Remnants, traces of a century and a half of French colonialism were everywhere. Elegant, historic buildings abraded. Grim, Soviet era-like apartment blocks, hastily knocked up after independence, seams coming apart, sinking like another layer of history back into the once-fertile French vineyards and olive groves. Semi-completed constructions with reinforcement-rodded antennae abandoned in fallow fields.
Traversing a vast plain where vendors were selling potatoes: fifteen years back Hocine had kept his hives in these pastures until they were burned by terrorists. Explosives had been planted in the earth around the hives. When the beekeepers arrived to tend the colonies and collect honey, their footsteps detonated them. His two brothers had suffered shock but had not been physically injured. His cousin had lost a leg. No explanations for these acts of violence against ordinary non-partisan citizens. Back then, in the nineties, this area had lacked a military presence. Lawlessness ruled. Today, the military, the security forces were the law. It was essential.
I silently recalled Palestine, the groves that had been illegally uprooted by Israeli ‘settlers’ who believed that all Palestine was theirs to take by whatever means. The senseless destruction of rural livelihoods, of campestral futures, by extremists of whatever persuasion for the sake of a cause.
Turning northwards to the coast, the roadsides were fringed with eucalypts. Shade cover, I assumed incorrectly. Their original purpose had been to aid drainage. The extended roots of the eucalyptus are known to be aggressive. Because they absorb great quantities of water, absorb excess humidity, they are excellent in waterlogged soils. The French planted them in the nineteenth century when this area was more humid, but today the region was bordering on arid and they were leaching what essential water remained.
‘This is our first rainfall in three years.’
In northern Morocco I had seen rows of towering eucalypts lying at roadsides, dug up not felled, exposed roots withering, and I had silently questioned the purpose of destroying decades-old trees.
‘Today, they are a predator,’ explained Hocine. ‘We desperately need the groundwater.’ A positive factor was the pollen. Eucalyptus honey, excellent, curative.
Plane trees, also a French legacy, lined village streets, surrounded by unattractive mounds of rubble and litter. Roads fanning from central squares had grown unstructured, lacking organisation, dirty. I pictured postcard-pretty villages at home in Provence. No doubt these Algerian duplicates had reminded the colonials of their homeland. But what had such northern planning meant to the Arabs and Berbers?
Groups of labourers in fields on their knees digging the rich earth with bare hands, planting tomatoes in the rain. The earth was red and lush. It reminded me of eastern Libya. Olive trees had replaced the rows of cypresses as windbreaks. They served the same purpose but also yielded fruit. Burned-out carcasses of French wine caves dotted the countryside. These fields had been vineyards. After the departure of the French in 1962, the grapes were still pressed and wines still shipped to France, but at some point the ex-colonists refused to buy the cargoes. Of no interest to the Muslims, the vignobles were ripped out.
Once beyond the agricultural and fruiting hillsides, approaching the coast, police were evident at every bank, corner, crossroads, cradling rifles, halting vehicles, rummaging through boots and engines.
Hocine sighed. ‘We thought all this was over,’ he mumbled. ‘Thought we had turned the page.’
I had yet to fully comprehend the impact of the previous day’s bombings on the psyche of these people; not until close to the end of my stay did it become clearer.
Until 1962, when the French quit, Algeria had never known independence. Hocine, who had been a professor of history before he had turned to bees, briefly outlined the story.
‘We are a country in transition,’ he began. ‘While the French ruled, education was not readily available to Algerians. We did not own our land. We were treated with disrespect, sometimes cruelly, by our colonists. Such indignities fed the War for Independence. And once the struggle was ignited, rage and hatred, on both sides, engendered bloody crimes. One and a half million Algerians lost their lives.
‘Beyond independence, the country formed a one-party system, ruled by the FLN, the National Liberation Front. These were the underground resistance fighters, socialists and nationalist groups who had won us our liberty. However, freedom of speech was censored and the media came under government control. Then, between 1990 and 1991, the Islamic Front began to gain power at municipal and legislative elections. To arrest this swing, in 1992, the electoral process was annulled. Revolts broke out. The more extreme branches of Islam were calling for religious clampdown, which many opposed and the country degenerated into violent confusion once more. This was our Decade of Terrorism. This was when Algeria fought against itself, struggling for its identity, living in fear, resisting fanatics who desired extreme changes. Now we are finding our feet but we still have to understand ourselves, discover who we are. We are a peace-loving nation; Islam is not about murder. The world has a thwarted perception of us, but yesterday’s bombings are a setback.’
A first glimpse of the maplessness that was unfolding before me.
Nearing Tipasa, vast allotments had been given over to plasticultura. Just as in southern Spain, greenhouses dominated the littoral. But as we drew close to the ancient city, the landscape emptied; grew bare, vast, red-earthed, void of construction. The sea was grey, wild, angry. As we drove through the modern town that abutted the ancient ruins a farmers’ market was in progress. Men served, men shopped.
Tipasa, founded by the Phoenicians. Algerian-born writer Albert Camus was fond of this location. We took a brief walk round its port where hillocks of stones and sand awaited a reconstruction programme already under way. Passing through a sodden lane of trinket stalls and restaurants, empty of tourists, to the 2500-year-old city. After the fall of Carthage, Rome transformed this trading port into a military base.
Great excitement shoving sinewy weeds and wild branches aside, uncovering damaged but original stone presses and dozens of stone jars used for stockage and transport of olive oil.
‘Azemour,’ Hocine told me, ‘is Berber for olive.’
Oil was aceite, the same as in Spanish. The Berbers, Moors, it must have been who contributed this word to modern-day Spanish.
Beyond the eastern hill of Tipasa broke the humped shoulder of the Chenoua mountain. At its foot were visible traces of the original port. Perched at the booming water’s edge, the first grains of Africa, it was an inviting spot, ideal for anchorage. I roamed for hours, hair flattened against my face, while Z’hor picked wild flowers, running to recite their Arabic names to me. Flocks of olive trees within the walls of the ancient city, worn down, bent like beasts, frazzled, flattened, swept by centuries of storms roaring in off the water. A curious picture, like shock-haired birds in flight.
Down within a crescent bay a couple were striding the windblown beach, losing balance. Hocine recounted a pleasing story. The delights of being in the company of a historian! I listened while the surf lashed furiously against ancient stones, gulls strained to negotiate the insistent wind and spindrift fogged the horizon.
When Phoenician merchants first called on these shores occupied for epochs by Berbers, sailing from their coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon in modern Lebanon possibly as early as 1200 BC, they had no means of verbal communication with the natives. (The language barrier had puzzled me everywhere.) An added complication came when the Berbers hid themselves, refusing to show their faces to the purple-skinned sailors from the east. The Phoenicians opened negotiations by depositing items on the beach and then, withdrawing to their galleys, lit smoking fires, signalling to the natives. When they returned certain of their goods remained while others had been swapped. Nothing stolen, always swapped. In this way, they grew to understand what appealed to the Berbers. Next, they wrote messages and left these on the beaches. The Berbers had no alphabet, no written language. They could not read or write.
Theirs was an oral tradition but eventually they entered into the mysteries of the letters and found their own scribbled means of response.
A phone call from Hamzoui broke into our wet promenade. He had tracked down a seventeenth-century olive mill. Ottoman! This news set us on an excited trail back along the coast to a rendezvous with Dgeloul, a very European Algerian, an engineer who had heard of this mill operating somewhere in the hills behind Hadjout. We stopped briefly for mint tea at Dgeloul’s home, hiked inland of the shore along a lane with sheep and rich damp scents to his olive groves in blossom, and beehives. It had stopped raining; the bees were venturing out.
Our hinterland excursion, following Dgeloul’s car, was circuitous and I lost all sense of direction. As did Hocine, while Z’hor lay curled up asleep; a hibernating squirrel, cradling wilting wild flowers, fallen petals at her elbows. In the one-street villages where the women were swathed in black chador and the men wore white crocheted skullcaps, small beards and baggy trousers fastened above the ankles, the homes were the skeletons of colonial cottages. Above one such property a faded sign in green Art Deco lettering, Boulangerie. I remarked upon the rubbish lying at the roadsides in decomposing heaps while the deep-throated mechanical growl of the late afternoon prayer call reminded me whose land this was.
‘Our people have not learned to care for their country, to structure a social state, to respect their environment.’
The mill, when we eventually found it, was indeed a rare Ottoman jewel (the Ottomans took control in 1518). Out of season, no olives to press, its miller maintained it like polished shoes. Its exterior seemed more recent, reminding me of a country stationmaster’s home deep in rural France. Within were two white-tiled rooms with cracked walls. Generations of olive paste had veneered the interior fabric of the building. The place surely had served an earlier purpose for there was a window, now boarded up. It lacked all lighting, creating a cold, dark atmosphere. The press was solid steel fed from granite-crushing stones. I had expected an Ottoman press but on its head was engraved Lachère et ses fils and beneath Hussein-De——A———. These final words, names, were impossible to decipher due to encrusted paste.
‘Who were these people? Is this machine a replacement?’
The miller shrugged. He was wearing a parka and tartan carpet slippers.
‘Do you know anything about its origins?’
He shook his big silver-haired head.
In the adjoining room were two iron cuvettes, tanks, capable of holding 2800 litres apiece. Rare and magnificent.
Outside in the damp yard, speckled guinea fowl were feeding off hillocks of discarded paste. It was raining again. A neighbouring building, abandoned, had been storage for wine vats. The miller had managed the establishment since independence. It was part of a worker-controlled farm of 250 hectares. Fifty produced olives and the rest were vineyards for table grapes. Under French rule, its proprietor was French-Swiss, Madame Schwit. According to the miller, Madame had loved an Algerian, married, joined the resistance and fought with them. Arms were found on her property. She was imprisoned by the French. While serving time, comrades advised the sale of her holding. Upon release in 1959, she sold to colonials who lost the farm when the War of Independence was won and lands were confiscated. Madame remained in Algeria, returning to Europe only after the death of her husband. The district was known by locals as Schwit’s Commune; a tribute to her loyalty and courage.
In 1994, during the Black Decade, terrorists had robbed the mill at gun point and walked off with 1200 litres of oil, leaving the local cultivators penniless.
We stopped in the village of Merad. There, peeling colonial properties wore the identical cream walls and burgundy shutters of our farm when we first purchased it.
I asked a passing gent how the region was called.
‘Schwit’s Commune,’ he smiled.
A day plagued by rain. Squatting bodies in the soaked fields worked on, planting and hoeing in the abandoned vineyards. The ghosts of colonialism, the scars of the past. A sign read Clos St Jean. Carcasses of rusted Renaults, Citroën vans, lorries subsiding into the unploughed earth. Along the banks, muddied sheep grazed on fists of weeds.
‘As I said, we are in transition. It will require generations,’ mumbled Hocine.
A profound sea change indeed.
My second night was with Hamzoui, his wife, six pretty daughters and a plain-faced cousin, also a beekeeper with forty hives of her own, one of the first female apiarists in Algeria. The couple’s only son had been killed in a motorcycle accident. His framed photograph alongside the Koran and vase with plastic flowers adorned a corner table. The girls were teenagers or in their early twenties. It was they who ran the house and looked after ‘Papa’. I smiled, considering Hamzoui toiling all day with queen bees and hives of working girls, and returning of an evening to this domestic arrangement. This household enjoyed running water and – luxury! – a computer with Internet connection. An external Webcam clipped above the screen allowed the family, thanks to Skype, to wave incessantly at relatives in Paris. The flat was spacious, ornately decorated. Much excitement erupted when I gratefully accepted the offer of a bath. Four girls, talking all at once, explained the taps, ‘hot first, then cold, or you can run them together’. The tapped water was fed through a short hosepipe into a pail. I squatted in the bath and washed from the bucket. Regular knockings on the door. ‘How are you getting on?’ ‘Are you fine?’ Behind a plastic shower curtain decorated with coloured fish, my Algerian baptism!
Hamzoui and we nine women sat to dinner. Couscous was, again, the principal dish, accompanied by Day-Glo-red-and-orange fizzy drinks. Talk was of the bombings. At the mention of Bin Laden several of the girls erupted into hysterical giggles. Why? The room consigned to me included a bedside copy of the Koran. The two girls whose bed I had been allocated were camping across the hallway. Five sleeping together; a dormitory of delighted whisperings and secrets.
Hamzoui and I were up at the first call to prayer while the women slept on. We drank bitter coffee in the kitchen while he talked me through arrangements for the upcoming days. I was travelling east. It was a longish distance and entailed changing public taxis at various points along the way. Waiting, at my final destination for this leg, would be the next beekeeper, Achour. Hamzoui was anxious on my behalf. I had purchased a local phone card (not an easy exercise) because he insisted I stay in constant touch.
We drove in incessant rain as dawn was breaking to the Blida bus station. Rubble and more rubbish everywhere. Hamzoui feared for me alone. I assured him that I had travelled with the grands taxis in Morocco and that I was not afraid (I was). He hung around for an hour. The taxi was still only half full. Eventually, I offered to pay for two extra seats, a total outlay including my own place, of seven euros fifty. My destination was Tizi-Ouzou, the capital of the mountainous district of Greater Kabylia. East of Algiers, Kabylia was renowned for its olive oil. My fellow passengers were two young men and a bent leprechaun with white beard, cane and swirling rust cloak. It was Friday, sabbath; the roads were snarled with traffic, with open-backed vans carrying hillocks of runner beans, chickens, bicycle wheels, flotsam. A van disgorged its load of tomatoes. They rolled and spilled across the wet, glistening tarmac, striping the lanes with blood-like rivulets. There were controls, road blocks, police every kilometre. The country remained on high alert. Police riding green and white motorcycles, men in bullet-proof vests with rifles, waving us on or pulling us over to inspect the carcass, the engine. The green and white of their flag, of security; the colours of Islam. The countryside was lush, sodden. Swallows flew low. An overturned lorry, like a beast flayed, caused ever more traffic jams, pile-ups, fire engines. Virgin coastline – at one time, the greater part of the Mediterranean had been like this. Storks nesting everywhere. It seemed a while ago that I had seen the same image in Spain.
Tizi-Ouzou, Hill of Gentians, capital of the Kabylia Mountains, located inland of the Mediterranean at the foot of the Atlas range
s. This was Berber territory. In earlier eras, the Berbers had fled to higher ground to protect themselves against all invaders; slowly driven inland from their coastal settlements. I waited in the rain at the taxi station for my contact who was running late. I could hardly make out the passing cars due to the streaming rain. Achour, when he arrived, was an older man, an olive farmer who had inherited a farm and mill. It had been in his family for three centuries. He was also the director of this region’s beekeeping community. A man whose small head seemed to be plonked on a pair of broad shoulders and paunched, well-fed body. He was well travelled and spoke impeccable French with barely a trace of accent. He proposed a tour of Greater Kabylia, where there were groves that dated back to the eighth century and leagues of wild olive trees yet to be cultivated. Climbing the winding mountain road out of town, I pressed my face against the foggy glass, hoping for a view. The car reeked of stale nicotine. Achour was saying that the acid level in this area’s olive oil was 4 per cent. In Europe, they would not be allowed to sell or consume such a product. It would only be good for soap! Why so high?
A brief stop at a huilerie somewhere in the foothills. An Alsatian sat placidly in the pouring rain while a handsome man leaned against the frame of an open door, staring through the bleak weather across the deserted street to steep olive-groved mountainsides. The pressing season was over. He had nothing to do. We were invited in. It was a chaotic, filthy place.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 25
