Colonialism Denies the Colonised Their Own History, National Liberation Re-invents it
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.’ Frantz Fanon, 1961 (Fanon 1967)
The Algerian independence struggle against French colonialists was one of the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions of the twentieth century. It was part of the wave of decolonisation that started after the Second World War in India, China, Cuba, Vietnam and many countries in Africa. It inscribed itself in the spirit of the Bandung Conference and the era of the ‘awakening of the South’, a South that has been subjected for decades (and in many cases for more than a century) to imperialist and capitalist domination under different forms, from protectorates to proper settler colonies (as was the case for Algeria).
Retrospectively, French colonisation of Algeria can be seen as unique, as Algeria was the first Arabic-speaking country to be annexed by the West and one of the first countries in Africa to be officially subjugated by a Western empire, long before the Berlin Conference in 1884, when different European empires (British, French, German, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) met to carve up the continent amongst themselves.
France invaded Algeria in June 1830. The French army was to spend the next 50 years suppressing an insurgency, 15 of them fighting the brilliant, fierce and dedicated resistance leader Abd-El-Kader. France’s war of conquest was conducted without let-up, especially under the command of the ruthless Marshal Bugeaud, who adopted a scorched earth policy (Fisk 2005), committing atrocities ranging from population displacement to land expropriation, massacres, and the infamous enfumades, where the French army eliminated whole tribes through asphyxiation.1
Alongside Marshal Bugeaud’s “pacification” campaign, France actively encouraged colonisation of Algeria by its own population. In a statement before the National Assembly in 1840 Bugeaud said: ‘Wherever there is fresh water and fertile land, there one must locate colons [settlers], without concerning oneself to whom those lands belong’. (This is exactly the approach the Zionists were to apply in Palestine, a century later). By 1841, the number of such colons/settlers already totalled 37,374, in comparison with approximately 3 million indigènes (native peoples) (Horne 2006). By 1926, the number of settlers had reached some 833,000, 15% of the population, and it increased to just under 1 million by 1954.
Colonisation involved the expropriation of the basic factor of production, land, from the indigenous peasantry and its redistribution to the settlers, destroying the foundation of the peasant subsistence economy (Lacheraf 1965). The rural masses fought the encroachment of the colonial army until 1884, but the core of the Algerian rural resistance to colonialism was smashed in 1871, when the big politico-agrarian revolt that had spread over three-quarters of the country was finally crushed. This historic peasant uprising was a reaction to a series of disastrous confiscatory measures during the 1860s that outraged the majority of rural Algerians and led them to fear for their lives and livelihoods. Their situation was made worse by drought, harvest failures, famine, locust invasions and disease, which resulted in the deaths of more than 500,000 victims (around one-fifth of the population). In the period between 1830 and 1870 it is estimated that several million Algerians died (Bennoune 1988, Davis 2007 and Lacheraf 1965).
The Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin has described how the Algerian rural population transformed the colonial conquest into a protracted and devastating war:
‘The collapse of the regency government and the war of extermination undertaken by the French army gave this early period (1830–1884) certain special characteristics, which are not found elsewhere … faced with military power, the urban ruling class was thrown into thorough disarray and could think of no other alternative but flight … as for the peasants, flight was out of the question. Faced with the threat of extermination, they turned the Algerian countryside into the terrain for a fifty-year war which claimed millions of victims.’ (Amin 1970)
French colonial rule in Algeria lasted for 132 years (in comparison to 75 years of colonial rule in Tunisia and 44 in Morocco), having a duration and a depth that was unique in the experiences of colonialism in both Africa and the Arab world. In 1881, Algeria was administered for the first time as an integral part of France. With this extension of civilian rule to the country came the application of second-class status to Algeria’s Muslim population. The exclusion of Muslims was reflected at all levels of political representation, anti-Muslim discrimination was built into the electoral system, and the inferior status of Muslims was inscribed in law under the loathsome Code de l’Indigénat of 1881 (McDougall 2006).
After the French success in violently suppressing Algeria’s anti-colonial rebellions, the last of which took place in the 1870s and 1880s, over half a century was to pass before the Algerian resistance movement once again took up the fight, in the shape of Algerian nationalism in its modern form.
8 May 1945: ‘Victory in Europe Day’ and massacres in Algeria
‘It was at Setif that my sense of humanity was affronted for the first time by the most atrocious sights. I was sixteen years old. The shock which I felt at the pitiless butchery that caused the deaths of thousands of Muslims, I have never forgotten. From that moment, my nationalism took definite form.’ Kateb Yacine, Algerian writer and poet (quoted in Horne, 2006).
On 8 May 1945 there were joyful celebrations across Europe as news spread of the Nazi capitulation. France rejoiced at being delivered from a five-year occupation. At precisely the same time, events in Algeria began that would lead to the colonial massacre of thousands of Algerian Muslims over the next two months.
On Victory in Europe Day, while Europeans celebrated, Algerians marched in Setif for independence and an end to colonisation, deploying banners bearing slogans such as ‘For the Liberation of the People, Long Live Free and Independent Algeria!’ They also brandished for the first time what would later become the flag of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) liberation movement. The French colonial authorities violently repressed the march, triggering a rebellion that led to the murder of 103 Europeans.
The colonial retaliation to these murders was savage. The French military (air, navy and army) bombed several regions, and burnt and razed many villages to the ground in Setif, Guelma and Kherrata. Over the space of two months, the French gendarmerie2 and troops, alongside vengeful settlers, slaughtered tens of thousands of Algerian Muslims, with some estimates as high as 45,000.
The parallels between the Setif, Guelma and Kherrata massacres and the 7 October 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood operation by the Palestinian resistance against Israel, and the pitiless genocidal butchery that followed it, is too stark to ignore. In both cases, resistance whether peaceful or violent, was entirely disallowed, and aspirations for self-determination were crushed with grossly disproportionate force.
At the time (in 1945), one analyst, trying to explain the ‘barbarism’ of the colonised and to justify France’s bloody repression, wrote: ‘The call to violence raises from the mountains a kind of evil genie, a wild and cruel Berber Caliban, whose movements can only be stopped by a force greater than his own. This is the historical and social explanation for the events that took place in Sétif on the very day that victory was celebrated’ (Gresh 2023). The same supremacist colonial mindset and the same racist, orientalist and essentialist explanations of why the oppressed and colonised revolt persist today: the Palestinian attacks on 7 October are often put down to the pure evil, irrational savagery and timeless barbarism of medieval and sub-human terrorists, far removed from the political context of more than 75 years of settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation.
The massacres that followed the demonstrations of 8 May 1945 had significant repercussions for the Algerian nationalist movement. For the young generation of militants, the Algerian war had already started and the preparation for armed struggle could no longer be postponed. Most historians agree that the massacres of 1945 were traumatic, marking every Algerian Muslim who lived through the period. Moreover, every Algerian nationalist who was prominent in the FLN traces their revolutionary determination back to May 1945. It will not be surprising if future generations of Palestinian and Arab revolutionaries (of all political tendencies) trace their commitment to liberatory struggle to the genocide that followed the 7 October attacks and the heroic resistance in Gaza, which continues at the time of writing.
Ahmed Ben Bella, an FLN leader and head of the Algerian state from 1962 to 1965, had been a much-decorated sergeant in the 7th Regiment of Algerian Tirailleurs, a unit that distinguished itself in battle in Europe. But it was the events of 1945 that launched him on the path of revolution. He later wrote: ‘The horrors of the Constantine area in May 1945 succeeded in persuading me of the only path: Algeria for the Algerian.’ Similarly, for Mohammed Boudiaf, another revolutionary FLN leader and also a future head of state, the colonial massacres of 1945 led him to reject electoral politics and assimilation and to embrace armed resistance and direct action as the only way to achieve liberation (Evans & Phillips 2007).
The traumatic events of 1945 were the first volleys in the Algerian struggle for independence.
Vietnam’s victory is Algeria’s inspiration
‘Our actions aim to take the war to them, to let the whole world know that the Algerian people are leading a war of liberation against their European occupiers.’ Djamila Bouhired(external link)
The Algerian struggle for independence cannot be divorced from the global context of decolonisation. In 1945, the Arab League was formed, committed to Arab unity. In 1947, India won independence from Britain. In 1949, the Chinese Maoist revolution defeated the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek and established the People’s Republic of China. 1955 saw the rise of Arab nationalism/Nasserism and the holding of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, where 29 non-aligned countries from Africa and Asia challenged colonialism and neocolonialism in a context of Cold War tensions.
The FLN leaders were under no illusion about the scale of the task confronting them, but their confidence was bolstered by the humiliating French defeat in Indochina in May 1954. As Frantz Fanon explained, the great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu was no longer, strictly speaking, just a Vietnamese victory: ‘Since July 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been “What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?”’ (Fanon 1967).
Fanon was fascinated by what the Vietnamese had achieved at Dien Bien Phu. In his view, the Vietnamese victory over the French in this remote Southeast Asian valley had demonstrated that the colonised could generate the revolutionary violence needed to force decolonisation on the coloniser. News of the Vietnamese victory quickly reverberated across the French empire, shattering the myth of the coloniser’s invincibility and initiating cracks in the empire’s structure. The importance of Dien Bien Phu and its impact on the psyche of colonised people can hardly be overstated. Benyoucef Ben Khedda, president of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, recalled: ‘In 7th May 1954, the army of Ho Chi Minh inflicted on the French expeditionary corps the humiliating disaster of Dien Bien Phu. This French defeat acted as a powerful catalyst on all those who had been thinking that an insurrection in the short term is by now the only remedy, the only possible strategy. … Direct action took precedence over all other considerations and became the priority of priorities’ (Ben Khedda 1989).
Ferhat Abbas, who became the first acting president of the newly independent Algerian Republic, cast the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu in epoch-changing terms, considering it as significant as the French revolutionary army’s victory over the Prussians in the historic battle of Valmy in 1792:
‘Dien Bien Phu was more than just a military victory. This battle is a symbol. It’s the “Valmy” of the colonised peoples. It’s the affirmation of the Asian and African vis-à-vis the European. It is the confirmation of the universality of human rights. At Dien Bien Phu, the French lost the only source of “legitimation” on which their presence turned, that is the right of the strongest [to rule the weakest].’ (Abbas 1962).
Others have described Dien Bien Phu as the Stalingrad of decolonisation (Meaney 2024).
