ON THE DEATH OF AN OLD MILITANT
P., S.
Messali Hadj, father of the Algerian nationalist movement and one-time charismatic leader of the Algerian people—in Algeria itself, but particularly among those Algerians who had gone to work in...
...Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of Messali's movement was its popular founda tion, the fact that most of its members and supporters came from the Algerian poor, workingclass nomads who had drifted over to France to work in the bottom layer of French industry...
...Messali himself had worked for years in the Renault plant and never lost touch with Algerian proletarians...
...S. P. q 478 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS...
...So many storms, so many tests, and so much violence inflicted and suffered were summed up in this episcopal smile...
...He stood for something independent Algeria has yet to find—a socialist Algeria within a democratic framework —and this, in fact, was his program for the entire Maghreb of North Africa...
...One would have said that of a Karl Marx withdrawn to Mount Athos...
...Although he lost out in the bitter internal struggle that split the nationalist movement, he never ceased to represent its democratic and socialist spirit as opposed to the Muslim nationalism represented by his opponents...
...A reluctant Algerian government finally permitted the burial of Messali to take place in the city of Oran, Algeria, near his birthplace...
...Messali Hadj was a striking figure, a Za'im, to employ the Arabic term...
...On the day after independence, for example, or after the putsch (by Boumedienne) of 1965, commenting upon the political events affecting his country with finesse and a certain serenity...
...Despite efforts to keep his burial secret, word got about and many thousands of people escorted his body to the burial grounds where an emotional ceremony took place...
...Messali Hadj, father of the Algerian nationalist movement and one-time charismatic leader of the Algerian people—in Algeria itself, but particularly among those Algerians who had gone to work in France during the colonialist days—died in France on June 3, 1974, at the age of 76...
...The inspired actor, the exalted prophet of a proletarian Islam had taken upon himself the inspired gesture, the engaging smile and the calm voice of a pontiff on vacation...
...Forty years of struggles, of involuntary nomadism, of different prisons had passed over him like thousands of years of wind on an abrupt mountain peak...
...To be sure, he had kept his hermit's beard, his lathe-turner's dervish head of hair topped by an imposing tarbouch, and wore the noble caftan of an "alem" of a Koranic university...
...His death, virtually ignored in the French press and totally ignored in the world press, ought not to pass unnoticed...
...While this is not the place to evaluate that long struggle between the two wings of Algerian and North African nationalism, a comment on Messali written by Jean Lacouture (Le Monde, June 5, 1974) is appropriate: From time to time, Messali Hadj would receive journalists...
...A strange silhouette, more Balkanic than Maghrebian, more orthodox in appearance than Musulman...
...But what struck one perhaps most forcefully in this old leader of exiled masses was a kind of malicious good nature, an ironic detachment, that of a man who had seen much, and retained above all whatever it was that strengthened his convictions and his faith, indestructible and almost naive, in his star...
...He was eroded, pounded upon, but also appeased...
Vol. 21 • September 1974 • No. 4
