Our correspondent At Bou Saada (Algeria)

“You are the first European tourist to come here for eight years”, I was told by a disconsolate Ahmed Boudiaf, cousin of the President of the Republic assassinated in 1994, member of the Bou Saada local authority and its probable future mayor.

Bou Saada was the “city of felicity”, the “gateway to the desert” for nineteenth century travellers, before the French occupation and then Boumediène’s new socialist state moved that gateway four hundred kilometres further south, to Guardai, by building villages and tarred roads. It is three hundred kilometres from Algiers, and one seems to be in another Algeria. Red earth, no scrub or lines of trees, mountainous spurs, the steppe.
When the military annihilated Ben Bella politically, it was in these solitudes that they kept him under house arrest for more than a decade. Who knows whether they would ever have let him travel to Sidi Ameur, where the mausoleum of the marabout of that name is a place of worship and meditation fifty kilometres distant.
“When the terrorism started – Azzedine, my guide, told me – I went there on pilgrimage. I had attacks of panic, my heart was beating furiously. I was advised to leave one of my singlets and put my trust in the saint. It took me two years to get over it, but I did so without medicine. At times, travelling this road alone, by car, I lowered the window and yelled out my fear”. At Sidi Ameur you can sleep, be accommodated, pray. In the fiercest moments of the armed struggle the barbus, the long-bearded fundamentalists prohibited people from going there. And that the exegetes of the faith prevented exercise of the faith gives an idea of the paroxysm that had been reached. The people have now come back to pray, just as the little markets of ceramics have returned on the road from Bouira to Sour El Ghozlane, “the wall of the gazelles ” gateway to the steppe and to the realm of the nomads, the Arab Algeria, the Algeria of the Bedouin. But the army has not yet left; its checkpoints, watchtowers, convoys and barracks remain. “The terrorism reached Bou Saada in ‘93”, said Boudiaf, “There was a group of Italian and Spanish tourists at the El Cai”d Hotel, there was an ambush of the military on the road leading to the market. Three years ago, the departing shot: they set fire to the hotel, an entire wing was destroyed. Now we are trying to start up again. We have rebuilt it, we are working to reopen the Atlantique, Bou Saada’s gem”. Built by the French in the early nineteen hundreds, the Atlantique reflects perfectly what an attentive academic like Edward W. Said has called “orientalism”, that is, the Orient seen through the eyes and desires of the Occident, the languor and folklore of a diversity tamed and made compatible with the tastes and expectations of Europeans. The postcards of the hotel that Boudiaf showed me seem to belong to another epoch, but in fact date from less than twenty years ago, when oleanders and bougainvillaea filled the garden and on the borders of the swimming pool there were deck chairs, bodies, towels and impeccable waiters with trays full of glasses. From the terraces, the Sahara behind, palm trees in front, the old colonial fort in the background, the panorama is enchanting. A Lafayette piano, all inlays and decoration, recovered and restored, stands covered by a dust sheet in the dining room. “Within a year we shall have reopened and Bou Saada will return to being what it always has been, the first Sahara oasis coming from Algiers, the junction for Djelfa, Laghouart and Guardai to the west, for Bistra and El Oued to the east, the date palms, the desert, the Mozabite cities of art that enchanted Le Courbusier…” Wandering through Bou Saada, between suk and old city, between parabolic aerials and skewers at the road junctions, between cars and donkeys, one realises that the social and family structure of Algeria is much more complex than Europe thinks it is or than westernised Algerians make an effort to present it as. On a rise, the El Hammel mosque with its Koran school, reception centre for pilgrims and the faithful, the model of the future Islamic university; old men lazily crouched along the walls and young students of a religion to be learned by heart make a singular contrast with the expansion of the city on the opposite side, facing the remains of what was once the Ferrero mill, yesterday luxuriant with water and preferred set for spaghetti Westerns, today a rubbish tip besieged by construction development without rhyme or reason, broods of infants, a female humanity visible until twelve or thirteen years of age that then disappears, swallowed up and invisible. In the capital, in the big cities, the female presence is still somewhat comparable with what it is with us, though with all the adjustments and compromises that such a comparison must involve. According to Benjamin Stora, Director of the “Maghreb Department” in France and recent author of La guerre invisibile), “in what other country of the Arab or Moslem world is it possible to find, simultaneously, a director of a leading newspaper (Salima Ghezali), a woman at the head of a political party (Louise Hannoune), a passionate exponent of secularism (Khalida Messaoudi), and a writer of international reputation (Assia Djebai)?” But here everything is as it was a century ago when Jules–Gervais Courtellemont took his first photographs of veiled women, with only an eye free to the view of the world, the absolute equality of bodies thanks to their negation, the disappearance of the beautiful and the ugly, youth and age, wealth and poverty, the ultimate defence, one might say, against the effects of time and age, physical defects, seduction, the conditioning and obsessions of fashion. And this, too, explains why an imposition intolerable to us can be seen as a defence and not as an offence, a protection and safeguard rather than as a constriction. The only women with uncovered faces are the prostitutes of the Cai”d who can be seen breakfasting in the morning, with their ringed eyes, often shapeless bodies, beside their casual Saudi lovers, “pigs”, is the kindest Algerian comment, closed in a room for a week to do always and only that, a tired and uglified sex that is a pale copy of the “Printemps de coeurs” that Etienne Dinet painted here in Bou Saada at the early nineteen hundreds, courtesans of lively colours touched and pawed by Arabs in heat. Like Courtellemont, Dinet too converted to Islam and though the former is buried in Algiers, the latter has his tomb a few steps from the Atlantique, both Europeans of sand who found here the Orient of their imagination. The museum that bears his name is empty. It contained garments and items of furniture that the future mayor Boudiaf took home, as a precaution, in the hottest days of the Algerian delirium, when even the memory of a Frenchman turned Moslem could be a source of hate and conflict. “We shall put everything back in place now”, he told me, “The nightmare is over, perhaps ”. A trip to Algeria is at bottom this too; a taking note that hope can be greater than fear. (trad.Interpres-Giussano)