Showing posts with label Best Of. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Of. Show all posts
Friday, November 25, 2016
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Algeria celebrates victory over Egypt
This article was first published in When Saturday Comes November 19, 2009
I have to admit that I was scared for ten or so minutes after the final whistle blew here in Oran, Algeria last night. I watched Les Verts' World Cup play-off game with Egypt in a cafe in darkened streets of a city that I don't know. Anthar Yahia's 40th minute goal, a Van Basten-esque angled volley, unleashed the country's wildest celebrations since July 1962 – the month Algeria secured its bloody independence from France. Chairs flew over the road, aerosal sprays flashed into the sky, cars vroomed down the streets backwards and sideways, kids slalomed between klaxoning motorbikes and I had to duck once or twice to avoid the fireworks thrown like confetti.
More than 12 hours after the game ended, I've had to close my hotel window to keep out the noise of honking cars on the street 13 floors below. Even the barbus – the Islamic fundamentalists who for ten years brought the country to its knees – are dancing in the streets.
It is impossible for a European to imagine the rivalry that exists between the Fennecs and the Pharaohs. In Algiers, the offices of Air Egypt were burnt down two days ago. As the final qualifying group match drew to a close last Saturday, with Algeria minutes away from automatic qualification for South Africa, Algerian television's John Motson could restrain himself no longer. “Win it boys, win it for our million martyrs, show Egypt that Algeria never retreats," a barbed allusion to the fact that Algeria won their war against France but Egypt lost theirs against Israel.
After last weekend's two-nil defeat, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika commandeered half of Air Algérie's fleet to convey supporters to neutral Khartoum for yesterday's play-off match – a move that nearly backfired when disappointed fans ransacked Algiers airport on learning there were not enough planes to go around. Such disappointment is a distant memory this morning as Algeria unites in ear-splitting harmony. Chanting supporters, young and old (including a fair helping of women) are once more bringing the streets, and the entire transport network, to a halt. Want a taxi, train or plane? Ask again in a couple of days.
Today's mass-selling Le Soir d'Algérie, normally a French-language newspaper, is headlined with a single word in Arabic: Dernaha (We've done it!) and inside we learn that the mountains, wadis, villages and dunes of the Algerian Sahara are emblazoned with a familiar-sounding slogan: "Impossible n'est pas algérien." Both on the streets and in the media everyone is hoping, everyone is – ironically – praying that football fever will hammer the final nail in the coffin of fundamentalism.
 |
| They think they've won it already |
More than 12 hours after the game ended, I've had to close my hotel window to keep out the noise of honking cars on the street 13 floors below. Even the barbus – the Islamic fundamentalists who for ten years brought the country to its knees – are dancing in the streets.
 |
| On the streets of Algiers |
After last weekend's two-nil defeat, Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika commandeered half of Air Algérie's fleet to convey supporters to neutral Khartoum for yesterday's play-off match – a move that nearly backfired when disappointed fans ransacked Algiers airport on learning there were not enough planes to go around. Such disappointment is a distant memory this morning as Algeria unites in ear-splitting harmony. Chanting supporters, young and old (including a fair helping of women) are once more bringing the streets, and the entire transport network, to a halt. Want a taxi, train or plane? Ask again in a couple of days.
Today's mass-selling Le Soir d'Algérie, normally a French-language newspaper, is headlined with a single word in Arabic: Dernaha (We've done it!) and inside we learn that the mountains, wadis, villages and dunes of the Algerian Sahara are emblazoned with a familiar-sounding slogan: "Impossible n'est pas algérien." Both on the streets and in the media everyone is hoping, everyone is – ironically – praying that football fever will hammer the final nail in the coffin of fundamentalism.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Harraga and Hittistes I
When I was working in Algeria earlier this year, the big talking point in the street cafés of Annaba (in the north-east of the country) was that, for the first time, the body of a girl - a young girl, a girl with her whole life ahead of her - had been found washed up on the sea-shore near the former French city of Bône.
Corpses - bloated and anonymous - have become an increasingly common sight on the beaches of Algeria's Mediterranean coast over the past three or four years. The country has, on the whole, become resigned to the nightmarish phenomenon of young men, usually in their twenties but sometimes in their teens, so desperate to avoid the misery of their homeland that they flee their patria by any possible means.
And the most common means is to pay a faceless, moral-free "shark" to convey them across the Mediterranean to mainland Europe - on boats that, more often than not, are doomed never to reach their destination.
It is hard for a western European to imagine such desperate hopelessness: would you do anything, absolutely anything, would you knowingly risk your life, for a "better future" that might involve - if you’re lucky - ending up ten to a room in some seedy Parisian hostel? Yet this is the El Dorado, the profane Mecca, not just for troops of young Algerians but also for many Libyans and Moroccans and, indeed, a sizeable slice of sub-Saharan Africa.
A few years ago, in the middle of the Sahara, I stumbled across a Nigerian man, little more than a boy, who was walking the length of the desert to reach Tripoli and, he hoped, eventually the southern shores of Italy. This young man wasn't, as I later learned, some rara avis. A Tuareg guide told me that earlier that year, as he was searching for firewood in the Akakus region of the Libyan Sahara, he had encountered the corpses of nearly fifty men, bleached and burned by the African sun, who, seeking shadow where there is none, had died of the hands of thirst.
So, to return to the cafes of Annaba: why was every Algerian seemingly talking about the unidentified girl washed up on the shore? Quite simply because hers was the first female body that had ever been found. Up to that moment the harraga - literally "those who burn (their identity papers)" - had all been men seeking to avoid the life of the hittiste, "those who prop up the walls (because there's nothing else to do)". Now, for the first time, Algeria, this most patriarchal of countries, was having to wake up to the fact that life was as meaningless for its young brides-to-be as for its disenchanted manhood.
It begs the question: when will the Algerian government acknowledge the misery of its citizens? And when will we in the west have the desire to do something about these weekly mass migrations?
For hittistes, see this link, and for an evocative description of the desperation that drives young North Africans to desert their homeland, see Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir.
Corpses - bloated and anonymous - have become an increasingly common sight on the beaches of Algeria's Mediterranean coast over the past three or four years. The country has, on the whole, become resigned to the nightmarish phenomenon of young men, usually in their twenties but sometimes in their teens, so desperate to avoid the misery of their homeland that they flee their patria by any possible means.
And the most common means is to pay a faceless, moral-free "shark" to convey them across the Mediterranean to mainland Europe - on boats that, more often than not, are doomed never to reach their destination.
It is hard for a western European to imagine such desperate hopelessness: would you do anything, absolutely anything, would you knowingly risk your life, for a "better future" that might involve - if you’re lucky - ending up ten to a room in some seedy Parisian hostel? Yet this is the El Dorado, the profane Mecca, not just for troops of young Algerians but also for many Libyans and Moroccans and, indeed, a sizeable slice of sub-Saharan Africa.
A few years ago, in the middle of the Sahara, I stumbled across a Nigerian man, little more than a boy, who was walking the length of the desert to reach Tripoli and, he hoped, eventually the southern shores of Italy. This young man wasn't, as I later learned, some rara avis. A Tuareg guide told me that earlier that year, as he was searching for firewood in the Akakus region of the Libyan Sahara, he had encountered the corpses of nearly fifty men, bleached and burned by the African sun, who, seeking shadow where there is none, had died of the hands of thirst.
So, to return to the cafes of Annaba: why was every Algerian seemingly talking about the unidentified girl washed up on the shore? Quite simply because hers was the first female body that had ever been found. Up to that moment the harraga - literally "those who burn (their identity papers)" - had all been men seeking to avoid the life of the hittiste, "those who prop up the walls (because there's nothing else to do)". Now, for the first time, Algeria, this most patriarchal of countries, was having to wake up to the fact that life was as meaningless for its young brides-to-be as for its disenchanted manhood.
It begs the question: when will the Algerian government acknowledge the misery of its citizens? And when will we in the west have the desire to do something about these weekly mass migrations?
For hittistes, see this link, and for an evocative description of the desperation that drives young North Africans to desert their homeland, see Tahar Ben Jelloun's Partir.
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