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Editors

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Rosemary Betterton, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Brieuc-Yves Cadat, North-Holland Participation Institute, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Nanny de Vries, Najade Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gert [trekma, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Isabel Hoving, University of Amsterdam & University of Leiden, The Netherlands

Jill LeBihan, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Sara Mills, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
Ann Phoenix, University of London, London, UK
Thelma Ravell-Pinto, Olympus College, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Sue Vice, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Gloria Wekker, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Founding Editors
Jan Best, Najade Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Nanny de Vries, Najade Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Editorial oard
Ernst van Alphen, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Inge Boer, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Carole Boyce Davies, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Nehru Memorial Museum aud Library, New Delhi, India
Saskia Wieringa, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands

Advisory Board
Barbara Brookes, University of Otago, Otago, Nevr Zealand
Joceline Clemencia, Cultural Institute Independence, Willemstad, Curagao
Irene Dlling, University of Potsdam, Berlin, FRG
Lillian Faderman, Californian State University, Fresno, CA, USA
Rehana Ghadially, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
Ifurla Gruodis, Gender Studies, University of Vilnius, Vilnius, Lithuania
Judith Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Magda Karabelova, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
Marilyn Katz, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA
Annette Kuhn, Rhein. Friedr. Wilhelms University, Bonn, FRG
Julia Leslie, University of London, London, UK
elma Leydesdorfi Universiry of ,A,msterdam, Amsterdam The Netherlands
,lulie Marcus, Charles Sturt University, Albury, NS\M, Australia
Yvonne Mokgoro, Braamfontein, South Africa
Nakanyike Musisi, University of Toronto, Toronto, ONT, Canada
Ivelanie Nolan, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Nan Peacocke, Hastings, Christ Church, Barbados

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, University of Ponnsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
Qi Wen Ying, Peking University, Beijing, China

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Thamyris ISSN 1381-1312

1 Spring 1998, pp.79-104

Vol.5 No.

The Cadats
Saharan Blach Christians'
Brieuc-Yves Cadat

Kada ben Abdellah, accompanied by his wife Fatima bent Ahmed ben
Salem, tribe of Timimoun (Ksar2Deldoul-Marcinat) is authorised to go
to Ghardaa to work there for the person called Zohra .

The administrative note, traced in

clumsy hand, meanders under the

titles of a French colonial leave-pass written for Kada, my Algerian

grandfather.3 I possess the duplicate of this document. Joseph Cadat, my

father, gave it to me. The form is bilingual French-Arabic.

printed in fat letters:

It

reads,

Oran's division. An-Sefra's subdivision. Territory of Saharan Oasis.

Annexe of Timimoun. Circulation permit no. 345. The present permit
will be valid for 1 year. Timimoun, on August L3,1906, The annexe's
Commander-Captain [unreadable signature].
1
My gratitude goes out to Ronald Eissens and Jill LeBihan who edited respectively the
basic and final English version of this article. Besides I wish to thank Gert Hekma and Gloria
Wekker for their editorial work and their critical comments on earlier versions of this article.
Last but not least I am indebted to Pieter Kersten for putting at my disposal documentation and
photos of El Golea and the Cathedral of the Desert.
2
Ksar,plvalksour,is a tiny hamlet or a fortified house located in an oasis.
3
His real name, however, is Kada ben Abdelhi ben Boudjema ben Omar ben Salah ben
Larbi ben Sidi Ahmed.

B0

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

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The

Cadats 81

Kada died h 1970 at La Chapelle-sous-Aubenas, in the centre of the

Ardche, France. Reading this document touches me every time. It
reminds me, Brieuc-Yves Joseph Marie Alex Cadat, black Breton,
Christian of the Sahara,a of my Algerian years.

Ghardaa

It all started in Ghardaa, capital of Mzab,s at the beginning of the

century. An unknown French officer leaves Kada, native black adolescent, in the good care of an Arab woman who has converted t Catholicism. Her name is HenrietteZohraDelacroix. She is a native of the region
of Djelfa, south of Algiers. The administration has registered her under
the plain name of Zohra. She manages a kind of pub for the local soldiers
at Ghardaa. Why is she Catholic? Because she has been rescued, brought
up and baptised in one of the orphanages in Algeria founded by the
Primate of Africa at that time, Mgr. Charles-Martial Lavigerie.6As for
the officer, he returns to France at the end of an Algerian colonial stay in
Timimoun, the red oasis lying along the Great Western Erg. He wants to
take Kada back to France with him. However the enterprise fails in
Ghardaa, when the laws of the Republic stand in the way. The law denies
theAlgerians access to France.T Should he escort Kadabackto Timimoun?
This is not easy. The oasis is situated more than six hundred kilometres
away, a fifteen-day journey on the back of a camel. The officer gives a
sum of money to Henriette Zohra, who is charged with the care for the
adolescent. The journey of Kada ends in Ghardaa. Henriette Zohra likes
him and decides to keep him with her. Kada will grow up in Ghardaa.
Timimoun
1906: Kada is now a young adult at the age to get married. The
decision is taken to go back to his natal oasis. The importance of the
matter justifies the endeavour. Kada returns to Timimoun in Henriette
a

The word Sahara is derived from the Arabic word "Sahra" which means desert, empty

The region ofthe ethnic group "Mozabites" in the Sahara.

aea.

Cardinal Lavigerie (1825-1893), founder of the anti-slavery corporation (1888) and

participating in the anti-slavey congess of Brussels in 1889, devoted his life to fighting the
persistence of slavery in the Muslim countries and to evangelise the populations. His proselytism will have limited success: there will hardly be more than a few thousands of converts. The
slavery of Blacks, practised in the Algerian South, will not be wiped out before the Algerian
6

independence in1962.
7
Algeria became a French colony in 1830.

82

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

Zohra's company. His family quickly arranges

Muslim wedding. Kada

the ksar BeniMelouk, she from the ksar Deldoul-Marcinat, both near Timimoun.
Kada and Fatima belong to Hartani8 ethnic groups concentrated
a

will marry Fatima, my grandmother. He originates from

around the palm garden oasis. Kada is, according to his own statements,
a free Black,e the son of a maraboutlo whose mausoleum still attracts

worshippers today. The prosperous region of Saoura, where its main

centre, the oasis of Timimoun, is located, is quite fascinating. At the time,
it presented two faces: the face of general trade in commodities ranging
from gold to books, and the face of the trade in human beings, abolished
by the French but still tolerated by the military authorities. The Saoura
is known for the trans-Saharan slave trade between Arab and Black
Africa. It explains the very presence in this region of many folks of slave
descent. They are called a'bi (servants or black slaves). The caravan
tracks there link up the Southern Sahel
- that is to say Niger, Chad and
Mali
to the Northern Sahel, composed of the Algerian and Tunisian
coasts so well described by Fromentin. In Timimoun, the peasants have
practised the growing of vegetables, cereals and especially date palm
trees for generations. In terms of religion, their Muslim faith is mixed
with animist rituals. The local language is Berber. Kada and Fatima, as
almost everyone, are illiterate and their mother tongue is zenati, the local
dialect. They also speak an Arab dialect, the lingua franca tsed in order
to communicate with travellers. The assimilationist colonisation will
later impose the French language. Thinking about this multilinguism
brings back memories of my grandmother's linguistic decay during the
last years of her life. She progressively forgot the languages she had
learned as an adult. First she forgot French, then Arabic. In the last
she died in Aubenas, France, in 1984
months of her life
- she could

barely express herself other than in zenati, the language of her origins.
Near the oasis of Timimoun, in this landscape of massive dunes and
stony hamadas,ll Kada and Fatima were born in about 1,885 and 1892
respectively. Their dates of birth are registered by the French administration that calculates these approximately by referring to local memories
of peculiar circumstances. Were they born in the year of the falling star?
Was this the year of truffles? Nobody knows exactly. It is certain that
they were both born before the conquest of In-Salah in 1899, a decisive
moment in the oppression of the Sahara by the French army. The
8

Black farmers from (mixed) Berber and Arab origin.

As far as we know, he is not a redeemed slave as Father Roger Duvollet claims
- without
proof in his memoirs (Duvollet, Pre Roger [19881,Les trois provinces d'Algrie. AuSahara,
CollectionAfrique duNord, volume IX, Vesoul, Collge St Georges du Marteroy,210).
10
Spiritual Muslim leader, ssen as a descendant of the Prophet.
11
A stony tableland.
e

The

colonisation therefore

will

Cadats 83

determine their lives. France attributes

second-rate statute to the Algerian populations. The Code of the native,

a special law, is applied first to Kabylia, as early as 1878 to the Territories
of the South and at last to the whole Algerian territory. Under this law,
Fatima and Kada are subject to specific rights, duties and prohibitions.
This explains why, in 1906r Kada ad Fatima are not free to move from
Timimoun to Ghardaa without military authorisation. When my grandparents leave Timimofin, the Algerian Sahara has existed as a political
entity for four years, on the basis of the decree of December 2 4, L9OZ.The
administrative entity of the Territories of the South is divided into four

circumscriptions: An Sefra, Laghouat, Ouargla and Oasis. General

Laperrine conquered the great Saharan desertin 1901. The old permit that
I presented at the beginning of this article evokes the inequity of this
epoch. According to this permit, Kada and Fatima are given permission
to go to Ghardaa. In fact, they never manage to get there, because, on the
way to the capital of Mzab, they make their final stop in the oasis of El
Golea.
Seven long day-trips on the back of camels separate El Golea from
Timimoun, situated at the southern foot of the Saharan Atlas. Seven torrid
days of dark tracks, a dry climate and thermal contrasts alongside the
western edge of the plateau of Tademat. Seven clear and frozen nights
passed on the border of the Great Western Erg in the uniform, bejewelled
immensity of the South-Sahara. Neither Fatima nor Kada, indeed no one,
suspects that in that soil an industrial wealth slumbers that will overturn
the serenity of the desert in the decades to come: oil, natural gas, uranium,
iron. An absolute drought reigns here, maintained by the sandstorms of
the sirocco. At last, near the bend of the track, appears the oasis: El Golea,
"Sahara's door", the "desert's pearl", famous for its Sand Roses.12

El Golea
El Golea, reached as early as 1859 by the French Duveyrier expedition, in 1906 displays its palm tree gardens and its towering cypresses
under a crumbling Berber fortress. This elderly ksar, called El Menia
("the impregnable" in Arab) gave its name to the oasis in its golden age.
The French occupied it in 1873 and renamed it El Golea ("the fortress").13
It is built on a hill. The eye of the attentive pedestrian stumbles over the
traces of fossilised shells and stone tools dating back to greener and

wetter neolithic times.

13

of crystallised gypsum.
Algeria gave it back its name El Menia after the decolonisation.

-'Ro.",

84

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

Ksar El Menia ("the impregnable") that gave its name to the oasis.
foreground a Muslim cemetery. Pieter Kersten copydght 1993.

In

the

When the caravar coming from Timimoun and bound for Ghardaa
comes to El Golea, Henriette Zohra,Kada and Fatima decide to stop there

for some time because they need to rest and find the financial means to
a white Catholic Arab and
two black Muslim Berbers illustrates what the Sahara is about: an area of
contact and of transition between White and Black Africa. El Golea is
also the place where Henriette Zohra meets Layani, called "Laagta", a
native Jew running a coffee bar. This encounter marks the beginning of
a friendship and solidarity that, beyond the rupture accompanying Algerian independence, lasts until today between the families, now sheltered
in France. The presence of the local French Command - set up in 1891
and with Captain Lamy as its first post commander - should permit
Henriette Zohra to open a pub for soldiers, like in Ghardaa. Layani
donates some bottles of absinthe. Their dreams do not come true. The
clientele is scarce. There is only poverty. Is it providence? The Catholic
Church has since L897 a local mission, consisting of two priests and a
brother. The superior, Father Richard, aware of the presence in the oasis
of a Catholic Arab reduced to misery, intervenes. He helps the trio. He
hires Kada, who then has the opportunity to devote himself to do what he
knows best: gardening. Kada takes care of the mission's orchard and
learns French. From garden to church, there is only a small step' Pushedby
Henriette Zohra, their adoptive mother, Kada and Fatima decide to become Catholics. The catechisation will last four years, applying the strict
rules adopted by the missionaries. Kada is taught to read and write in French.

go on with the trip. The intimate trio formed by

The

Cadats 85

Saturday, May 14,l-91-0, the day of Pentecost: Kada is now called

Pierre, Fatima is called Marie; they havq just been baptised and married
in company of their young children, Lucie and Jean-Baptiste, the first
ones of fourteen children. The moment is exceptional because the
Catholic Church has just made them the first Christian natives of the
Sahara. The small black Catholic community of El Golea has been
founded. A special community. After all, it is not widely known that it is
not only in Kabylia but also in the Sahara itself that these rare and
ephemeral Christian communities of Algeria have existed.

Father de Foucauld's Devotees

Between 1910 and 1.9L6, the new Christians regularly meet the
famous and very controversial hermit of the desert, Eugne Charles,
Vicomte de Foucauld, named Father de Foucauld. De Foucauld, also
Charles, Brother of Jesus, lives in solitude at an altitude of 2750
metres on the plateau of the Assekrem, the highest point of the Ahaggar
Mountains, where he established an hermitage. It is near Tamanrasset,
850 kilometres south of El Golea. He stays at the Christian mission at the
time of his passage in El Golea. Pierre cuts his hair, and Marie and

known

as

Henriette Zohra take care of his ironing. My grandmother will remain

strongly marked by the encounter with de Foucauld for the rest of her life.
Several years later, in France, towards the end of the Seventies, Marie,
eighty-seven years old, is asked to give her testimony on de Foucauld.
The Catholic Church is making a preliminary investigation for the
beatification proceedings of de Foucauld. In the document that concerns
her, Marie explains:
My two elder children knew Father de Foucauld; the only thing of which
they remember is that he told them: "The cat ate your tongue". They
were not talkative with him but knew how to appreciate the candies that
he gave to them.la

My grandmother participated in the presumed charity work of the

Brother of Jesus. She explains:
When he wanted to do a charity to the poor, he gave a sum of money
to his friend Father Richard. This last one bought semolina and fabric
and this was given to me to make clothing for the poor and good
couscous to satisfy the hunger of the starved.15
1a

Cadat, Marie (1979), Tmoignage sur Charles de Foucauld, Lettre Monseigneur B

J acqueline, unpublished, personal archives, 2.

15

Idem,

1.

86

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

Father de Foucauld in the company of two redeemed

slaves including his Catholic servant Paul Embarek (sitting).

of Senoussi, Sunni Muslim zealots

raiding into the Hoggar, assassinate Charles de Foucauld. Father de
Foucauld was rburied in 1945 in the Christian cemetery of the ftsar Bel
Bachir near El Golea, between the graves of the Cadats. The Touaregs of
Tamanrasset asked for his heart to be preserved. When the wooden coffin
that contained the remains of Charles de Foucauld was replaced, all El
Golea's Christians attended the exhumation. Fervently, many of them
collected pieces of the original coffin. From this moment on, these people
always bear, as does my father, this modest wooden debris, testifying to
the spiritual presence of de Foucauld. Charles, Brother of Jesus: their
saint, the universal light of their Saharan faith. De Foucauld, the opponent
of slavery,l6 representing for the black Christians of the Sahara the
justification of their conversion to the Christian faith.
For me as her grandson, looking back at this story, it can be seen that
Decernber First, 1916: a faction

de Foucauld represents the spiritual subjugation ofthose black Christians

to the white master. This is evident in the fact that my grandmother,

16
"Not only those who are slaves remain slaves, but one buys, one sells every day to the
view and to the knowledge of officers (...). This is not only the slavery, this is the theft of

children, the rape of al1 persons that sanction here the French authority." (Foucauld, Charles de,
"La grande question est celle de l'esclavage", Lettre Mgr. Gurin, 28 June 1902, in Denise &
Robert Barrat (1958), Charles de Foucauld et la fraternit, Collection Maitres spirituels,
Editions du Seuil-Paris, 124-125.

The

Cadats 87

throughout her life, would tell people that her hand had shaken the one
of her "dear de Foucauld". It is striking that she would remember such a
petty fact. For her de Foucauld was everything. He gave meaning to her
life. For de Foucauld, Fatima was nothing. She was not worthy enough
in his eyes for him to hand her the money to make clothes and food. She
was not an equal. Father Richard was his equal. Black Christians to him
all looked alike. They were not individuals but instruments of his
mission. All her life Fatima put de Foucauld on a pedestal. She did not
realise that her work made his beatification possible. Between my
grandmother as a black woman and de Foucauld as a white man there was
no real communication. He built his reputation on the erasure of people

like her.
The New French Citizens
1914: World War I begins. The mobilised missionaries leave for the
front line. Church and garden are placed in the charge of Pierre Cadat.
After the war, Pierre remains in the service of the fathers as a horticulturist. He has his own house in an enclave of the orchard of the mission.
L92t:Pieteaccepts a better position as chief-gardener of El Gol ea. 1923:
Pierre chooses to take on French nationality and he is admitted on
Saturday the 27thof October t923 "to enjoy the rights of a French Citizen
by application of articles 1 and 4 of the Senatus-Consult of July 1-4,
1.865".17 The decree is signed Alexandre Millerand, President of the
French Republic. The patronymic evolution of the family illustrates the
double religious and juridical adventure of Pierre and Marie, this black
couple in colonial Algeria. My grandfather
- although baptised - is still
officially registered under his Muslim surname (see note 3). He has since
1910 the statute of "Christian Muslim Indigenous" [sic]. His family name

will

be changed when he becomes a French ciiizen. The French administration on one hand transmutes his Arabic first name into a French name
and on the other hand eliminates the Muslim patronymic names. The
Arab first name Kada becomes the French family name Cadat.18 A new
French citizenis born: Pierre Charles Flix Cadat. This name henceforth
will be carried by the following generations. It is mine today. From Kada

the

1?
The Senatus-consult of 1865 makes the "native Muslims" French subjects submilted to
Muslim law. Do they want to enjoy civil rights? They may ask for them, although in daily

practice the administration does hamper the procedure. "Native Muslims" who are accepted, are
then submitted to the civil andpolitical laws of France. This implies loss of their special Muslim
status and denial of their religion.
18
My grandmother's name, Fatima bent Ahmed ben Salem, becomes "Anne Marie
Madeleine Vincent" in 1966.

BB

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

to Cadat in less than a generation indigenous Blacks are integrated into

the French nation on a religious and juridical level. They did not cut the
links with their Muslim family. The Muslim Melloukis, the half-brothers
of Pierre Cadat, Ahmed and Boudjema came from Timimoun in the
Thirties, to settle in El Golea with the help of their brother. Joseph, my

father, has still a lively memory of the first time he met with uncle
Boudjema and his wife and his son Hamel. They spoke exclusively in
Berber. Pierre built houses for the brothers at the ksar of Badriane and
bought them gardens. They remained Muslim and their converted brother
always respected their faith. On the eve of the Second World War, my
grandparents had a family of fourteen children, half of them boys, half of
them girls. Lucie is the oldest daughter. She is bqrn in 1907. Her sisters
Marie-Thrse, Frangoise, Bathilde, Marie-Jeanne, Marie-Clmence and
Madeleine are born between 1.91.2 and 1927 . Jean-Baptiste (1910) is the
eldest son. His brothers Louis, Gabriel, Robert, Joseph, Michel and Flix
are born between l-91-5 and 1936. My father's brothers each have half a
dozen children. The first grandchildren have been born. In thirty years the
black El Golea family has grown from a single married couple to a clan
of fifty people and will expand very quickly. The eldest sons of Boudjema,
Hamel, and Mhamed and his daughters, Acha and Messaouda, grew up
in the company of my father. Thanks to their uncle, the nephews, Hamel
and IMhamed went to the school of the White Fathers. Were they ever

tempted to become Catholics? Maybe, but the rupture

of Algerian

Independence hinders any vague desires. In any case, the education they
received allowed their upward social mobility. Mhamed became the
renamed El Menia after Independdirector of the airport of El Golea
and Hamel was in charge of the department of fuel at the same
ence

airport.

World War

II and lts Aftermath

The years flowed on peacefully. Then World War II exploded. Joseph

remembers the departures to the war:

I remember it as though it were today the day that all our children [the
male conscripts] left from El Golea and Saint Joseph lksar near El
Golea where Catholics lived]. There was a big farewell party in the
garden of the White Fathers of El Golea, near the house of my father.
Big trucks took all the people, families, all young people, on their way
to the front line, on the Rhine and the Danube and all. I remember it as

if it was yesterday. It was in 1939,I was

le

1-1

years old.le

Interview with Joseph Cadat, audio recording from January 10, 1994, personal archives.

The

Cadats 89

Uncle Robert is killed in action. He is buried in El Golea. His grave still

exists, next to the one of Father de Foucauld. The black Christians of the
Sahara struggled against Nazi barbarism.
Marie-Clmence, my aunt who became a nun, remembers daily
supply difficulties:
During the war of 40, there was so much starvation that the people from
Saint-Joseph had absolutely nothing. They were given bran, one kilo for
on person. One day Father Lusson visits Frangoise [one ofthe daugh-

ters of Pierre and of Marie]. Good, she was busy making bread or
couscous with that stuff. The men were at the frontline, and the people
desperate with hunger. The Father asked her: "But, is this all that you
have?" She says: "this is all that they gave us." "How is that?", says
Father Lusson,"allthe men went to the frontline for France and this is
all that France give to you?" He jumps on his bicycle and he goes right
away to the military annexe. "But my captain, listen to me, what does
this mean? All our men, they are over there in France in daily danger
and here their children are starving. You give them a kilo ofgrain. Ifyou
do not immediately take care of this, I'11 telephone the General Gover'nor in Algiers right away." And after this everyone gets all they need.
After the intervention ofFather Lusson everyone had a right to clothing,
to bread, just like the Europeans, because we were also French.2o

Pierre Cadat retires in1945, at the age of sixty. The Cadats grow up, get
married, enlarge their gardens, set themselves up in the oasis and
construct their life and their community in'the Sahara. It is the period in
which the Algerian nationalist Muslim movement develops and claims,
more and more strongly, first reformation, next autonomy, and at last
independence and the departure of the French. But for the Cadats, this is
a confused politics that only concerns the North. The Sahara is another
world in their eyes, in their experience. In this universe limited to the
gardens, to the desert and to faith, they have no political interest. They
do not care about the ongoing National Liberation Movement of Hadj
Messali and of Ferhat Abbas, about the National Liberation Front of Ben
Bella and Krim Belkacem or about the Algerian National Movement.

Denise Bricaud, My Breton Mother

My mother Denise, born Bricaud, has, on the contrary, a strong

interest in Algerian nationalism. She discovers the Sahara in1954 during
a trip through the Maghreb. Denise is from French Brittany. She stems
20

Interview with sister Marie-Clmence Cadat, audio recording from January 10, 1994,

personal archives.

90

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

from a rough, proud and poor chouanne (ethnic Breton) farmer aristoccultivated its fields
racy that
according to the family'S oral tradition
bearing the sword. Denise supports the struggle for the independence of

Algeria. This is because she

- as a supporter of independence for
Brittany
shares the desire for liberty ofoppressed people. Denise reads
Fanon, admires Senghor and Csaire. Nowadays she still quotes the
romantic exclamation of Xavier Grall, Breton protest-singer: "Negritude,
celtitude. The mood today is the 'right to be different'. Senghor did not
wait for the mood to proclaim his difference as a Black. As for us, we are
Bretons who have shouted in the wind and cried our singularity as Celts
around the town. Our identity could not be read by the colour of our skin,
alas! And thus we had considerable troublebeing heard (...)." Denise is
active during her youth, on the eve of World War II, as a militant in the
Nationalist Breton Party (PNB): BreizAtao!Brittany for Ever! InL954,
when the Algerian insurrection begins, she is still secretly a member of
the PNB. In France, the Breton flag is forbidden at this time. The state
forbids all Breton political expression as being of a seditious nature.
Denise wished "to see how nations get rid of French colonialism".22 In
1956 she gets her nomination as a Catholic schoolteacher in rebel
Algeria, in the southern Sahara... at El Golea! Denise is 34 years old and
quite enthusiastic. She leaves Nantes by rail to Marseille, embarks on a
passenger ship for Algiers and then travels again by train to Djelfa,
followed by a bus to Ghardaa. A truck, at last, carries her to El Golea to
take up her post. An immortal mernory. Ghardaa is left behind on
Thursday at about 18 hours. The truck rolls all night on the track
meandering between the dunes. Friday morning, half past nine, rising
heat. Denise discovers El Golea's palm tree garden leaning from the
Bten (plateau) which overlooks the oasis. This is the last weekend of
September and she is just in time to get ready for school. Denise meets
Joseph next Sunday at mass. They are part of a small group, hybrid of
culture and of skin, in a place where young people meet, Catholics, Jews
and Muslims, in spite of the racial and religious divisions of the oasis.

Joseph Cadat, My Saharan Father

When Denise reaches El Golea, Joseph, my father, is 28 years old. He
is the twelfth child of the family. Thanks to his diploma in Agriculture,
put in charge of a 30
in spite of local European jealousies
he is

C al

21
Grall, Xavier (1991), "Ngritude", in Bernard Guillemot, Les vents m'ont dit. Quimper
ligrammes, Quimper, 97.
22
Interview with Denise Cadat, recorded December 27 , 1994, personal archives.

The

Cadats

9L

hectare experimental agricultural station. This farm is situated at Hassiel-Gara (ksar near El Golea) where I pass the first )rears of my life. Joseph
experiments on a small scale with what will later be developed on a huge
scale in the Northwest of the Oranais Sahara at Emballa (region of An
Sefra). He is a specialist in the knowledge of thephoenix dactylifera, the

palm tree that produces the delicious date that is called deglet-nour,
which means "light's finger". The experimental station becomes internationally known. Joseph will show many heads of state around during
official visits to the Sahara, from de Gaulle to N'Krumah.

Mixed Family and Colonial Racism

On May 26, L956, Denise and Joseph get married. The next year,
Denise, after the birth of her first daughter, Anne-Galle (1.957), abardons her schoolteacher's post and works at Hassi-el-Gata, in the farm's
office. Denise, Joseph and their children form a mixed household realising at El Golea a racial union despised by the supporters of racial division.
These belong to the clan of colonists as well as to the camp of the
colonised. At the time, this unusual wedding of a native Black with a
white metropolitan, surprises, irritates, and is seen as racial treason. The
Europeans of the oasis try to put Denise under pressure so that she will
break her engagement with Joseph. My father, for those people, is
nothing but a Negro whom they denigrate.
Whatcanyou expectfrom colonials? In 1956, colonialracism, hostile
towards interbreeding and miscegenation, is still very much alive. It
reveals itself fully in the writings of Robert, winner of the Algerian
literature award in t934:
Not a pure white, or a true black. Hybrids, quadroons, octavoons,
whateverl The whole range of the yellow ones and brown, from
cappuccino to gingerbread, from nut-brown to mahogany, from ashen
to soot. Hodgepodge of Bambaras, of Toucouleurs and of Sonras, of
Fellanis and of Tibbous, of Mandingues and of Peuhls, of which the
cohabitation with the conquering white races, Arabic and Berber,
engendered these hybrid monsters, without brain or face: black albino
and Negroid whites, and makes of the Sahara at the same time the hall
and the extension of Sudan, a huge ngrerie [Negro's region]; so well
that one can say, as early as Touggourt and Figuig: the Ngrerie begins
here.23

Robert, Claude-Maurice (1934),L'envofitement du Sud, d'El Kantara Djanet,diions

'z3
Baconnier-Alger,1,47.'lhe book has a laudatory preface by mile-Felix Gautier, famous

colonial geographer and historian, professor at the University of Algiers.

92

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

This is the horror of the mixed, the aversion of the racial melting pot
sprinkled with the colonial speech of teratological notions. This is
colonial literature. The eurocentrist superiority feeling is not absent in the
social sciences. Robert Capot-Rey,2a professor of anthropology at the
writes
he personally knows the Cadat family
University of Algiers
populations
in L953 about the Algerian oasis: "Isolated in the middle of
of other races, the Europeans dominate those locals thanks to their energy
that is not diminished by heredity of fatalism and misery."2s And again:
"In the eyes of the Blacks, Arabs and Berbers, all these men [young St.
Cyriens; ageing road menders] of our race are also bosses. In this
hierarchy that establishes itself spontaneously within a corporation,
survival depends on the energy of some individuals, there was a peremptory justification for the presence of the French."26
And the colonised? Arabs and white Berbers see the Blacks as beings
from slave descent. The progressive abolition of slavery gives a special
form to the opposition of black and white. An anonymous priest notes
acutely in 194L: "Their Negroes, their former slaves have in fact only
contempt for them [the Arabs]. They help them only if Arabs help them.
If Arabs insult them, they insult them back. The proud Arab that, this
evening at the market, squatted in a corner with other nomads speaks
despisingly about Negroes, suddenly becomes very polite in drinking tea
with the black who gives him something to eat when he is hungry. There,
in small company, he calls Miloud his brother and Acha his sister."27
During the French colonisation the black and French Catholics and
mulattos from El Golea were assigned a peculiar position. The white
Arabs of the oasis consider them as inferior on a racial level. Nevertheless, at the same time, they are situated generally, as opposed to Arabs,
on a superior level in the local economic and social hierarchy. This is
because of their double political and religious status as French citizens

and Catholics. Then, in a double move of racist and anti-colonial

rejection, the white and Muslim Arabs of El Golea, subjects of the
Republic, treat these black M'tournis (apostates) as what they are to
them; the same as roumis (white Catholic Europeans) and as kalouches
(Negroes).
This is the somewhat tragic and schizophrenic position of the Cadats.
They belong to two worlds: on the one hand they are part of the colonised
Algerian Sahara as black Berbers and Muslims; on the other hand they are
part of the western colonial world, being Christian and French. In both
The works of Robert CaporRey still figure on the program of certain aggregations.
Robert (1953), Z e Sahara Frangais, P.U.F.-Paris, 201.
'z5 Capot-Rey,

2a

26ldem,20l.

27
Anonymous IPar un missionnaire] (1941), Petites Monographies Sahariennes, Collection Rachid-Alger, 21.

The

Cadats 93

Family portrait (1960): in my grandparents' courtyard. From left to right, adults: Fatima
Cadat, my granny; Denise Bricaud, my mother; Pierre Cadat, my granddad; Joseph Cadat, my

father; children: Anne-Galle, my first-born sister and myself.

traditions they are considered as junior partners and are therefore neve
fully recognised by those to whose world they belong.

Saharan Childhood
I was born in France, on the air force base of Luxeuil-les-Bains where
one of my maternal uncles, a career military man, is posted. My name
indicates my double origin: Berber and Breton. I am 15 days old when I

94

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

reach El Golea in L95B in the arms of my mother, Denise Bricaud. The

Algerian War has been agitating in the North for four years, the Battle of
Algiers is one year old and the Fourth Republic has just died in the putsch
of generals Salan and Massu in Algiers. Charles de Gaulle, the General,
has just come into power in France and the Fifth Republic has just been

born.

My first memory goes back to the luminous and burning years spent
in Hassi-el-Gara. My family lives there, isolated from El Golea by five
kilometres of track. My younger years pass there in serenity. During the
day, my mother teaches us to read and write. I practice the alphabet every
afternoon sitting at our garden table, an old, small, yellow, painted, metal
table. I practice writing. The hand of iny mother leads mine firmly. The
violet ink dirties my thumb and my index finger. At the end of the day,
the heat diminishes and the homework is over. I go along with Boubaker,
the gardener, on his round of the orchards and the animals. The ordered
palm tree gardens, planted tree after troe by my father, seem huge to me.
They shelter the vegetable gardens. The beans grow to the height of a
person there. We are in the midst of the Sahara, away from the oasis. Here,
nevertheless, thanks to the artesian well dug for ground water, fruit and
vegetables proliferate. I like quenching my thirst with fresh crystal water
drawn from the guerba (Algerian canteen made of goatskin). Sometimes
the brutal sirocco pervades everything, all night long. I remain inside,
safe. The acetylene lamp whistles and emits a faint odour. At last, I fall
asleep. In the morning, the wind suspends its sandy whirlwinds and with
my sisters Anne-Galle and Marie-Christine, I play in the courtyard with
the small dunes formed during the night. Generally, the air of the desert
keeps its absolute serenity. In the evening, the whole family gathers on
the house's clean terrace with those high walls whitewashed with lime.
The nocturnal canvas of the Saharan sky satisfies my gaze. There are
quiet noises climbing from the palm tree garden close by. We doze off.
On Sundays, there is mass in the small church of the oasis. I pray with
fervour even if I do not understand anything of the traditional Latin.
Always, I ask my mother, during he Kyrie Eleison: "Say mom, why do
the hedgehogs laugh?" (In French theGreekKyrie Eleison, a holy prayer,
sounds vaguely like "the hedgehogs laugh"). After the mass, this is the
time of strolls. We go to the desert. We often visit an old crumbling house
some kilometres away from the oasis, of which the enclosure wall always
intrigues me. A huge dinosaur has been painted here almost invisible,
buried under a climbing sand dune. My mother explained to me that it was
the house of colonel Augiras,z8 who retired here, and who died in 1958.
28

Several years later I will discover

- thanks to Gert Hekma, professor at the University
FranEois Augiras (1925-1971), "maudit" writer, and nephew of colonel

of Amsterdam

The

Cadats 95

In his home, he had built a Saharan museum that my parents often visited.
My mother knew how to tell me about Augiras, stories that excited my
young imagination. For instance, he had brought back monkeys from subSaharan Africa. These had cruelly injured his black servant Papagou
a friend of my uncle Jean Cadat, who was in charge of the monkeys but
doing a bad job. After walks, in the evening, the whole family meets in
the gardens of my El Golea granddad. The adults talk, mostly in an Arab

dialect.

do not understand anything, but

I remain seated quietly,

listening to the melody of the language. I do not speakArabic because my

parents only speak French at home. Arabic is my father's language at
work, with his parents, brothers and sisters andArab friends. My mother
never learned to speak Arabic. French is the language of the household.
My father is afraid that learning Arabic could be a first step towards Islam
for his children, the religion on which his parents, these M'tournis turned
their back. So I grew up in this country, Algeria, learning very few of the
cultural foundations which are Arab and Islam.
It is in this cultural context, faded by the distance that separates Hassiel-Gara from El Golea, that I go through my first experiences in the real
world in company of my sisters Anne-Galle (1957) and Marie-Christine
where my
(1962). After El Golea, our family will stay in Laghouat
younger brother Herv will die in 1966, some days after his birth, as a
result of blood poisoning. Our last Algerian years flow away at Ouargla
and it is from this oasis that we shall leave Algeria for France it 197l, ten
years after Independence.

The End of French

Algeria

I was hardly aware of the ongoing Algerian war. It was not very
visible in the S ahara and I was too young. I remembe r v aguely a fe ll a gh a2s
killed in action. My child's memory retained the pictures - a darkbody
without understanding it. My parents
wrapped up in white rags
explained it to me later. The corpse lay stretched out on El Golea's centtal
sqrare. French soldiers had exposed it publicly as a warning. The good
Father Cougoula went

to tell them: "This is shameful, you act as

FranEois Augiras is twenty years old when he stays with his uncle at
the post El Golea in the aftermath of the Second World War. FranEois Augiras undergoes a
homosexual experience there, an initiation of which he gives an account in his essentially
autobiographicalwork Le vieillard et I'enfan published in 1954 by Editions de Minuit under
the pseudonym of Abdallah Chaamba. The text of the original edition is sprinkled with details
assciated with the story of Cadat: the Black Christians of the oasis, the French schoolteachers,
the monkeys, the total eclipse of the moon on December 15, 1948 which one remembers vividly
in my family, the tomb of Father de Foucauld.
2e
Algerian partisan.

a"glOr* ff880-1958).

96

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

monsters." The fellaghas were not unknown to Hassi-el-Gara, during the

two last war years. These evenings, visitors were local folks, our neighbours. They stay with their family between clashes, sometimes drop by
the farm where they know they will find a charitable reception. Joseph
and Denise help the indigent families of the Algerian fighters, through the
International Red Cross and Caritas
- within the limits impinged upon
them by the war's circumstances. They do this out of Christian spirit and
belief in justice and solidarity. The French soldiers, finally informed of
this, occupy the outbuildings of the farm for several months. In the
aftermath of Independence, the local militants of the National Liberation
Front (FLN) will remember the solidarity of my parents with emotion.
The Algerian war is also the moment of the vain attempt by Joseph
to politically conquer El Golea's City Hall in the name of a party of
natives. A late democratic reformation widens the electorate. The municipal elections of 1959 give the opportunity to exercise one's citizenship. Joseph canvasses for an innovative political group, culturally and
racially mixed. He does it with his friend De Souqual, a West Indian
mestizo from Martinique, manager of the main local radio station,
married to a European woman of Spanish origin. The other political camp
represents settlers and soldiers. The annexe's commander actively supports them. The alternative political attempt fails. Joseph loses the
elections. Denise explains this failure by the electoral fraud organised by
the oasis' colonists. As an electorate helper of the Cadat-De Souqual's list
at the voting office she notices that her colleagues
- settler rromen behave in a very curious way with the native ladies entitled to vote: they
give them exclusively the ballot papers of Cadat's opponents. Denise
rebels, calls Joseph. Political scandal. A supervision is set up. From this
moment on, my mother is accused, more or less explicitly, of subversion.
The commander explains to everyone listening to him that it is only
because she is a Cadat's spouse
- an esteemed family -,that he does
not throw her injail. Joseph and Denise, passionate about democracy and
justice, have done the unforgivable: they have tried to implement areal
democratic order and have therefore jeopardised El Golea's established
order.
The French presence draws to an end. From September 1959 to March
1962, fuom the self-determination principle proclaimed by the Algerian
nationalists to the Algerian Independence and to the integration of the
Sahara into Algeria, the irreparable happens. In the North, the extremism
of the French Organisation of the Secret Army (OAS) and the bloody civil
war that follows make impossible the cohabitation of the defeated
oppressor and the victorious oppressed: 750 000 pieds-noirs (Evopean
settlers) and 200 000 Harkis (pro-French Muslims) leave Algeria in a
hurry. They will not participate in the referendum of July 1,1962 on the

The

Cadats 97

Evian agreements. The French black Christians of the Sahara, still there,
will vote "yes" for Independence, along with the Muslims. They have the
hope to remain although they feel betrayed by General de Gaulle. De
Gaulle asserted that the status of the Sahara would not change. My father
remembers the General's passage at El Golea. De Gaulle attended the
mass on Sunday. He was so tall that he had to bend over in order to get
into the church. By his very presence, he seemed to affirm, as far as the
black Christians ofthe oasis were concerned, the assurance ofthe specific
characer of their Sahara, forever French.

1962: De Gaulle Leaves, the Cadats Remain

I still have an exact memory of the colour pictures of Independence

Day (5 Jluly,1.962) in El Golea. My father filmed us on this day with his
B mm camera. We have often watched the Kodak film. The crowd of
joyful citizens. The joyous women. The cries of children. The men walk
proudly. We fraternise. Dignity has returned.
The war is over. A million deaths, four hundred thousand orphans.
Five hundred thousand refugees returned from the adjacent countries and
two million purged peasants coming back from regrouping camps,
having lost everything. The war has been terribly destructive. There are
two million unemployed, four million people without resources. In the
comparatively protected Sahara, people also initiate the reconstruction of
the country. One hopes for a better life in a new nation, amongst a
regenerated people.
1963: Ahmed Ben Bella is elected President of the Algerian People's
Democratic Republic. 1965: Military coup. Colonel Houari Boumdienne
becomes President. Immediately, the Evian Agreements, destined to
protect the Algerian French against the consequences of a total independence become dead letters. In El Golea, the Cadats are afraid. Some of the
new masters of the country harass them, ranging from petty vexations to
physical attacks and theft. Pierre Cadat, my El Golea grandfather, was

attacked. As he sat in the sun in front of his house, as was his habit,
chatting with some Arab friends, a man rose. He thundered: "Perform the
shaada3o or I kill you". Without waiting for response, he hit my grandfather violently. Things rapidly worsen: the new regime decides to
expropriate the gardens of Pierre and of his children. Most of the Cadats
decide to leave their country for France. Their decision is final, despite
the fact that they feel awful about it. They fear for their physical and

spiritual integrity.
30

The shaada formulates the conversion to Islam

98

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

1965: Late morning somewhere at some point in the year. The El

Golea airport, a long strip of black tar in the desert, dominated by the
green bays of the control tower where my uncle works. A DC-10 is
heating up on the unway, blue and white, the shiny steel, the droning

turbines, ready to take off. Alongside the runway, the beautiful and
venomous flowerbeds of laurel. The dazzlingsun exacerbates their heavy
scent. Around me, the people are sad. All of them except the children. I
am seven years old. Seeing the aeroplane leave is exciting and nevertheless

have a constricted throat.

understand vaguely that today's

departures are irreversible. My El Golea grandparents leave us for France

far beyond the sea. They climb slowly onto the plane, the whirlwind of

the rising sirocco around them. My eyes sting. Is

it only the sand?

Grandpa is nearing sevety-five, and granny nearing seventy-tv/o. My El

Golea grandfather left. The granddad that always pronounces my first

Breton name, Brieuc, with this typical modulation of El Golea people:
"Briou..." My grandfather lost his gardens, his Sahara, his oasis. What
remains is his faith and France. France? I always liked going there for the
long school vacation, with the pleasant certainty in my mind of returning
to the desert after a few months, welcomed at the airport by family. It is
over. The embarkation is already over. Rapidly, my father took the slides
that we are to look at so often in the following years. The plane takes off
already. I often went to the airport during those last days in Algeria. This
is the time of departures. The whole Cadat family leaves El Golea, the old
oasis, flees the new Algeria. Destination: Ardche, in France, the land
where neither they nor their ancestors have been born but to which they
feel linked, firstly because of their faith, and secondly because of their
citizenship. Why do they settle inArdche? By accident. The Cadats have
no personal ties to the Ardche. The Catholic Church has managed to
accommodate them in this region. The White Fathers assisted by a high
departmental official of Muslim-Arab origin living in Largentire in the
Ardche, very skilfully organise the departure to France of the black
Christian community of El Golea in this summer of 1965. The small black
Catholic community of the Sahara is pulled out of the Algerian earth. It
is relocated on Protestant soil. Grandfather and grandmother will finish
their days in La Chapelle-sous-Aubenas. Pierre and Marie Cadat, married
for six decades, fly to France. My grandparents are neitherpieds-noirs
nor Harkis but black Christians from the Sahara. They are safe now, but
orphans of the Sahara.
The whole family did not go however. My parents decide to stay in
Algeria. With each departure we accompany the others and we return to
the oasis, every time a little more alone. My small cousins took off. I no
longer play in Grandpa's garden neither with Aline nor with Monique,
Viviane or Noel. I no longer have disputes with my cousin Clment, the

The

Saint Joseph, the Cathedral of the Desert. Pieter Kersten copyright L993

,s.:

,{l

Cadats 99

100

Brieuc-Yves Cadar

one I played marbles with. I do not see the DC-10 anymore. It has
disappeared, with the sonorous beating of wings into the fata morgana of
the Northern horizon. It is done.

Postcolonial Algeria or the Impossible Co-operation

My father is both the last Cadat of the colonial Sahara and the first
fully integrated into the independent Algerian nation.
He will work there for ten years as a French civil servant within the
framework of aid to the developing countries. My father, agricultural
delegate for the southern Wilaya (administrative district), devotes himself to his task. He co-operates with the socialist managoment Committee
of 1963, develops the four-year plan of 1970, puts the Charter of the
Agrarian Revolution3l of l97l into operation. The same year Joseph
assists with the start of the construction of the trans-Saharan axis, the
Asphalt road towards Tamanrasset and sub-Saharan Africa. He spends
these first ten postcolonial years as a man of good will, as a lucid and
critical witness of the administrative chaos. Between Algeria and France
the co-operation is difficult. An arduous co-operation due to the numerCadat of a Sahara

ous crises, from the arrogant act of exploding French atornic bombs in the
Sahara to the nationalisation of France's national belongings. And then
one day, it's over. At this time, my father holds a post at Ouargla at a few
hundred kilometres from the Tunisian border. We live in a beautiful white

villa built by Pouillon, our last Algerian home. After the Algerian State
decides to nationalise the oil industry, France terminates the technical cooperation agreements. We leave. My father takes a post at Montpellier,
in southern France. This is the summer of 1971. and I am thirteen years

old.

t9O6-L965: In less than six decades, the small black Christian

community of El Golea emerges, develops, prospers around Pierre Cadat,
and then suddenly disappears. This community was born out of the
French colonisation and withers away the day after Algerian Independence. A tragic community that would seem to never have existed except
that in the midst of the Sahara, there is still to this day a small forgotten
Christian cemetery nestled at the foot of the"St Joseph church
- the
cathedral of the desert, where some graves ran aground, silent witnesses
piously grouped around Henriette Delacroix and Father de Foucauld's
tombs.

31

Redistribution of land to form collectives.

The

Cadats 10L

From left to right: myself, Dewi Pieter Erwan, my son, and Marije Joanne van Mierlo,
Dewi's mother and my partner (1997).

From Montpellier, France to Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I lived in France until 1987. I grew up in Southern France. There was
a giant gap between my Catholic Saharan education and post-68 French
society. As a result I never felt integrated into this white atheist society

where I experienced painfully in daily life my difference as a Catholic and

as a Black inL973. By the time I went to university to study law in 1975
I had substituted my faith in God with a faith in a social movement and
rainbow coalition ofblacks and migrants, disabled people, gays, lesbians
and women. In the eighties I left Montpellier for Paris to study political
science. I discovered the black consciousness movement. I joined MarieLine Ampigny, a West-Indian director from Martinique to set up a black
company. I mobilised in the movement (overwhelmingly second-genera-

tion white Arab and Berber) against racism and for equality. This
movement was first successful in emphasising the right to be different.
However this political position produced a boomerang effect. The growing racist National Front, the party of ex-OAS Jean-Marie Le Pen argued
that autochthonous people of "French stock" had also the right to be
different ("Own folk first") and that the best way for "races" to stay
different was, at the modest end, to segregate, and at the extreme end, to
send migrants "back home". As for me I shifted away from a particularist
to a universalist position. I helped to set up and develop the French "black
andwhite" anti-racist organisation "sOs-Racism hands off mybuddy".

102

Brieuc-Yves Cadat

In 1986, through my sister Marie-Christine's involvement in the

Dutch antiracist and migrant movement, I met my Dutch partner, Marije
van Mierlo. This was almost 12 years ago and we now have a delightful
two-year-old son. Dewi.
At this point, I propose to set out my family history in the form of

kind of genealogical table. One dimension represents the direct parental

line running from my grandfather and grandmother to my son through
myself. The other dimension brings together geographical, cultural and
racial variables.

My grandather:

Berber

a) Sahara
b) Franc
(1 965)

Pier Cadat
(1 1885-1S70)

Black

(Hartani)

a) Ber(Zenati)
b) Arab (dialect)
c) French

a) lslam
b) Catholicism
(1910)

(1e06)

a) Muslim
lndigenous
b) Christian
Muslim
lndigenous
(1e10)

c) French
(1

ather:
Cadt
(1e28)
My

Joseph

,,!4y!-f-nitii:'Denise

":,

Braud

a) Sahara
b) France
(1e71)

,,)rFlA,.
b)

Sahara

(re22)

(1954)
c) Fhnce
(1e71)

Myself:
Brieuc-Yves
Cadat
(195S)

a)
b)

My

My

Arab & French

BerberFench

,,t,

,uriBi,.-t9n,ri lgmte,r,r

Sahara
France
(1971)

,l;:i t

,,:

"''."

Catholicism

,:, tl::ii.,t,ltlhdigi1,, French

b) Frnch

BerberBreton

Mestizo a) French
b)

Dutch
(1987)

a) Catholicism French
b) Alheism
(1974)

) Nethrlands
(1 e87)

partner

Nethsrlands

Dutch Whit6 a).Dutch

son:
Cadat

Netherlands

French- Mestizo French&Dutch

Dutch

Dewi

(1995)

923)

Agnogthism

Dutch

French &
Dutch

The

Cadats 103

Looking at this genealogical figure in the future Dewi will have a

synthetic vision of the giant fractures within his own family history
through the twentieth century: from Muslim Indigenous to French (1923)
and Dutch (1987),from Islam to Catholicism (1910) and atheism (L973),
from colonial Africa to Europe (1965-71), from France to the Netherlands (1-987). There is a striking shift from Fatima, Dewi's granda black Muslim and Berber-speaking women born in
grandmother
Sahara
- to Dewi himself, bicultural and biracial child32 growing up in
Amsterdam, educated without religious references and learning both
Dutch and French. Dewi: he is a real second-generation mestizo. Isn't he?
Looking back from the Amsterdam of L998 at my Algerian years, my
memories remain. At the Northern side of the Mediterranean sea, sometimes on a Sunday, after mass, savouring nice Saharan couscous amongst

my family, the words of my father and my mother start to flow. The

memories and tongues loosen over mint tea. Over there, on the Algerian
side, there is the Muslim part of our family, implanted in the Sahara. The
descendants of my grandfather's half-brothers are glorious. In El Menia,

the Mellouki family is well-known in the neighbourhood. The family

correspondence and holiday visits have continued between the Sahara
and France until the bloody violence of conservative intolerance of the
nineties drilled fear deep into the heart of my Algeria.
BRIEUC-YVES CADAT (nickname: Mellouki) works as a senior,staffofficer at the North-Holland Participation Institute, Haarlem, the Netherlands.

He has been a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and has published on

migration and citizenship issues in Europe. He.is. currently-working on the
disourse of migrant poliiicians. His articl "Politiciens issus ds l'immigration.
Image de soi, mag des autres" is forthcoming in Revue Europenne des
M igr ations I nternationale s.

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32
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