In July 1962, Algeria became independent after 132 years of French colonial rule, and a seven-and-a-half-year War of Liberation (1954-62). Vast swathes of the Algerian countryside had been bombed by the French army and nearly half of the rural population forcibly displaced. Infrastructure had been destroyed, or was barely functioning. For the entire colonial period, the running of the administration, economy, hospitals and schools had been dominated by European settlers. In the course of 1962, most of them left Algeria. Replacing them was a huge challenge – in 1954, 86 per cent of the Algerian population was illiterate.

This project engages with the major preoccupation of newly independent African and Asian countries across the world in the mid-twentieth century: how do you (re)build a country after decades, and in some cases centuries, of colonial rule marked by political marginalisation, socio-economic impoverishment and cultural denigration? How do you become an international actor and (re)define what it means to belong to the nation? More mundanely but also most urgently, how do you provide access to healthcare? How do you begin to eradicate illiteracy? How do you get the trains, and perhaps even the planes, up and running?

Much less studied are the Algerians who contributed to (re)building post-independence Algeria, beyond a few major government figures who have written their memoirs. This is despite the fact that, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was widely held to be true that independence could only be fully achieved when the economy, education, healthcare and culture were in the hands of Algerians. This was termed “Algerianisation”. In many cases, positions of significant responsibility were taken up by a very small number men and women who had only recently finished their university studies. Some of these university graduates were also veterans of the War of Liberation, for others the war had been the background to their childhood or adolescence. In courts, hospitals, schools and factories, these graduates were supported by a slightly larger number of people who had a primary, or less likely, secondary, education and a much larger group again of Algerians who were illiterate but knew how to do an injection or repair a machine or without ever having set foot inside a classroom.

“War on Ignorance! I liberate! Teachers’ Guide”

Democratic and Popular Algerian Republic, National Commission for Literacy Programmes, c. 1963

Work available at: La Contemporaine

This made it relatively easy for students and graduates to move across university courses, sectors and jobs. Employers, including government ministers, often needed their employees more than employees needed them. This gave them margins of manoeuvre. Algeria after 1962 was an authoritarian political system with a single permitted party, that of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Decision-makers had to – more or less, or at least publicly – follow the same political line. But, for very practical reasons, the views and actions of those who played a key role in state-building without holding the levers of power were impossible to rigidly police all the time. As the pool of qualified personal grew in the course of the 1970s, the political system could afford to be more selective. In the immediate post-independence period, however, “the state” was something small, and not as centralised or top-down as the term “single-party state” implies. There were not large numbers of intermediaries between, on the one hand, the president and his ministers and, on the other hand, newspapers editors, university deans and even student activists. There was a proximity to the centre of power, which created a space for negotiation and compromise as well as scope for very personalised score settling.

In the absence of published histories of the period “in between” 1962 and 1988, official or otherwise, the gap tends to be filled by generalisations and value judgements about whether this period was “good” or “bad”. The 1960s and 1970s tend to be talked about in two ways, which are contradictory, but nevertheless coexist. On the one hand, the anti-colonial struggle 1954-62 is described as having been “betrayed” by a repressive post-colonial monolithic and omnipresent regime which rejected political and cultural plurality. On the other hand, the 1960s and 1970s are presented as a golden age of education, economic development, culture and Algerian internationalism, when Algeria was considered “the Mecca of Revolution” for anti-colonial movements and leftists from around the world.

The stories which emerge here challenge these black-and-white judgments. They reveal a political system which was both authoritarian and disorganised, populated by politicians, civil servants and officials who could be both visionary and narrow-minded. They reveal the power of human will and hope in the face of material constraints, the importance of chance encounters and the desire to continually push the boundaries of the possible in a society undergoing a profound transformation. The stories travel from the local to the national to the international and back. This is Generation Independence.