eastern half of the country, from the Kabylia through the provinces of Sétif, Batna and the Constantinois : a sinister undertone of violence that never lets you forget the past. There are wrecked guard-posts, gutted barracks and broken bridges; there is the farm of Le Main Rouge where they brought FLN suspects for torture – and you would have to be blind to forget the war in Arris itself.

It is a big village of rough stone houses, with flat baked mud roofs rising in tiers up the hill. It was Ramadan when we went there and we had to mind our manners. Tempers snap on empty stomachs. In the bazaar there were lots of people with little to do; the boys holding hands and hitting their heads against the wall; the old men hunched in the shade so their turbans seemed to wind around their knees; and the fancy young men back from France, strutting in their wasp-waisted suits and saying yes to policemen. The FLN cemetery is downhill from the village. It is a very big cemetery. In Arris, we were happy not to be French.

The history of the war relates directly to the plight of immigrants in France. The greater part of them comes from Eastern Algeria. They began the revolution; they were the hardest hit by it. Traditional agriculture, difficult enough in peace, was completely dislocated by the war, and centuries of tradition were broken. Then there is the psychological damage to the tortured, and to those who saw their villages burning, their mothers and sisters raped, or their male relatives lined up against a wall and shot. It is said that one million people were killed. Certainly, you can hardly find an immigrant in France without a missing father, brother or son. Salah Bougrine is thirty-six. He was twenty-five when the war ended and seventeen when it began. In those days you learned to use a knife.

The knife is the classic weapon of the high plains' Arab. In his last book,
The Wretched of the Earth
, Franz Fanon, the Martinique-born psychiatrist and hero of the Algerian revolution, explains how the Algiers School of Psychiatry went to endless lengths to prove, with ‘scientific' data, that the Algerian peasant was a born killer. He was no suicide: instead, he channelled his homicidal melancholia outwards into murder. The fact that he stabbed several times and often mutilated the body revealed ‘primitive impulses uncontrolled by the cerebral cortex'.

This kind of dogma, if believed, was very useful to the coloniser. It gave him tacit permission to treat the native as an animal, even to condone the use of torture with the minimum side-effects to himself. Fanon's refutation of the argument is one of the best things he wrote: he shows how homicidal depressions relate to the degree of brutality applied. No one can hope to remove the scars of the war within eleven years. Nor can one deny that some Algerians are quick on the draw – often with good reason. On two occasions I have heard them say, ‘When an Algerian goes to France, he buys a knife!' And in Marseilles what an opportunity! What a selection! Eight-inch switchblades and all the latest cutlery!

 

The young men of Salah Bougrine's generation fought under the slogan ‘Land to the Fellah!' When the colon farmers left, their workmen moved in on the land and farmed it themselves in co-operatives. But there was no land for the dispossessed peasant of the margins. The country was starving: there could be no question of dismembering the old estates and risking further famine. So the young men drifted to the towns, but there were no jobs. Then they heard on the grapevine that France, the old enemy, was the land of jobs: and since the boss had always been the enemy, they set off to earn money from him. Most went for reasons of poverty; some from curiosity; a few because they couldn't sit still. First they went to the white city of Algiers and saw the cars, the shops and the sad-eyed street boys. Then, often without a word of French, they boarded the boat for Marseilles.

The poor young man, crossing the sea to face the Industrial Giant, is a theme for a modern Virgil. If the immigrant is lucky, he will escape with some pay-packets saved up: enough, after a few years, to buy a café or a grocer's shop, or a house and tinsel dresses for his wife. But the risks are high, and the French unfriendly. They have dangerous machines he doesn't understand – and there is always the danger of a nervous breakdown.

The emigrants do bring one big advantage to the Algerian Government. Annually, they remit home one milliard of francs (about a hundred million sterling) and this helps make up the trade deficit with France. It also relieves local unemployment. The nineteenth-century evictions gave Algeria a floating population of landless unemployed: their number, at the time of independence, had risen to two million, with twice as many on the breadline. Boumedienne's administration has staked everything on the generation born after 1962, and hopes to abolish urban unemployment by 1980. The older ones, the ones who are scarred by the war, would slow down the programme if they stayed. ‘So,' say the French racists, ‘they come and shit on us.'

France, as a young Algerian economist put it to me, is ‘
la societe de la consommation folle
.' A mania for the modern is sweeping the country: modern in the most old-fashioned sense – Frenchmen now want all the things Americans wanted twenty years ago. Supermarkets and shopping-malls are going up in every provincial town, and the new High Paris – west of the Arc de Triomphe – has the appearance of an undistinguished American city. But this soi-disant economic miracle needs labour: and, long ago, French planners realised there would not be enough Frenchmen for the task. Accordingly, they introduced ‘la politique nataliste'. They dangled every inducement in front of French motherhood to breed: yet the population graphs obstinately refused to soar. It was then evident that, even if enough babies were born, most would aspire to becoming skilled workmen, and would not want to be stuck in a lower industrial proletariat, doing the underpaid jobs known as ‘travaux pénibles'.