A Bastille Day post: Tocqueville on France and Algeria

I somehow neglected this in my springtime frenzy of reading about the French-Algerian War, but its ringing words may be even more relevant in the waning moments of Bastille Day than than they were in April.

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I still don't know why France treated Algeria differently from Tunisia and Morocco, making of it a full-fledged colony while holding the others as protectorates. It couldn't really be because of a fly swatter, could it?

It transpires, though, that some of the impetus for France's decision about how to proceed after its invastion of Algiers came from the guy better known for writing about America:

"Tocqueville himself had sought such an incorporation when, in his 1847 report, he described the goal that would guide France's elusive, destructive, and ultimately failed project in Algeria:

"`We should set out to create not a colony properly speaking in Algeria, but rather the extension of France itself across the Mediterranean.'"

I don't say that makes him a perp, but he is at least a person of interest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

North Africa: A History From Antiquity to the Present with a couple of mistakes

The latest book in my Maghrebi jones, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to the Present by Phillip C. Naylor, has a few exasperating flaws, but it's a fine introduction. One review suggests it might make a good introductory textbook, and it does.

First the good: The book's wide chronological scope allows Naylor to discern patterns that persist over time in a given culture or country. Muammar Qadhafi was not the first ruler who failed to build civic and other social institutions in Libya, for example.  Among other things, I appreciate Naylor's lack of sentimentality and excuse-making over post-colonial troubles in North Africa.

On the minus side, the proofreader apparently lost interest in the book's final chapters, leaving a reference to the former United Nations Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar as José Pérez de Cuéllar. And the Egyptian statesman whose name is variously spelled elsewhere Saad Zaghloul or Zaghlûl appears throughout Naylor's book as Zaghul, no first l. I don't know if this is due to some vicissitude of transliteration or pronunciation, but it sure looks odd. If the spelling is not simply a mistake, the author should have explained his decision to render the name as he did. Explanations of spellings are routine in books that render names from non-Roman alphabets into English.

I also don't care for Naylor'a love of the odd locution "equates with." Why not "amounts to" or even "means"? And the author gets wifty when summing up postcolonial theory--but then, who wouldn't? Such matters are probably dealt with in longer discussion than this survey permits, or else by reading the original sources.

I do, however, find useful Naylor's assessment that postcolonial discourse abandons binary considerations, the insistence that cultures, countries, and their populations are either modern or outmoded, Western or Eastern, and so on. And mostly I like his last chapter, which amounts to a checklist of contemporary writers from Morocco, Tunisian, Libya, Algeria, and Egypt. That just may feed my craving.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013