Algiers. That version is confuted by a report that they are holding Ben Bella in the Sahara, at an army base. According to another view, he is still staying at the Villa Joly, which has a certain logic in that it would allow Boumedienne to keep Ben Bella under close observation. Boumedienne could be meeting with Ben Bella right now and negotiating.
Everything is possible, since nothing is known.
The most common version is the official one: that Ben Bella is in Algeria and being well treated. It might even be true.
Ben Bella was the leader of Algeria for three years.
Algeria is unique; at every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts. Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.
Algeria is in that group of African countries where European colonialism lasted a long time. The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portuguese in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure. Algeria will bear the mark left by French colonial hegemony for decades. It has crippled and deformed Algeria—more so than in most of the other independent African countries—and in this deformation European settlers have played a major role. They always do. In assessing the devastation, what matters is not only the length of the colonial period, but, perhaps above all, the
number
of settlers: only South Africa has more. Around 1.2 million Europeans settled in Algeria, equal to the number of European settlers in all the twenty-six countries of tropical Africa combined. Settlers made up one tenth of the Algerian population.
There is another important factor: Algeria’s geographicalposition. Of all the African colonies, Algeria lay closest to its colonial metropolis. Today, it takes two hours to fly from Algiers to Paris, two hours that are not only a fact of communication but also a symbol of the bond between France and Algeria: one that the French developed over a period of 132 years and which neither the liberation war nor independence has severed. What’s more, Algeria today is, as the statistics reveal, more closely bound (and not only economically) to its former colonial metropolis than any other independent country of Africa.
An image characteristic of a colonial country is the modern automated electronics factory, and beyond its walls are caverns inhabited by people who still use wooden hoes. ‘Look what beautiful highways we’ve built for them,’ say the colonialists. Indeed: but along those highways lie villages where people have yet to emerge from the palaeolithic age.
That is what you see in Algeria.
People who love France will rave about Algiers. It is a French city through and through, and even the Arab district of the Casbah has a French
esprit
. This is not Africa; it is Lyon, Marseille. International shop windows, sublime French cuisine, enchanting bistros. The contrivances of Parisian fashion reach here in a day, like the Parisian press and Parisian gossip.
But forty kilometres from Algiers, from this Paris of Africa, the stone age begins. After half an hour’s drive I feel that I am back in Africa. Sixty kilometres from Algeria begin villages where to this day the people do not know the potter’s wheel. The original Kabyle pots are formed by hand. And a new contrast: in this primitive Kabylia where they believe that washing children causes agonized death, I found a hospital where a Polish doctor who had justarrived from Kraków on a contract told me: ‘They have an operating room here beyond my wildest dreams, with technical miracles I could never have imagined. I don’t even know how to work these gadgets.’
A journey into the depths of Algeria is a journey in time, withdrawing into remote epochs that continue to exist here, still present, surrounded by the parched steppe or sands of the Sahara.
Nine tenths of Algeria is Sahara.
The Algerian Sahara is famous for the French atomic research centre at Reggane,
Everything is possible, since nothing is known.
The most common version is the official one: that Ben Bella is in Algeria and being well treated. It might even be true.
Ben Bella was the leader of Algeria for three years.
Algeria is unique; at every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts. Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.
Algeria is in that group of African countries where European colonialism lasted a long time. The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portuguese in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure. Algeria will bear the mark left by French colonial hegemony for decades. It has crippled and deformed Algeria—more so than in most of the other independent African countries—and in this deformation European settlers have played a major role. They always do. In assessing the devastation, what matters is not only the length of the colonial period, but, perhaps above all, the
number
of settlers: only South Africa has more. Around 1.2 million Europeans settled in Algeria, equal to the number of European settlers in all the twenty-six countries of tropical Africa combined. Settlers made up one tenth of the Algerian population.
There is another important factor: Algeria’s geographicalposition. Of all the African colonies, Algeria lay closest to its colonial metropolis. Today, it takes two hours to fly from Algiers to Paris, two hours that are not only a fact of communication but also a symbol of the bond between France and Algeria: one that the French developed over a period of 132 years and which neither the liberation war nor independence has severed. What’s more, Algeria today is, as the statistics reveal, more closely bound (and not only economically) to its former colonial metropolis than any other independent country of Africa.
An image characteristic of a colonial country is the modern automated electronics factory, and beyond its walls are caverns inhabited by people who still use wooden hoes. ‘Look what beautiful highways we’ve built for them,’ say the colonialists. Indeed: but along those highways lie villages where people have yet to emerge from the palaeolithic age.
That is what you see in Algeria.
People who love France will rave about Algiers. It is a French city through and through, and even the Arab district of the Casbah has a French
esprit
. This is not Africa; it is Lyon, Marseille. International shop windows, sublime French cuisine, enchanting bistros. The contrivances of Parisian fashion reach here in a day, like the Parisian press and Parisian gossip.
But forty kilometres from Algiers, from this Paris of Africa, the stone age begins. After half an hour’s drive I feel that I am back in Africa. Sixty kilometres from Algeria begin villages where to this day the people do not know the potter’s wheel. The original Kabyle pots are formed by hand. And a new contrast: in this primitive Kabylia where they believe that washing children causes agonized death, I found a hospital where a Polish doctor who had justarrived from Kraków on a contract told me: ‘They have an operating room here beyond my wildest dreams, with technical miracles I could never have imagined. I don’t even know how to work these gadgets.’
A journey into the depths of Algeria is a journey in time, withdrawing into remote epochs that continue to exist here, still present, surrounded by the parched steppe or sands of the Sahara.
Nine tenths of Algeria is Sahara.
The Algerian Sahara is famous for the French atomic research centre at Reggane,
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