The first thing Ben Bella must have seen when he woke was the rifle barrels pointed at him and then the massive but graceful silhouette of his friend, the hero of the liberation war — Zbiri, in whom the president had invested such great political hopes.
There are four different versions about what happened next; they are all journalistic invention. The only thing we can assume is that Ben Bella was led out of his bedroom. The rest is rumour.
Literally nothing, in fact, is known.
Ben Bella is said to have been killed. To have been wounded. To be alive. To have been not wounded, but ill. Everything is reported, since nothing is known. One version has him on a ship anchored off 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 geographical position. 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 just arrived 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, for the first oil fields and for the stones of Tassilli where the oldest frescoes in the world have been preserved. At the town of Insalah in the Algerian Sahara the largest slave market in the world existed until recently: Ben Bella closed it, dividing the land and date palms of the slave traders among the slaves. Today Insalah is the only place in the world ruled by the slave class, known as the haratin (beasts of burden). Thus did Ben Bella make the dream of Spartacus come true.
Colonialism fosters social chasms, and the fissures still run through Algerian society. Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. The bureaucrats, the bourgeois and the intelligentsia are cut off, all clearly and undemocratically raised above the rest of society. They have modelled themselves on the French, have adopted their way of living and, to a large degree, of thinking. Their habitat is the city, the desk vacated by the Frenchman, the café. Every Algerian politician is here from reactionaries to communists, united by their lifestyle, not their politics. The people who run Algeria’s political and administrative machine have been recruited from these circles. A command of French is a condition for entry and these people are fluent in French. One more common characteristic: their isolation from the country. One thing these people are certainly not doing: they are not filling in the chasm between Algiers and Algeria. That is not their job; they do not think about it, mainly because they do not know the country: they live in Algiers, but they do not live in Algeria. ‘It is striking,’ someone told me in conversation, ‘that these people are generally strangers to Algeria. Nobody here knows the countryside. Ben Bella took a slight interest in the villages, but nobody else.’ And the villages are eighty per cent of Algeria.
The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China’s and Vietnam’s, was one of the biggest wars of liberation of the last twenty years. The Algerian people showed the highest proof of their heroism, endurance and patriotism.
The war ended in defeat for France.
But Algeria paid a high price for their victory. It is still paying.
One tenth of the Algerian population — more than a million people — died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of chuhada—the martyred.
The French worked enormous destruction upon Algeria. Eight thousand villages were levelled, and millions were left without a roof over their head. Thousands of acres of forest, which shielded the soil from erosion, were burned. The cattle that provided half the peasantry with its livelihood were killed off (only three million head of cattle out of seven million survived). The fellah bore the brunt of the war.
The war caused huge migrations. Three million Algerians were driven from their villages and confined to reservations or resettled in the isolated regions. Four hundred thousand Algerians found themselves in prison or interned. Three hundred thousand fled to Tunisia and Morocco. At the same time, throughout the whole war, people from the villages — where repression hit hardest — fled to the cities, where, today, thirty per cent of the Algerian population now lives. Most of them have no jobs, but they do not want to go back to the villages, or they cannot return because the villages no longer exist.