Three new books on Algeria are reviewed in this weekend's Financial Times. One on Albert Camus by Catherine Camus his daughter, one by Jennifer Sessions, a historian titled, By Sword and Plow and a final one by Martin Evans, Algeria: France's Undeclared War. Tony Barber's review of these several books on Algeria is balanced and informed. What is disappointing is the lack of a more comprehensive perspective. Beginning with the reference to the 2005 French riots as the "Algerian syndrome," which has been a frequent reference since the events, he misses the opportunity to address the recent riots in England. When thousands of English working class people of all backgrounds loot, rob and trash stores, fight police and challenge the authority of established order on the streets, one has to ask, what kind of "syndrome" is that?
More important, however, is the subtext of the recent Arab Spring and Algeria's future and the descriptions by the authors of the books he reviews of the failures of colonialism in Algeria. While the French governments made mistakes, and should have learned from the Italian adventures in Libya at the beginning of the 20th century which were quite clear by the end of the Second Sanusi war, none of the colonial powers learned anything from their failures. Among the colonists there was always the delusion that the peoples of Africa and Asia would melt away as the Native Americans did and that the problem of separation would evaporate with extermination.
From Kenya to South Africa to India, the idea of separate populations with separate laws and land could not be rationally expected to produce anything but violence. The arrogance of modernity, founded on the machine, made fact by the Gattling Gun, gave faith to each new outrage and atrocity, but the inevitable frustration was that the native would not die. In Tasmania massacres did nearly succeed as in Australia, but as Frantz Fanon argues from his own experience in Algeria where violence failed, the colonist simply would not see the native, ignored his existence and in the end, was faced with defeat, not a defeat of the technology of modernity, but the failure of their humanity. Where extermination, slavery and caste had been wanting, colonists had left themselves only one end, evacuation.