African Resistance: Algeria
Like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which combined social reforms (it was anti-elitist), nationalist sentiment (it was anti‐western intervention) and Islam as a means of protest (Islamism), the anti‐colonial movement in Algeria was a complex weave of ideologies. Unlike the situation in Egypt and more like the situation in Kenya and South Africa, Algerians faced a growing population of European, this time French, settlers. Gradually over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the European settlers, the so‐called pieds noirs, came to dominate Algerian politics and society.
Immigration and natural increase were driving up the Algerian population. Arable land was becoming scarce and was increasingly in the hands of European settlers. Tensions in the Algerian countryside were on the rise. Tensions also existed among Algerians who had migrated to France to work as cheap labor. In 1926, the Algerian anti‐colonial movement arose among poorly paid Algerian laborers in France. The movement, the African North Star, combined anti-capitalist Marxism with notions of Algerian and Muslim identity. The movement grew during the 1930s, despite French suppression, and tensions between anti-colonialists and the French came to a head in the Setif Rising of May 1945. Violence confrontations between Setif Muslims and the colonial police escalated with Setif attacks on European settlers, about 100 were killed. The Algerian colonial government responded with a massive military operation (and this following the conclusion of WWII) in which an estimated six thousand Algerians were killed, an event known as the Setif Massacre. Moderate opposition to French rule lost popular appeal in post‐massacre Algeria. Radicalism came to dominate Algerian political thinking, and militaristic opposition became the primary anti-colonial tactic as in Kenya in the 1950s with the Mau Mau Uprising. Colonial violence was now turning back on itself.
Immigration and natural increase were driving up the Algerian population. Arable land was becoming scarce and was increasingly in the hands of European settlers. Tensions in the Algerian countryside were on the rise. Tensions also existed among Algerians who had migrated to France to work as cheap labor. In 1926, the Algerian anti‐colonial movement arose among poorly paid Algerian laborers in France. The movement, the African North Star, combined anti-capitalist Marxism with notions of Algerian and Muslim identity. The movement grew during the 1930s, despite French suppression, and tensions between anti-colonialists and the French came to a head in the Setif Rising of May 1945. Violence confrontations between Setif Muslims and the colonial police escalated with Setif attacks on European settlers, about 100 were killed. The Algerian colonial government responded with a massive military operation (and this following the conclusion of WWII) in which an estimated six thousand Algerians were killed, an event known as the Setif Massacre. Moderate opposition to French rule lost popular appeal in post‐massacre Algeria. Radicalism came to dominate Algerian political thinking, and militaristic opposition became the primary anti-colonial tactic as in Kenya in the 1950s with the Mau Mau Uprising. Colonial violence was now turning back on itself.
