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Past and present, colony and metropolis. By Jim House.

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Dr James (Jim) House is a Senior Lecturer in French at Leeds University. With co-author Neil MacMaster (UEA, Norwich) he has published Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford University Press, 2006). This book also received a French translation in 2008 (Tallandier publishers). Our thanks goes to Professor Margaret Majumdar for her help.

Past and present, colony and metropolis.

Recent months in France have seen a number of prominent and disturbing cases of alleged police violence against racialized minorities. In circumstances such as these, historians are often asked by journalists and civil society groups to assess how and to what extent the colonial past influences the present, notably here with regard to postcolonial minorities, policing, socio-ethnic segregation, and racism. In discussing these themes, my article will argue that we often need to be cautious when claims are made for a strong similarity (if not identical situation) between past and present, an assumption that seems often to inform many of the questions I receive. It is precisely the historian’s role to examine the ‘space’ that exists between what may indeed be similar yet which is not identical between past and present. Rather like with debates on the usefulness or not of the term ‘fascist’ to describe several prominent politicians and movements today, historical analogies can be suggestive, but we should not collapse distinctions between past and present, the colonial Metropolitan and the colonial in the colonies.

Having recourse to apparent parallels between past and present usually stems from a range of options that are themselves historically informed. The frequency with which analogies are established between the situation in France’s poor outer suburbs today (hereafter banlieues) and various French colonial situations before the 1960s indicates that a particular historical (or memorial) sensibility has now emerged across French society. This development started in the early 1980s, as antiracist activists sought to explain how and why Algerians, and those of Algerian heritage, faced such widespread discrimination, and to challenge these injustices through collective action. Over subsequent decades, it was the lethal repression of the 17 October 1961 Algerian pro-independence Front de libération nationale demonstrations in Paris that became emblematic of colonial state violence and its impunity. Since the 1980s, this interrogation of the past has been combined with a growing recognition of the intrinsically-linked nature of imperial and national histories notably, but not exclusively, due to the Franco-Algerian context. Political and media debates have increasingly been couched in an explicitly as opposed to implicitly postcolonial language. We have also seen a widening out of the colonial problematic to include the colonial situation in the colonial theatre itself: other massacres (Sétif, Thiaroye), often linked to the desire to ‘punish’ collective agency challenging colonial rule, have become better known in France and used by campaigners to symbolise long-standing problems of routinized racism, violence and state impunity. In turn, this wider public awareness of the colonial period has led to as many if not more parallels being made between Metropolitan France today and the colonial theatre, as between Paris during the Algerian war of independence and France in the 21st century.

At this stage, it is important to underline that there are no doubt some strong parallels that can indeed be drawn between (for example) the colonial situation in North Africa and Metropolitan France in the 1950s and today in terms of how racialized groups experience and perceive the difficult political, social or economic situations in which they find themselves. Daily discrimination, fear, feelings of vulnerability, frustration, social suffering and the desire to produce transformative politics can be seen in all these contexts.

There are other parallels between today and the 1950s. For example, we can see this with the spatial dimensions of unequal power relations and the ways in which negative representations of specific urban areas were often linked to negative images of their inhabitants. In the colonial context, there was a strong correlation between social status and ethnicity, leading to residential segregation that was as much the indirect result of the colonial economy and society as it was the direct product of any overtly segregationist policies, the latter always stronger in urban Morocco than in Algeria, for example: in fact, urban segregation in Algeria was extremely complex and in cities such as Algiers can arguably only be understood on the micro-level.[i] With the huge re-housing programmes of the Plan de Constantine (1958-1962), parts of the industrialising suburbs of Algiers (Hussein-Dey and Maison-Carrée), with their housing estates (built to replace shantytowns) often distant from the more ‘European’ town centres, resembled the now-familiar Metropolitan French situation. Here, the sequence is not necessarily that the colonial situation (Algiers) came before the metropolis: we see an almost simultaneous re-defining of socio-ethnic segregation in the two urban contexts.

Thanks to recent scholarship, we now have a much better understanding of the ways in which social housing policy, and municipal intervention targeting informal housing, ultimately led to the redistribution – as opposed to the reduction – of socio-ethnic segregation in France in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, as part of what could be called the ‘pre-history’ of the banlieues.[ii] The contexts in which space, ethnicity and class came to interact are therefore becoming better known. At a general level, some guarded comparisons between today’s banlieues and the colonial urban situation might thus be usefully made. Even here, we need to keep in mind the different political contexts and statutory rights that, up until the accelerated reformist phase of the decolonisation period narrowed the gap, still distinguished very clearly between colony and metropolis: the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad reminded us of the indirectly but inherently political nature of migration, as (here Algerian) colonial migrants sought a better future away from the colonial society in the colony.[iii]

Yet we know much less about the specific influence that colonial legacies may play on the policing of the French banlieues today. The impact of colonialism on cultures of policing, on how practices in the colonies changed policing in Metropolitan France – possibly through greater militarization – and the flows of personnel and ideas across the Mediterranean (for example) need much further work.[iv] To be sure, we see some similarities between the 1950s and today regarding law and order operations and wider spatial containment both within and between urban areas judged ‘dangerous’ and between such areas and the central city, as part of highly gendered discourse on who ‘controls’ urban space. Similarly, state agents often act with some impunity against stigmatised groups, and may intervene within a ‘punitive’ logic.

However, the French state uses far less lethal violence and is significantly less unaccountable today than it was in Paris or Algiers in the 1950s: the democratization of access to audio and visual recording material, combined with the development of social media, allow campaigners to discredit official versions of contested events more easily and swiftly than in the past. Those groups being policed – and most are indeed French nationals – are certainly often treated as ‘diminished citizens’ (citoyens diminués), as Emmanuel Blanchard terms them, unable to enjoy the rights from which other citizens benefit, hence some campaigners’ recourse to the term indigènes today:[v] but this should not elide the legal and social differences between colonial and postcolonial situations. A further difference is that, in the colonial theatre, the colonised faced not just colonial state violence, but also European vigilantism. It was precisely in these ‘triangular’ situations such as Sétif, when punitive violence was exercised by both state and European militias against (here) Algerians, that the repression was often so deadly. Yet it is probably due to the more everyday instances of police harassment and other symbolic violence that banlieues residents today make comparisons with their parents’ and grand-parents’ generations.

The most meaningful historical analogies that can be made between past and present arguably relate to the late-colonial period in Metropolitan France but even here, as I have suggested, we should not underestimate the considerable differences. However, we should perhaps be broadening our gaze to set many of these issues within wider geographical contexts. For example, it would be helpful to have more studies of the forms of social and political control – and repression – in the DOM-TOM both today and fifty years ago. Similarly, the problems faced by postcolonial groups in France’s banlieues today probably more closely resemble those experienced by comparable groups in London or Brussels than in urban North American or (post)colonial Algiers. We need more comparative work on the articulation between ethnicity, space, class, and gender in former imperial capitals (and other large urban contexts) to better understand the weight of colonial legacies and the forms of inequalities they produce. In brief, the past can inform but never totally explain the present, but we also need to understand why and how ‘appeals’ to the past are made, by whom, and why such calls might prove meaningful. History as a discipline needs to maintain the delicate balance between demanding the ‘right to complexity’ and informing struggles in the present.

[i] Rachid Sidi Boumedine, Bétonvilles contre bidonvilles. Cents ans de bidonvilles à Alger (Algiers: Apic Éditions, 2016).

[ii] Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, En finir avec les bidonvilles. Immigration et politique du logement dans la France des Trente Glorieuses (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016).

[iii] Abdelmalek Sayad, ‘Nationalisme et émigration’, chapter in (same author) La Double absence. Des illusions de l’émigré aux souffrances de l’immigré (Paris: Seuil, 1999), pp.133-159.

[iv] See however Mathieu Rigouste, L’ennemi intérieur. La généalogie coloniale et militaire de l’ordre sécuritaire dans la France contemporaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).

[v] Emmanuel Blanchard, La Police parisienne et les Algériens, 1944-1962 (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2011).

 

North Africa: a complex cultural miscellany (Part II)

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The following is the second part of Dr Kamal Salhi’s reflections on problems relating to culture in North Africa. The first part appeared on 16 May 2017 and is available under ‘Related Posts’, and can also be found via the ‘Archive’ tab. Thanks go to Dr Margaret Majumdar for her assistance.

North Africa: a complex cultural miscellany (Part II)

Culture is not constituted solely by our collective images of ourselves, but also by our collective images of others. And those inherited images may be utterly destructive. The mere fact that a habit of mind is authentic does not mean that it is helpful. Prejudices, patronizing generalizations, false assumptions, and contemptuous attitudes may be deeply rooted, venerable, and steeped in tradition. Conversely, toleration and a willingness to embrace diversity and sympathy for people unlike ourselves may be the products of very recent experience: hence the hasty description of cultures or peoples who lack any official status as ‘minority’ or ‘marginalized’ groups, even though in North Africa they actually make up a majority of the population and have deeper roots there than the ruling caste. North Africans may eventually develop a way of describing the pre-colonial cultures in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt by reference to indigenous terms. Until those terms are researched, agreed upon, and widely understood, we have to make do with European/Western concepts. Discussions about minorities do not pose problems for the hegemonic ideologies of North Africa and its various regimes as much as they do for those who are culturally, politically, and ideologically repressed by these regimes, since those in power do not even accept that there really are any minorities with issues to be addressed. The recent liberal, ‘democratic’ current in the region, with its experience of confronting ethno-historical questions, has not developed theories of minority rights, but has instead rushed to create new ministries or national institutions to safeguard human rights, deliberately mixing up these concepts to sow confusion.

This confusion is a response to international pressures and a way of controlling and manipulating local unrest more than it is a recognition or accommodation of ethnic difference and cultural blending. These supposedly democratic institutions do not pay attention to the ‘minority rights’ of national minorities – if they are to be so called – that cannot be assimilated into the larger, artificial Arab-Islamic community. In Western terms, ‘minorities’ often denotes people identified as belonging to minority nationalities or permanently settled immigrants with distinguishable, coherent traits marking them out as cultural groups. One of the major features of North Africa is its ethnic diversity – the result of its various indigenous cultures and centuries of settlement and colonization from outside. Although the French and Ottoman empires have now left the region, it still bears witness to their presence. However, any attempt to identify all the ethnic populations in the region would be controversial, since it would mean classifying them, and it is not easy to agree on a single criterion of classification. Any attempt to do this would spark a complex, sensitive debate on whether the defining criterion should be cultural, linguistic, geographical, spatial or religious, or whether a combination of these criteria should be applied. Government officials do not recognize the existence of distinct ethnic groups with practices or languages that deviate from the officially proclaimed homogeneity of Arab-Muslim culture. The minority groups in North Africa tend to be the original inhabitants of the territories occupied by the region’s states, who were socially and politically autonomous before being incorporated into these larger hegemonic units. They tend to view themselves as separate peoples. It is difficult to accept the argument that the supposedly democratic states of North Africa are ethnically and culturally neutral. On the contrary, all the region’s democracies have developed a degree of linguistic and institutional cohesion as part of their process of nation-building. In North Africa, the official discourse presents that unity as having been achieved through integration into the culture of the state: i.e. a culture only found within its territorial boundaries and centred on a shared language disseminated to all members of the nation through state policies (and institutions, such as those of the education system and the mass media) in both public and private life.

If ethnicity is considered a valid concept for the understanding of North African perceptions of culture, these socio-cultural categories are not necessarily well defined and delimited, because the real majority – the Imazighen or Berbers, for example – are still struggling to become visible while the ‘ethnic minorities’, such as the Jews, the Copts, the Christians, the Europeans, and the Turks, are other-defined more often than self-defined. The phrase ‘ethnic minorities’ has never been officially used. Rather, the term ‘ethnic group’ or ‘ethnic people’ is sometimes employed. In reality, the term ‘ethnic people’ implicitly refers to those who are not ethnic Amazigh or Arabs, although the Amazigh may sometimes be referred to as an ‘ethnic group’. As a direct consequence of these blurred categories, the identity and culture of some ‘minority’ individuals are disrupted. They fail on both counts: they do not fit in with the majority identity and culture, as they do not entirely share all the social and cultural attributes of the majority. Nor do they fit into the ethnic minority culture per se. For them, the connection between identity and culture was lost during the period of Arab nationalism and the post-Independence years when the construction of ‘new Arab men’ was supposed to remove all particularist and ‘reactionary’ identities. One impulse behind the recent cultural resurgence has come from the activist cultural movements that have pursued confrontational approaches in responding to the existing situation. Successive postcolonial governments have failed to put in place policies that have genuinely promoted self-determination. These problems have arisen with the creation of the new nation-states in post-Ottoman North Africa.

The French colonial territories that became independent were very often populated by various peoples and tribes, each with its own language and culture. The various languages spoken in these states often differed in many ways, making it difficult, if not impossible, for adequate communication to take place between different groups. During the colonial period, the dominant language for inter-group communication was the language of the colonial power. After World War Two, there was a general feeling that the North African peoples would only be successful in their struggles against French colonialism if each country could be united into a single social, cultural and, especially, political force; hence the commitments made by political leaders to the establishment of a single, united state, a single nation, and a single language, all in the name of independence. It may seem strange that the Algerians and the Moroccans, for example, nations with populations of millions of Imazighen, gave up their own languages in favour of Arabic, which was in reality foreign to them.

As I have noted elsewhere,[1] the term ‘minority’ denotes the smaller in number of two aggregates that together constitute a whole. However, this statistical definition of a minority neither reveals anything about the social status of a minority group in relation to the majority group in a given society, nor reflects the minority group’s attitude towards the majority group and vice versa. It refers only to two aggregates, thus neglecting situations in which there may be more than two constituents that together form a composite whole, as is often the case in North Africa. Should all North Africa’s countries, then, be characterized as being made up of linguistic minorities? Such a definition of ‘minority’ may even include dominant elites that, despite being tiny in number, happen to exercise power and control resources that are not available to the subordinate, but majority, group in the population. Only a small percentage of the total population of North Africa can claim standard Arabic as their first language, yet it is the tiny elite groups that promote this language who are the most privileged and powerful sections of these societies.

Another perspective through which the semantics of the concept of the ‘linguistic minority’ has been circumscribed introduces the notion of ‘language power’ based on a wider range of usage in a certain domain, a greater degree of control over the speakers of another language, and higher status and prestige in the eyes of the general populace. Language power brings out the dichotomy of the dominant versus the dominated. In fact, it is common to speak euphemistically of dominated groups as ‘minorities’, and, it is possible to speak of languages as ‘minority languages’ even though, in some cases, their speakers actually represent a majority in a given population.

Such definitions may obliterate the distinction between the general mass and ethnic or linguistic minorities. For example, the Amazigh communities are not, in any real sense, minority groups, and it is important to distinguish the issues faced by these groups from those of the separatist movements active within some ethnic minorities. While the Berber cultural movement, for example, is led by a group that is numerically in a majority in resisting the domination of an elitist numerical minority, the resurgence of ethnic movements all over North Africa is largely due to the struggles of minority groups for linguistic or ethnic survival in the face of repressive dominant majority groups. Within the developing nations, we find at least two distinct types of minority groups: those that are gradually losing their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness and consequently find themselves in the process of changing ethnic identification; and those that have become militant after reaching a state of crisis in their struggles for survival. In this particular instance, ethnicity is a category denoting a particular way of organizing groups by reference to attributive identity-markers. The way in which the term is often used in public and academic debate seems to insinuate that characterizing such phenomena with this category is a major step towards understanding them.

This reasoning is highly problematical, in that academic discourse materializes and legitimizes identity-constructions by promoting cultural traits as essential to given social groups, whereas in reality they are in flux. Differences, both between and within groups, change significantly over time. As a consequence, ethnicity becomes the fundamental reference point in analysing politics and patterns of conflict in a linguistically, culturally, religiously, and artistically diverse region like North Africa. This is exactly the perspective within which identities acquire the character of a historically given foundation on the basis of which collective interests are formulated and political forces mobilized. Contrary to the existing scholarship which relies on the postcolonial critical apparatus as a given theory resulting from French colonialism, the palimpsestic formation of new experiences since the 1990s compels us to look at new parameters of the French legacy in the context of globalisation, and demonstrate how North Africa can be an example representing the region as a performative site where contemporary, cultural and political cataclysm can be best observed and understood.

[1] Cf. Kamal Salhi, “The Colonial Legacy of French and Subsequent Postcolonial Policy”, European Journal of Language Policy 5.2 (2013): 187-224.