The French Colonial War on Algeria: A Short Personal Reminiscence

As I think about the colonial period in Algeria, several situations come to mind. Some of these took place during the period before the start of the independence war, and some events happened during the war.

I was born in Saïda, a small town of the higher plains in the South-West of Algeria. I was 6 years old in the early 1950s when I started realizing the nature of the world around me. Our interaction with the European/French population was quite limited. There was no apartheid law, but the practice was truly apartheid. I cannot recall any significant personal or social interactions between the European and the local/Algerian communities, except around work. On our identity card, the citizenship was “Français-Musulman,¹" which for everyone indicated that the holder belonged to a lower class.