Algeria From Within
9781465677662
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
A writer who sets out to study a foreign country such as Algeria is faced with two difficulties: the first, the natural suspicion of the Mohammedan population; the second, the little information obtainable from the French inhabitants of the country. It has been possible to overcome the first difficulty by making the Arab realize that there was no intention to interfere with his interior life or to obtain information in order to denounce family secrets. The second difficulty has remained. This is due to two factors. The first is the ignorance of the majority of Frenchmen, whether they be business men or colonists, of the customs and peculiarities of any area not neighboring that in which they actually dwell; the second is the French administrator’s apparent lack of information on anything beyond that which is not already to be found in the official handbooks. When occasionally one meets some one with a deeper knowledge of the matters which should interest him, it is hard, as a foreigner, to obtain any valuable data. The Frenchman finds it difficult to realize that any one can wish to peer into the inner workings of a foreign country without some ulterior motive. If it is not deliberate spying for a jealous government, it is to steal a march on some business enterprise! Comprehensive books on Algeria of to-day are few, and usually contradict one another, according to the point of view of the writers. The only solution, therefore, to the problem of writing this book has been for the author to settle in the country, living the life of its people, and gleaning what information was possible as a business man in the city of Algiers, as a sheep-breeder on the Sahara, and as a traveler across the great plains and mountains of this sunny land. The title of the book has perhaps a pretentious sound, suggesting that Algeria is some unexplored country into which the writer has penetrated, bringing back with him revelations of unknown mysteries never yet set before the public. But though this is not the case, it is hoped that the reader, be he a tourist or scholar, will find in these pages information which is new and interesting—Algeria from Within in opposition to the Algeria from “without” as set down by travelers who have passed a few winter months in the country and who, returning home, have compiled an inaccurate volume based on first impressions and on legends served up very hot by the hard-worked guides. These legends will have to be dispelled at the cost of disillusioning veteran visitors who pass winter after winter in the overheated hotels of Mustapha Supérieur. But, against this, the book will endeavor to explain shortly and accurately what this French colony really is, what its people are doing and thinking, wherein lies its future. There have been no aspirations to make of it a comprehensive guide-book or survey of the country’s long history, neither has any attempt been made to criticize the French rule, or to compare it with the administration of other colonies. True facts have been set down as seen by one who has lived many years in the country, constantly studying all about him without confining himself to one area nor to one class of people. Living not only in the big cities, but also in the cultivated plains, in the desolation of the desert, and mixing with the French administrators, with business men, with the colonists, and visiting the Arabs in such intimacy that it is possible to tell of their daily life as it is really lived.
