The Pluralism of Collective Memory: a summary of my Bachelor's thesis

 We have all heard the statement “History is written by the victors”, which in the context of colonialism, often comes down to Western imperialist powers like the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, Belgium and, central to this article, France. While some may dismiss this as a logical follow-through, others see this worldview as one that has been carefully crafted to maintain a colonial legacy that does not necessarily strike us today as a modern adaptation of colonialism nor as something which lingers over the lives of those most affected. While many nations and peoples face this marginalization in present-day contexts due to colonial legacies, I find the case of Algeria and its diaspora in France to be the most pertinent – despite its lack of visibility which shall be further addressed – of structural and institutional remnants that trace back into the French occupation. 

Algeria and its people have been independent from French rule since July 1962 following 132 years of occupation that was marked by horrors like systemic violence, mass displacement, massacres, large-scale torture, as well as ethnic/cultural cleansing. It is a part of history that remains, to this day, hard to articulate by its descendants due to sustained efforts by the French state to minimize and distort the nature of these crimes, henceforth owning the narrative. Unlike other French colonies, Algeria was unique in that it was an official and integral part of France (“French Algeria”) that was, like mainland France, separated into departments, and considered Algerians as French nationals (exceptions existed such as Algerian Muslims, who fell under le Code de l’indigénat, subjecting these individuals to special punishments, administrative controls, and unequal political rights, thus requiring abandonment of Islamic personal-status law to obtain full French citizenship). Algerian migrants were often brought into France to work low-paying jobs – a choice shaped by colonial inequality and pressures – across sectors like agriculture, factories, and construction. These migrants were housed in shantytowns, thus facing gruesome conditions that the colonial state deemed them inherently inferior enough to endure. This influx peaked post World War 2, as well as during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) for reasons related to reconstruction and economic expansion. 

As I was reading about this history there was one question that systematically perturbed me: how did French civilians accept and tolerate the horrific atrocities committed by their military and government both overseas as well on their own land (such as the shantytowns)? To answer this, we must understand how ‘the Algerian’ was constructed in the French mind. Edward Said explains how Western colonial empires historically maintained their dominance not just through military violence, but through cultural and political discourse that constructs the colonized ‘other’ as fundamentally chaotic, inferior, and irrational. Imperialism functions by generating knowledge about the colonized in order to contain and discipline them, establishing an authority over a body of knowledge that shapes how we picture the ‘other’ through the lens of Western hegemony or superiority. As such, this occupation was framed as a civilizing mission to a population and a land that had been languishing, neglected, and backwards, where France had a moral obligation and power to intervene. Furthermore, as the Algerian War of Independence began and escalated, public narratives and sentiments started to shift towards a desire for France to disengage with the conflict and subsequently their rule in Algeria. Despite this, France’s official narrative and strategy were to pacify the war by solely referring to it as “les événements” (the events), framing it as a stabilizing measure to a domestic matter in order to maintain control of public narrative. 

It is likely that a large portion of those reading this article have never heard of – or perhaps only to a limited extent – this history. It is thus insightful to once again to note that this obscurity of colonial traumas imposed onto the Algerian population can be accredited to the deliberate efforts, on behalf of the French colonial powers, to silence truths and incompatible (to the state’s narrative) collective memories of those traumas. Ann Stoler developed a term for this specific phenomenon which she labelled ‘colonial aphasia’; a structural blockage in articulation: the state retains knowledge of its colonial past and violence but is unable to give it form in official recognition due to an inadequacy in articulating its lasting relevance. As a result, Algerian descendants as well as the general public struggle to name its relevance in both a historical context as well as in a contemporary one. The former due to factors like shame, guilt, or the exhaustion of having their traumas dismissed (first generation Algerian immigrants often refrained from discussing the realities and effects of the atrocities committed to them by the French state), and the latter due to institutionally constructed ignorance. 

Let us look at a concrete example to highlight how exactly this obscurity arises. During a peaceful protest initiated by the FLN (national liberation movement) in October 1961, 30000 men, women and children took to the streets, in the heart of Paris, to protest a discriminatory curfew imposed on Algerian immigrants (“Algerian muslim workers” or “French muslims of Algeria”). French Police forces responded with extreme police brutality under Maurice Papon’s command, attacking demonstrators across detention centers claiming arrested citizens, the Pont de Neuilly, Place de L’Etoile, and the Pont Saint-Michel. This brutality included beatings with iron bars, rifle butts, being shot at close range, and demonstrators being thrown alive into the Seine. The morning after as bodies began to resurface in the Seine, officials claimed the death toll to be 3. However, historians who later reconstructed events now established the number to be around at least 200, a drastic difference. Despite this, officials in 1998 still only admitted to 40 deaths. This is not an isolated incident. Since Algerian independence, the French state imposed strict amnesty laws designed to erase crimes committed during the war – such as routine torture and summary executions – particularly those linked to the independence struggle. This architecture was thus etched into the institutional reality of France regarding its colonial past and legacy, allowing it to claim it has moved past these horrors without considering nor addressing how current structures and narratives would continue to marginalize Algerians and their diaspora. 

The impact that stems from France’s colonial aphasia and amnesty laws are not limited to the Algerians that directly faced the ruthlessness of the French state, they continue in the form of generational trauma, worsening for as long as their collective memory (one that significantly differs from that of the French state) remains concealed and unaddressed. But then, where exactly do those memories go if no one knows how to articulate them anymore? One thing I am certain most people have heard about are the ‘uncontrollable riots’ in the Parisian banlieues, usually spearheaded by barbaric and uncivilised North African (majoritively Algerian) youth. Before I continue, let me preface that it is no coincidence that a big portion of the Algerian diaspora today reside in the Parisian banlieues, which mimic similar experiences of poverty, marginalization and state violence as shantytowns. It is hence also not a coincidence that ongoing racist rhetoric continues to ‘other’ them using the same labels previously used to justify colonial violence to the public eye. As such, given all of these experiences by both the state and the affected community, I find that these collective memories find expression within the physical spaces of the Parisian banlieues, a phenomenon I call spatial counter-memory.

Paris is separated into a core and a periphery, much like colonial Algeria was structured into Native and European quarters. The core consists of Paris’ material and romantic ideal whereas the periphery is often designated to North African migrants whose existence and poor living conditions are physically shielded from Paris's core – or its utopia. Unlike Paris’ core, those in the periphery are subject to systemic inequalities: discrimination in the workplace, institutional neglect, as well as harsh and sometimes fatal displays of police brutality. The physical boundary thus behaves as a way for the French state to permit themselves to maintain the use of colonial methods without receiving backlash from the public. Take for instance the infamous 3-week-long 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-bois following the murder of two teenagers – Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré – of Sub-Saharan and North African descent by French police. Following the eruption of riots, President Chirac declared a national state of emergency, enacting the 1955 national security law, a legislation initially designed to handle colonial uprisings during the ‘insurrection’ in Algeria, allowing authorities to restrict movement, place individuals under house arrest, and conduct unwarranted searches; essentially allowing the modern French state to maximize force and surveillance by employing colonial mechanisms. It is quite hard to imagine the French state enacting such a law against white French nationals in the city centre, thus highlighting the discriminatory nature of this event.

In the 21st century, we find a contemporary need to anchor past memories within physical spaces in order to bridge the past-present continuity that seems fragile in light of society’s social acceleration. Lieux de mémoire is a concept developed by Pierre Nora that accounts for the dissolution of communal memory into institutionalized memory, which includes the processes by which lived and inherited memory is replaced/extended by the deliberate construction of sites, archives, and ceremonies. This is why nations commemorate incidents or histories with museums, statues, by naming buildings/streets after certain individuals. Though, with regards to its colonial history towards Algeria, France maintains very limited sites of memory that genuinely addresses its own accountability. The Paris massacre for example was only ‘commemorated’ in 2001 with a small plaque on the corner of the Pont Saint-Michel. It is framed in a way the French public can absorb: a historical tragedy, a lapse of judgment causing excessive violence, and its acknowledgment now signifies that this lies behind the state’s present identity and should not be discussed further. It serves the national community’s need to acknowledge the crimes, not the diaspora’s need to be recognized. As a result, it performs colonial aphasia differently, instead of resolving it, by acknowledging while containing the significance of the massacre and in so reproducing the same logic of exclusion as the violence it seemingly commemorates.

The 1961 massacre as well as the 2005 riots function as spatial counter memories by imprinting traces of state-suppressed colonial trauma into the physical landscape of Paris and its periphery. These traces persist due to, rather than despite, Frances’s colonial aphasia – the structures and mechanisms to contain counter-memories – and its denial of affording them official institutional form. Spatial counter-memories accumulate within Paris’ colonially-produced geography (namely the means of segregation, surveillance, and containment used to marginalize the Algerian diaspora), resurfacing with escalating intensity across generations as spatial eruptions, exposing and contesting the incoherence of France's narrative of national unity and colorblind universalism. This cycle of spatial eruptions may perhaps only be interrupted only through explicit and official recognition of colonial legacies and most importantly, institutional and structural reform.

What does it mean to be Mauritian when the world isn’t watching?

Whether you are Mauritian or not, most of us, at one point or another, have heard the plethora of labels attributed to Mauritian culture; the rainbow nation; the fruit-salad; a melting pot. Since its independence in 1968 our island has been internationally renowned for maintaining a peaceful co-existence between diverse cultures, ethnicities, and religions. Like the Flamboyant, Mauritius’ colors are exoticised – from our skin to the seven colors of Chamarel – within the international imagination, laying claim to an exceptional multiculturalism that reads as a picture-perfect postcard. Though for those of us who call this bustling Island home, an internal tension persists between the reality we are exposed to, and this utopic ideal the rest of the world feeds on. 

Unlike most post-colonial nations, Mauritius shares a unique history in that it holds no [documented] indigenous population, with its two largest ethnic groups – the Creoles and the Indo-Mauritians – being descendant of a brutal colonial history marked by slavery (and indentured labor, arguably a different form of the same), land dispossession and cultural erasure. While the research into Mauritius’s history and its post-colonial influences is arguably limited, scholars have exposed the harsh realities of Afro-Malagasy slavery and in so provided a stepping stone to understand the root of current socio-economic issues. One of the most significant findings, made by Vijaya Teelock’s “Breaking the Wall of Silence”, explores how the enslaved population was actively stripped of ancestral ties by being given new names, intentionally being mixed with other ethnic groups, and forced into religious/linguistic assimilation, which thus manufactured a lasting identity struggle and subsequent alienation across several spheres. While this past evidently continues to hinder social, political, and economic equality, Mauritius has struggled to articulate and tend to these legacies, visible across factors like the socio-economic domination of the Franco-Mauritian minority and the marginalisation of the Creole community. 

Our reputation as an exotic, borderline paradisiac island filled with hospitable and vibrant people (and culture) does not make its claim without shaping itself for the Orientalist gaze – a manner of appropriating Eastern and Southern nations/peoples/cultures deriving from a Western colonialist view that treats them as exotic, backwards and inherently inferior. When we consider our island's colonial history and its ongoing legacy – visible for example in the way hotels, schools, and districts still bear the name of colonisers, whose statues still line the corridor at Place D’Armes) while at times even advertising a colonial aesthetic as part of the experience – this profitable image of empty beaches and smiling locals lays the ongoing exploitation bare; the fetishisation of a people, one that ultimately others Mauritians on their own land by stripping them of an identity beyond economic and foreign interests. Let us not forget the widely disputed ‘Mark Twain’ quote (“Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”) that our tourism industry nevertheless parades as an invitation for this orientalist gaze. The role played by, typically Mauritian Creoles, marketed to the international audience, has become unsettling across an accumulating amount of habits. Of course, that is not to dismiss the unshakeable wit, pride, and resistance practiced behind the scenes by Mauritians, undeniably contributing to the solidarity and liveliness of our community; however, it remains painful to witness this commercialised legacy precede us in seemingly small ways, like the tendency to “bat enn ti fransce” or to instinctively defer to white ‘expatriates,’ whose color still subconsciously signals a certain social and economic standing when contrasted with the ‘migrant’. When it comes to witnessing this internalised hierarchy, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Mauritius’ most iconic symbol, the Dodo, has been reappropriated as the name of the Franco-Mauritian club ‘Dodo Club’ that is infamous for exclusively associating with their own. 

It is worth asking whether these social reflexes made by (some) Creole Mauritians today, that actively repositions them as inferior to the White elite, are inherited rather than incidental. Beyond the obvious violent and legal means of restriction and exploitation, colonisers often enforced their hierarchy by systematically surveilling and reporting on ‘defying’ behaviors, thus keeping its enslaved population fearful. It would be no great surprise if that conditioning outlived its initial colonial structures, resurfacing today across quieter mechanisms of social control like the notorious palab. Today however, this fear of being seen stepping out of place is not only governed by the (subconscious) placement of whiteness at the top but also across our own inclination to constantly mind and judge other people’s business.

One may further ask, in hindsight, whether this shift to internal social control signifies something more severe in regards to our community. Within recent years what has been previously been labelled the Malaise Creole has become the Malaise Morisien as a result of the economy's newfound focus on establishing itself as a high-end commercial and residential hub for ‘expats’. With skyrocketing costs of living and stagnant minimum wages, the general Mauritian population is beginning to feel socially and economically excluded. This segregation is further visible across physical boundaries. Take for instance the increasing (marketing of) privatisation of legally public beaches by luxurious resorts, villas, and private residences that are essentially turning these post-cards into deeds. Of Mauritius’ 322 Kilometer coastline, a striking 48 kilometers, or 15% remains genuinely for public access. For a culture whose traditions and sense of community is significantly strengthened by beach centered activities like Sunday barbecues and picnics or Sega-Ravanne performances by the shore, this theft of land demarcates a visible movement that is slowly squeezing us out. 

Mauritius can be said to have become highly skilled at re-inventing itself for whoever it can profit from – the paradise for the tourist and the safe haven for the investor – however the question of who truly belongs here, on what terms, as well as who we are as Mauritians beyond this profitable image, remains one we have yet to market convincingly  to ourselves. In going over our history and how our current policies, behaviors, and sense of identity are largely informed by these lingering inequalities, we remind ourselves of what exactly we need to fight for. I believe that one of our most defining characteristics is our Lakorite: our ability to, despite the ethnic, economic, and social divides, practice and maintain a sense of solidarity and belonging with one another and our island. It is specifically because it is so hard to trace the origin of this phenomenon that I am so intent on asserting it as ours. It is not a label assigned to us from the outside, but rather a quiet, everyday practice we return to when no one else is looking, perhaps being so defining because it has never needed an audience to feel real. To be Mauritian means to hold onto Lakorite as more than sentiment. It is exactly this that carried a decade of sustained pressure to restore Pomponette Beach to public status in 2025, concrete proof that solidarity, organised rather than simply felt, can still reverse what profit tries to take from us. If our coastline, our wages, and our sense of belonging continue to be renegotiated in rooms we are not invited into, Lakorite is one thing that is still fully ours for as long as we're willing to use it.