The Algerian Dream: Youth and the Quest for Dignity

By Andrew Farrand

Few outsiders have had the privilege to get to know Algeria and its youth so intimately-or to observe firsthand this pivotal chapter in the nation's history. It's a story that reveals much about the relationship between citizens and leaders, about the sanctity of human dignity, and about the power of dreams and the courage to pursue them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637301531

Andrew Farrand

Andrew G. Farrand is a non-resident senior fellow covering North Africa at the Atlantic Council and author of THE ALGERIAN DREAM (2021). He lived and worked in Algeria from 2013 to 2020, implementing youth development programs across the country alongside a range of creative projects. "An expert on North Africa" (The New Yorker), he is the translator of INSIDE THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (2017) by Zohra Drif, a contributor to UNCOMMON ALGER (2016), and author of numerous articles on Algeria. He is well known in Algeria as a travel writer, photographer, and media personality. Born and raised in the United States, he is a proficient Algerian Arabic and French speaker. In 2020 he served as host of Andi Hulm ("I Have a Dream"), Algeria's first entrepreneurship reality television show. He blogs at ibnibnbattuta.com.

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New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Andrew G. Farrand

All rights reserved.

Front and back cover photographs copyright © Sabri Benalycherif.

Map of Algeria copyright © Amina Wafaa Berrais.

Interior photographs copyright © Andrew G. Farrand.

The Algerian Dream

Youth and the Quest for Dignity

ISBN

978-1-63676-716-1 Paperback

ISBN

978-1-63730-051-0 Kindle Ebook

ISBN

978-1-63730-153-1 Ebook

For Nina

Contents

Map of Algeria

Prologue

Introduction

Part I The Crossroads Years (2012–2018)

Chapter 2. Identity and Belonging

Chapter 3. Economic Opportunity

Chapter 4. Knowledge and Information

Chapter 5. Home and Environment

Chapter 6. Security and Health

Chapter 7. Creation and Culture

Chapter 8. Justice and Dignity

Part II The Movement (2019–2021)

Chapter 9. Revolution

Chapter 10. Counter-Revolution

Chapter 11. Crisis Upon Crisis

Chapter 12. The Future

Timeline

Glossary of Terms

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Disclaimer

Wherever possible, events presented in this book are based on verifiable written sources, as documented in the reference notes. Personal anecdotes are reconstructed as faithfully as possible based upon memory, personal notes, and follow-up interviews when needed.

Names of some individuals cited in the text have been changed to protect their identities.

The contents of this book are those of the author alone and do not reflect the position or viewpoints of any of the individuals or organizations mentioned therein.

Note on Transliteration of Arabic and Tamazight Terms

The orthography of Arabic and Tamazight (Berber) words in Roman characters found in this book may appear unfamiliar to some readers, as I have maintained the spelling conventions used in Algeria. This generally implies following French—not English—phonetics in rendering words, names, and places and prioritizing popular usage over linguistic precision. You will read inchallah instead of insha’Allah, medersa instead of madrasa, moudjahidine instead of mujahideen, and you will wonder what has changed since that book on Egypt you read last summer. And thus you will get your own first taste of Algeria—a land that many expect to be just like its neighbors, but which instead surprises and confounds.

Prologue

"Cut off the snake’s tail, not its head.

We will persist until the subjugation ends."

The banner spanned the road several meters above my head, its message in blocky Arabic letters accompanied by a menacing cartoon cobra.

It was one of many such signs printed, stenciled, or handwritten in the last few days and strung from the balconies overlooking Rue Didouche Mourad, the main artery that wends its way downhill to the heart of Algeria’s capital, Algiers.

"You fools betrayed and sold out the nation.

We, the poor, are reclaiming and buying back the nation… at any cost."

When the government pushes the people toward ruin by every means, disobedience from every individual is not a right, but a national duty.

Our message is clear: We want freedom for the people.

The signs fluttered from the ornate colonial-era façades flanking the road, where a river of protesters flowed steadily toward downtown.

Amid this current, I tagged after a few friends while also taking time to simply absorb the ambiance. The day was overcast, cool but already humid, foretelling the long summer to come. All around, men and women carried colorful homemade placards asserting their independence, denouncing senior officials, or demanding a new constitution.

The Algerian flag, with its red star and crescent straddling fields of emerald green and white, was everywhere. Some draped the emblem over their shoulders like capes, others waved it through the air in time to a distant drumbeat. As they walked, the protesters shouted a mix of the latest anti-government slogans (Yetnahaw gaa, or Get them all out) and favorite soccer chants (One, two, three, viva l’Algérie).

Toddlers perched on parents’ shoulders, waving flags, while teens snapped selfies or browsed the patriotic swag at makeshift sidewalk stands. Residents perched on the railings above, watching the crowd stream past, while further overhead helicopters purred ominously—a rare sight before the protests began on February 22, 2019.

On that day, years of accumulated indignities and frustration had finally ignited, sparked by the news that Algeria’s president, ailing octogenarian Abdelaziz Bouteflika, would seek another term after twenty years in office.

In Africa’s largest country, the protests touched every city, small and large, from dusty towns in the deepest corners of the Sahara to the capital here on the shores of the Mediterranean. They swelled each Tuesday, when university students would skip class to demonstrate, and Friday, when Algerians of all stripes would occupy the streets.

On April 2, after six weeks of mounting protests, Bouteflika had announced his resignation. Algerians celebrated late into the night, then rushed to consult their constitution, which in such cases prescribed an interim leader.

Behind the scenes, however, lurked Algeria’s powerful army. After the president’s resignation, the generals let it be known that they would get around to installing that interim president soon. But meanwhile, they were prioritizing some housekeeping; within days, they fired the head of Algeria’s formidable intelligence services and folded the body under the military’s authority.

Judging from the crowd milling all around me, neither the president’s resignation nor these back-room machinations had placated anyone. It was April 5, and Algerians were marching for the seventh consecutive Friday. Seemingly every segment of Algerian society was in the street. The crowd thrummed with an excited energy.

With police deployed in huge numbers, that energy was partly nervous; historically, the Algerian police aren’t known for restraint in moments of crisis. In general, however, the ambiance felt overwhelmingly positive, reflecting just how long everyone around me had been waiting for this moment of release: when the wall of fear would finally break and every Algerian could scream their frustrations in the street. The regime might silence any one of them, but it could never silence all of them.

However positive the atmosphere, I wasn’t taking chances. I had donned my sturdiest jacket and pants and laced my boots up tight before walking the few miles from my apartment. (Authorities had shut public transport, hoping in vain to slow the crowd’s swell.) With protesters chanting Peaceful! Peaceful! and encouraging calm whenever tempers flared, violence seemed unlikely, yet nothing was certain. I had lived in Algiers for six years and knew its geography like the back of my hand, but I had never felt this crackle in the city’s air. And one thing was certain: if the situation went south, the foreigner would be the last to see it coming.

To top off my outfit, I slung on a baseball hat and pulled the brim down, trying in vain to keep a low profile. Yet even in a city of four million, I couldn’t hide. My blond hair, while not unheard of in Algeria, wasn’t common. What’s more, as a familiar face on Algerian social media, I was a known quantity around town. Algiers is nothing if not a small village, and before long I was spotted. So good to see you here, brother! my friend Samy shouted, elated to see a foreign face in the march—and all too glad to interpret my presence as an endorsement of the protests.

Well, I’m here to observe, not to protest, I demurred. In fact, I was even wary about observing; remaining neutral was essential if I was to stay in the country. Ever since the movement began weeks earlier I had carefully avoided any actions or statements of support.

But there in the crowd, my ear-to-ear grin must have betrayed my true feelings. Samy doubled over in exaggerated laughter, then grabbed my elbow. Come on, let’s walk.

The road flattened out as we neared the Place Audin. There, I paused to snap a photo of an activist holding aloft a homemade placard in the shape of a yield sign. From inside the red triangle, a querulous cartoon army general peered out above a simple message: Yield power! (Weeks later, I would learn the activist’s name, Messaoud Leftissi, when the papers reported his subsequent arrest and imprisonment.)

Soon, the street widened into the broad plaza at the epicenter of Algiers. My jaw dropped at the sight, so unimaginable in all my earlier years in Algeria: an unbroken mass of protesters filled the expanse, all the way to the steps of the Grande Poste, the city’s central post office, with its imposing neo-Moorish arches.

Demonstrators waved signs calling for the downfall of Bouteflika’s gang; one young man climbed a light pole to wave an Algerian flag high above the plaza; the crowd chanted, The army, the people: brothers, brothers.

For six long years, I had watched my Algerian friends and their fellow citizens struggle against the Kafkaesque red tape, the stifling security services, the maddeningly small-minded authorities—against the unending indignities required just to survive daily life in their own country. How long can they put up with this? I would wonder to myself. How can you not explode with rage and want to tear this whole place apart and start again? I would ask my closest Algerian friends. Trust me, we do, was the usual response. Now, at last, an opening had arrived.

I hung a left, following the crowd into the tunnel that ran under the University of Algiers’s main campus. Usually full of traffic, it was now overrun by protesters who marched through the darkened passage, their chests puffed out, heads high, and voices thundering off the walls: Hey-o, Hey-o, throw out the gang and we’ll be just fine.

As we emerged from the tunnel, my eyes readjusted to the daylight, and I found myself facing a black-and-blue mass: row upon row of police in formation, stone-faced and armored in riot gear, truncheons at the ready.

After weeks of demonstrations, Algerians had unseated an ailing president and jolted his gang to the core. Transforming the system over which this gang presided would prove far more challenging.

Introduction

When the protests erupted in February 2019, international news outlets scrambled for reliable information. But few had correspondents or sources in Algeria. (Why would they, in a country that discouraged such scrutiny and where nothing of international import had happened for years anyway?) As the foreign press cobbled together stories from Cairo or Paris, it became clear from their fumbling descriptions that none were well-versed in Algeria’s history, much less in the cascade of contemporary grievances that had just swelled into a tsunami of protest.

So how on earth had I—an American born and bred in Baltimore, Maryland—ended up here in the streets of Algiers, surrounded by a swirling, screaming, red-white-and-green sea of demonstrators staring down a wall of riot police?

* * *

I was born in 1984 in Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty, racist redlining policies, drugs and gun violence, industrial decline, and other ills. It was a city where the American Dream was within reach of precious few, but where many pursued it anyway, even as it grew harder to climb the social ladder with each passing year.

Historically, that dream is the motor that has propelled so many American success stories, eternally feeding and being fed by our country’s relentless optimism. It’s certainly what drove my parents. Baby boomers from the mid-Atlantic, they worked long hours (as a struggling landscape architect and a school administrator) to raise two kids in a rare mixed-race, middle-class pocket of Baltimore City and to cover tuition at a series of elite private schools.

My childhood spanned those two very different worlds. To be sure, many of my classmates contended with much wider cultural divides (critically, I didn’t have to surmount the vast racial gap that divides so much of life in Baltimore), but even this modest contrast sufficed to cultivate something chameleon-like inside me. At school among the horse farms outside town, I worked to mask the working-class, urban edges, while with friends back home I learned to conceal the fancy vocabulary and Ivy League ambitions. Although I didn’t appreciate that skill at the time, years later I never could have adapted to the peculiarities of life in North Africa without it.

In the summer of 2001, aged sixteen, I had the chance to travel to France on an academic exchange—my first time leaving the east coast of the United States. Three weeks later, I returned home to Baltimore breathless and wide-eyed at the world I had just discovered beyond America’s borders, convinced that language was my ticket to seeing more.

That September, I was settling into my new classes as a high school junior when the 9/11 attacks rocked the US. That tragedy quickly catapulted the Arab and Islamic worlds to the forefront of American public attention—and also highlighted just how little our country knew or understood them.

I began reading up on these overlapping regions and their peoples and cultures. My music collection expanded to include new influences, from Lebanese and Egyptian pop ballads to Algerian raï and hip-hop hits. All I could understand of Cheb Khaled’s crooning or MBS’s rhymes were the occasional French words; even so, I kept them on repeat. The following summer, back in France on my own, I was more attuned to the many people and influences from beyond France’s borders.

Though the ability to adapt to my surroundings began out of necessity, as I moved further from home I discovered that it could enable me to bridge all sorts of cultural borders. Soon, I was no longer just playing one character at school and another back home. I had learned to unearth commonalities and forge understanding anywhere.

After entering Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC, in fall 2003, I fully embraced this identity. My head soon brimmed with trivia from courses on Middle Eastern history, African political movements, international trade and development, Islamic theology, and more. Thirsty for linguistic and cultural challenges, I took up Arabic. I progressed from learning the first letters of the Arabic alphabet to months of immersion courses in Syria and Jordan to dissecting stories in North African literature courses.

As graduation neared and the professional world loomed, I discovered that the doors my Arabic studies opened widest led to careers in espionage and oil. Hoping to build a more positive legacy, I instead entered the nonprofit world, spending several years implementing international development programs from posts in DC and Morocco, where I lived for a year and continued studying Arabic.

When the Arab Spring began in early 2011, I was working at the Washington headquarters of the National Democratic Institute, a nonprofit offering training and exchanges to politicians and activists worldwide on effective election campaigning, legislating, and community organizing. In those heady days, when the uprisings still pulsed with the hope of millions across the region, I followed with rapt attention from afar. Before long, demand for NDI’s services spiked across the Arab world. Thanks to my language skills, I was tapped to support new projects in North Africa, including Algeria.

Something was different about Algeria, I quickly realized. While the Arab Spring swept the rest of the region, toppling autocrats, Algeria saw protest but its government stood firm. As I read about its history, I discovered this was nothing new; despite all Algeria shared with its neighbors, it had never been in sync with events elsewhere. Its experience of French colonialism had cut deeper and lasted longer than nearby Tunisia and Morocco’s, and only ended with a bloody seven-year liberation war. After the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in the Sahara Desert, Algeria’s independence in 1962 was followed by periods of state socialism, Arab nationalism, and rentier capitalism. In the 1990s, when the rest of North Africa was comparatively quiet, an abrupt political opening triggered a decade of catastrophic conflict between the army and Islamist insurgents. This Black Decade left between one and two hundred thousand dead—many of them civilians.

With those horrors still fresh in their collective memory, observers surmised, Algerians prized stability above all else. So when the Arab Spring arrived and others rose up against their governments, Algeria witnessed only sporadic protests. Its rulers snuffed these out with a mix of carrots and sticks: mass deployment of security forces around protests, an easing of the longstanding state of emergency, and more generous distribution of oil and gas wealth. But you can’t bully or buy off a population forever.

* * *

In the spring of 2012, aged twenty-seven, I was preparing to travel to Algeria for the first time on a work trip with NDI.

What awaited me there? I had heard little of Algeria during my time in Morocco; even from right next door, the country was a black box. In the US, I had hardly ever met anyone who could point out Algeria on a map, much less who had visited and could help set expectations as I prepared for that first trip. In the English-speaking world, little had been written about Algeria since the war of independence ended fifty years earlier, and its recent history was even more impenetrable. Algeria’s government offered none of the usual resources that might have helped inform and entice outsiders, and few bookstores or libraries in Washington carried volumes on the country. The latest travel guide I could find dated to 2007. Massive but mysterious, Algeria was largely unknown to the outside world, myself included. Yet what little I could dig up about the place only intrigued me more. And I already knew one thing for certain: their music rocked.

My mind awash with questions and thumping raï lyrics, I landed in Algiers hoping for the best.

Algeria did not disappoint. In fact, it shined. In just those first few months, I had many warm exchanges, great laughs, and home-cooked meals to prove it. I also forged a close friendship with my Algerian colleague, Karima, then thirty. Far more effectively than any official ambassador could have done, Karima ensured I both knew and loved every aspect of Algerian culture, from chaâbi music to Berber carpets, classic cinema to the modern memes coursing through social media—a recent introduction to Algeria that was exploding in popularity as I arrived. Karima also singlehandedly refashioned my Arabic (then colored by strong Moroccan influences) in an Algerian mold, giving me the means to appreciate and join in the rich exchanges all around me.

For a year, I shuttled frequently between Washington and Algiers. With its intricate mesh of identities and dizzyingly complex history, Algeria had proved just as fascinating as I had hoped. This was a country filled with twenty-somethings yet ruled exclusively by gray-haired geezers, with a thousand miles of pristine Mediterranean coastline but not a foreign tourist in sight, and where many cursed France for its brutal colonial past but aspired to emigrate to Paris or Marseille. Algerians spoke three languages but never seemed to complete a full sentence in a single one. Their capital, once known as the Mecca of revolutionaries, now outlawed public protest. And it was a nation where Islamists and barflies, feminists and mustachioed bureaucrats, Berber poets and Arab nationalists, Touareg nomads and avowed Trotskyists, soccer fans and sculptors, and many more all coexisted in a tense standoff.

I was hooked. Soon, each time I returned to Washington I would spend my days pestering my boss to reassign me to Algiers for good. Finally, she conceded, and in June 2013 I moved to Algeria, becoming one of the few foreigners in the country.

I spent two years with NDI in Algiers, organizing training seminars and exchanges for Algerian political party officials and civil society activists, many of them drawn from a young generation eager to leave its mark. When my project concluded, I realized my Algerian experience still hadn’t; I had begun a relationship—with a cute UN staffer from Germany named Nina—and sensed I still had much more to discover in Algeria.

As luck would have it, World Learning, the only other American non-profit in town, was hiring. I spent the next five years overseeing employment, English language, and exchange programs for students across Algeria. That role gave me the chance to meet thousands of energetic, ambitious young people and see much of their country, developing a keen appreciation for its diversity. I ultimately visited twenty-nine of the country’s forty-eight regions. (Even today, I still haven’t visited that many US states.)

Along the way, I published personal reflections and photos from travels and daily life on the blog I had started years earlier, titled Ibn Ibn Battuta. (In Arabic, the blog’s name means son of Ibn Battuta, an homage to the famous fourteenth-century world traveler from Tangier, Morocco.) To my surprise, in Algeria my stories finally attracted an audience—mostly among Algerians. I built a sizable local following as one of the only outsiders sharing perspectives on everything from Algerian wedding traditions to the national soccer team, my favorite tourist destinations to local artist collectives, and more.

Eventually, I became an unwitting social media star. Online videos led to profiles in major newspapers, then live interviews on Algerian and French television. By the time I left Algeria in 2020, I was the host of Andi Hulm (I Have a Dream), a nationwide reality television show for young entrepreneurs. I had also worked side-by-side with one of Algeria’s great liberation heroes to translate her memoirs into English, contributed to economic investment reports and several new guidebooks, and saw my wedding—to Nina, the aforementioned cute German—make front-page news. (He’s American, She’s German; They Fall in Love, Get Married, and Live in Algeria!)

Along the way, I forged lifelong friendships with Algerian peers, witnessing their struggles firsthand, and spent much of my energy each day trying to help young people find their place and realize their dreams in a country that seemed determined to discourage them.

* * *

Warped by tremendous oil wealth, corruption, isolation and paranoia, a violent and unresolved history, complex layers of identity, and a ruling elite who jealously guard their power, Algeria is inhospitable terrain for the young and ambitious. While it generally guarantees bare necessities (few Algerians go hungry or face destitute poverty, for example), Algeria seems to keep true prosperity just out of many citizens’ reach.

Among the young Algerians I came to know well, most spent their days grappling with impossible questions: How can you succeed when red tape chokes off entrepreneurship, when diplomas stack up but don’t reflect real learning, and when your friends spend their waking hours plotting their escape to Europe? How can you thrive when salaried jobs go to the sons of the rich and powerful, when a single comment on social media can prompt a visit from security forces, and when the costs of housing, transport, marriage, and food keep rising impossibly higher? Oh, and by the way, Grandma is asking again when you’re finally going to find a job and get married.

The group facing these onerous challenges is huge. Today, seven in ten Algerians are under age forty—the generous cutoff age for youth, according to the local definition.¹ Just who are these young Algerians? Through seven years of travels, travails, and conversations in Algeria, I have tried to grasp what makes them tick. What hopes and aspirations are they pursuing? In other words, for young Algerians, just what is the Algerian Dream?

I made the right connections to answer that question. Nearly all my Algerian friends and former colleagues come from my generation, those we call the millennials. Born between 1980 and the mid-1990s, they grew up during the violence of Algeria’s Black Decade—and more than a few have the emotional scars to prove it. The next cohort, born from the mid-1990s through 2010, has no memory of that conflict. Counterparts to Generation Z, these were the younger students whom I served in my work, helping build their résumés so they could successfully enter the professional world. Both groups have come of age amid the powerful influences of global online culture and are nearly as fluent in social media, online gaming, and viral memes as their American counterparts. For both, Algeria’s war of independence is ancient history. It’s no surprise, then, that these youth view the world quite differently than their parents or grandparents do. It’s a difference that has already proven decisive.

As the Arab Spring swept the region, Algerians largely watched the revolutionary moment pass them by. But much changed during the years that followed, when I lived in the country—a period I call the Crossroads Years, for reasons I will explain. Among those transformations, one of the greatest affected Algeria’s population: many elders passed away, and a new cohort of youth came of age politically.

Marching to their own beat as usual, in 2019, while most surrounding countries focused on affairs at home, Algerians launched a revolution of their very own, known as the Hirak. While the Hirak mobilized Algerians of all ages, it was the youth who would fuel and sustain the movement at critical moments. This raised other intriguing questions, namely: What had driven millions of Algerians into the streets in 2019, demanding sweeping changes to the country’s longstanding order and a rewrite of the social contract?

I witnessed this uprising firsthand. But even more importantly, I also observed the long buildup that preceded it. During those years, I crisscrossed Algeria, meeting and listening to young people and trying to help them achieve their dreams despite the long odds. As I did so, the contours of the Algerian Dream became clear to me (and often looked surprisingly familiar). Ultimately, I identified eight pillars that, for young Algerians, like many of their counterparts worldwide, constitute a dignified life:

1.Political voice: A genuine influence over decisions and their country’s future.

2.Identity and belonging: A sense of belonging to a nation.

3.Economic opportunity: A shot at economic success, including education and the chance to earn a livelihood.

4.Knowledge and information: Reliable information and sources of truth.

5.Home and environment: A residence, a community, and a wider environment of which they can be proud.

6.Security and health: Protection from violence and care for health needs.

7.Creation and culture: The means to create and consume art, to express creativity, and to pursue hobbies and leisure.

8.Justice and dignity: A sense of prevailing fairness both at home and in the wider world, and the chance at a dignified life.

(The list is not an exhaustive survey of young Algerians’ concerns, which are as diverse as they themselves are. Some priorities, like faith and gender, for example, infuse so many areas that they are better explored throughout rather than in isolation. The themes listed are just a starting point for understanding Algeria’s young generations—who I hope will share their stories with the world in their own words.)

This book explores how young Algerians view each of these critical facets of the Algerian Dream; where their state and society succeeded or failed to provide them with these essentials; how those failures offended their dignity and drove them to open revolt in 2019; and where the delicate situation in the country is heading.

The story is not a simple one, and the tensions at its heart remain unresolved today. But from within this cloud of uncertainty, Algeria’s recent past can nonetheless illuminate its future, including the greatest question on the horizon: As they come of age, then eventually inherit the reins of the country, how will Algeria’s youth seek to refashion their homeland and the world?

Few outsiders have had the privilege to get to know Algeria and its youth so intimately—or to observe firsthand this pivotal chapter in the nation’s history. It’s a story that reveals much about the relationship between citizens and leaders, about the sanctity of human dignity, about what it truly means to love one’s country, and about the power of dreams and the courage to pursue them.

---

1 Démographie algérienne 2019 (bis) (Office National des Statistiques, April 2020).

Part I

The Crossroads Years (2012–2018)

We will defeat you, because you are the past and we are the future.

—Larbi Ben M’hidi

Chapter 1.

Political Voice

Fourth term! Fourth term! the crowd chanted.

Behind the podium, Algeria’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, paused and peered stone-faced at his notes, giving no indication that the supporters’ admiration was mutual.²

It was May 8, 2012, and Bouteflika had been campaigning for weeks, crisscrossing the country to address large crowds. This would be his final speech of the campaign. Bouteflika himself wasn’t on the ballot; this was a legislative election—and a high-stakes one, coming just a year after the Arab Spring swept the