THE SUNDAY TIMES: A third of Algerians are under 15 - inheritors of a brutal legacy of ancient and modern hatreds. Their country has suffered through civil war, terrorism and Islamic extremism. Is this uneasy peace what post-fundamentalism looks like?
"Is this your first time in Algeria?” everyone I meet asks me. It’s a polite inquiry, a courtesy veiling an admonishment, an accusation. “Where were you? Why did you take so long?” And with a weedy smile I reply, in geographic mitigation, that this isn’t my first time in the Maghreb. “Morocco,” they’d sigh. Yes, Morocco. “Ah, Morocco,” they’d repeat with a curl of the lip. “Disneyland.” And, compared to Algiers, it is.
Nobody’s been to Algeria for a decade unless they had a very pressing reason and some very secure connections. The last photographer I knew who tried to do a story here never got out of his hotel room. He went straight back to the airport, thoroughly scared. There were precious few news teams or foreign journalists — 11 years of civil war have been unforgivingly diligent and murderous and terrifying. Threats in Algeria are never empty. They come replete and fatty with promise, dripping with a brutal, dark efficiency.
“Zidane,” I say — Zinédine Zidane is the only contemporary Algerian anyone’s heard of. “Zidane,” they reply, “everyone was following him, looked to him for pride, for a sign.” Pity about the last match, though, that final head-butt in the 2006 World Cup. “What do you mean?” a man exploded at me, waving his hands. “We loved that! That moment! All his life Zidane was acquiescent, silent, a brown Frenchman, and then finally at the last he did something properly, authentically Algerian.”
Algiers curls like a sun-bleached spine around a great natural harbour. It is a city of lairs, of shadows. Up front is the icing, the promenade: unmistakably, vauntingly French. Tall white apartment blocks with beautiful Algiers-blue shutters and awnings hanging above shaded arcades of shops and deep, dark bars. There are broad, curving boulevards edged with ficus trees that have been pollarded and topiaried into a suspended, undulating green sunshade. It has that faded and dusty decrepitude that so suits colonial architecture, that lends a nostalgia to the bourgeois snobbery and imposed racism. The French city looks out across the Mediterranean towards Marseilles, its mirror. >>> AA Gill | Sunday, December 13, 2009
