OUT of the past
OUT of the past
My Arabic was pretty flaky, but it didn’t take much to work out that the message blaring from the van could be summed up as: ‘Our brothers and fellow-Muslims are being attacked by the perfidious Israelis, helped by the imperialist forces of Britain and the USA.’
This was the 6th of June 1967, the second day of what was to be called ‘The Six Day War’, by the end of which Israel had gained control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Not a good day to be the only Brit among 100,000 Arabs.
Of course, neither Britain nor the USA were involved, as I knew from the BBC World Service, my invaluable lifeline to the outside world. But tell that to the hundreds of men and youths standing around in the street, ears glued to little transistor radios, listening to Algerian radio on AM, or snatching the latest copies of ‘El Moudjahid’, the official French-language mouthpiece of the FLN (National Liberation Front), the only political party allowed since the French had scurried away 5 years before.
Even at the Lycee Benzerdjeb, where I was teaching English, people were starting to look at me askance. Fayed and Souad, the two Palestinian teachers, who usually chatted away to me in English, since the local form of spoken Arabic was as far removed from what they spoke as Spanish, say, from Portuguese; even they averted their eyes and left the staffroom as I entered.
We had arrived in Algiers by boat from Marseille the year before. Passport and customs procedures dragged on for over an hour in the heat of a Mahgrebi August, with my three-year-old daughter Celine increasingly fractious, poor love, and Christou, heavily pregnant, slumped in the shade on one of our trunks. Eventually the second in command at the British Council, my employers, worked out who we were and came up to us, apologising profusely, saying that he had known a certain ‘Vaughan Rees’ at Cambridge and had been looking for him all the time.
An hour or so later we were relaxing in the apartment usually occupied by Bill Fyfield, the Council Representative (or ‘Rep), who was back home on leave, having left us a note of welcome in which he urged us ‘to treat my servant as yours’. (‘Servant’? ‘Treat’? All I knew of the subject I had gleaned from Bertie Wooster’s relationship with Jeeves, which didn’t seem much help when it came to dealing with the 50ish Berber gent who greeted us when we arrived. In fact, we got off on the wrong foot when he asked what we would like to eat that evening and we said we weren’t very hungry; a ham salad would do. Oops!).
But he didn’t hold it against us, and by the time we headed for Tlemcen, not far from the Moroccan border, we were quite getting used to having someone waiting on us hand and foot.
The only imperialist in the village: Tlemcen, June 1967
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Unlike Algiers, much of which looked astonishingly like Marseille, Tlemcen had a distinguished past as a flourishing Arab city. Before the likes of us came along and imposed borders, Tlemcen really belonged to that group of Moroccan cities with imperial pretensions: Meknes, Fez, Rabat, Marrakesh. It has a Great Mosque (see above) worthy of any of these cities, and, in similar style a magnificent mosque and tomb commemorating Sidi Bou Mediene.
The central part of town has French-style cafes where, in those days, it was still possible to sip a glass of Pernod. And our house, on Boulevard Lt Khatir, was in a area of separate villas, previously occupied by well-off French settlers, our neighbours now being solid middle-class Arabs.