ARTICLE
A Settler Colonial Memorial Book:
The Agricultural School and Museum
of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria
Susan Slyomovics, Anthropology Department, UCLA
In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from
both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria’s
independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement
and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pied-Noirs, this
community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and some-
times return visits to Algeria. My article looks at Pied-Noir settler associations devoted to
Algeria’s colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they recon-
stitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. My
case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of
the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits,
claims, and writings by settlers.
Key words: French Algeria, settler colonialism, memorial books, pied-noirs, agricultural
museums
Through the genre of “memorial books,” this article explores how French colo-
nialism created the largest European settler community in Algeria, who these settlers
are now, and “what settlers do and what they think they are doing when they do the
things they do—a critique of their logic and its operation” (Slyomovics and Veracini
2022, xiv). To characterize French colonial Algeria (1830–1962) and reckon with
its importance to the field of settler colonialism ensures, at the very least, further
refinements in the study of modes of settler domination as they are evidenced in settler
written memorials. According to Frantz Fanon (1967), the Martinican psychiatrist who
lived and worked in colonial Algeria, European settler mass departures at Algerian
independence were inevitable: “the settler, the moment the colonial context disappears,
has no longer an interest in remaining or co-existing” (35). Yet, my case study explores
the memorial book that commemorates French colonial Algeria’s network of agricul-
tural schools, which was published in 1990, in relation to a rare alumni pilgrimage by
resettled European settlers from France to their former school in 2008. The writers of
the memorial book to the agricultural school confronted their memories of the school
before Algerian independence on a return visit to a museum dedicated to remembering
the colonial period on Algerian terms. Reading European settler literature produced
after the settlers departed to France at Algerian independence in 1962, reproduces
© Zoryan Institute, 2023
Volume 23, Number 2 | September 2023 | doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.30