Revolutionary Children

The Algerian revolution was practiced by and for children. It was about the "birth of a nation," or what Frantz Fanon called a "new man" altogether. As late as 1952, the Algerian School of medicine declared in its handbook for physicians: "these primitive people cannot and should not benefit from the advances of European civilization."  That is to say,  all Algerians were children from the colonial point of view. The colonized "child" was a peculiar genus because it was held that s/he  would never grow up, and thus had to remain in the condition of  tutelage. Here emancipation would refer both to ending colonial rule
and, in the traditional sense, to being granted adult status. For Jews,  women, colonized subjects and many others, such emancipation has often "lagged behind" that of white men, creating that sense that the "time is out of joint," the spectrality of the modern.

In newsreel footage of the period, children are shown being arrested en masse, as revolutionary activists. In The Battle of Algiers, this role was metonymically performed by the young FLN cadre Omar, who chooses to die with Ali la Pointe, rather than give up. Like Ali himself, Omar was in the film and in reality from the streets. He was Yacef Saadi's nephew and would have been a very young child during the revolution itself, just like the children in the revolutionary documentary J'ai huit ans (click for details).

As can be seen in Fanon's work, and the Algerian projects he was associated with such as J'ai huit ans, this dedication was not without its costs. As in the South African uprising of 1976, a generation missed proper schooling, suffered violence and displacement, and many lost parents and other friends and family members. Perhaps one should not be surprised that there was a desire to bring the revolution to an end by 1967 after fifteen years of conflict, although that seems a fateful decision today.

As befitted their status both as agents of the revolution and its intended beneficaries, children were a key subject in post-independence Algerian cinema and some also became non-professional actors. The very first feature-length film produced in Algeria Une si jeune paix [Such a Young Peace], directed by Jacques Charby, contained a section devoted to the work of children in the revolution. Entitled La Grive [The Thrush], the montage style of this extract seems analagous to that of J'ai huit ans as was the use of non-professional actors. The film is now very rare but this clip shows a powerful visual style.

The "Third World Child"

The image of the child from a developing nation has an established place in present-day media culture: dark-skinned, preferably naked, clearly suffering from hunger, helpless and in need of "aid." In the case of the notorious Kevin Carter photograph taken in Sudan (1993), the twenty minutes that Carter spent waiting to see if the vulture preying on the little girl might spread its wings before he took the picture and chased it away, may have been a contributory factor to his suicide from depression in 1994.

This is simply one of the best-known of a vast archive of such images: what does it take for "us," the global beneficiaries, to visualize "the children" of the global deprived as in every sense "actors"?

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