3 - Education and Violence in the Black Decade

Summary

A polemical chapter in Boualem Sansal's Le serment des barbares [The Barbarians’ Oath] (1999) begins by announcing to readers: “We need to talk about National Education” (417). After enumerating the different “types” of schools in Algeria, the narrator also mentions a “clandestine, secret” school maintained by “honest people” who spend their time and meager funds teaching their children understanding and tolerance not taught anywhere else (419). Yet the story he tells about that school does not appear, on its surface, to constitute a discussion of education as we typically conceive of it. The narrator reports a story from the newspaper Liberté about five friends – Djamil, Mehdi, Hicham, Lyes, and Yacine – who were kidnapped and brutally murdered by terrorists in Algiers. The only direct suggestion of a link to education is the fact that the boys were “supposed to be returning to school in a few days” before their abduction (421). The narrator, however, frames the story as a cautionary tale about education, not only in how he introduces the narrative, but also in how he closes it, lamenting that

out of ten kids who enter [public] school, only one, a lucky one with nerves of steel, gets out alive. The others disappear along the way, like Djamil, Mehdi, Hicham, Lyes, and Yacine. It must be destroyed. This call isn't addressed to politicians, this school is exactly what they’re looking for. It's addressed to UNESCO, to UNICEF, to the Commission on Refugees. This is an emergency. Thank you. (422)

This story, part of a stand-alone chapter unrelated to the main narrative of Le serment des barbares, is emblematic of the fragmented approach many Algerian authors have adopted to writing about the “Black Decade” of the 1990s. The term (la décennie noire in French and al-ʻashrīyah al-sawdā’ in Arabic) describes ten years of bloody conflict between Islamist groups and the Algerian military that devastated the Algerian population and claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. In this chapter, I explore literary depictions of education during this violent and traumatic period. While other novels discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 obliquely reference (or were influenced by) the Black Decade, novels that set the events of their narratives during the 1990s take a different approach.