LETTER FROM ALGERIA

...In the proposed integration of Western Europe, a common labor pool must Winter 1955 DISSENT 54 indeed be a corollary of a common pool of steel and coal, and also of a common Western European army...

...French misdeeds in Algeria are therefore offirially no conrern of other members of the United Nations...

...and the French had not yet understood that Koranic law never grants an individual the same kind of outright ownership of the land as French law...

...But this Europeanization has been rendesed more hazardous by inequalities in the political status of the various administrative areas affected...

...But no steel industry has yet been developed in Algeria, which exports its ore and imports all its metals and machines, even exporting much of the labor that transforms this ore in metropolitan France, where over three hundred thousand Algerian workers are now employed, many of them in the factories of such key industrial areas as the North, the Paris area, Saint-Etienne and Marseilles...

...Though most of them return to thzir native farms as soon as they have earned enough to repay the mortgages that helped to finance their trip, there are now close to 500,000 Mohammedans living in France, including the 300,000 who are employed in industry...

...Populations arc expanding throughout the Islamic world, as indeed they are in all colonial or semi-colonial areas where sex is still considered cheaper and more fun than Hollywood movies and where modern hygiene has only recently been taught to expectant mothers...

...The highlands of Kabylia, with their tiny steep fields and orchards where the farmers plough beneath the figtrees in perspectives as fantastic as those of a Chagall landscape so that the ox seems to be building a nest in the tree, must feed two hundred and fifty souls, on an average, per square kilometer...

...On the contrary, the French have been remarkably liberal...

...Not that French colonial administration in North Africa has been any more despotic or corrupt than in other areas of the French Union, or than those of other colonial powers...

...As a solution to Algeria’s demographic problem, Catholics and Mohammedans seem to agree in rejecting mere birth-control, and the Communists have not yet dared to propose openly a remedy so alien to the fundamental Islamic belief that children are a blessing of Allah...

...The different political history and economic evolution of each of these territories has, moreover, led to the adoption, in each, of a number of peculiar expedients and compromises that serve to increase, in the long run, the basic differences of status...

...but this only illustrates the French government’s suspicions about the loyalty of the Communist-infiltrated and pacifist youth of metropolitan France...

...It has been estimated that the present population of Algeria is more than five times what it was numerically in 1830, at the time of the French conquest...

...Algerian unemployment has ceased to be an African problem and is beginning to threaten all of Western European organized labor with an expanding manpower reserve that is driven by hunger and desperation to undercut any agreed minimum wage and accept whatever it is offered...

...This total population continues to increase...

...In addition to a million European settlers and their descendants, a figure which now includes also the native North African Jews and a large number of offspring of mixed marriages of all sorts, Algeria has over eight million Mohammedans, as compared with a bare two million Jews and Mohammedans one hundred years ago...

...The French have been established in Algeria since 1830, in Tunisia since 1881, in Morocco since 1912...

...But these are all export crops that employ only seasonal labor and contribute little to the diet of the millions of undernourished Algerian Mohammedans...

...Families of ten children are not unusual...

...One hundred and twenty years of colonial history have managed to depersonalize Algeria’s native Mohammedan population until, though dissatisfied with its present status, it no longer knows very clearly what it Winter 1955 52 DISSENT wants and remains, at least for the time being, more perplexed and purposeless than the Nationalists of Tunisia and Morocco...

...These Algerians emigrate to France much as the starved workers of France were once driven, under the Nazi occupation of their country, to seek work in the industries of Germany, and often live in France in conditions that are no better than those of the slave laborers of the Third Reich...

...Huge citrus groves, especially around Orlkansville and Boufarik and in the plain of the Mitidja, enormous vineyards that produce more wine than all of France can ever consume or export, now remind the traveler of Southern California, Florida or the Corpus Christi area in Texas...

...The French wxe thus able to expropriate the Mohammedan farmers wherever the land seemed interesting enough for them to raise the question of ownership...

...THE EXPANSION OF THE ECONOMY of Algeria has failed signally to keep up with the countly’s general increase of population...

...Only a steady, rational and subsidized expansion of Algerian industry, to the detriment of some of the export industries of metropolitan France, might now train and absorb these many willing but unskilled workers, all clamoring for jobs, salaries and food...

...True, the names of the seriously wounded prisoners who were released . by the Viet Minh after the fall ofl Dien Bien Phu revealed a high percentage of North African Mohammedans...

...In the Saharan South, around Colomb BCchar, coal deposits are already exploited, and iron ore is mined in several other areas...

...The Europeanization of North Africa therefore presented to the French a problem that was far less fraught with potential trauma than the cultural assimilation of the West African “slaves” imported some two hundred years ago into Brazil or the southern states of the U.S.A...

...As early as 1840, French colonists were busy draining swamps in the coastal area...

...In the crowded Casbah of Algiers, those whom we view as destitute slum-dwellers already believe themselves to be a relatively privileged middle-class : the truly poor huddle outside the city limits in shanty-towns of reed-built huts, in kennel-like contraptions built of rotting old packing-cases, beneath a roof of rusty old U. S . Army tomato catsup cans...

...In the military territories of Saharan Southern Algeria, all fands and oases, a kind of demographic and political vacuum subsists, a Happy Hunting Ground for swashbuckling military adventurers with a dash of Lawrence of Arabia or of Lady Hester Stanhope in their sometimes ambivalent personalities...

...Even after the Mohammedan Conquest of North Africa, relations between the Maghreb and Spain continued to be close as long as the Arabs were still in the Iberian peninsula...

...The French have been conscious of the human and political rights of the less advanced peoples, even if they have flouted these rights when they conflicted too overtly with certain French interests...

...For the problem of Algeria’s under-employment, many solutions have been suggested, ranging from an agrarian reform that would break up the great industrial estates of the wealthy colonists and restore part of the rich plains to the Mohammedan subsistence farmers, to a vast program of vocational training and industrial expansion which would both prepare the population for new jobs and create these jobs...

...Since 1945, Algeria proper has become, at least in theory, a part of the same political unit as Continental France, a politically and economically underprivileged Corsica...

...Any defeatist can already predict tlie worst that is likely to happen in the Protectorates: after a number of appeals made to the United Nations by member-states of the Arab League and hastily seconded by Argentina and the United States in a rush to get in ahead of the USSR, the French might be forced to relinquish their hold over Tunisia and Morocco even faster than they are now being forced to withdraw from Indochina...

...East of Algiers, a factory area is now being developed beyond the hugc harbor...

...But Algeria has no lost sovereignty of its own to regain: just as Puerto Rico is part of the territory of the United States, Algeria is legally a part of France...

...Nor is this huge increase of Algeria’s population the direct result of a French policy of encouraging the systematic breeding of cannon-fodder...

...LETTER FROM ALGERIA Edouard Roditi When Lord Acton declared that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, he may not have been thinking of the slave economy of 18th-century plantations, nor of the kind of peonage that much of 19th-century colonialism still implied...

...We live in an age of highly publicized pathos, and it has not yet become fashionable for the guilt-ridden American middle class to shed crocodile tears over the poverty and hunger of colonial Islam...

...Perhaps we should airlift a few joy-riding foreign correspondents to Algeria before it is too late, because the West is so signally failing there in its self-proclaimed mission of freeing the world from hunger, poverty and fear...

...Considerable numbers of them are beginning to filter into Belgium, the Saar and West Germany...

...Only one out of every eight Mohammedans, on an average, is bringing home pay, though one out of every six of the total population of Algeria is employed, most of thc six hundred thousand employed Europeans having steady jobs...

...Over a million North African migratory workers have, since 1945, tried their luck in France, over 90 per cent of thcm coming from Algeria...

...55 DISSENT Winter 1955...

...Immediately west of Algiers, there are miles of tomato plantations along a rocky coast picturesque enough for the same kind of resort developments as the Rivieras of Italy and France...

...in this manpower pool, Algeria is a richer reserve than Italy...

...With 4 per cent of its population under nineteen years of age and 12 per cent of its able-bodied Mohammedan males now driven to seek work in the alien industrial slums of housing-starved France, Algeria now has 35 times as many Mohammedan farmers subsisting as best they can on 3 mere three and a half times as much farmland as its European colonists occupy in the more fertile plains...

...More devout than many Christians, the Mohammedans are as averse to birth control as Italians or Spaniards...

...Still, some drastic reforms are immediately necessary, if France is destined to remain in North Africa and if North Africa is to be saved from the kind of economic and political frustration that can only lead to violence and chaos...

...Serious-minded Europeans and Mohammedans have begun, in Algiers and metropolitan France, to organize groups for study and discussion of the problems that this situation creates...

...THOUGH EVENTS IN TUNISIA and Morocco have, in recent years, tended to distract “informed public opinion” from any potential troubles in Algeria, the actual political and economic situation in this former colony, where there are no armed partisans attacking French farms as in Tunisia and no political assassinations in reprisal for the arrest of Mohammedan leaders as in Morocco, is perhaps more desperatc and, in the long run, less predictable than in either Protectorate...

...I met, in Kabylia, the Europeanized Berber principal of a local elcmentary school, a man who writes and publishes regionalistic novels in French and already enjoys quite a reputation as a literary figure in Paris...

...Tunisia hovers on the brink of the same kind of national sovereignty as Egypt and Iraq have already been able to wrest from the British...

...53 DISSENT Winter 1955 Three million hectares of forests have been cleared, since the conquest of Algeria, in the arid mountains where >:he Arab farmers who once owned the land of the richer plains have now withdrawn...

...Though the slave trade had brought to the Barbary Coast a considerable number of Negro slaves from the Saharan oases and the Sudan, North Africa was still bound by closer ties to Europe, beyond the sea, than to Africa proper, beyond the 51 DISSENT Winter 1955 less hospitable desert...

...But his statement explains very well the kind of absolute confusion and corruption that one still encounters at every step in areas like French North Africa, which have inherited the inescapable tangle of injustices, hatreds and resentments which slavery and peonage continue to breed long after they have been officially abolished...

...From the desert South, the starving nomads stream northwards, all anxious to find jobs...

...Algeria remained for a long time an outright colony, whereas Tunisia and Morocco have always been Protectorates, still theoretically enjoying a kind of dormant sovereignty of their own...

...But huge loans are required for any program as revolutionary and humane as all those now proposed, and every necessary reform already meets with the bitter opposition of well entrenched vested interests that are powerfully represented in Paris...

...Speculative and industrialized agriculture, concentrating its efforts on a few valuable export crops, provides employment to this huge and expanding Algerian labor reserve only on a seasonal basis, whether in the fields or in packing and processing plants...

...The Lycanthropist poet Petrus Borel, a precursor of Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Hart Crane and Kenneth Patchen, died of sun-stroke suffered while working in his fields in Mostaganem...

...Two million three hundred thousand Mohammedans are now actively employed in Algeria, two million of them only seasonally...

...an American writer of his status would probably produce a book every two years and a child every five, a Frenchman a book a year and no children at all...

...they were inspired, even in the early stages of their colonial administration but especially after 1870, by generous 18th- and 19th-century notions of civilization and democracy as goals towards which the colonial peoples whose tutors they had chosen to become must still be educated...

...In 1945, an insufficient harvest of subsistence crops in the foothills caused a famine, while the plains still produced huge quantities of wine that no devout Mohammedan is allowed to drink...

...A thousand years of common economic and cultural history, under Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and Byzantines, had already bound these arcas closcly to the Northern shores of the Mediterranean, long before the Iron Curtain of Islam cut them off from the Christian world...

...The frontiers that divide these various territories from each other and from Spanish Morocco, the International Zones of Tangier and Tripoli, are moreover quite artificial and correspond to no real economic, linguistic or ethnic differences...

...after that, an uninterrupted series of wars and expeditions of all sorts, ranging from piracy and the repression of piracy to normal trade relations, kept Algiers and the coastal cities of Barbary in close contact with other areas of the Christian Mediterranean...

...When the French authorities first demanded proof of ownership of the land, the Mohammedans were not able to producc deec!s that could be considered valid in terms of French law...

...In Morocco, the political ineptitude of French politicians and administrators threatens to create a situation almost as hopeless as in Indochina...

...Though no practical solutions are yet proposed for immediate legislative action, more and more Frenchmen are beginning to realize that France must soon formulate a North African policy that will take into consideration the real needs of the Maghreb...

...Unlike Jean Giono, Marcel Jouhandeau and other famous French regionalists, Mouloud Feraoun already has seven children but has published only two books...

...The native population of the Northern coasts of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia was thus, in spite of the Asian veneer of Islam, in most respects as Mediterranean, by 1830, as that of Spain or Sicily, lands that had also experienced several centuries of Arab occupation...