Albert Camus has often been dismissed as a supporter of colonial practice – and quite often far worse. But this is a deeply mistaken and unfair narrative for a man who did more than most to stand up for the indigenous and Arab people of Algeria.
Albert Camus has often been dismissed as a supporter of colonial practice – or worse. As his detractors regularly point out, he did write a book about a character called Meursault – a colonial who murdered an Arab on a beach near the city of Algiers. Shortly after Albert Camus’ death, a fellow French-Algerian novelist, Henri Kréa, wrote that Meursault’s infamous murder was the ‘realisation of the obscure and puerile dream of the “poor white” Camus never ceased to be’.
Camus’ legacy has been tainted by these sorts of ad hominem attacks. And they gained ever more traction in the English literary and political world with the help of no less a figure than Edward Said. Said claimed that Camus’ silenced and murdered Arab characters were a clear and obvious indication that the author himself supported the French colonial system.
However, long before Said wrote Culture and Imperialism, Camus observed:
But, after all, you can also write about incest without having necessarily hurled yourself on your unfortunate sister; and I have nowhere read that Sophocles ever thought of killing his father and dishonouring his mother.
Of course, many of those ‘poor whites’ of Algeria, that Kréa refers to, at the time of Camus’ death in 1960, were engaged in a murderous colonial war. A war whose brutality has remained a permanent stain on French history. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people were killed and brutalised by French government forces.
But what was really held against Camus in his lifetime (and after his death), was not that he supported the war (he didn’t), but that he never advocated for Algerian independence. Again, the claim was a simple one: he didn’t want Algeria to be independent because he supported the colonial system there. But this was not the case and it ignores almost everything Camus said and wrote.
To put it simply, Camus believed in a ‘one-state solution’ for Algeria and France – not unlike Edward Said’s advocacy for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. And there was good reason for this. Algeria, from 1848, was not a colony but an integral part of France. Departments or provinces in Algeria voted their representatives into the National Assembly in France. Jewish people, who had lived in Algeria since the Roman Empire, were given full French citizenship in 1870. But Arabs and Berbers (or Amazigh) were never allowed equal political rights.
Camus’ argument was simple. It was high time that the Arabs and the Amazigh were afforded full political rights in the land of their birth – and he had been arguing this since he was a young journalist. He demanded what we demand of all democratic states: for them to be inclusive and to not discriminate on the basis of race and gender. Why should French Algeria be any different? France, Camus argued, if it was to be a proper democracy must recognise the Arabs and Amazigh as full citizens.
In 1937, Camus became a journalist at the left-wing newspaper Alger-Republicain. A newspaper that insisted that full social and political rights be granted to all those who lived in Algeria ‘regardless of race, religion, or philosophy.’ While working on, and ultimately running this paper, Camus began a series of articles on the state of the Arabs and Amazigh. His investigative journalism into the situation in the province of Kabylia during a period of famine, features the impassioned cries of what would now be called a ‘social justice warrior’.
In a series of articles published under the title “Misery in Kabylia” he wrote how the state of the people drove him to utter despair. Camus tirelessly recorded the poverty: children fighting in the streets with dogs over scraps of food, the wretched education system, old women bent double in hunger weighing only 25kg. And, he concluded, there was only one entity to blame: the French government. The Amazigh and the Arabs, he wrote, had a great deal to teach the French oppressors:
I do not think I am mistaken when I say that the destiny of this people is to work and to contemplate, and in so doing to teach lessons in wisdom to the anxious conquerors that we French have become. Let us learn, at least, to beg pardon for our feverish need of power, the natural bent of mediocre people, by taking upon ourselves the burdens and needs of a wiser people as to deliver it unto its profound grandeur.
Camus’ fight with the French authorities on this issue began long before fellow travellers like Jean-Paul Sartre took up the cause of Algerian independence. And after the Second World War, Camus was, once again, one of the first to connect what had happened to France, under German occupation, with colonialism. As he wrote in the resistance newspaper, Combat, five days after victory was declared in Europe:
The Arab people of Algeria should finally be recognised as a people. I want to point out that the Arab people also exist, by that I mean that they aren’t the wretched faceless mob in which westerners see nothing worth respecting or defending. On the contrary they are a people of impressive traditions whose virtues are eminently clear to anyone willing to approach them without prejudice. These people are not inferior except in regard to the conditions in which they must live and we must have as much to learn from them as they from us.
It should also be remembered that before Camus died, it seemed unlikely that the National Liberation Front (FLN) was going to win the war in Algeria. Far from it. The prospects of the FLN looked bleak, fighting against a French army with its superior weaponry and its horrifying tactics. Of course, it must be mentioned that Camus was also vehemently against the FLN’s terrorist tactics. As he famously stated, if these barbaric methods of war, on both sides, were a fight for justice, then, as he said, ‘I prefer my mother.’ The life of his deaf-mute mother, who worked as a domestic worker in Algiers, was more precious to him than a war that involved the killing of civilians, wholesale massacres and the torture of political prisoners.
In January 1956, Camus attempted to make an intervention into the toxic environment where FLN radicals and white French “Ultras” lived and breathed violence. Camus went to Algiers to broker a civilian truce. Walking to the hall in which he would speak, he could hear thousands of colonial Ultras at Place du Gouvernement shouting ‘Camus au poteau!’ or ‘Camus to the gallows!’. As he took to the stage with the man who would become the first Arab president of Algeria, Ferhat Abbas, the crowd of white colonials surrounded the building still calling for Camus’ head.
‘This meeting,’ he began, ‘was supposed to demonstrate that there is still a chance for dialogue.’ But as these words were uttered, stones smashed the windows of the hall. Dialogue, Camus argued for most of his life, was democracy. Without dialogue there was nothing, only a brutal war whose end would see no dramatic improvement in the prospects of the poor and marginalised. With stones, guns and the threats to have Camus killed, there could be no democracy, there could be no one-state solution for France and Algeria.
