Algeria - back in North Africa - I need a new heading!

And why would you go to Algeria?  There is an awful lot of not very much in between busy port cities full of white, obviously colonial, French buildings, theatres, courts, residential blocks;  interspersed with a bey’s palace; the ancient casbah, decayed and propped with concrete and iron, walls heavily graffitied with the names of football clubs and footballers; generations of mosques and mausoleums going back as far as you like; contemporary buildings, little merit there; a leftover cathedral at the top of a hill, a vast contemporary mosque, this is Algiers and the mosque, the third largest in the world, the Djamaa el Djazair,  and the most notable focal point for worship in the country. Beyond that, always and everywhere, in all and every city, the memorial to the martyrs of the revolution, remembering the fighters for freedom from the hated colonial power. The one in Algiers, stark, Soviet realist concrete, is the most pictured, the emblem of the country for the country and its people, more important perhaps than any of the mosques that beat the rhythm of the daily life of the country. 

Recent history is important here and I should have read more about French Algeria before I came, to understand the particular and particularly brutal colonial experience suffered by Algerians.  Not many among the French subscribed to the sentiments expressed by  Napoleon III that Algeria was “not a French province but an Arab country, a European colony, and a French camp” and the period of French rule, from 1830 until independence in 1962 was notable for extreme violence on all sides, peaking during the struggle for independence, bringing immiseration and loss of life on a massive scale for Algerians.  Younger generations move on apace, as time goes on memories will disappear and history will have begun in 1962, just as in Pakistan the beginning of history is becoming 1947.  All the same it is not quite the same, Algeria did not become a new country and it will continue to lick its wounds until the history is beyond what happened to a great or great great grandparent. 

The former colonial power is alive in the voices in the street that speak French as readily as Algerian Arabic, and on show everywhere, more grandly on the hill where old foreign embassies sit in their abundant gardens.  Nearby, their newer, less attractive office blocks loom, bristling with the usual paraphernalia of instant secured international electronic communication and next to examples of earlier colonialists in those Turkish palaces transformed into museums such as the Bardo.  It was set up by Hajj Ben Omar, the wealthy Tunisian who also founded the more famous Bardo Museum in Tunis, with its utterly miraculous collection of mosaics, before his exile to Algeria. More evidence of colonial power among the photographs covering the walls of the bar of the St George Hotel, which include Winston Churchill and Dwight D Eisenhower among the French stars of stage, screen, political and literary arenas.  It is also up the hill in the better part of town, where there are florists and boutiques catering to a more cosmopolitan, travelled clientele than those of the heaving market streets in the lower part of the city that leads downhill to the picturesque old port buildings and the less attractive bustle of contemporary shipping and trading.  The St George’s is the place to stay, the only alternative of theoretically similar standard is the arbitrarily many starred government owned contemporary hotel on another hill overlooking the port.  It is one of those state built morgues, always too cold, too empty and wholly without cheer or the character the St George has managed to retain in a not entirely luxurious sixties style that has survived government takeover and a new, properly Algerian name used by no one. 

We stayed downhill and downtown in the Hotel Suisse where the card payment machine didn’t work, almost none do in Algeria. It is better and a lot less frustrating to settle for cash and the black-market money changers at their pavement headquarters outside the central law courts.  Woe betide you if you have less than pristine foreign notes. Beds were generally comfortable in Algerian hotels, bathrooms operated variably, showers almost always leaked – a night in the St George before leaving was a time warp to the 60s or 70s with added slightly hit and miss broadband.  We had forgotten the horrors of indoor smoking and everyone smokes in Algeria, not quite true but It certainly felt like it in the tightly closed basement restaurant of the Hotel Suisse where the grilled dorado with nothing but half a large lemon to squeeze on it was worth the enforced laundry and hair washing afterwards.

Algerians, the Francophobia aside are disposed to be charmingly friendly to tiresome tourists who they expect will find their country, as they do, ‘the best in Africa’, possibly in the World.  Competition is hot in either category from the touristic view but Algerians are patriotic to a remarkable degree and would rather gaze at the navel of their own country than look outside it despite the enormous diaspora that subsidises many families and communities across the country with foreign remittances. They are on nodding terms with neighbouring Tunisia but their borders are otherwise firmly closed, especially that with Morocco, a country they currently abhor above all others.  Younger generations are inclined to take these enmities more casually than those elders for whom colonial days remain part of the long view, only just beneath the horizon of one short generation. Meanwhile the politicians, an elite circle round the ruling National Liberation Front, the party of government since independence, and the military, enjoy the fruits of their corruption largely unbothered by an electorate that sees the status quo as immovable and immutable under an almost overtly fraudulent voting system.  People don’t vote, they pray, their government enriches its individual selves and Allah will or will not provide. 

Our young guide was of a somewhat more sophisticated turn of mind and religious doubt and was rare among even young women for not covering her hair or more than absolutely required of person.  Her father is clearly from an unusual mould, her mother, more traditional by far with imams among her close family, fighting a rearguard and fractious battle to make her adventurous and well-educated daughter conform to the standard.  As an oldish traveller, my tolerance for the issues of the millennial generation is fairly short lived but by and large we did well enough with an excellent and imperturbable driver and only the unexpected irritation of police escorts making very long drives slower by far than necessary.  In theory the escorts are de riguer for tourists but this is no longer actually the case and the expectation that tourists going in the same direction will happily join a convoy of others and be dragooned in the same direction with no opportunity to go off piste in search of some unexpected curiosity is simply infuriating – changeovers from escort to escort take time while everyone exchanges god knows what in the way of news and gossip and the temper of the waiting tourist shortens by the second.

But again, why are you here getting irritated?  First and foremost, this traveller would say, because it is worth the trials of the road to see the exceptional and glorious remains of the cities of much earlier settlers and colonialists, the Romans.  Nevertheless, it is almost certainly possible to see them in a much shorter time by flying as much as possible to the important UNESCO sites in the country, most of all Djemila, near the modern city of Constantine with its bridges and gorges, and Timgad near Batna. 

There are also almost ignored surprises like the huge triumphal arch, just a shadow in the dark in an empty field off the road between Timgad and Batna, a monumental but unannounced signpost to the remains of another Roman city, Lambaesis.  

Batna itself is a mainly French looking market town, its most important site the memorial staute to Mustafa Ben Boulaid, the father of the revolution, possibly even the ‘déclenchement’, the trigger of the revolution.  This region, Aurés, was where it all began and where the the trigger fired the first shot among the tumbled rocky landscape of the Tighamine gorges. Not an essential sight for the uninvolved tourist.  Instead, after Rome in its grandeur, a desert sojourn perhaps – for the best of that you need to go South, to Tamanrasset, Assekrem and the Hoggar Mountains and onwards towards Niger and that will be a trip for this traveller for another time.

If you are doing a flying visit for the North and ancient Rome only rather than embarking on a desert expedition, spend a little time by the sea, seeing those French built port cities along the Mediterranean coast East and West of Algiers, the massive and remarkable so-called Royal Mausoleum of Mauritania, possible resting place of the daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, and the important 11^th century Almoravid ruins at Tlemcen as good excuses for a stay on a beach for a few days, eating as much fish as possible.  Coastal hotels need further exploration and unquestionably, as tourism levels rise, and they will regardless of the Algerian government’s apparent lack of interest, new development and greater understanding of international standards. 

 

We stayed in one vast holiday hotel complex, the Gazelle d’Or, outside the Saharan oasis of El Oued, ‘city of a 1.000 domes’, and much less romantic than it sounds. The hotel was an enormous sprawl, again state owned, of individual almost grand domed rooms, dusty floors, restaurants, swimming pools, a bar and things that mainly worked but with gaps, and a mile to walk to reception or anywhere else through the identical rows of domes if the golf cart transports didn’t arrive.  An hotel probably for the wealthy from big cities all over the country more than for international tourists currently but perhaps demonstrating the best available of holiday resorts – minus the sea of course, this is a desert escape but those who escape the hotel should go further afield than the nearby dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental on the outskirts of El Oued to see anything like real desert.  Now almost a municipal park, the sands here are where local friends and families gather under the setting sun to stroll, ride motorcycles up the dunes, chat, cook and eat and leave an indescribable level of   plastic residue behind them that may be there almost forever.

The oasis of Timimoun feels more like a real desert town.  In fact, it was mainly developed by the French and the domed and sometimes white washed shrines of local marabout that lend atmosphere to its streets will soon be mere pointers to the past amongst the bricks and mortar of unrestrained contemporary development, possibly funded by diaspora remittances. The old ruined ksars around the town crumble picturesquely into the sand from whence they once grew in the days of camel trains and desert traders in slaves and goods from wherever the Saharan sands touched civilisation.  Contemporary building is far from picturesque and there are few obvious pointers in Algeria today to an aesthetic sense that may or may not once have existed before hundreds of years of outside influences stamped their own marks on the country and its wounded population. 

Are the Berber towns of the World Heritage Site Ghardaia, in the Mzab Valley, with their circlets of white and yellow buildings descending hills topped by the distinctively styled minarets of their mosques, the better image of that past?  The whitewashed graves of scholars and holy men tumble down barren hillsides among the sandy stones that mark more everyday lives and draw the eye to the beautifully simple structure of a saintly mausoleum, supposed to have inspired Le Corbusier. But and but, the contemporary has been allowed to impose depressingly to disfigure historical structures while society holds publicly to an extreme traditionalism.  Women in these towns are expected to cover themselves entirely in white cloaks, married women showing only one eye, and there are rules for every aspect of life in an almost mediaeval society, except of course it isn’t quite.  It Is quite a relief to see those women with a mobile clamped to a white covered ear as they clutch their wrappings and negotiate the narrow, stepped streets where 2 donkeys might walk abreast and another is loaded with the garbage from the central market square.  

So the tourist has the nerve to judge and find wanting, bewailing the loss of the picturesque aspects of the past while demanding the future for those who may chose otherwise but it is hard not to regret ugliness and what she perceives as the lack of a freedom she herself enjoys. 

The guide books suggest the towns of Ghardaia are the place for souvenirs although not the only souvenir this tourist chose.  The men’s trousers, finely pleated affairs with low crotches, what might be described as ‘Turkish’  are excellent for women’s wear. The pleats stay in because they are almost invariably now manufactured in man made fibres and are definitely business wear in these towns with metal zips on the long pockets that fall almost to the knees and sensible belt loops to hold them up.  The carpets that are considered the most desirable acquisition here were left behind.

Algeria is short of all the obvious international stores, happily, but all those less obvious and quite charming small independent shops sell little for a traveller to gloat over as a unique souvenir.  It is rather a relief but it would be nice to be able to buy a map of the country somewhere in the country.  Traditional wedding clothes are good in child sizes and the ornamented women’s velvet jackets too if you can find the right one in the right size. A marriage involves a spectacular number of changes of clothes for the bride so there are hundreds of shops selling uncountable varieties of almost the same thing. Historically, the Saharan towns and cities were often centres of learning and libraries as well as camels, precious metals and slaves.  In neighbouring Mauritania, and more obviously in Mali, and if only we could go there, the memory of those libraries is retained whether or not ancient collections have long since been dispersed or destroyed.  

The long road between Gardaia and Timimoun runs through flat desert, interspersed with the green treasuries of the palm gardens that have provided a life and a living for desert populations since time immemorial.  They are often now supported by international investment and so also a library, 50,000 books in French and Arabic, the project of one man, and now his son too, with a passion for literature, learning, and lending for both purposes.  They are rightly proud of a remarkable achievement that runs without benefit of the donated computer system that sits as an emblem of future ambition for the library, as yet unattached to anything.