(4 of 10)
The Price of Success. For the 9,000,000 Moslems in Algeria, nine-tenths of the population, the cry that "Algeria is France" has proved a cruel delusion. The very achievements of French rule have served to increase the misery of the Moslem masses. Many of the highly efficient farms operated by French colons—often on land expropriated from Moslems in the 19th century—are not devoted to producing the food that Algeria so desperately needs; instead, they produce wine —which Moslems do not drink. The modern medicine which France introduced has all but wiped out the malaria, typhus, typhoid and venereal diseases which once plagued the Moslems. It has also sent the Moslem population zooming. In 1914 there were 4,000,000 Algerian Moslems; today there are 9,000,000 and by 1988 there will be 18 million. Since Algeria is unable at present to feed more than 3,000,000 people, the result has been mass pauperization. Some 800,000 able-bodied Moslem men are chronically unemployed. At least 2,000,000 Algerian Moslems live entirely upon remittances sent back by the 300,000 Algerian laborers digging the ditches and working the roads in Metropolitan France.
For any Algerian Moslem who sought to rise in the world, the odds were staggering. In 1954 only one out of five Moslem boys and one out of 16 girls went to school. The lucky ones read French textbooks speaking of "our ancestors, the Gauls," but in French army messes, Moslem noncoms drew only two-thirds of the food allowance of Frenchmen of equal rank.
Silver Braid. No one more completely personifies the dilemma of Algeria's Moslems than the gregarious druggist who is Premier of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic. Not long ago, sipping fruit juice in a Tunis cafe, Ferhat Abbas mused: "You know, if I had been born, say, an Egyptian, I would have grown up in Islamic culture and would have been able to feel deeply part of a nation. But my life has been different."
Abbas does not even know whether his ancestors were Berbers or Arabs or both. Family legend has it that his grandfather was a wealthy landowner whose property was confiscated by the French after the bitter, yearlong Kabylia revolt of 1871. But by the time Ferhat was born (Oct. 24, 1899), the Abbas family was completely identified with French rule—so much so that Ferhat's fattier, a caid (local governor) in the northern Constantine village of Chahna, was ultimately rewarded for his loyalty with the rosette and silver braid of a commander of the Legion of Honor. After running wild with the local shepherds until he was ten, Ferhat entered upon a pattern of life very much like that of any young French boy in Normandy or Picardy. He got his baccalaureat at a French lycee in Philippeville, did three years compulsory service as a sergeant in the French army medical corps, then entered the pharmacy school of the University of Algiers, where he avidly read Victor Hugo, Sophocles, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man.