Algeria from within

by R. V. C. Bodley

To-day, therefore, the inhabitants of Algeria are Arabs and Berbers of whom fifty per cent. claim almost pure Berber blood, and Frenchmen. There are many Spaniards in the department of Oran, and in the east a fair sprinkling of Italians and Maltese. The Jews, too, form an important section of the community; those who live in the north wear European dress, and in the south most of them wear Arab costume, with a certain little difference in the burnous, and in some districts they have robes peculiar to themselves. Their women, even in some families of the north, keep the dress of their people, the embroidered kerchief about the head and the rather shapeless frock. By a law known as the Décret Crémieux, voted in 1871, to facilitate the conscription of recruits for the Franco-Prussian War, all Jews north of a certain latitude in Algeria automatically became French citizens. It was not very popular at the time, but its consequences now are much appreciated. In spite, however, of this French citizenship and all the wealth acquired in commerce, the Jews of Algeria have kept themselves strangely apart. Even in Algiers all their shops are in a certain quarter; they close without exception on Saturday, and attend the synagogue with the utmost regularity. They never intermarry, and they form as distinct a race as the Arabs. In fact, in many districts—and especially in the south—they are always referred to as Israelites. Sometimes they are persecuted, but this merely knits them closer together. They despise the Arabs, but fear them, and tremble at any sign of force.

The Arabs equally despise the Jews, but unfortunately they have got themselves rather into their hands through making use of them as money-lenders.

The actual French occupation of the land does not penetrate very far—in fact, in a great many areas the Frenchman is leaving the interior and returning to the coast. Again and again one passes through European villages with a church built to accommodate a thousand people or so, and one sees about twenty European dwellings in the town and the rest of the houses in ruins or inhabited by Arabs. What has caused this? Primarily, the inherent dislike of the Frenchman to expatriate himself. If he comes to Algeria it is with no idea of spending the rest of his days here. His one idea is to make enough money to permit him to return home to France and eke out a pinched existence in his native village, but with the satisfaction of being a rentier. Secondly, the rather ungrateful task of cultivating in a country where all depends on the rainfall. It is all right for the man who has capital and who can bide his time to pay off his losses of the bad year with the profits of the good, but it is heart-breaking work for the small landowner. Of course there are numbers of families who have settled in the cultivated regions and who have become Algerian, but they are the exception; their names can be counted off rapidly.

These men have great fortunes in wine, in cereals and tobacco, and their children have in many cases never seen France; but, generally speaking, the Frenchman is not a colonist, and it is very, very rare to see him away in the Sahara sheep-breeding or alfa-collecting. He has, however, done one rather contradictory thing in imposing his language on practically the whole country. With the exception of the nomads who wander about the Sahara, it is rare to come to any center and not find a French-speaking population.

The Arabs among themselves of course speak their own language; it is a strange dialect based on pure Arabic, but peculiar to North Africa.

Moreover, it differs in accent according to regions. For instance, the language of the south is much deeper and more guttural than that of Algiers, and the talk in Constantine and Oran, again, has many words and intonations not found in other centers.

I think that the correct name for this dialect should be Arabo-Berber. There is, of course, also the pure Berber spoken by the people of the Kabyle and Aurès Mountains, of the Mzab and the Hoggar; and, though Berbers are often found who can not speak anything else, it is almost a general rule to find them bilinguists, while the majority talk French too. It is interesting to note that when the Sultan of Zanzibar came to North Africa the only people with whom he could speak fluently were the Berbers of the Mzab.

The Jews speak both Arab and French fluently; their Arab is often purer than that of the actual natives. A great number speak Hebrew among themselves.

However, to progress comfortably through the country, French is essential, and Arabo-Berber is a great help and inspires confidence among the people. Grammatically, it is a simple language, but the pronunciation is difficult and the number of words which mean the same thing requires one to have command over a large vocabulary. It is a language that can be learned only with a teacher.

These, therefore, are the peoples and the tongues of North Africa, and, armed with this knowledge, we can now penetrate further into the system of administration.