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2009 29: 324Critique of AnthropologyAbdelmajid Hannoum

Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb

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Notes on the (post)colonial in theMaghrebAbdelmajid HannoumUniversity of Kansas, USA

In memory of Clifford Geertz

Abstract ■ This article examines the formation of French colonial culture in theMaghreb and the power relations it has generated. Through an analysis ofcolonial knowledge, the author shows the different and changing discursive strat-egies put in place to comprehend and control the local population. He alsoargues that the effects of this colonial knowledge continue in the present and,far from debunking it, national reactions by historians helped make colonialcategories and understanding part of the present.Keywords Arabs ■ Berbers ■ French colonialism ■ historical knowledge ■

nationalism ■ racial theories

The notion of ‘culture’ used in this article is a common one with consider-able currency among anthropologists and cultural studies scholars, thanksin large part to the work of Clifford Geertz. Human beings, Geertz oncenotes, are by definition ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seekinganimals’ (1973: 140). However, human beings are not only creators ofsymbols and meanings, but paradoxically they are caught in, and depen-dent on that which they create. Geertz contends that: ‘Man is an animalsuspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun’ (1973: 5).Man’s dependency on culture also means that his behavior is not only regu-lated by biological needs, but also more so by systems of meanings thatGeertz calls ‘programs’ (1973: 44). The main objective of this articleconsists in showing how colonialism has introduced and imposed its ownwebs of significance into the colonies and especially to show the conditionsunder which the colonized became caught in webs of significance that theythemselves had not spun. Needless to say, these colonial webs of signifi-cance were neither fixed nor homogeneous. On the contrary, they weremade of different and at times even conflicting elements, the implemen-tation of which was conditioned by colonial politics and subtle and overtpower dynamics. Therefore, a discussion of culture, whether colonial ornot, needs to take into consideration the constraints, the limits, and therules that govern relations between various subjects.

While the article discusses colonial power relations, its goal is not toexamine the dynamics of those relations in postcolonial France, but ratherin the Maghreb. In scholarly terms, the ‘metropole’ has always been more

Article

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Hannoum: Notes on the (post)colonial in the Maghreb

fortunate than the colonies, in both the past and the present. Whereas the(post) colonial in France has been examined mainly through the issue ofimmigration (Silverstein, 2004; Silverstein and Chantal Terwault, 2006),and Islam (Scott, 2007), the (post) colonial relationship within theMaghreb has been relatively neglected despite its enormous importance.The article is thus a preliminary investigation on how the colonialcontinues in the contemporary Maghreb, especially in Morocco and inAlgeria. The goal, let us be clear, is not to offer another narrative on theMaghreb, but rather to engage an anthropological critique of the discourseof both colonialism and nationalism.

On colonial culture

The Maghreb had known Europe mostly, if not exclusively through colonialmodernity – that is to say the dominant French culture of the period from1830 to 1962. Yet colonial modernity has different faces. Thus, for instance,until 1870, colonial modernity was initially and mostly racial in character.Ironically, comprehending or imagining Algeria (and by extension theMaghreb) through racial categories gave birth to a more complex, richerview of society.1 In the case of Algeria, for instance, the entire populationwas seen as astonishingly diverse. During his visit to Algeria in 1841, Alexisde Tocqueville noted this diversity:

a prodigious mélange of races and customs: Arabs, Kabyles, Moors, Negro,Mahonais2 [sic], and French. Each of these races that agitates together seems tobe in a space much more narrow to contain it, [each] speaks a language, wears[specific] clothing, and has different morals. (Tocqueville, 1951: vol. 5, 191)

In 1843, a more in-depth study by Louis-Adrien Berbrugger gives a fullerdescription of the inhabitants of Algeria (Berbrugger, 1843–5). Tocquevillemet Berbrugger during his visit and deemed him ‘not the most catholicmind, but the man who lived longer with the Arabs’ (1951: vol. 5, 207). Thisjudgment seems justified when one looks at Berbrugger’s work of thisperiod. It reflects a familiarity with Algerian social life, yet it also betrays aclumsy understanding of the race theory of his time. Berbrugger talks about‘Algerian races’, but by this expression one concludes that he means‘Algerian racial types’. Nevertheless he labels all of them ‘the Semitic race’,except for blacks and what he considers remains of a white European race,to wit, the Vandals.

Around this time, the Comte de Gobineau in France – and even in thelarger Europe – was the most articulate and influential race theorist whosework had an impact even on the first half of the 20th century (Arendt, 1966:171–5). After he notes that the West African race shares what he calls ‘thestructure of the monkey’, Gobineau judges them to be better than theinhabitants of the New World, who are ‘absolutely hideous’ (1967: 107).Gobineau puts Europeans on the pedestal:



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Not only are these peoples more beautiful than the rest of mankind, which is Iconfess, a pestilent congregation of ugliness; not only had they the glory ofgiving the world such admirable types as Venus, an Apollo, a Farnese Hercules;but also there is a visible hierarchy of beauty established from ancient timeseven among themselves, and in this natural aristocracy the Europeans are themost eminent, by their grace of outline and strength of muscular development.(1967: 107–8)

Between the first and the second, between the beautiful and the ugly,between the superior and the inferior, there is the Semite race, which is amixture of whites and blacks, where beauty and ugliness meet, the secondalters the first, the inferior undermines the superior, and ultimately thegood turns bad as a result of this contact. For Gobineau, the Semites areindeed an eloquent demonstration of how mixing creates degeneration,which is fatal to a race and therefore to civilization. As human races areunequal and exclusive of each other in this view, intermarriage is stronglywarned against.

Berbrugger applies the racial framework of Gobineau to the popu-lation of Algeria. The newly invented concept of Semite is put to use here.Yet there is something remarkable in this early colonial text. It portrays anastonishingly diverse population. It viewed the country as inhabited mostlyby a ‘Semite race’. This ‘Semite race’ is itself diverse; it is made up of Jews, Turks, Moors, Coloughli, Berbers and Arabs. Berbrugger gives adescription of each. First, he depicts the Jews, who constitute, according tohim, one quarter of the total population. Berbrugger describes theirphysical characteristics. In his estimation, they have:

. . . an aquiline noise, black beard, magnificent eye albeit always false, white andsmooth tint.. . . It is easy to recognize them by their air of deceit (fourberie) andhumility, by the inclination of bodies bent forward, by the severe and semi-circular features that frame their black eyes and that are particular signs of theirrace. (Berbrugger, 1843–5: 5)

Berbrugger’s representation of the Jews contrasts with his represen-tation of the Turks. Not only because they do not have physical character-istics of their own, but also because, unlike the Jews, the Turks, he notes,are politically dominant. Indeed, Berbrugger maintains that the Turks area mixture of Albanians, Maltese and various renegades from Europe.However, unlike the Jews, the Turks, according to him, are not deceitful;on the contrary, Berbrugger states that they are ‘excessively honest’, evenwhen they are merchants and traders.

As for the Moors, they stand in opposition to the Turks and to the Jews.They are ‘lazy and accepting of domination’, unlike the Jews who are‘active, acting, intriguing’, the Moors are ‘nonchalant and apathetic’(Berbrugger, 1843–5: 7). Berbrugger also notes that the Moors have twoenemies: the Arabs and the Berbers. However, the Moor also has a relativein the form of another group of the Algerian population: the Couloughlis.The Coloughlis are descendants of Turkish fathers and Moorish mothers.Berbrugger describes them as having the ‘nonchalance of the Turks and



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the lymphatic temperament of the Moors’. But they also have qualities thatset them apart from both the Turks and the Moors and, in fact, from all ofthe rest of the inhabitants of Algeria. Those qualities are ‘excessive naughti-ness and profound ignorance’ (Berbrugger, 1843–5: 8).

The Berbers, on the other hand, appear in this text as heterogeneouswith profoundly diverse origins. Berbrugger writes:

They were formed either from both the Libyans and the Getules or from theemigration of the Medes, the Armenians and the Persians, mentioned bySalluste, the historian, on behalf of the authority of the Punic books ofHiempsa, or even from Tyriens, the Salentins and other elements whoseremains are lost in time. (1843–5: 9)

They have their own moral characteristics that make them distinct from therest of the population:

They are most bellicose and the most indomitable barbarians of this part ofAfrica. Their body is skinny, but very nervous and very robust. The postures ofthe body are not without elegance. The roundness of the head is remarkable,the features of their faces are short, and it is especially this characteristic thatdistinguishes them from Arabs. The expression of their figure is rude andsavage. Their eyes show some type of cruelty, too much confirmed, any way, bythe acts of brigandage they carry without repugnance. (1843–5: 9)

Indeed, in Berbrugger’s text we are far from the representation of theBerber as a primitive European, Christian indigène, in total opposition to theArab that we find in the literature of the officers of the Arab Bureaux (seeHannoum, 2001) and in the literature of the civilian regime (Hannoum,2008). Instead, the Berber in his text is opposed to everybody else, ‘he treatsthe rest of humanity as his enemy’ (1843–5: 9). In war and conflict, theBerber is brave, but awfully cruel with his enemies, Berbrugger notesdisparagingly

As for the Arabs, Berbrugger depicts them as descendants of theconquerors who ruled Spain and most of Africa. ‘They are generally culti-vators’, he notes. But a group of them are considered Bedouin and nomads:‘neither civilized nor primitives’. They live in the desert and wander withtheir tents from place to place. The Arab cultivators, Berbrugger observes,are ‘much closer to us’, as shown by their social organization. Berbruggerconsiders all Arabs a group by themselves and he calls them a nation,despite relations of enmity between them. He writes:

Even though they are divided into societies or independent tribes that are ofteneven enemies, we can however consider all of them as one body of a nation.(1843–5: 8)

Now, how could one distinguish the Arab, say from the Moor, theColoughli, the Turk and the Jew? Berbrugger’s description of the Arab mayappear positive, especially compared to later colonial representations bothin the work of the Arab Bureaux such as Daumas (1847) and in the workof historians of the civilian regime, such as Ernest Mercier (1875) andEmile-Felix Gautier (1927):



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The Arabs are of average height and a remarkable force. Their physiognomy isexpressive; their eye is sharp and animated, their skin color is brown, sometimesit is olive skin, rarely black like the one of the Negro. However, even when theyhave this characteristic [of blackness], it is the only resemblance they have withthe Negro race. The type of their women is more or less the same as the maleone. Their face is less rounded than the face of the Moor. The features aremuch more pronounced, but less agreeable. Their gait is less light and theirgesture reminds often of the nobility of the antique gesture. Their hair isgenerally black. (1843–5: 12)

Berbrugger also discusses the moral qualities of Arabs and comparesthem to other groups, especially the Berbers. These two groups are differ-ent from each other in this text, but not really opposed to one another.Arabs are brave and ‘excessively audacious’, Berbrugger notes. They areconfident, he continues, and unlike the Berbers, the Arabs treat theirdefeated enemy with mercy. Furthermore, the Arabs tend to observe theirreligion, a virtue in the view of Berbrugger. He also approvingly notes thatthey venerate the elderly. Arab women are also depicted in positive light:

Arab women, distinguished by their fortune, dress up very nobly. They wearshorts made of very fine fabric, underpants, and some type of silk vest and ontop a long colored robe to the knees, extremely large sleeved. (1843–5: 15)

Clearly the description of the Arab in Berbrugger’s text is hardlynegative. Compared to other ‘races’, if anything, they seem to constitutethe nobility of Algeria. However, what is most striking about this text againis not only the application of Gobineau’s racial theory to the population ofAlgeria, but rather it is the impressive demographic diversity that it reflects.This diversity was soon mysteriously erased in the literature of the ArabBureaux and was replaced by a literature regulated by the dichotomyBerber versus Arab. The latter dichotomy served as the main discursivedevice of the colonial discourse on the Maghreb, and not just Algeria.However, it has survived even in today’s Maghreb, and is solidly entrenchedin its forms of postcolonial culture (Hannoum, 2001, 2003). Berbrugger’stext prompts us to ask: why in its early phase did colonial discourse accountfor Algerian demographic and cultural diversity, albeit with racializedlenses? Why, by the 1930s, had the colonial discourse become more re-ductionist and presented a population made only of two ‘races’ that areopposed to each other – Berbers and Arabs?

The answer may be found in the fact that after 1871, and with thedisappearance of the Jews as ‘natives’,3 the colonial discourse, while stillracialized, concentrated around the nation and used the opposition Arabversus Berber to demonstrate the impossibility of nationhood in theMaghreb.

Indeed, after 1871 a significant shift happened in French colonialmodernity: the introduction and, in fact, the triumph of the modernideology of nationhood. On 11 March 1882, the most authoritative textabout the concept of the nation was delivered as a public lecture at theSorbonne by Ernest Renan, once a major racial theorist, and more



specifically of anti-Semitism (Renan, 1947; see also Hannoum, 2008;Renan, 1864).4 However, Renan’s text on the nation articulates new under-standings of the modern polity and speaks about new relations in a way thatclearly undermines the concept of race. Renan identifies the principle ofthis new form of belonging and this novel form of identification; it is thenation, which he defines in the following manner:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. There are two things, which in realityare only one, that constitute this spiritual principle. One is in the past; the otheris in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories;the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to assert theundivided heritage that we have received. (Renan, 1947: 903–4)

The new understanding soon affected the reality of Algeria. From 1870onwards, North Africa was seen as a region that had never organized itselfnationally mainly because of its purportedly ‘tribal’ nature. The Arabs, inthe work of Gautier, one of the most notorious colonial historians, arenomadic by definition, incapable of founding cities, but able – and in facteager – to destroy them (Gautier, 1927; Hannoum, 2008).5 On the otherhand, as a European population, the Berbers were cursed by the presenceof invaders, especially the Arabs who had always prevented them fromforming a viable nation. Berbers, as well as Arabs, live in tribes, either intents or in villages. Both Berbers and Arabs cannot conceive of existencebeyond the tribe. Tribalism thus became a hallmark of primitiveness andbackwardness. Nationhood, on the other hand, was the mark of modernity,civility and, ultimately, rational progress. Racial ideology, however – andmore specifically the Arab versus Berber dichotomy – became part andparcel of a colonial discourse about the absence of nationhood in northernAfrica. This discourse reordered North Africa and established a newrelationship – a tertiary one between Arabs and Berbers on the one hand(antagonistic as conquerors are to the conquered) and between both kindsof North Africans and the French on the other. The Arab is an enemy, anegation of Europe; the Berber is a remote parent of Europeans, a primi-tive. Taken together, they are placed in a position of racial and socialinferiority, for both lack the cultural concept of nationhood. One canclearly see what kind of power relationship is hidden behind and beneaththis cultural perception of the colonial state vis-a-vis the population itgoverns.

On postcolonial power

Colonial knowledge functioned as a means by which to order the coloniesand to make them understood, so that effective colonial policies would beinformed and founded on solid, empirical grounds. This is also to say thatthis knowledge was produced in a specific historical context with the intentto understand and control colonial reality. If this understanding and

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control failed (as evidenced by the collapse of the colonial system), onewould expect a dismissal of this same knowledge that either failed tomaintain control or, which does not amount to the same thing, caused thefailure by its myopia or its ‘errors’. Yet an important question still cries outfor an answer: if the colonial public no longer exists, one may assume thatthe colonial knowledge discussed above has also disappeared, or at least isconsidered no longer accurate and thus no longer relevant?

It is most surprising that colonial knowledge became increasinglyeffective, albeit at times invisibly so, only after the departure of the French.The colonial signifying objects still constitute a postcolonial public, mostnotoriously a national one, who consume them in the form of Frenchmodernity. Hence another crucially important characteristic of colonialknowledge, or any form of modern knowledge for that matter – thecreation of imaginaries, of realities that produce subjects who themselvesreproduce the same realities, albeit with changes and alterations. Onemight well ask then: how, why and under what conditions colonial objectsstill participate in the making of a (postcolonial) public? What are thedynamics, the rules and constraints of such making?

The postcolonial period brought about a new situation: when theformerly colonial scholars retreated to French institutions, the formerlycolonized national elite inherited colonial institutions such as theUniversity of Rabat, the University of Algiers, the University of Oran, theUniversity of Tunis, and even institutional or bureaucratic organs such asHesperis, Tamuda and Revue Tunisienne. Further, the national elite, the in-heritor of the colonial state, was still in a state of dependency, given thatthe journey to French institutions had become a necessity, a rite de passagenot only for any would-be intellectual, but also for any would-be politicianor ideologue. In other words, colonial culture not only stayed where it wasborn and developed, but it was also consumed as a commodity to enhanceone’s symbolic capital. One can even make a general, but still accurate,remark and state that the educational system was inherited from colonial-ism, as were most of the forms of modern governance and state surveil-lance. Yet, at the same time, most of the intellectual effort was directedagainst the colonial legacy. Thus, five years after the independence of thelast North African country, then Algerian president Houari Boumediennedeclared at the first Pan African symposium:

To reject the counter truths spread by colonialism, to bring proofs from thepast and the intellectual presence of Africa, such was from the outset ourstruggle, a task to which we have assigned its place and its role. (Boumedienne,1995: 87)

Boumedienne represented, at least in Algeria, this willingness to cut offfrom the colonial past. However, his condition of a postcolonial subject,made him unable and in fact unwilling to think outside of colonial

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parameters: indeed, he never spoke French in public, nor did he ever visitFrance, and during French official visits he always made recourse to thetraditional Algerian burnous – beneath which, however, one could still seethe European suit. This is different from the attitude of the king ofMorocco, Hassan II, who visibly enjoyed speaking French in front of anaudience of French journalists, and who often boasted of speaking Frenchbetter than a French-born person. In these contrasting cases, it is clear howthe actions of the former colonized are nothing but reactions. This meansthat the culture of colonialism still governed and imposed attitudes andbehaviors, in opposing ways, even on its most fervent detractors. TheMaghreb, despite the once promising Third World revolutionary experi-ence of Algeria, can only be added to the list of those regions that have notovercome the terribly powerful colonial culture in postcolonial contextsacross the globe, from the Pacific (Thomas, 1994), to Amazonia (Taussig,1987), to Indonesia (Anderson, 1992).

Whether through the political or intellectual elite (often fused in thecase of the Maghreb, especially immediately following independence),colonialism has become a focal point of competing Maghrebi nationaldiscourses. In other words, colonial categories, as articulated in variousdiscursive formations (whether nationalist, religious or variants thereof),not only contain the colonial categories of race and nation, modernity andprogress, a certain vision of time, and the profane and sacred, but are oftenreformulated to fit the postcolonial condition. The point is seen mostevidently in the postcolonial era, when the formerly colonized havecategories of their own to think about themselves, to contest the colonialOther, to resist him, but the same categories of colonial modernity linger.Or, as Pierre Bourdieu succinctly puts it:

When the dominated apply to what dominates them schemes that are theproduct of domination, or, to put it another way, when their thoughts andperceptions are structured in accordance with the very structures of the relationof domination that is imposed on them, their acts of cognition are, inevitably,acts of recognition, submission. (Bourdieu, 2001: 13)

Postcolonial power is marked by a horizontal, not a vertical, relation-ship, no matter the constraints and maneuvers of the so-called native. Itremains limited, yet at critical junctures it can even be effective in the faceof strategies and tactics of postcolonial struggle and human liberation.Nowhere is this relationship more apparent than the domain of language.Small wonder, as language is often seen as one of the defining character-istics of a nation. Colonial language, in this context French, retains aprofound symbolic charge. It provides the new masters – the nationalistelite – with the language of power, giving meaning and in turn allowing forthe proprietary monopoly of knowledge and resources both symbolic andmaterial vis-a-vis a mass whose most salient characteristic is precisely the absence of such language. Let us discuss three examples: one from

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literature, the second from political rhetoric about education and the thirddrawn from historiography (the textual form of the national discourse).

By language I do not mean langue in the sense given by Ferdinand deSaussure – that is, as an abstract, a virtual system of signs – but rather anactual system of signs, precisely that which Saussure (1984) calls langage,language-in-use, language as practiced in communications, in literature,and in all types of speaking and writing. The importance of language as anideological project vital to the nation-state is better seen, I believe, in thedomain of artistic creation, especially in literature, and even more specifi-cally in the novel. In the Maghreb, an impressive body of literature iswritten in the language of the colonizer. More importantly, the canons ofMaghrebi literature are invariably articulated and penned in French. In1969, in his brilliant book L’Idéologie arabe contemporaine, Abdallah Larouilaments the condition of North African literature in French (which he callsFrench North African literature) for being expressive not of nationalvalues, but of a culture of somewhere else. However, Laroui makes oneexception: Kateb Yacine (1965: 176). Yacine may beg to differ; indeed, hestates that ‘I represented to this day an aspect of the alienation of theAlgerian culture. I was considered a great writer because France has thusdecided’ (Yacine, 1994: 73). Yet there is no doubt that Yacine, despite orbecause of his specific writing about the Algerian situation, emerged as thefather of the Maghrebi francophone literature. As the Moroccan writerAbdellatif Laabi once put it, ‘we all came out of Nejdma’,6 in an indirectreference to Dostoevsky’s statement ‘we all came out of The Coat ’ ofNicholas Gogol.

Yacine once wrote, ‘French is a booty of war.’ This expression has beenrepeated by francophone Maghrebi writers such as Djebar (1985) eventhough, in practice, Yacine actually refused to write in French afterindependence and chose instead the Algerian ‘dialect’, which heconsidered more Algerian than either Arabic or French. For him, writingin French was justified only by the fact that he wrote ‘to tell to the French[in French] that I am not French’. After independence, Yacine took a morecritical stand towards francophonie, a stand ignored by those who repeat hisphrase about French being a ‘booty of war’.

This is to say that Yacine stored, or recycled the ‘booty of war’ once thewar for independence reached its goal. Yacine’s act can be clearly seen asan attempt to achieve cultural liberation. But for other francophonewriters, the booty of war, instead of being owned, has come to imprison itstaker. Consider Mohamed Dib, one of the most notorious francophoneMaghrebi writers, who only a few months before his death asserted thatwriting in Arabic was shameful:

The Algerians who write in Arabic should be ashamed to write in an archaic language which is for the Algerians as Latin or Greek is for the French.(Dib, 2003)

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If an Algerian responded, ‘Algerians who write in French should beashamed to write in a foreign language which is for the Algerians asGerman is for the French’, he or she would not make sense in this context,nor would he or she be given a prestigious page of the Magazine Littéraireto express such a view.

Language is always linked to power (Barthes, 1978). It is not only ameans of communication, or an assembling of words that translate things;it is, rather, a cultural system in and of itself. Let us quote Benjamin Whorf:

Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which areculturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not onlycommunicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relation-ship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of hisconsciousness. (Whorf, 1956: 235)

French is not, then, a medium that gives one access to modernity; thisclaim is rather an expression of its ideology. French is rather a culturalsystem, with specific categories, that determines subjectivity itself and createsan understanding of the social world. This is to say, that while in the colonialperiod it was understandable that French was a ‘booty of war’, since theAlgerian writer needed to express his protest and, in the case of Yacine, hisrefusal to be French, or rather French colonized, in the postcolonial period,the same language ties the Maghrebi writer to a system of domination thatcontinues in the present. All the more so as writing in French is always atthe expense of the national language – be it Arabic, Berber or a Maghrebi‘dialect’. The ‘booty of war’, then, is not booty but a Trojan horse, withcolonial categories playing the role of Greek soldiers. In fact, it is not bootyat all since it is intimately linked to its origin, to its multiple and contestedsites of power, where postcolonial French institutions of language, ofpublishing, of distribution, of francophonie are solidly established in themetropole. It is obvious what type of cultural dependency this creates.Cultural creation, especially in the case of literature – and more so in thecase of the novel – is very much associated with the formation of the nation-state, as Anderson (1992) has reminded us. But in the case of Europe – or,to be more specific, in the case of France – this nation-state was givensubstance from within its own territory by French writers formulating andarticulating French bourgeois values. French itself was established in Franceat the expense of other languages that it eliminated or marginalized. Thisprocess, long and difficult in some parts, short and easy in others, was deftlycalled by Weber ‘a White man’s burden of francophonie, whose firstconquests were to be right at home’ (1976: 73).

However, whereas for obvious reasons the process of Frenchificationwas exclusive, indiscriminate in France, it became selective in northernAfrica. French was taught to Europeans and was also the privilege of smalllucky local elite (Gosnell, 2002). It was (and it still is) deemed modern,



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clearer and scientific.7 The same French myth of clarity and precision thatdeveloped in the time of the rise of French as a dominant language(Swiggers, 1990) was redeployed in the colonies. However, the myth ofclarity and precision was given greater power by the fact that French wasthe language of importance and prestige. Indeed, as a colonial language,it was the language of power itself, of the rulers, of the masters.

Since colonial times to the present an impressive Maghrebi culturalproduction has been defined by French post/colonial institutions. Thisshows the paradox of nationalism in the Maghreb, which claims it is Arab(and/or Berber) but expresses itself in a colonial language, and that sameexpression is decided in Paris by its publishing houses. The German orEnglish literary canons do not and could not possibly be defined in Francefor the Germans or for the English. This is why even Yacine, arguably themost powerful Maghrebi francophone writer, bluntly alludes to the insti-tutional difficulties facing a writer: after he spoke about his dishearteningexperience publishing in the French press, he stated: ‘What one calls“francophonie” is a neo-colonial political machine that does nothing butperpetuate our alienation. I have always denounced it despite what mydetractors say’ (Yacine, 1994: 132). Yacine was indeed well placed to seethat French in Algeria was operating a similar transformation of ideologiesto those accomplished in France.

Be that as it may, writing in French is essentially writing to the Frenchpublic, making the Maghrebi writer a soldier of the fifth column (légionétrangère,8 as Nouvel Observateur surprisingly labeled them). The Maghrebiwriters, unlike their Indian peers for instance, do not have a place in theFrench literary establishment. They are taught neither in French highschools and only marginally in universities. Being themselves products ofthe colonial imaginary, their effect on the French imaginary is less thanminimal, despite the fact that the authors advocate are those of franco-phonie. Therefore, authors are looked at with paradoxical suspicion by thenational ideologue who accuses them of providing the literature offolklore.9 These authors remain, in the end, writers for a small, liberal,Frenchified elite. They reach the national elite because of language, andbecause they are, after all, an expression of ‘national’ culture after indepen-dence. Yet they are as far from the masses as a foreign language is for apeople. For despite, or maybe because of its high symbolic capital, whichmakes it a desired and a highly competitive commodity, the masses of theMaghreb do not speak French and they do not even know it well enoughto read it.10 This takes me to the second issue of political discourse onlanguage and culture.

In May 2000, during a lecture on the situation in Morocco given byUS ambassador Edward Gabriel, the then president of Al-AkhawaynUniversity and a former minister of education was asked about the state ofeducation in Morocco in front of a small audience of students and faculty.His response was:



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We admit that we failed in the educational project. This failure has to do withthe fact that we were in charge of educating a multilingual population. InMorocco, Arabic is not spoken, but what we find instead is three languages:Moroccan dialect, Berber, and French. We formulated the educationalprogram as if all Moroccans speak the same language.11

He then proposed a solution:

What should be done is to educate the people according to the language theyspeak. Therefore, those who speak French need to be educated in thatlanguage, others speak Arabic, they should be educated in it, and others speakBerber, they needed to be educated accordingly.12

The Moroccan diplomat was not, in fact, stating his vision of Moroccaneducation, but was expressing the cultural situation in Morocco, which hedescribes as a failure. In other words, he confessed ‘our failure’ ineducation and, surprisingly, proposes the same failed program as asolution. The linguistic divisions are the result of colonial rule. Both Arabicand Berber have come to be defined in relation to French. In practicalterms, languages are endowed with different and unequal symbolic capital,mainly because of the ideologies associated with them. There is no doubtthat French is, by far, considered the language of the elite. It is the languagethat allows access to – and the ability to monopolize – important positionsin Moroccan (as well as in francophone Maghreb) society mainly becauseit is deemed to be the language of modernity – of science, and of savoir faireand savoir vivre. Arabic is second, and even secondary. Its relative import-ance stems mostly from the fact that it is seen as the language of Islam,sacred in the view of the masses, but useful in the eyes of the state. It is thelanguage by which state ideology is articulated and communicated. Berber(or rather the ensemble of dialects referred to as Berber) is a language withminimal symbolic capital. It is mostly the language of those masses locatedin the periphery of the nation-state – both physically and metaphorically.Language in education has always been the strongest means by which astate assures linguistic hegemony and homogeneity in modern liberalsocieties. The vision of the Moroccan diplomat, which is an official vision,shows that the institutional power of education is seen as means by whichto assure the continuation of socioeconomic inequalities. Linguisticdivisions must be abridged to achieve social justice, one may think; how-ever, what the Moroccan diplomat suggests as a solution is the sameproblem, namely to maintain these divisions – and therefore with them thedifferential access to power and social positions – intact.

Yet, as stated above, French remains, as it used to be, a symbolic goodof competition that not many could afford. It constitutes the currency thatcan give one access to greater and better material goods. This does notmean those who do not speak it or know it are free from colonial culture.On the contrary, French becomes a symbol in and of itself with maybe agreater impact on the minds of those who do not speak it. The value of a



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commodity may become more appreciated by those who do not possess it.Those who have it keep it, jealously. Those who do not have it, dream of it,constantly. This will take me to the second question which is the questionof national history.

The most authoritative national historical narrative of the Maghreb –Laroui’s The History of the Maghreb (1977)– was written in French. Semioticsshows that the form of a narrative is as meaningful as its content and thatform and content cannot be separated, the way they were in the old philo-logical tradition. There is quite a cultural paradox in a national narrativethat argues in French that the Maghreb is Arab and Muslim, and that it hashad a unity and a culture of its own. This discrepancy between the formand the content can be explained only if the national is examined not as adiscourse of resistance and challenge, but rather as a genealogical narra-tive that owes its very existence to the colonial. It then follows that, giventhe form and the content of the national narrative, it is not a counter-history (of the colonial), but rather it is a postcolonial history. Therefore,the national, like the colonial, stands as the counter history of the pre-colonial (and thus in this case Muslim) historiography. This should comeas no surprise as the colonial dismissed Muslim historiography (using solelyan argument of authority) as lacking historicity (Gautier, 1927). Thenational historian followed suit most of the time.

Abdallah Laroui, arguably the most influential Maghrebi nationalhistorian, sets as a goal for himself (and for the nation) to articulate itshistory and thus define its present. He does so argumentatively againstcolonial historiography and against what Laroui himself calls ‘Khaldunism’.By ‘Khaldunism’, Laroui means the framework of analysis, but also thetheses, and even the narration itself found in the work of Ibn Khaldun. WhyIbn Khaldun? Not only because, to a certain degree, Ibn Khaldun’s histori-ography was a colonial phenomenon, but also because the historiographyof Ibn Khaldun itself was one of the first, and indeed one of the majorcognitive casualties caused by colonial administration.

Indeed, L’Histoire des Berbères, a French colonial text that bears the nameof Ibn Khaldun, is rather a transformation and an appropriation of theArabic historiography of Ibn Khaldun, through the act of translation(Hannoum, 2003). The historical narrative structure of Ibn Khaldun’s workin Arabic is not regulated by modern rules of narration: beginning, plot andend. Its narrative grammar is not the same either. The Greimasian model ofnarrative actors does not apply (Greimas, 1983). Instead, what one finds isa narrative continuation in which there is no beginning, no end, no hero,no villain, no opponent, nor helper. Further, whereas the Khaldunian narra-tive pertains to a type of a historical discourse that Foucault calls thediscourse of the race war (as different from the racist discourse) (Foucault,1997: 60–61), the colonial discourse of the late part of the 19th century was rather a counter-history, precisely because of its introduction of the



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narrative of the race struggle and also because it paid attention to that whichwas ‘obscure’ and to those supposedly without ‘glory’.

The colonial narrative was undoubtedly one of these counter-histories,not only because it transformed a discourse that, mutatis mutandis, may becalled a discourse of sovereignty, that is the Khaldunian discourse, but alsobecause it pays attention to those who, according to counter-colonial narra-tive, were left in the ‘shadow’, those ‘glory-less’ people, in our case theBerbers. The colonial historical discourse (based on, yet opposed to, theMuslim historical discourse) narrates the racial struggle between Arabs andBerbers. It also goes on demonstrating the misery, humiliation and aboveall domination of the Berbers at the hands of Arabs. Whereas the Muslimdiscourse, especially in its Khaldunian form, is a discourse that speaks aboutthe glory of the Berbers, which is ultimately the glory of the suzerain whohas been since the 11th century a Berber, the colonial discourse makes thesuzerain disappear and he is replaced by the people, the Berbers, by therace (Hannoum, 2008). The aim of this is to link race to the colonial enter-prise and thus for the latter to present itself as the savior of those who hadno glory and who were found in the shadows in the time of the conquest,the time of liberation, to use the same colonial language. Initially, at thetime of the conquest, the French army claimed to liberate the Berbers fromthe Turks, and later, at the time of colonization, the settler called for theliberation of the Berber from the Arab. The latter liberation took on moresignificance, especially in colonial historiography from Mercier (1875) andmore importantly from Gautier (1927), and even later with Brunschvick(1946). But again, this colonial discourse is one of both liberation and racestruggle.

This is what the national historian inherited – a discursive colonialsituation, itself the result of an entire age of colonial cultural production.This colonial cultural production is nothing more and nothing less than anarrative called: the Maghreb.

About this, the discourse of the national historian is rather ambiguous.On the one hand, his narrative too celebrates the ‘glory’ of the Berbers, itbrings him out of the ‘shadows’; on the other hand, this ‘glory’ is anunhappy one, it was never achieved and thus it is a misery created by thosewho make it the result of Arab domination. It is rather the work of Romein the past (as evidenced, for the national historian, by the numerousrevolts against it) and continued in the present by France, as evidenced bycolonial occupation that created a state of ‘retardation’ even after thedeparture of the French.

In Laroui’s narrative, the history of the Maghreb was not a history ofstruggle between dominating Arabs and dominated Berbers (this is thecolonial argument repeated in the national), but rather a history of classstruggle undertaken within a national territory, threatened by an imperial-ist Other – Rome (whose heritage, even in the Maghreb, colonial France



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claimed, this is the colonial myth hiding in the skirts of the nationaldiscourse). To quote Laroui:

The Moors were dispossessed peasants who chose freedom; the Numidianswere free peasants and farm workers who periodically avenged themselves ontheir exploiters. It was on the one hand a national, on the other a social, protest.Roman development of the land brought not only forced sedentarization, butalso exhaustion of the soil, deforestation and social debasement. (1977: 55)

One can see how the category Berber, so dear to colonial authors, isreplaced in the above quote by other names: Moors and Numedians, whereeach of the terms is endowed with a socioeconomic meaning, not a racialone. However, despite or because of this effort to de-legitimize the colonialdiscourse of the race struggle, Laroui could not ignore the very importantquestion of the origins of the ‘races’, which is part and parcel of thecolonial discourse. In fact, the category of origin itself is a colonial category.As seen earlier, the colonial discourse traces the origins of Berbers toEurope. The thesis of the European racial origin of the Berbers makes therace struggle not only between Berbers and Arabs, but also between thelatter and Europeans, who, by it, are given the legitimacy to be ‘here’ toliberate. Laroui offers, rather, a narrative of diversity, mostly socio-economic. Laroui assumes that the purported cultural unity stemmed from the Sahara and contact with the Mediterranean, which resulted in theend of cultural diversity (itself relative, given the ‘Eastern’ origins ofMediterranean countries). Thus, the problem of origin of both culturesand inhabitants are differently solved; both are originally diverse and bothare originally Oriental. The Phoenicians did not play any role in a civiliz-ing mission, Laroui argues, but only brought urban commerce to anagricultural society. Nevertheless, and as a result of this contact, Larouicontinues, one finds at center stage the formation of monarchies in thenorth, which in some ways ultimately created a discontinuity between theeast and north. Thus, one can find the three geographical divisions ofNorth Africa: the Sahara, the east (where a number of colonies developed),and the north, where local monarchies established themselves, he notes.This division, already established by the Phoenicians, became more flagrantduring the two centuries of Roman occupation. While the east was underoccupation, in the south the Sahara had become a refuge for those whochose freedom instead of submission to Rome, Laroui concludes.

It is clear to see here how, instead of the historical narrative of thestruggle of races, Laroui maintained (and in fact imported) the narrativeof the class struggle. The transition from one – the race struggle – to theother – the class struggle – was natural because the narrative of the struggleof classes itself has its origin in the narrative of the struggle of races. Marxwrote to Engels saying ‘but, our class struggle, you know very well where wefound it: we found it in the [work of] French historians when they narratedthe race struggle’ (quoted in Foucault, 1997: 69). The national historianoperated here, then, the same transformation created by the European



historians of the 19th century vis-a-vis the discourse of race struggle. Thismeans that, even within the framework of the nation, epistemologicaldiscontinuities are nothing but continuities of the former colonizer. Whathappens in Europe, sooner or later, happens in the (post)colony.

It is also clear how this discourse is fraught with colonial categories,some of which may not seem so. Categories such as ‘foreign’, ‘occupation’,‘domination’, ‘liberation’ all denote the national body. In colonial narra-tive, they were introduced to maintain the thesis of the Arab (race)invading and dominating ‘the Berber’ (race) who were liberated by theFrench (nation). The terms ‘foreign’, ‘occupation’ and ‘domination’ drawtheir meanings only from within the frame of the national semantics thatestablishes who is ‘us’ and who is ‘others’, what territory is ‘occupied’ andwhat territory is or has to be ‘liberated’. Whether the population of theregion referred to in Muslim historiography as Ifriqiya thought of these‘events’ in such language at the time they occurred, no one asked. However,for the sake of clarity, given the absence of the major category of the nation,the absence of its associated categories must have been also absent in thepre-colonial Maghreb.

Equally absent from previous pre-national writings is the name‘Maghreb’ itself. The name was made most popular by Emile-Felix Gautier,and behind it there is a whole colonial politics of naming that had to isolatea French zone called the ‘Maghreb’ to make it distinct from what is notFrench, and give it a personality of its own that cuts it off from othercolonial entities, eastwards, westward and southward, in a complex gamethen called ‘geopolitics’. Laroui himself seems well aware of this, or whyelse would he write: ‘The idea is to trace the genesis of the concept of theMaghreb and discover how it ultimately took on an objective definition’(1977: 14)? Yet he does not show how the name itself is colonial andbecause it is so the name itself is an appearance of colonial power. For, asNietzsche poignantly put it: ‘One should conceive of language itself as anexpression of power on the part of the ruler: they say “this is this and this,”they seal every thing and event with a sound, as it were, take possession ofit’ (1967: 26). Regardless of the national historian’s impressive intellectualstrength, and even high acuteness, he accepts colonial naming, repeatsthese names and reiterates colonial categories, even when he does so torefute them. In so doing, colonial power displays itself in a postcolonialcognitive act. The question now is: ‘Could it be otherwise?’

In any case, here one can see the pervasive power of the colonial overthe national and cannot but accept the argument of Anderson (1992) thatnationalism in the Third World is a colonial import and that the nation wasalso imagined on the colonial model. Such an argument, I believe, wasmisunderstood by Partha Chatterjee, who argues for a thesis that wouldrather give credit to the Third World and restore its agency. He maintains,as a counter-argument, that the Third World did not seem to have evensufficient agency to imagine itself (Chatterjee, 1996). While one can under-stand that Chatterjee’s account, which is consistent with the theory of

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omnipresent power of Foucault, Anderson’s view does not undermine theagency of the Third World, nor does it even undermine the idea that poweris everywhere. On the contrary, one should look at the term ‘imagination’and understand it as a philosophical and more specifically phenomeno-logical concept. To imagine is not to create ex nihilo, but rather to restruc-ture ‘semantic fields’ (Ricoeur, 1994). Even Foucault concedes that an ‘ideais born out of an idea not out of the absence of an idea’ (Foucault, 1972).Therefore, what the nationalists have imagined, that is created whether in Algeria, India or elsewhere, is a transformation of available colonialsemantics. Yet such transformation bears within itself the unequal powerrelationship between what is transformed and what it is transformed from.The concept of the nation, with its key categories of unity, territory,language, history, progress, modernity and even will, are all colonialmodern categories, despite their restructuring in national narratives.Nationalism in Europe was transformed out of the semantics (or thecontent) of what Anderson calls print capitalism. Third World nationalismis a restructuring of colonial semantics. It is one idea created out of another.Anderson does not maintain that nationalism in Europe is the same asnationalism in Indonesia. Rather, nationalism in the Third World was animport and, because of this, it had to adjust to where it was imported to.Yet the national ideologue (in the form of historian, writer, politician or allof the above) had nothing available to him but those same colonialcategories that he oftentimes reversed and, in so doing, not only repro-duced but also perpetuated.

Such national discourse, created out of the colonial semantics, inreaction to it, and often against it, has been espoused by the nation state.It constitutes the discourse of the nation. It remains, as of today, the mainand maybe the sole legitimate reference on the history of the Maghreb. Itoffers a national narrative, but also a colonial critique. Because it does so,it is called by its authors and its readers alike a ‘decolonization of history’.But such a narrative, as we saw, is not decolonizing. For, in order to be so,the historian needs to manage either to become epistemologically able toignore the colonial – which is impossible given the effective postcolonialpower axis shaping the imagined national community – or the historianmust become a critic and engage in an examination of colonial discursivepractices in and of themselves, in order to deconstruct them and show howthey have participated in the making of a postcolonial culture, in whosewebs the national subject is still caught or rather suspended. Such a projectis possible only now, because it links itself to other postcolonial historiesand anthropologies, especially in India and Latin America, where differentconditions gave birth to a postcolonial epistemology.

Last, I would like to make it clearer that the above critique does notmean that the national historian missed the point, and did nothing butperpetuate colonial symbolic domination. The culture of nationalism thenational historian articulated and helped to put in place may be what was

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needed in the period following independence, when nationalism con-stituted the cultural and political horizon of what was then called the ThirdWorld. Compared to the colonial condition, nationalism offered what onemay call an ideology of hope. However, what a half century of nationalismhas indeed revealed, through violent events within and outside of theborders of the nation, should make one think that nationalism should be subject to a rigorous critique to show its limitations and lay down thenecessary conditions to go beyond it.

Toward a conclusion

A system of domination consists of a set of symbols that are present andhence naturalized in different cultural guises. It has effective, sometimeseven everlasting, consequences, both symbolic and material. Symbols ofdomination, because they are often naturalized, permeate all aspects ofsocial life; hence the tremendous power they exert on bodies and fissuredor colonized minds. Colonial knowledge, as it survived in its customaryforms as well as those that are disguised in what appears to be an anti-colonial discourse, are generative of what Bourdieu calls ‘symbolic power’.Here, symbolic power is ‘that invisible power which can be exercised onlywith the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subjectto it or that they themselves exercise it’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 164).

I have interrogated in this article the culture of colonialism and itscontinuation in the postcolonial era, the culture of nationalism. Thus, thearticle has privileged the analysis of the culture of the state, and has nottackled the issue ethnographically, from the bottom up – that is, from the level of the masses. Most are either ‘Arabized’ or ‘Berberized’, and inmost cases ‘dialecticized’, meaning they do not even speak a distinctlanguage. This equation provides insight into the culture of the state andthe nationalist projects it has weathered. Yet the masses undoubtedly havea different discourse, and have lived in ways that defy the elite figurations.A colonial language is intimidating for a non-French speaker, but not theother way around. Even the Islamist discourse that seems to be viscerallyanti-colonial reproduces colonialism and its power relation by makingFrench the focal point of its narratives, as the marks or signatures ofcultural imperialism. This is to say nothing of the Islamist movements,whether that associated with the Adl wa al-Ihasan in Morocco, al-Nahda inTunisia or Jabhat al-islamiya li a-Inqad, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), inAlgeria. France is an adversary whose presence is personified particularlyin what the Algerian masses call hizb fransa, which usually denotes thenationalist elite. The relationship that Islamist movements envision is notonly one of equal adversaries, but one of asymmetrical power. The projectof the Islamic nation is not thought of without this relation; and France isnever far from view, often placed in a higher zone of the fluid structure of

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power relations, a power that obstructs even its own agentive capacities.Thus the actions of Islamic movements are always reactions. The samesympathizers of the Islamist movements would undoubtedly dream of thehellish heaven of France, and continue to board boats of death to cross theMediterranean guided by colonial myths. Even on the level of the masses,France governs not only attitudes, but also actions that are reactions to thecolonial mirror. Postcolonial power may be exerted without intent – that is, without strategy or tactic – and that may be one of its other definingcharacteristics.

Notes

1 Actually, even of European societies themselves. In the case of France, forinstance, racial diversity required that the state account for inequalities andantagonisms. When France was reduced to a nation, racial diversity disappearedand, with it, racial claims, demands and protests. It was as if the nation hid theinequality of races with a unitary national ideology of which the bourgeois arethe only real beneficiary. This is not the case, for instance, in the United States,where racial claims are highly present.

2 This may be only a typo for the term Mahomais, a variation of the French termMahometans, that is, Muslims. But why would Tocqueville consider them a race?The term race may have been used loosely to mean also ‘type’.

3 In 1871, the French government issued the Decree Cremieux by which all Jewsof Algeria were considered French. This occurred after an earlier failed attemptin 1864 to open French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria. Given the smallpercentage of those who took on French citizenship, only 1 out of every 1000,the French government took the more drastic measure in 1871.

4 See, especially De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation(Renan, 1864). For a discussion of Renan and his contribution to the formationof Orientalism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (1979).

5 To mention just the most authoritative colonial texts on the issue, see ErnestMercier, Histoire de l’établissement des Arabes en Afrique septentrionale (1875), Emile-Felix Gautier, Les siècles obscurs du Maghreb (1927).

6 Nedjma (1956) is Kateb Yacine’s most acclaimed novel. Unlike the work ofprevious Maghrebi novelists such as Mouloud Feroun or even Mohamed Dib,Kateb’s novel constituted a break in that it was a national, not a colonial novel.In it, he portrays a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Algeria which, despite orbecause of successive conquests, became stronger and more distinct – neitherFrench, nor Arab, nor Turkish.

7 As Moroccans, our philosophy teacher explained to us in high school howFrench is a language of clarity and precision by giving us an example. In Arabic,he said, when one describes the weather, one says: ‘al jawwu jamil’ (the weatheris nice). This is neither clear nor precise, he noted. In contrast, the Frenchexpression is. When one describes the weather, one says: ‘aujourd’hui, le ciel estbleu’ (today, the sky is blue). He explained to us how the latter sentence is moredescriptive and thus more clear and precise.

8 This is an interesting use of metaphor by Nouvel Observateur, as the légionétrangère was the military regiment with only foreign recruits from the colonies.

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9 The accusation was generalized to all francophone literature by Laroui (1967),who noted one exception – Kateb Yacine. The term ‘folklore’ is a pejorativeone in the language of nationalists, who in the name of modernity, consideredpart of local culture unworthy of the nation. Folklore, literally popular culture,is a culture in its own right. In fact, it is more local than national culture, whichowes its expression, and existence to colonial culture.

10 This remark by no means applies to the generation of French Maghrebi writingsin French in France.

11 Eight years later, in February 2008, after a forum on education, the Minister ofEducation of Morocco made a public announcement about ‘the failure ofeducation’ in Morocco. In 2008, one would have expected the failureannounced in 2000 to have been addressed, not a return to the conclusionalready reached in 2000.

12 The case of Berber he mentions is not clear and is highly problematic, to saythe least, as there are varieties of ‘Berber dialects’, and no written tradition.

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■ Abdelmajid Hannoum is assistant professor of anthropology and African Studiesat the University of Kansas, Lawrence. He is the author of Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Memories (2001), Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (forthcoming), andother essays on colonialism, culture, historical anthropology, and the epistemologyof social science. [email: [email protected]]

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