The Algerian Tragedy
Ptastrik, Stanley
ALGERIA: THE REALITIES, by Germaine Tillion. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 1958. 115 pp. $2.50. Germaine Tillion's Algeria is a beautifully written, but seriously flawed, book. The author, an...
...So much for what Mlle...
...Two more mutually linked communities would be hard to imagine...
...It is impossible to discuss this here (we cannot neglect this forever, however...
...Alfred A. Knopf, New York...
...dwindling of resources...
...Algeria was particularly vulnerable: Weeks of work and seven fleeces are needed for the weaving of a burnous, and each fleece is worth between five hundred and a thousand francs...
...Tillion cannot come to this point...
...It is the same wherever you look, and so in every field the seedy and the sordid are . . . replacing the splendid survivals of the past...
...It is difficult not to agree with her that the gaining of independence, tout court, i.e., "independence" brought about by an abrupt withdrawal and abandonment of Algeria by the French and a repatriation of the 400,000 Algerian workers in the metropolis, would result in chaos, a catastrophic decline in living standards already below the minimum and a series of explosions...
...This leaves a balance of over one million non-Moslems who are skilled workers, government officials, white collar employees, taxi drivers, service managers, small merchants, laborers etc...
...the author cites the example of North American male deer and bucks who, when fighting, frequently interlock their antlers and die together, "snout to snout...
...It is ridiculous for people who eat meat only four times a year to spend all that time and money on a garment when for next to nothing they can get a handmedown that may be seedy but will at any rate keep out the cold...
...This leads us, of course, to the question of politics...
...the classical anti-imperialist struggles of the backward peoples (led—do you remember—by the small, but highly conscious proletariat and its revolutionary party) never existed and never will...
...The Algerian people must have time to develop their institutions and their parties...
...In essence, it is the now familiar story of 19th century imperialism uprooting and tearing apart the fabric of an archaic, yet fairly stable and harmonious order of life...
...That colonialism is 75 per cent dead...
...unprecedented increase in population...
...This is the background of the nationalist revolt...
...I can even go along with those who see in de Gaulle's referendum-consultation of the Algerian masses at least the beginnings of politics, electoral activity etc...
...Whether or not the Algerian people will opt for full independence is no one's concern but their own...
...That independence had best come In transitional stages—local autonomy to regional autonomy to internal autonomy to federation etc.—is an acceptable notion...
...Germaine Tillion's Algeria is a beautifully written, but seriously flawed, book...
...I have never read such a terse yet brilliant analysis of the degradation and pauperization so characteristic of the Arab lands...
...What does the fellagha who fights believe...
...an FLN-won "independence" for Algeria would be a political disaster for all of us—an authoritarian, Nasser-like regime living on blood baths whose first foreign gesture would be an effort, with Nasser's aid, to crush Tunisia...
...A ruthless cycle begins: hopeless indebtedness of the peasant...
...More concretely, there are 400,000 Algerian workers who have immigrated to work in France...
...Mlle...
...Economically, they represent more than three-fourths of the country's economic structure which is to say their future lies with the development of Moslem economic health...
...the issue of independence...
...leadership, aims and means—all are different and—irony of ironies—do not necessarily lead to "independence...
...Her thesis is a simple one: Between France and Algeria there is a two-way current of dependence, an "objective interdependence" as she wrote earlier (Encounter, July, 1958...
...But Algeria cries out for a political solution and she talks of "...a precise and coherent develop ment plan, [which] would result, not in a secession of Algeria from France, but, on the contrary, in a consolidation of the unity of the two economies and therefore of the two political systems...
...True, she prefaces this by a mention of "political concessions" (unspecified), but this runs counter to her own thesis...
...Tillion analyzes in sharp strokes the origins of the current disaster...
...For all her insight, Mlle...
...I will go further...
...Tillion knows what she is talking about...
...by the same token, of the 1,200,000 nonMoslems living in Algeria, we can eliminate perhaps 100,000 who are "colons" (settlers) or of their milieu...
...It'll be the end of the bad times" they say, and they mean work, schools, houses, clean and hardworking wives, money, land, and bread...
...further, her presentation is as sure as her grasp...
...Tillion I must insist upon this recognition of a people's right to decide for itself...
...At least we can agree that national movements such as in Algeria are not at all what we had expected...
...Tillion splendidly calls in an untranslatable world, the "clochardisation" (literally, bum-ification) of Algeria...
...the French presence in Algeria sped the social disintegration of this unfortunate people on its way until...
...Yet each can destroy —and are—the other...
...destruction of native craft industries by foreign techniques, etc...
...Tillion loses her precision and grasp at this point, unfortunately...
...Thus far Germaine Tillion stays on solid ground...
...But even from the fascinating Mile...
...Mile...
...a minimum of 2,000,000 of their countrymen depend primarily on the money order remittances these industrial workers send home each month in order to eat...
...Mlle...
...For—and it is time we recognized this—"colonialism" and the struggles of colonial peoples are infinitely more complex that they were in, say, the time most of us were nourished on the milk of anti-imperialism...
...This was, of course, the "threat and menace of independence" with which de Gaulle confronted the black populations of sub-Sahara France during his referendum campaign...
...In Europe, France, even in the Communist bloc, there has been a steady and regular improvement in life, but "two thirds of the Algerian people have experienced a fate the direct Contrary...
...The author, an ethnologist and a leading French authority on the sociology of Algeria, has put together this study of the Algerian reality with a precision and firmness hard to surpass...
...no matter how strongly we may consider such an option to be in error, an end to the tragedy of Algeria is inconceivable without recognition of this right and without provision of the means to exercise it...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
