The Algerian is a senseless killer: Very often the magistrates and police officers are stunned by the motives for the murder: a gesture, an allusion, an ambiguous remark, a quarrel over the ownership of an olive tree or an animal that has strayed a few feet. The search for the cause, which is expected to justify and pin down the murder, in some cases a double or triple murder, turns up a hopelessly trivial motive. Hence the frequent impression that the community is hiding the real motives.
Finally, robbery by an Algerian is always breaking and entering, in some cases involving murder, in every case involving assault of the owner.
All these elements focalizing on Algerian criminality appeared sufficiently evident to support an attempt at systematization.
Since similar, though less implicit, observations had been conducted in Tunisia and Morocco, reference was increasingly made to a North African criminality. For more than thirty years, under the constant direction of Professor Porot, professor of psychiatry at the Faculty of Algiers, several teams worked on defining this criminality’s modes of expression and offering a sociological, functional, and anatomical interpretation.
The main research work on the question conducted by the psychiatric school of the Faculty of Algiers will be the basis for our conclusions. Research findings conducted over more than a twenty year period were the subject, we recall, of lectures given by the chair of psychiatry.
Consequently the Algerian doctors who graduated from the Faculty of Algiers were forced to hear and learn that the Algerian is a born criminal. Moreover I remember one of us in all seriousness expounding these theories he had learned and adding: “It’s hard to swallow, but it’s been scientifically proved.”
The North African is a criminal, his predatory instinct a known fact and his unwieldy aggressiveness visible to the naked eye. The North African loves extremes so you can never entirely trust him. Today, your best friend, tomorrow your worst enemy. He is immune to nuances, Cartesianism is fundamentally foreign to him and moderation, a sense of proportion and level-headedness, are contrary to his inner nature. The North African is violent, hereditarily violent. He finds it impossible to discipline himself and channel his instincts. Yes, the Algerian is congenitally impulsive.
But, they tell us, this impulsiveness is highly aggressive and generally homicidal. This explains, they say, the unorthodox behavior of the melancholic Algerian. French psychiatrists in Algeria were faced with a difficult problem. They had been trained to fear suicidal tendencies in a patient suffering from melancholia. The melancholic Algerian, however, kills. This disorder of the moral conscience, which is always accompanied by self-accusation and suicidal tendencies, in the Algerian takes the shape of homicidal instincts. The Algerian suffering from melancholia does not commit suicide. He kills. This is the homicidal melancholia elaborated by Professor Porot in the thesis of his pupil Monserrat.
How does the Algerian school account for this anomaly? Firstly, according to the school of Algiers, killing oneself is tantamount to examining one’s own feelings, looking at oneself and practicing introspection. The Algerian, however, rebels against his inner feelings. There is no inner life in the North African. On the contrary, the North African rids himself of his troubles by attacking the people around him. He has no sense of analysis. Since by definition melancholia is a disorder of the moral conscience it is obvious the Algerian can only develop pseudo-melancholias given the unreliability of his conscience and the fickleness of his moral sense. This incapacity of the Algerian to analyze a situation, to organize a mental panorama, makes perfect sense if we refer to the two types of causality proposed by the French psychiatrists.
First of all, his mental capacity. The Algerian is mentally retarded. If we want to fully understand this basic point of departure, we must recall the semiology elaborated by the school of Algiers. The “native,” it says, presents the following characteristics:
complete or almost complete lack of emotivity
highly credulous and suggestible
doggedly stubborn
childlike mentality minus the curiosity of the European child
prone to accidents and pithiatic reactions39
The Algerian is unable to grasp an overall picture. The questions he asks himself are always concerned with details and rule out any synthesis. Pointillistic, attracted to objects, lost in details, insensitive to ideas, and closed to concepts. Verbal expression is reduced to a minimum. His movements are always impulsive and aggressive. Incapable of interpreting details on the basis of the overall picture, the Algerian absolutizes the component and takes one part for the whole. As a consequence his reactions are generalizing when confronted with minor provocations or trivialities such as a fig tree, a gesture, or a sheep on his land. The congenital aggressiveness looks for outlets and is content with the slightest pretext. It is aggressiveness in a pure state.40
The school of Algiers abandoned the phase of description for the next stage of clarification. It was in 1935 at the Congress of French-Speaking Psychiatrists and Neurologists in Brussels that Professor Porot was to define the scientific bases for his theory. Discussing Baruk’s report on hysteria he indicated that “the North African native whose cortex and reflexes are poorly developed, is a primitive being whose essentially vegetative and instinctive life is primarily governed by his diencephalon.”
In order to gauge the importance of this discovery by Professor Porot we should recall that the characteristic which differentiates the human species from other vertebrates is the cortex. The diencephalon is one of the most primitive parts of the brain and man is above all the vertebrate governed by the cortex.
For Professor Porot the life of the North African is governed by the diencephalic agents. This is tantamount to saying that the North African in a certain way is deprived of a cortex. Professor Porot does not evade this contradiction and in the April 1939 issue of Sud Medical et Chirurgical he states, in collaboration with his pupil Sutter, currently professor of psychiatry in Algiers: “Primitivism is not a lack of maturity, an interrupted development of the mental psyche. It is a social condition which has reached the end of its evolution and is a logical adaptation to a life different from ours.” Lastly, the professors address the very basis of the doctrine: “This primitivism is not only a condition resulting from a specific upbringing, its foundations go far deeper, and we believe its substratum must lie in a specific configuration of the architectonics, or at least of the dynamic hierarchical organization of the nervous system. We have observed that the impulsiveness of the Algerian, the frequency and nature of his murders, his permanent criminal tendencies and his primitivism are no coincidences. We are in the presence of a coherent pattern of behavior and a coherent lifestyle which can be explained scientifically. The Algerian has no cortex, or to be more exact, like the inferior vertebrates he is governed by his diencephalon. The cortical functions, if they exist, are extremely weak, virtually excluded from the brain’s dynamics. There is therefore neither mystery nor paradox. The colonizer’s reluctance to entrust the native with any kind of responsibility does not stem from racism or paternalism but quite simply from a scientific assessment of the colonized’s limited biological possibilities.”
Let us end this overview by requesting Dr. Carothers, an expert from the World Health Organization, to conclude with his findings throughout Africa. This international expert collected his primary observations in a book published in 1954.41
Dr. Carothers practiced in Central and East Africa but his findings match those of the North African school. For the international expert, “The African uses his frontal lobes very little. All the peculiarities of African psychiatry can be envisaged in terms of frontal idleness.”42
In order to make his point clear Dr. Carothers establishes a very vivid comparison. He puts forward the idea that the normal African is a lobotomized European. We know that the English-speaking school believed they had found a radical therapy for treating certain serious mental illnesses by practicing surgical incisio
n in the front of the brain. This method has been abandoned since discovering the major damage it caused to the personality. According to Dr. Carothers the similarity between the normal African and the lobotomized European is striking.
After having studied the work of various researchers practicing throughout Africa, Dr. Carothers gives us a conclusion that establishes a uniform concept of the African. “These are,” he writes, “the data of the cases that do not fit the European categories. They are culled from several parts of Africa —east, west, and south—and, on the whole, the writers had little or no knowledge of each other’s work. Their essential similarity is therefore quite remarkable.”43
Before concluding it is worth pointing out that Dr. Carothers defined the Mau-Mau revolt as the expression of an unconscious frustration complex whose recurrence could be scientifically treated by radical psychologically appropriate methods.
So it was the unusual behavior such as the Algerian’s recurring criminality, the triviality of the motives and the murderous and always highly bloody nature of the quarrels that posed a problem for observers. The proposed explanation, which is now taught as part of the curriculum, seems in the last analysis to be as follows: The configuration of the North African’s brain structure accounts for the indolence of “the native,” his mental and social inaptitude as well as his virtual animal impulsiveness. The criminal impulsiveness of the North African is the transcription of a certain configuration of the nervous system into his pattern of behavior. It is a neurologically comprehensible reaction, written into the nature of things, of the thing which is biologically organized. The idleness of the frontal lobes explains his indolence, his crimes, his thefts, his rapes, and his lies. And the conclusion was given to me by a sous-préfet now préfet: “These instinctive beings,” he told me, “who blindly obey the laws of their nature must be strictly and pitilessly regimented. Nature must be tamed, not talked into reason.” Discipline, tame, subdue, and now pacify are the common terms used by the colonialists in the territories occupied.
The reason why we have dealt at length with the theories by the colonialist scholars is not so much to demonstrate their paucity and absurdity as to address an extremely important theoretical and practical question. Algerian criminality, in fact, was given relatively little attention among the questions which the revolution was confronted with and the issues which were raised during discussions on political enlightenment and demystification. But the few debates on the subject were so constructive that they enabled us to examine further and better identify the notion of individual and social freedom. When the question of Algerian criminality is broached with leaders and militants in the heat of revolution, when the average number of crimes, misdemeanors and thefts in the period prior to the revolution are brought to light, when it is explained that the physiognomy of a crime and the occurrence of misdemeanors are based on the relationships between men and women, between man and the State, and everyone gets the message; when we see the notion of the Algerian or North African as born criminal dislodged before our very eyes, a notion which was also planted in the Algerian’s consciousness because after all “we are a bad, quick-tempered, aggressive people . . . and that’s the way we are ...” then yes, we can say the revolution is making progress.
The major theoretical problem is that the insult to man which is in ourselves must be identified, demystified and hunted down at all times and in all places. We must not expect the nation to produce new men. We must not expect men to change imperceptibly as the revolution constantly innovates. It is true both processes are important, but it is the consciousness that needs help. If the revolution in practice is meant to be totally liberating and exceptionally productive, everything must be accounted for. The revolutionary feels a particularly strong need to totalize events, to handle everything, to settle everything, to assume responsibility for everything. The consciousness then does not balk at thinking back or marking time, if need be. This is the reason why as a combat unit progresses in the field the end of an ambush does not mean cause for respite but the very moment for the consciousness to go one step further since everything must work in unison.
Yes, the Algerian spontaneously acknowledged the magistrates and police officers were right.44 This narcissistic aspect of Algerian criminality as a manifestation of genuine virility had to be tackled again and reconsidered in the light of colonial history. By showing, for example, how the criminality of the Algerians in France fundamentally differed from the criminality of the Algerians directly subjected to colonial exploitation.
A second aspect caught our attention: in Algeria, criminality among Algerians occurred practically in a closed circle. The Algerians robbed each other, tore each other to pieces, and killed each other. In Algeria, the Algerian seldom attacked the French and avoided quarreling with them. In France, however, the immigrant’s criminality crossed boundaries between communities and social categories.
In France Algerian criminality is diminishing. It is mainly directed at the French and the motives are entirely new. One paradox, however, helped us considerably to get the militants to understand that since 1954 common law crimes have virtually disappeared. Gone are the quarrels, the disputes over minor details ending in homicide. Gone the explosive fits of rage because the neighbor caught sight of my wife’s forehead or left shoulder. The national struggle appears to have channeled all this anger and nationalized every affective and emotional reaction. The French magistrates and lawyers had already noted this, but the militant had to be made aware of it and understand the reasons.
We now had to find an explanation.
Could it be said that the war, the privileged terrain for expressing finally a collective aggressiveness, directs congenitally murderous acts at the occupier? It is common knowledge that significant social upheavals lessen the occurrence of misdemeanors and mental disorders. The existence of a war which was breaking Algeria in two and rejecting the judicial and administrative machine onto the side of the enemy was therefore a perfectly good explanation for this decline in Algerian criminality.
In the countries of the Maghreb already liberated, however, this was true during the liberation struggles and remains so to an even greater degree during independence. It is therefore apparent that the colonial context is sufficiently original to afford a reinterpretation of criminality. This is what we have done for the militants. Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian’s congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it’s a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an immense hatred and desire to kill —and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding “his taxes,” he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.
Exposed to daily incitement to murder resulting from famine, eviction from his room for unpaid rent, a mother’s withered breast, children who are nothing but skin and bone, the closure of a worksite and the jobless who hang around the foreman like crows, the colonized subject comes to see his fellow man as a relentless enemy. If he stubs his bare feet on a large stone in his path it is a fellow countryman who has put it there, and the meager olives he was about to pick, here are X’s children who have eaten them during the night. Yes, during the colonial period in Algeria
and elsewhere a lot of things can be committed for a few pounds of semolina. One can kill. You need to use your imagination to understand these things. Or your memory. In the concentration camps men killed each other for a morsel of bread. I can recall one horrible scene. It was in Oran in 1944. From the military camp where we were waiting to embark, the soldiers threw bits of bread to some Algerian children who fought for them in a frenzy of rage and hatred. A veterinarian could no doubt explain these events in terms of the famous “pecking order”* noted in farmyards where the corn is bitterly fought over. The strongest birds gobble up all the grain while the less aggressive grow visibly thinner. Any colony tends to become one vast farmyard, one vast concentration camp where the only law is that of the knife.
In Algeria, everything has changed since the war of national liberation. The entire reserves of a family or metcha can be offered to a passing company of soldiers in a single evening. A family can lend its only donkey to carry a wounded fighter. And when several days later the owner learns the animal was gunned down by a plane he will not sling curses or threats. Instead of questioning the death of his donkey he will anxiously ask whether the wounded man is safe and sound.
Under a colonial regime, no crime is too petty for a loaf of bread or a wretched sheep. Under a colonial regime, man’s relationship with the physical world and history is connected to food. In a context of oppression like that of Algeria, for the colonized, living does not mean embodying a set of values, does not mean integrating oneself into the coherent, constructive development of a world. To live simply means not to die. To exist means staying alive. Every date grown is a victory. Not the result of hard work, but a victory celebrating a triumph over life. Stealing dates, therefore, or allowing one’s sheep to eat the neighbor’s grass is not a disregard for property rights or breaking the law or disrespect. They are attempts at murder. Once you have seen men and women in Kabylia struggling down into the valley for weeks on end to bring up soil in little baskets you can understand that theft is attempted murder and not a peccadillo. The sole obsession is the need to fill that ever shrinking stomach, however little it demands. Who do you take it out on? The French are down on the plain with the police, the army and their tanks. In the mountains there are only Algerians. Up above, Heaven with its promises of an afterlife, down below the French with their firm promises of jail, beatings and executions. Inevitably, you stumble up against yourself. Here lies this core of self-hatred that characterizes racial conflict in segregated societies.