A Savage War of Peace Page 7

  For all its immense scale, the Algerian scene shifts with unexpected rapidity. Within a few hours’ drive northward from the desert oasis of Bou-Saada, you are up in the 7,000-foot Atlas range of the Djurdjura, where (as I once discovered to my cost) even as late as mid-May roads can be blocked or swept away by avalanches and landslides. Beyond the mountains lies a totally other world. The hundreds of miles of rugged, indented coastline where the Barbary pirates had their lairs is the true Mediterranean; but a Mediterranean where secret, sandy bays are often pounded by seas of Atlantic force. Parts of it, like the aptly named Turquoise Corniche, are as breathtaking as the Amalfi peninsula but without its hordes and hoardings. There is the beguiling Roman site of Tipasa, on its gentle promontory where “the sea sucks with the noise of kissing”, drenched at midday by the scent of wild absinthe, and where Camus repeatedly experienced “the happy lassitude of a wedding-day with the world”. In springtime the ruins are a blaze of contrapuntal colour: wild gladioli of magenta, bright yellow inulas and spiky acanthus thrust up among sarcophagi carpeted with tiny blue saxifrage and sprawled over by convolvulus with great pink trumpets. The ochre stones and iron red soil contrast joyously with the silvery-grey of the olives and absinthe and a peacock sea. “Here the gods themselves serve as tryst-places, or beds,” says Camus. “Happy is he among the living who has seen such things.” And happy, indeed, were the pieds noirs who, in the “good days” owned summer villas — such as one might find in Brittany or Arcachon — at Tipasa or on other stretches of Algeria’s unspoilt coast-line.

  Pied noir Algeria

  The centre of gravity of French colonisation lay close to the coast, with its big, Europeanised city ports of Algiers, Oran, Bougie, Philippeville and Bône, and the Mitidja — the rich, flat farmland which French ingenuity had created out of malarial swamps. Here, in country which might have been Languedoc, straight eucalyptus-shaded roads led through a prosperous and tidy succession of cereal and citrus farms, drenched with orange-blossom scent in May, and vast vineyards, owned by pieds noirs and operated by Muslim labour. The Mitidja towns — like Blida, where Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and André Gide once vied for the charms of “Arab boys as beautiful as bronze statues” — were unmistakably French. Their main squares, surrounded by well-pollarded plane trees (as well as containing the inevitable, graceless monument aux morts) would almost invariably boast a highly ornate bandstand where, of a Sunday, the band of the local garrison would endeavour to distract the indigènes from their lack of more worldly privileges with rousing martial music. The names of the townships founded by the colons were just as uncompromisingly French; Victor-Hugo, Rabelais, Orléansville, Aumale, Marengo and Inkermann.

  Algiers itself, cradled in steep hills green with pine and palm that offer countless superb panoramas, was one of the pearls of French Mediterranean culture. Arriving by ship in its bay — which, next to Rio, must be one of the most beautiful in the world — one’s eyes were blinded by the massed whiteness of the terraces climbing up from the sea. It deserved its sobriquet of Alger la Blanche. High above Algiers on one side was perched Notre Dame d’Afrique, a Catholic shrine of prime sanctity for the pieds noirs (and also of appalling taste, a little reminiscent of Montmartre’s Sacré-Cœur), containing a black madonna with the paternalistic inscription “Pray for us and our Muslims”. On another hill nestled the luxurious Hôtel Saint-George, where General Eisenhower set up his Allied Headquarters in 1942, and through whose exotic gardens of giant contorted euphorbia and sweet-smelling moonflowers Churchill and the titans of the Second World War strolled, laying plans for a world in which Anglo-Saxon predominance seemed assured in perpetuity.[1] After the war it reverted to being a haven for senior French officials, high army brass and their ladies. Just down the hill from the Saint-George lay the Palais d’Été, a dazzling white mauresque mansion where the governor-general resided in full viceregal splendour. Once the centre of Algiers was the Place du Gouvernement, close to the harbour whence creep fishy smells, and where the corsairs used to auction their slaves; but the true solar plexus (and certainly in the years after 1954) was formed by the Plateau des Glières, leading up from the sea, past the palatial Hôtel des Postes, up steep steps to the imposing monument aux morts and thence to the open space, or Forum, in front of the modern block that housed the offices of the Gouvernement-Général.

  With its waterfront of grand prosperous arcaded buildings belonging to the banks, big mercantile companies, the Hôtel Aletti and the Écho d’Alger, its red-tiled bourgeois villas gazing out over the bay, this could easily have been Nice or Cannes. Yet of its total population of 900,000 only one-third was in fact European. In their different enclaves the two communities coexisted closely together — which, in time of peace, was to provide Algiers with its most fascinating contrasts, and, later, its most savagely bloody collisions. The elegant, thoroughly French boulevards of Rue Michelet and Rue d’Isly, with their expensive shops and trottoir cafés thronged with chattering students, terminated abruptly in the Casbah. This, the old Turkish quarter, embraced in its compressed and nigh-impenetrable confines, redolent with all the odours of spice and oil of any Arab city and resounding with its ululations, a totally Muslim population bursting at the seams. The squalid, labyrinthine alleys often concealed ancient houses built around open courtyards of great charm. Abutting the Casbah on the other side lay the tenements of the European working class of Bab-el-Oued, so heavily impregnated with Spanish blood that its inhabitants were known collectively as the “Hernandez-and-Perez”. At the opposite, south-east, end of Algiers, in the seedier pied noir quarter of Belcourt, the boundary between the poor whites and their Muslim counterparts was still less distinct.

  The summer in Algiers is long and torrid, and by the end of it the Europeans tend to feel like fruits that have ripened too long in the sun. Tempers fray, until at last the potent September rains bring liberation and new life. Through much of the year — winters that sparkle and springs that warm — the climate, like the architecture, is that of the northern Mediterranean. Then, suddenly, with the least warning, the sky yellows and the Chergui blows from the Sahara, stinging the eyes and choking with its sandy, sticky breath. Men think, and behave, differently. It is a recurrent reminder that this is indeed Africa.

  Oran, the second city of Algeria, was even more European than Algiers; in fact, with 300,000 pied noir inhabitants to 150,000 Muslims, it was the only centre where they predominated. The scene of the Royal Navy’s tragic action to sink the French fleet in 1940, rather than risk it falling into Nazi hands, Oran was to suffer but little until the last days of the Algerian war. Camus condemns it as a city of ineffable boredom, where the youth had but two essential pleasures — “getting their shoes shined and displaying those same shoes on the boulevard” — and found its streets “doomed to dust, pebbles and heat”, its shops combining “all the bad taste of Europe and the Orient”. To him, while Algiers had an Italian quality, Oran with its “cruel glitter” had something more Spanish about it; and Constantine reminded him of Toledo. But, he added harshly, in contrast to those of Italy or Spain, “These are cities without a past. They are cities without abandon, without tenderness. In the hours of boredom which are those of the siesta, the sadness there is implacable and without melancholy.… These cities offer nothing to reflection and everything to passion.…”

  Kabylia and the Aurès

  In a country full of violent contrasts none could be greater than that between the Mediterranean littoral with its Europeanised cities, beaches and flat, cultivated hinterland, and the almost entirely Muslim-populated wild mountain massifs of the Aurès and Kabylia. Separating Constantine from the desert, the Aurès is a land of savage, inhospitable grandeur with Algeria’s highest peaks occasionally (and surprisingly) relieved by a few fertile strips along the floors of narrow canyons, and an occasional forest dense with scrub oak and entangling ivy. Of spring in one such oasis, El-Kantara, André Gide writes lyrically:

  the apricot trees were in blo
om and humming with bees; the waters were out and irrigating the fields of barley; nothing more lovely can be imagined than the white blossoms of the apricots overshadowed by the tall palm trees, and themselves, in their turn, overshadowing and sheltering the bright tender green of the young crops. We passed two heavenly days in this paradise, and they left me no memory that is not pure and smiling.

  But for the most part the Aurès is a treeless wilderness where it looks as if nothing but stone will grow. Even the shallow graves of the native Chaouias are marked only with jagged splinters of rock. The square dwellings of the villages that nestle on top of unassailable mountain spurs are built of the same ochreous stone, the only material available, and thus blend with such perfect camouflage into the natural backdrop as to be all but invisible from below. Searingly hot summers are succeeded almost immediately by the cutting winds of winter, and the Aurès has long suffered perhaps the most woeful poverty of all Algeria. Equally like the north-west frontier of India, which it closely resembles, it has from time immemorial been a land of unvanquishable guerrillas and banditry.

  Kabylia in springtime is surely one of the last unspoilt, bucolic paradises of this world. Cornfields are pink and azure with wild flowers spared the tidy rapacity of English herbicides; the foothills to its rugged mountain chains blaze with saffron masses of wild broom, or are shaded by groves of smoky blue cedars or dense forests of cork and Spanish chestnut reminiscent of the hinterland of the Alpes Maritimes. Clear streams burble through poplars that sing with the loving calls of doves, or tumble forcefully through rocky gorges as savage and beetling as the floor of the Grand Canyon. Above it floats the great jagged spine of the Djurdjura, mantled with winter snows till early summer. Riddled with caves, Kabylia is ideal country equally for ambushes and for guerrillas to melt away when hunted. In many ways it could be called the Scotland of Algeria but, in contrast to most highland or alpine countries whose villages crouch for shelter in the valleys, Kabylia’s white-walled and terracotta tiled douars perch defiantly atop razor-backed ridges. They are a reminder of a turbulent history when safety from raiders, floods or landslides often lay in the high ground — as well as providing the traveller with one breathtaking panorama after another, since the tortuous roads follow the line of the villages. But the lyrical beauty of Kabylia is deceptive. Like so much of Algeria, it has a stern ecology. The stony outcrops are often covered but thinly with arable soil; winters are bitingly cold, and rainfall scanty and unpredictable. In relation to its fertility, Kabylia had also become the most acutely over-populated region of Algeria.

  Whether it was the vast bled (as the French army called the outback) of desert, mountains, pasture and vineyards, or the cities and beaches, on French administrators and soldiers alike the country as a whole produced a curiously intoxicating effect. As the man who was to sign the settlement finally terminating the présence française there, Louis Joxe, remarked to the author: “Algérie montait à la tête.”

  Kabyles and Arabs

  The Muslim native of Algeria can trace his origin back to a multiplicity of racial and tribal stocks — Kabyle, Chaouia, M’zabite, Mauretanian blacks, Turkish and pure Arab — producing some particular and some general characteristics. The oldest inhabitants are the Berbers of Kabylia and the Aurès who, like their kinsmen in the Moroccan Atlas, fell back into the mountains under pressure from first the Roman, then the Arab, invaders. Together they comprised (in 1954) the largest proportion of the Muslim population. But probably less than a third still retained their separate identities of language and culture, the rest being rated by ethnologists as Arabised Berbers. Among themselves, the Kabyles have difficulty understanding the dialect of their kinsmen in the nearby Aurès, and have different customs. For instance, although in contrast to the Arab women with their more sombre clothing and faces concealed behind the haik both the Kabyles and Chaouias traditionally walk outside without the veil, in boldly coloured foutahs and often wearing exquisite necklaces of silver and coral, the Chaouia woman keeps possession of her dowry and plays a forceful role in married life; privileges which were not to be found in Kabylia. The Berbers through history have been a warlike and unruly people; as far back as 950 B.C. they are chronicled as fighting the Pharaohs on the Nile; they provided two Roman Emperors, Septimus Severus and Caracalla, and were with the vanguard of the Muslim conquest of Spain. But they tended to be as unsuccessful at ruling as being ruled. Revolt, and revenge in the Corsican fashion, were honoured occupations from time immemorial. Like the Scots they are a people imbued with intense national and regional pride; they are not great smilers, but if you tell a Kabyle waiter in Algiers that you have been to Tizi-Ouzou, his face will explode with pleasure. Jean Amrouche, the Kabyle writer, characterises his people as swinging between extreme enthusiasm, when inspired by an idea, and an apathetic withdrawal when that idea has lost its charm.

  In the past, the Kabyle and the Arab had little love for each other, and — in the best colonial tradition — it was often the policy of French administrators to set one off against the other. More orthodox in religion than the Kabyles, the Arabs were at the same time perhaps more supple in their mental processes, and shrewder businessmen. As townsmen and lowlanders they had had the most contact with French culture, and had also suffered, directly, the most in that it was largely their patrimonial lands that had come within the grasp of the colons. Nevertheless, at the risk of generalisation one can isolate certain “Algerian” characteristics shared by Kabyle and Arab alike. “Here everything is rock, even the men — as if, like the land on these slopes, they were lacking in some essential grace,” wrote Jules Roy, a pied noir deeply sensitive to the Muslim predicament. He was thinking specifically of Kabylia, but it might have applied equally to other Algerians. Like the soil, they are dour, uncompromising, sometimes harsh — and capable of extreme cruelty. In contrast with the sunny volubility of the Tunisian, the subtlety and humour of the Cairene, they are the Aberdonians of North Africa. “The Algerian mentality is characterised by the right-angle. There are no contours or compromises,” explained the Algerian leader, Abderrazak Chentouf, to an American professor. Complexe et complexé, the Algerian is allured by ceremony, military parades and decorations (a susceptibility readily exploited by the Europeans), but at the same time antipathetic to any showy, “cult of the personality” leadership (a Bourguiba would never hold sway in Algeria). He is distrustful by nature, reluctant to place himself under the authority of another — and exceptionally secretive. The Algerian male prides himself on a sense of courteous dignity and reserve — while, in praise of the essential toughness of the Algerian woman, Jules Roy remarks: “They do not betray, nor do they forgive. More easily than one supposes, the men sell their brothers.… But not the women, who are incapable of subterfuge, except in love.…” All these were characteristics that were to display themselves with emphatic relevance from 1954 onwards.

  The Muslim Algerian and the pied noir communities were separated by a wide gulf that was at once religious, cultural and economic. Solid friendships could exist between the two but seldom matured into anything more intimate because, says Jacques Soustelle, ethnologist and future governor-general: “the traditional status of the Muslim woman, recluse and veiled, hindered families from getting together, from households entertaining each other.” There was a fundamental divergence of orientations: when the pied noir went on holiday he made for the beach, and instinctively he gazed out over the Mediterranean towards Europe. In contrast, the Arab or Kabyle would head for the cool verdure of the mountains or the desert oases; he looked inland, towards the land-bound heart of Africa. Yet a number of qualities united the two peoples — at least in the eyes of metropolitan Frenchmen, or other Europeans. There was, noted a dispassionate Swiss journalist, Henri Favrod: “the same energy, the same indolence, the grandiloquence, the enthusiasm, the gambling instinct, the dressiness, the sense of hospitality, the arrogance of the male, the respect for the mother”. He might have added the common temperament of passion, a
nd indeed violence.

  The pieds noirs

  The diverse origins of the pieds noirs have already been noted. By 1917 it was estimated that only one European in five was of true French descent (and these included Corsicans and Alsatians), and in the 1950s you could still hear more Spanish than French spoken in the poorer quarters of Oran. Arriving, many of them, under the Second Empire, these Spaniards had adapted themselves readily to the climate and had proved perhaps the best workers on the land. Then there were the Italians who, like most of the Spaniards, had come with empty pockets and with little more than the hope of an Eldorado where either work or land would be readily available. They were artisans, builders, miners and fishermen. There were the Maltese who, being Catholic and speaking a language akin to Arabic, had a foot in both camps and established themselves swiftly as a class of petits commerçants. Of the French, apart from the Alsatians of post-1870, most came from the climatically similar Midi; especially after the phylloxera had wiped out the vineyards there. If there was one single common denominator for the pieds noirs, they were, in the expression coined by the French army, mediterranéens-et-demi. It was an important factor in understanding their motives and behaviour from 1954 onwards.