Remembering Colonial Algeria’s Desert in the “Grand Sud”

Abstract

While the majority of French colonists in Algeria lived on the Mediterranean coast in cities such as Algiers and Oran, or in not-too-distant inland towns like Constantine, those who settled further afield in communities bordering or in the Sahara Desert, like Aflou, Batna, Biskra, or Khenchela, had a vastly different experience of colonial life. These settlers were often isolated outsiders, subdued by the remote terrain. In French Algerian memorial books destined to fulfill French colonial nostalgia, repeated iconic images of recognizable destinations and events overlap and solidify in the memory of Algeria’s former French inhabitants, the Pieds-Noirs. Within these same memorial texts, the desert, which occupies 80% of Africa’s largest country, has always been present. Photographs from the 1850s onward, attempting to capture the country for its French occupiers, depict the desert as a peaceful and quiet landscape with exotic indigenous figures, traditional houses, and little evidence of Europeans in the frame. Locations are hard to pinpoint, outside of the occasional oasis, and the sand dune landscapes would have been shifting. This article examines how colonial photographs and sparsely written textual souvenirs of the desert provide a contrapuntal image of colonial Algeria as a place of the unknown. Using Dylan Trigg’s work on place and memory, I explore the juxtaposition of the predominant nostalgic vision of European settlement and images of the desert that highlight what the French Empire never possessed.