Colonialism: An Algerian Case study

Running head: THE VEIL, THE RADIO AND THE WATERS: A TALE OF ALGERIAN RESISTANCE 1

The Veil, the Radio and the Waters : A Tale of Algerian

Resistance

Indu Poornima.S.V

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad

THE VEIL, THE RADIO AND THE WATERS: A TALE OF ALGERIAN RESISTANCE 2

A

bstract

This paper analyzes Colonialism as a concept and the role of

various political, psychological and economic factors leading to

the same. As the second largest colonial empire, the French

exhibited a certain pattern which was different from all the

other powers during its colonial expedition . Using Algerian

colonialism by French forces as the case study, this paper draws

upon the different ways and methods with which the oppressor and

the oppressed interact. Transforming mundane materials as

symbolism of resistance, the Algerian case offers insights into

the role of the colonial power in arousing nationalist

sentiments. The paper also traces how various isolated

appraisals converged to become the broad-based Algerian War for

Independence. However, the existence of a nation-state by itself


is not a guarantee for an end to conflicts with the colonizer as

visible during the Islamic movement of 1980s , and instances as

recent as the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

keywords: French colonialism, Algeria, nationalism

The Veil, the Radio and the Waters:

A Tale of Algerian Resistance


The empirical man through his experimenting and observational

skills would base colonialism upon Darwin's theory of survival of

the fittest, the intrinsic lust for domination in the struggle

for existence. For the social scientist it was but a "natural

overflow of nationality"(Hobson, 1902, p.6). A revolutionary

communist would explain colonialism as the inherent consequence

of capitalism. Such was the impact of colonialism that shaped

the world as we see it today.

When ,why and how did colonialism come into being? Perhaps the

strongest catalyst behind colonialism is its psychological

motive as put by Prof. Hans Kohn.( as cited in Palmer and

Perkins, 2001, p.162). Acquiring and possessing colonies

correlated with status and superiority among the international

competitors. This correlation resulted in colonialism being the

causation of most of the wars fought in the last few centuries.

This motive could directly be linked to the emergence of

nationalism wherein the passion for one's language, culture

and institutions resulted in an urge to spread it to other


areas through any means , often by control.(Palmer and

Perkins,2001, p.163)

Industrialization and free market competition led way to the

institution of capitalism. The resultant thirst for profit and

the need for expansion of markets subsequently led to

colonialism. Pristine fertile lands were drooled over by the

profit-driven capitalist as potential sources that could manifold

their returns. Negotiations, armed revolt or outright plunder of

the colonies ; for the European capitalist what mattered was not

the means instead the goal of quenching their profit- thirst.

Tactically called by the Europeans as White man's burden, the

shrewd colonial powers took it as their moral obligation to

carry the blessings of religion to their lesser fortunate brown

brothers. Mercantile that they were, the mask of a self-less

service was donned in lieu of their own incentives. However, at

the same time sincere attempts especially by the Christian

missionaries particularly in the spread of education are not to

be understated. The period of colonialism incidentally collides

with the two World wars. The scapegoats again were the colonies.


From manning the army to being defense bases , colonies fell prey

to the folly of the world powers. The dent created by the war

politically and economically resulted in some of the powerhouses

losing their colonies after WWI and in initiating the process of

decolonization after WW2. Another motive behind acquisition of

colonies were as an extended area to emigrate the population of

the colonizer. It was increasing at an increasing rate then and

would in turn would save them of the troubles of overpopulation.

(Palmer and Perkins, 2001, p.164-165).

There were also exclusive motives that featured in the

colonization of certain areas by specific colonies. For the

Spanish empire ,the first realized colonial power, the driving

force behind the conquest of south and central America was the

myth of Eldorado- the land of Gold. Netherlands ventured into

colonialism to employ its newly advanced naval capacity . The

Portuguese did not have any intention of exploiting its colonies

during their early expeditions. Instead, they served merely as a

pathway for their trade routes to reach wider areas. For the


British certain colonies for example, Mauritius were acquired

merely as a channel to their most prized possession, India.

France as a colonial power emerged with the motive of

proliferating French cultural superiority . Unlike Britain which

had tailored program for each of its colonies , French

colonialists were torn by internal disagreements and conflicts

about the nature of their colonialism. Tocqueville , a liberal

French politician and historian was also at the same time a

dedicated imperialist. He had a realist approach towards

analyzing French Algeria by arguing that in practical politics

certain factors outside morality can become a necessity. Had

France not emerged as a colonial power, he rationalizes, both

North Africa as well as France would have been colonized by a

third European power. Therefore he emphasis on the absolute

necessity for a balance of power for France in relation with

other colonial powers which was achieved through the conquest of

Algeria (Tocqueville, 2001). North Africa was France's most

prized colony. The area was a silent witness to plunder and

conquests of the Ottoman Empire which retired with the arrival


of France as a colonial power. Evidences from 18th century

literature embarks on North African people as slothful and

uncritical, unable to exploit the natural fertility of their land

,a reason often quoted by French in justifying their colonialism.

The largest country in the continent of Africa, a major

producer and exporter of gas to the European countries and an

elegant amalgamation of both Arab and African culture; modern day

Algeria enjoys a subtle niche for itself in the African politics.

With long stretching yellow carpets of deserts, she was a damsel

in distress under the Ottoman empire when the French came by. Her

fertile land and natural resources were too much to escape the

lust-hungry eyes of the French colonizers. Algerian colonialism

was perhaps a story of paradox. During the Napoleonic wars the

very sustenance of France was at the mercy of the Algerians in

the supply of wheat and loans. However, by the 1820s , internal

financial troubles was rampant in Algeria . France refused to pay

back the money and the series of negotiations that followed

ended in what history calls as fly-whisk incident. It was the

striking of the French consul who had come for negotiations with


a fly whisk by Hussein Dey the then ruler of Algeria that

resulted in Algeria being an official French colony for the next

130 years to come. This was much in relation to the general

pattern of unstructured, impulsive reactions that France

exhibited throughout its colonial expedition( Evans,2012).

There were also other, more long term motives behind the French

decision. The mercantile class had for many decades interest in

establishing trading posts in Algeria. An official expedition

formalized the economic interests of the business class. History

has it that it was the political motives of King Charles X that

led to colonialism. He saw Algeria as a means to divert attention

of the general public from the growing resentment towards the

rule of the king. Although the Flipwhisk triggered armed

uprisings by the French , the final decision formalizing the

invasion was passed by the French national assembly only 3 years

later. The propaganda highlighted two main motives; French

sentiments and culture were jeopardized with the fly-whisk

incident. Therefore as retaliation, they were to frisk with the

Islamic religion thereby 'Cleansing ' them to the 'superior


French'. Second on their blueprint was a halt on the piracy in

Mediterranean coast, an example of how the unscientific native

deteriots his economy. In turn now, it would be the French

responsibility to efficiently use the economic resources

( Evans,2012).

The colonial master began to move its pawns by unleashing what

came to known as the French civilizing mission in Algeria. From

dismantling of Islamic schools and political institutions to

shattering the working of the local economy , the French had

their claws upon the nerve of the Algerian society- the Islamic

religion. Algeria eventually came to be a settlement colony of

France to where a large number of Europeans emigrated. Fertile

lands in the plains were confiscated for their benefit so that

economic resources would now flow to France. These settlers came

to be known as pieds noirs and had a considerable say in the

running of the government in Paris. The Algerian society had

its building base in strong family norms and morality imposed

through religion. The understanding of the various theoretical

imposition of such a framework was crucial for the French to know


the right targets to knock upon to reach their ultimate goal.

While forced confiscation of land as well as imposition of French

culture in school curriculum and political institutions resembled

a common colonial pattern which the French exhibited in its other

colonies as well, Algerian colonialism had its interesting

peculiarities. Certain mundane materials turned out to be

symbolisms of the relationship between colonizer and colony in

political and economic domains . For the purposes of this study,

one narrows down to three of them, the Algerian veil, water

resources, and the Radio. (Evans 2012,Wyrick 2011).

Perhaps the source of the most poignant agitation that the

colonial powers faced in the political realm was the Algerian

veil. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon phenomena explains the power

vested upon an individual because of his virtue of seeing,

without being seen . This has the inherent capacity to outsmart

any other political or military power because the ability to

dominate is given by differential position of knowledge. This

psychological fear and the urge to assimilate the colonial

culture led an adamant regime to order the unveiling of the


Algerian woman. According to Fanon ,( as cited in

Wyrick,2011,p.71)the colonizer projected the veil as oppression

upon the mobility of the submissive Algerian woman and forced

western clothes upon them. However, for the Algerian woman it was

a religious privilege and command from Allah. The stereotyped

'meek, submissive, veiled' woman turned this as the weapon

against the colonial army when she shed her veil under the French

commandment and adorned the more western Parisian clothes to pass

unnoticed as a French woman. Her deception enabled her to enter

into higher level offices of the French Bureaucrats and club

houses and extract confidential information .By the time

realization dawned upon the colonial master the Algerian woman

contributed to building a concrete base from which national

liberation struggle was to take-off. During the initial armed

struggle between the Islamic forces and the colonial powers, she

smuggled weapons for the war inside her voluptuous traditional

attire, the white haik and thus once again set the French on a

hoax. Impinging upon the cultural integrity, the French in

1930 launched the anti-veil campaign to impose forced unveiling.


Thus the political struggle between the colonizer and the

colonized in Algeria was marked with the metamorphosis of the

Algerian woman and her veil. The material relationship with a

piece of cloth in fact laid the foundation for the political

organization of the Algerians. (Wyrick, 2011,p.75)

The success of the French in physically conquering water

resources was a key in its establishment as colonial power. In

this capacity one explores the relationship between the base and

superstructure as understood in Marxism. The forces and

relations of production( base) determining the Political

institutions and new power relations( super structure) in an

economy can be extended to this case study . The physical control

of water and thereby the capital in an agrarian economy led to

the creation of a new power structure between the colonizer and

the colonized. The seizure of the most fertile and irrigated land

by the French was justified as the incapacity of the laidback

native to sustain and harness water from the southern

Mediterranean which resulted in the desertification of the land.

Thus under the pretext of judicious use of the natural blessings,


French dutifully took control of the most productive land

displacing the natives. Consequently, the French were only too

eager to replace the traditional Turkish model of water

distribution system to a more 'modernized and efficient' French

model. Now the French model catered mostly to the needs of

European settler population and selectively cut short the water

supply to the Arabs and Berbers. But the French was confronted

with an unforeseen challenge. Ravaged by diseases and loss of

livelihood, the natives migrated to the cities as canal and road

workers for the French. The natives carried with them a

storehouse of diseases, including cholera and typhoid and

colonial masters worried that the dirty Arab could spread

diseases. This was followed by rigorous surveillance of water

supplied to the cities to make sure that it was not contaminated

by the Arabs. Thus with the changes in the institutions of the

super structure the economic subjugation of the colony was

formalized ( Cutler, 2010,pp.167-175).

Another example of a material symbolism that eventually resulted

in rebounding effects for the French was the Radio-Alger, a radio


network that broadcasted form the French Algeria. The

technologies and gadgets introduced by the colonial power do not

come value-free, instead has an underlying symbolism of struggle

and resistance. As a result, the Algerians resented and even

condemned buying of radios. The French took conscious efforts to

break the image of a monopoly power in the Radio market, by

giving dealership to local intermediaries in sale. However, this

was met with little success . Thus the native Algerian perceived

radio with deep rooted vengeance, the voice and culture of a

foreign land that uprooted them off their own. However a

dialectical shift in their vantage point occurred around late

1950s, when the French colonial power was being challenged in

other parts of Northern Africa including Morocco and Tunisia

which had already started their war of Independence. The

Algerians inspired by the news had a keen interest in catching up

the latest updates. After the French Algerian government passed

censorship upon newspapers, the Algerians turned to radios as

their means of connecting with their counterparts in the other

colonies. By then, the Algerians had organized themselves into


preparing for their own independence war. The new broadcast came

to be known as ' The Voice of the fighting Algeria'. Thus a

political weapon the French tried to impose upon the natives was

now being used as a backfire against them in organizing and

spreading of nationalism. Fanon traces the dialectical change of

the same, which offers interesting conclusions. The Thesis that

Colonial power forced the natives to listen to their broadcast

led to an antithesis of resistance and outright denial of the

French voice. Eventually the synthesis of developing a native

broadcasting system was inspired from the initial thesis of the

French efforts. It is from the thesis that the Algerian leaders

gathered the inherent capacity of radio waves in organizing and

motivating people to the struggle for independence (as cited in

Wyrick,2011, pp.76-83).

These dramatic events highlighting the nature and method of

exploitation the French government employed naturally leads one

to an intertwining concept of arousal of nationalism and

establishment of a free nation state. In his work Benedict

Anderson( 1983), speaks of nation-states as imagined communities


in terms of its limitations and sovereignty. Drawing form this ,

pre-colonial Algeria does not fall under the category simply

because the different groups of local population did not have

the notion of belonging to an imagined community. It required the

coming of a foreign power and shared agony for well over 130

years for the Arabs, Tribes, Berbers to shed their differences

and find solidarity in their identity as Algerians.

In fact, the very first instance of resistance against the French

arouse not from any sort of national consciousness but from one

common understanding that all the natives based their lives upon,

the Islamic religion. First uprising ever against the French

was in response to Sufi orders against heavy taxation and

Christian invasion under the leadership of a holy religious

saint, Abd-el-Khader. This marked a widespread revolt against the

ruthless tactics employed by the colonial power. With this

rebellion the idea of Arabe Soumis or the subjugated Arab came

into being. After a few other sporadic happenings, the next armed

struggle came in 1870 under the leadership of Bachagha-el-

Mokhrani against selectively addressing citizenship rights to


Jews thus condemning Islam. The revolt though widespread, lost

out in coordination by 1870 and was defeated by the French

forces. With that came a more exploitative system characterized

by widespread confiscation of land, execution of leaders and most

importantly, giving Arabic the status of a foreign language.

More than the physical defeat, the psychological impact on the

Algerians formed the climax of the whole process. Humiliation of

Islam was formalized , a dent was created in the sentiments of

the natives that was eventually going to breed the nationalist

feelings. By 1881, Jules Ferry removed the status of Algeria as a

colony and instead became it an integral part of France under

the Third Republic's 1875 constitution thus implying full

integration of Algeria into the French empire. What was to follow

henceforth formed the bedrock from which Algeria's War of

Independence (1954-1962) triggered. From Muslims being stamped

as " voteless French citizens" to forced closure of Islamic

schools the French gradually paved way for its own eventual doom.

( Evans, 2012).


Ironically the first instance of national consciousness was seen

among Algerian workers who had been deported to France during

World War 1 . Here the natives encountered what was oblivious to

them till then, a modern society with labor unions that demand

their rights from the authorities. It was from them that the

notion of an Algerian nation progressed. During the war years,

finance to aid the struggle came from these workers. Parallel to

this was the development of a populist agitation by Religious

Scholars called the Association of Ulama that believed that the

French had to be repaid for the sins of religion they had

committed. The younger or the more radical members were convinced

that the religious preaching was not sufficient to sway the

concretely established colonial roots. For them force became

the necessary condition and thus took to arms on 1st November

1954 ,thereby embarking on the seven year long Algerian war of

Independence. The revolution was anti-party ,without a single

leader figure instead had committees, cliques and clans with

their motto as collective leadership. For them representing a

particular party was seen as a biased perception, not


representing common will thus conforming to the divide and rule

policy of the colonizer. The collection of Algerians fighting for

their Independence came to be known as the Front de Liberation

Nationale (FLN). Although their social composition was varied

among socialists, Islamists , Arabs and Berebr community, their

actions were guided by the collective motive of out throwing the

French colonialist. After ranges of armed struggles, bloodsheds,

guerilla warfare and negotiations, the French government legally

recognized the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria through a

referendum by President Charles de Gaulle in 1962. Various

international events like independence of Morocco, Tunisia and

most importantly lose of Indo-China culminated in bringing down

the second largest colonial power to its knees(Quandt, 1998).

According Ernest Gellener ( 1983), a nation implies "common

culture, understandings, meanings etc and the recognition that

the other is a fellow national and the recognition of mutual

rights and duties to each other in virtue of shared membership in

it"(p.6). He also acknowledges Weber's definition of state as the

agency that possesses monopoly of legitimate violence. The term


nation-state thus gives us the ability to combine both the

dimensions, the social as well as political. Following this

definition, Algeria categorizes as a nation-state with the

emergence of shared nationalist feelings during the independence

movement and recognition of state through an elected semi-

presidential government.

Having said that, it is also to be stated that Algeria has had

several internal chaos since independence. After independence an

Islamist movement of the 1980s sprout from perceiving FLN as too

socialist and arguing that French morals and culture still

persist .In that capacity, for the Islamic scholars, Algeria

still had not achieved independence in its true sense. They began

to challenge the sale of Cigarettes and alcohol and presence of

women in military which eventually led to violent clashes.

Another recurring event in post-independent Algeria is the

movement of the minority Berber community for greater recognition

of their rights resulting in the Berber spring of the 1980s.

(Stora, 2001). More recently, the spreading of Arab spring in the

Middle East has managed to create ripples in Algeria. The 2010-12


protests were in response to price inflation and unemployment,

along with attempts at widening the possibilities of Arab spring

happening in Algeria also. The most recent episode from the

unfinished chapter of the French -Algerian agony is the Charlie

Hebdo incident of 7th January 2015. The accused , Kouachai

brothers are of Algerian descent whose family fled to France

during the massacres of the Algerian war of Independence. The

attack on the so-called offenders of the Islam religion can be

perceived as a continuum of the excesses committed by French

colonial power upon the religion of the Algerian natives.

The dent left by the daggers of colonial power are never to be

completely healed, while Algeria as an independent nation-state

evolves itself to be of strategic importance especially in the

trade of Hydrocarbons both in particular to African politics and

in general in the world affairs.


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Colonialism: An Algerian Case study

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