I WAS A FRENCH MUSLIM

An exiled Algerian freedom fighter’s account of the less-than-heroic realities undergirding the Algerian revolution.

In this memoir translated by his widow, Mokhtefi traces his evolution from a young boy steeped in Muslim traditions to a disillusioned government administrator. The son of a butcher, the author grew up in an Algerian village seething with French-Arab tensions. A schoolteacher saw Mokhtefi's intellectual gifts early on and urged him to pursue a scholarship to a school outside of his village. There, he began his assimilation into a French-dominated society he questioned for how it “deprived my parents of an education” and made him feel culturally “mutilated, bouncing back and forth between the traditional family, the village, and my life at the school and in the city.” His political consciousness emerged in high school, and he dreamed of becoming a lawyer to defend Algerian nationalists like his imprisoned brother. As the French military began mobilizing to Algeria, the young Mokhtefi found himself drawn into the murky politics that pitted rival factions of Algerian nationalists against each other. He eventually joined the National Liberation Army and trained to send and receive Morse code among men who “barely [knew] how to read and write.” Eventually promoted to a supervisory position within the signal corps, he continued to witness a toxic “climate of fear and disdain” prevail in the ALN. After accepting an administrative post in the emerging Algerian government, he watched the minister and his cabinet censor all the reports he wrote, and the justice-for-all promises of the revolution turned to ash. This detailed, at times labyrinthine eyewitness account of a revolutionary’s disillusionment with the revolution to free Algeria not only from France, but from its own lack of political enlightenment will appeal most to historians of colonization and students of political movements.

An intelligent chronicle that may have limited appeal among general readers.