The Soccer War

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  At this point, Delegate Bibi’s speech was interrupted by Delegate J. Namfua, the Vice-Minister for Trade and Industry, who said that Delegate Bibi should either restrain herself or stop speaking altogether. In his opinion, she has ‘strayed too far from the issue at hand.’ Delegate Bibi agreed that in fact ‘it would be better for me to stop here, because I can see that too many delegates who are interested parties have very troubled expressions on their faces. I want to add one more thing,’ Delegate Bibi concluded, ‘which is that many girls die as the result of abortions. If we accept this legislation, nobody will need to have an abortion and we will save the lives of many young people.’

  Delegate M. S. Madenge (Tabora) stated next that he would support the bill if it applied to schoolgirls, but if it was to be extended to girls from the street he would definitely oppose it.

  A similar position was taken by Delegate H. S. Sarwatt (Mbulu) who took the position that the legislation would ‘lead to a decline in morality among women.’

  Another Delegate, M. S. Haule (Kondoa), pointed out that according to the last census, there were 5.5 million women and four million men in Tanganyika. ‘This disproportion has arisen through the will of God,’ stated the speaker, ‘and we should draw the conclusion from this that God permits a man to have more than one woman. Therefore, this legislation intends to violate the natural order of things.’

  The outcome of this debate was that ninety-five per cent of the Chamber came out strongly against the government child-support legislation. Although the Tanganyikan parliament consists exclusively of members of the ruling TANU party and had always given its unanimous approval of all bills placed before it by the Nyerere government, this was the first case in which virtually the entire Chamber had taken an anti-government stand. The government had to back down. Long procedural discussions between the government and parliament led to a compromise: a commission of five was established to make a fresh examination of the child-support bill.

  ALGERIA HIDES ITS FACE

  Ahmed Ben Bella, the president of Algeria, was overthrown on 16 June 1965. It happened during the night-time changing of the guard, just after two o’clock in the morning. Ben Bella lived on the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, about half-way between the stifling, overcrowded centre of Algiers and the exclusive villa quarter known as Hydra. His house, though it bears the lovely name Villa Joly, was not particularly distinguished, just as the presidential offices were, while elegant, hardly grand. Those invited to Ben Bella’s home remember that he would always have to open the gate himself with a key and, being absent-minded, was always having to look everywhere for it. Ben Bella was forty-six and lived alone.

  Ben Bella was modest, uncommonly honest and scrupulous about material affairs. He drove a Peugeot 404, a car that in other African countries would be driven by no one more senior than a department head. This was not a calculated modesty. The president always had an inborn, natural disregard for worldly goods. He ate at odd hours, on the run, and his clothes could never have been described as fine. These were simply things he did not care about.

  Although forty-six, Ben Bella seemed much more youthful—physically and mentally. He was, as we might say, an example of the eternal youth. When I saw Ben Bella in Addis Ababa in 1963, I would have said he was thirty-six, thirty-seven. He had thick black hair that grew low on his forehead and a strongly expressive face, a masculine face, young, with fair skin. I was always struck by the infantile aspect of that face, an aspect that suggested boyish caprice, whimsy. In fact, Ben Bella had an uneven nature. Everything about him was fluid, uncoordinated, contradictory. He was a seething element, electrified, one that could not be confined. In an instant, Ben Bella might easily jump from one mood to another. He was impulsive, gusty, swept by passions. He would get impatient, and that impatience finished him. When excited, he would let words fly, unchecked, unconsidered, and then make irrational decisions that he would have to disown the next morning. ‘Ben Bella put the leadership in a situation,’ one of his close associates said later, ‘where nobody knew what to hold on to.’ His behaviour reflected the traits of his character. From prison he developed a peculiar habit of relaxation; he could sit for hours without moving, with his face of absolute stone, not a single muscle stirring. The effect was eerie. Suddenly, he would come to life, become ecstatic, gesticulate violently as he spoke, until, exhausted and smiling, he then calmed down again. The terrific stress of his life must have destroyed his internal harmony.

  Ben Bella’s character riveted the attention; it was fascinating.

  Soccer was his passion. He loved to watch it and played it himself. Often, between meetings, he would drive to a soccer pitch and kick a ball around. In these impromptu matches, Ben Bella’s closest companion was another enthusiastic soccer player, the foreign minister and one of the leading organizers of the plot against Ben Bella: Abdel Azis Buteflika.

  Technically, the coup against Ben Bella was carried out with an absolutely flawless precision. The conditions were ideal: Villa Joly lay near Colonel Houari Boumedienne’s house, and near the Villa Artur, where Buteflika lived, and above all near the gendarmerie barracks, the general staff headquarters, where the plot was thrashed out. Ben Bella lived alone, surrounded by the houses of the very people who would later throw him into a dungeon. This was a drama that was literally played out in the backyard.

  Ben Bella’s house was watched by police and soldiers. At just after two in the morning, as the sentries went off-duty, they would have seen that the commander of the next shift was Tahar Zbiri, the chief of staff of the Algerian People’s Army. Zbiri, the son of peasants, was a born military talent, a classic guerrilla type, who as a partisan commander in the liberation war distinguished himself by his unbelievable bravery and his splendid tactical thinking. After the liberation, Zbiri was marginalized by the élite of Boumedienne’s army, and Ben Bella, guided by a foreboding—of which he may not even have been conscious—that Boumedienne might one day turn against him, raised Zbiri to chief of the general staff, believing apparently that in the event of a showdown with Boumedienne, Ben Bella could put Zbiri at the head of the army.

  Yet it was Tahar Zbiri who, on the night of 19 June, led the operation. Several general staff officers took part, all wearing helmets and fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. They entered the Villa Joly. A pair of juggernauts, T-54 tanks, clanked along the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt.

  The first thing Ben Bella must have seen when he woke was the rifle barrels pointed at him and then the massive but graceful silhouette of his friend, the hero of the liberation war—Zbiri, in whom the president had invested such great political hopes.

  There are four different versions about what happened next; they are all journalistic invention. The only thing we can assume is that Ben Bella was led out of his bedroom. The rest is rumour.

  Literally nothing, in fact, is known.

  Ben Bella is said to have been killed. To have been wounded. To be alive. To have been not wounded, but ill. Everything is reported, since nothing is known. One version has him on a ship anchored off Algiers. That version is confuted by a report that they are holding Ben Bella in the Sahara, at an army base. According to another view, he is still staying at the Villa Joly, which has a certain logic in that it would allow Boumedienne to keep Ben Bella under close observation. Boumedienne could be meeting with Ben Bella right now and negotiating.

  Everything is possible, since nothing is known.

  The most common version is the official one: that Ben Bella is in Algeria and being well treated. It might even be true.

  Ben Bella was the leader of Algeria for three years.

  Algeria is unique; at every moment it reveals its contrasts, its contradictions and its conflicts. Nothing is unambiguous and nothing fits into a formula.

  Algeria is in that group of African countries where European colonialism lasted a long time. The French ruled Algeria for 132 years. Only the Portuguese in Angola and in Mozambique, and the Afrikaaners and English in South
Africa, have had a longer colonial tenure. Algeria will bear the mark left by French colonial hegemony for decades. It has crippled and deformed Algeria—more so than in most of the other independent African countries—and in this deformation European settlers have played a major role. They always do. In assessing the devastation, what matters is not only the length of the colonial period, but, perhaps above all, the number of settlers: only South Africa has more. Around 1.2 million Europeans settled in Algeria, equal to the number of European settlers in all the twenty-six countries of tropical Africa combined. Settlers made up one tenth of the Algerian population.

  There is another important factor: Algeria’s geographical position. Of all the African colonies, Algeria lay closest to its colonial metropolis. Today, it takes two hours to fly from Algiers to Paris, two hours that are not only a fact of communication but also a symbol of the bond between France and Algeria: one that the French developed over a period of 132 years and which neither the liberation war nor independence has severed. What’s more, Algeria today is, as the statistics reveal, more closely bound (and not only economically) to its former colonial metropolis than any other independent country of Africa.

  An image characteristic of a colonial country is the modern automated electronics factory, and beyond its walls are caverns inhabited by people who still use wooden hoes. ‘Look what beautiful highways we’ve built for them,’ say the colonialists. Indeed: but along those highways lie villages where people have yet to emerge from the palaeolithic age.

  That is what you see in Algeria.

  People who love France will rave about Algiers. It is a French city through and through, and even the Arab district of the Casbah has a French esprit. This is not Africa; it is Lyon, Marseille. International shop windows, sublime French cuisine, enchanting bistros. The contrivances of Parisian fashion reach here in a day, like the Parisian press and Parisian gossip.

  But forty kilometres from Algiers, from this Paris of Africa, the stone age begins. After half an hour’s drive I feel that I am back in Africa. Sixty kilometres from Algeria begin villages where to this day the people do not know the potter’s wheel. The original Kabyle pots are formed by hand. And a new contrast: in this primitive Kabylia where they believe that washing children causes agonized death, I found a hospital where a Polish doctor who had just arrived from Kraków on a contract told me: ‘They have an operating room here beyond my wildest dreams, with technical miracles I could never have imagined. I don’t even know how to work these gadgets.’

  A journey into the depths of Algeria is a journey in time, withdrawing into remote epochs that continue to exist here, still present, surrounded by the parched steppe or sands of the Sahara.

  Nine tenths of Algeria is Sahara.

  The Algerian Sahara is famous for the French atomic research centre at Reggane, for the first oil fields and for the stones of Tassilli where the oldest frescoes in the world have been preserved. At the town of Insalah in the Algerian Sahara the largest slave market in the world existed until recently: Ben Bella closed it, dividing the land and date palms of the slave traders among the slaves. Today Insalah is the only place in the world ruled by the slave class, known as the haratin (beasts of burden). Thus did Ben Bella make the dream of Spartacus come true.

  Colonialism fosters social chasms, and the fissures still run through Algerian society. Colonial policy elevates a class of ‘cultured’ and ‘reliable’ natives while pushing the rest of society down on a stratum of poverty and ignorance. The bureaucrats, the bourgeois and the intelligentsia are cut off, all clearly and undemocratically raised above the rest of society. They have modelled themselves on the French, have adopted their way of living and, to a large degree, of thinking. Their habitat is the city, the desk vacated by the Frenchman, the café. Every Algerian politician is here from reactionaries to communists, united by their lifestyle, not their politics. The people who run Algeria’s political and administrative machine have been recruited from these circles. A command of French is a condition for entry and these people are fluent in French. One more common characteristic: their isolation from the country. One thing these people are certainly not doing: they are not filling in the chasm between Algiers and Algeria. That is not their job; they do not think about it, mainly because they do not know the country: they live in Algiers, but they do not live in Algeria. ‘It is striking,’ someone told me in conversation, ‘that these people are generally strangers to Algeria. Nobody here knows the countryside. Ben Bella took a slight interest in the villages, but nobody else.’ And the villages are eighty per cent of Algeria.

  The war in Algeria lasted seven and a half years and, with China’s and Vietnam’s, was one of the biggest wars of liberation of the last twenty years. The Algerian people showed the highest proof of their heroism, endurance and patriotism.

  The war ended in defeat for France.

  But Algeria paid a high price for their victory. It is still paying.

  One tenth of the Algerian population—more than a million people—died in the war. The killed, the murdered, and the napalmed go by the name of chuhada—the martyred.

  The French worked enormous destruction upon Algeria. Eight thousand villages were levelled, and millions were left without a roof over their head. Thousands of acres of forest, which shielded the soil from erosion, were burned. The cattle that provided half the peasantry with its livelihood were killed off (only three million head of cattle out of seven million survived). The fellah bore the brunt of the war.

  The war caused huge migrations. Three million Algerians were driven from their villages and confined to reservations or resettled in the isolated regions. Four hundred thousand Algerians found themselves in prison or interned. Three hundred thousand fled to Tunisia and Morocco. At the same time, throughout the whole war, people from the villages—where repression hit hardest—fled to the cities, where, today, thirty per cent of the Algerian population now lives. Most of them have no jobs, but they do not want to go back to the villages, or they cannot return because the villages no longer exist.

  Beyond the human and material losses, however, the traces of the war persist in the social consciousness. These are living traces, both positive and negative. Positive: because Algeria emerged from the war as a country of independent social and political ambitions, as an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial country. Negative: because divisions arose in Algerian society paralysing it.

  This had never been a homogeneous society. It consisted—and still consists—of a mix of ethnic groups, religious sects, social classes, tribes and clans: a rich and complex mosaic. The war introduced a certain order, drew the majority of Algerians into the struggle for a common goal; but as soon as the war ended, Algerian society began to disintegrate anew. But meanwhile, the war had added a new division: on one side, those who took part in the war: on the other side, those who served the French. And among those who took part were those who fought within the country and those who fought outside its borders.

  Guerrillas fought inside the country. Three hundred thousand Algerians are estimated to have taken a direct part in the guerrilla war. They are the ones who shed the most blood. At the same time, the French were recruiting Algerians into its army and administration: their hands in the struggle against the rebels. The dividing line often ran through a single village, through a single family. (‘Tujji does not contain one family,’ writes Jules Roy about an Algerian town in his book The War in Algeria, ‘which would not have been split and which would not have had to come to terms with both the FLN [Front de Libération National] and the French army … In a certain family one man joined the rebels and another is in the French army … Why is he in the service of the French? Because there he receives a chunk of bread and a soldier’s pay … Will these divisions vanish when peace comes? The army believes not, believes that on the contrary they will deepen … Is there any way not to share these fears? In Tujji, thirty men serve in the French army and every evening they lie in ambush for their guerrilla brother
s.’) The memory of who did what in the war remains alive in Algeria today. Today members of the Algerian professional class come from among the former collaborators, because only they had the opportunity to gain qualifications. Today they make up the administrative cadre: what’s more, even though many of them are engaged in quiet but systematic sabotage, the government has also been forced to take them back into the army. During the conflict with Morocco, Algeria was losing because of the weakness of its support staff and finally concluded that it had to utilize the collaborators because they are the experts.

  There is a third group: the emigrants—those who spent the war in French prisons (like Ben Bella) and those who served in the Algerian army that was formed in Morocco and Tunisia (like Boumedienne).

  Algeria gained its independence during a profound crisis among members of the guerrilla movement: they had been bled dry, decimated, beaten back into the depths of the country, into the most desolate and inaccessible wasteland. They were being scattered. In the meantime, across the border in Tunisia and Morocco, a strong, expertly organized, excellently armed, well trained, solidly provisioned young Algerian army was forming. And as the guerrillas took a step towards seizing power, they found that the army had already rolled into Algeria with armoured columns and was enforcing a new order. From that moment in the summer of 1962 the border army has decided, still decides, and will continue to decide everything in Algeria.