The Many Faces of Algiers

‘Excuse me, sir but do you want to see the Eisenhower Room?’  It seems an odd request, as I am staying at the Hotel El Djazair in central Algiers, but then I remember that the famous American general had been in North Africa sometime during World War II.  I am led up a flight of stairs and down a darkened, silent corridor to a door that opens onto a somewhat kitschly-decorated room with stiff couches and a small wooden writing desk.

The view through the window, though, is onto a magnificent garden of palms, bougainvillea and bright yellow cannas.  The warm sunlight of the Mediterranean fills the room.

It is hard to believe in this tiny room, balanced so perfectly between shadow and light, the fate of the world had once hung.  It was from here in 1942 and 1943 that General Eisenhower, led the campaign which drove the Axis powers out of North Africa and paved the way for the defeat of Facism.

The city of Algiers is filled with such half-remembered pockets of history and war.  The end of Facism brought freedom for Europeans, but Arabs remained under French colonial rule.  Finally, in 1954 an insurgency broke out which quickly grew into a nightmare civil war as the French resisted independence.  By 1963 an estimated 500 000 to 1 million Arabs had been killed and 40 000 French.

Down the hill from the El Djazair Hotel is the white-walled labyrinth of shops and tiny apartments called the Casbah.  It was here in its narrow, winding cobbled streets that French soldiers and police were ambushed by fighters of the FLN or National Liberation Front.

Little in the Casbah has changed today.  There is no real tourist industry and people look strangely at foreigners wandering through its alleyways.  We need a plainclothes policeman shadowing us discretely to be sure we are safe – or at least to provide the illusion we are.  As we wander through its alternating patches of light and deep shade I cannot help reflecting that it was from here that so much hope spread out through the continent.  The Algerian struggle for independence was a clarion call for other African countries, including South Africa.  It was the FLN who provided Nelson Mandela his first military training at a hidden base across the border in Morocco.  It was from the blood-soaked struggles of these cobbled streets that Franz Fanon drew his analysis of violence and the struggle against colonialism that so influenced people like Steve Biko.

Algiers has always stood as a fulcrum between worlds.  In a crowded street just a short distance from the Casbah is the school that Albert Camus attended.  He rose to become one of the world’s great humanist writers.  The vision of novels like The Stranger and The Plague, both set in Algeria has captivated cultures and influenced writers across the world from Japan to Argentina.  And yet, Camus could not fully accept the Algerian’s desire for independence.  He passed his last days in France, lost in the nexus between two worlds.  One fading inexorably, the other being born in violence and blood.

Violence has been the lot of Algerians for decades.  Throughout the 1990s Islamist insurgents and the Algerian government were constantly at war and some 150 000 people were killed by the time a ceasefire was declared in 1999.

‘It was a terrible time,’ Farouk, an interpreter I am working with, says.  ‘We cannot go back to those days.’

‘You cannot imagine how it was then.   And now we are frightened again.  We have more freedom today than before, but things are going bad.  We see more women wearing the headscarf, they don’t want to get in trouble.  They will rather just live their lives.’

He echoes what so many in Algeria say.  The country remains under tight control.  And yet the decades of war, the terrible past haunts people’s memories, holding them in its grip.  They are terrified of what might happen if extremism rises again.

At a factory I visit some 20 km out of town, men and women are working together in a way that one sees relatively seldom even in the most liberal countries in the West.  Yet the fear of the consequences of the renewed violence hovers just under the surface.  Most people won’t talk of it, but as we are speeding back to town on the highway, my host suddenly says.  ‘You see, there is nothing to worry about.  No one has attacked us.’

It is small consolation.  The fact that he felt he had to say it, hints at his fear of the possibility of the brutal past re-emerging in all its hideousness.

Algerians, though, somehow remain optimistic.  ‘No one wants to go back to the old days of the 1990s’, an American diplomat told me.

At a language school I visit the middle class young woman and men are laughing and filled with hope.  ‘I want to be an astronomist,’ one young woman wearing a traditional headscarf says.  ‘I want to be an engineer,’ another woman, unveiled says.  While her friend adds.  ‘I want to work with shale gas.’

Such ordinary dreams today, and yet, for decades they were nearly impossible.

That evening, I stand on a high point above the city.

The call of the muezzin drifts out across the vastness of the Bay of Algiers, echoing through the glistening turquoise sky as the last of the day’s light seeps into pinks and oranges above the skyline ofAlger la Blanche, Algiers the White, nicknamed for its pale, angular buildings rising up from the sea.

The city stands as a gleaming bastion to the continent, an echo of Cape Town, thousands of miles to the south, each city’s skyline mirroring each other and the vast promise of Africa.

Below, a poignant mix of memory, anger and hope fills the city.  As the sun sets and the light turns dark over the angular skyline, I reflect on what a fragile balance it is.  A city caught between the glories of the revolutionary past, the terror of extremist violence and the fear of it reoccurring in the future.  In so many ways, Algiers and its poignant equilibrium is a reminder to all of us, on the continent, and in the broader world, to constantly find ways to keep tolerance and openness alive.