Algerian Joan of Arc fights against Arabic

Lamine Zakaria, 16 March 2001

At the time when the French language is losing ground, just like any other language, in the face of the progress of the English language whose spread has been tremendously helped by globalisation and the explosion in information technology in the last two decades, Algerian ’intellectuals’ are doing their best to convince the Algerian people that all their problems would go away if they went back to using the French language as the medium of instruction in the schools. A task force headed by Benzaghou is, according to the Algerian media, proposing to make French the medium of instruction in the Algerian schools. The French language will not only be introduced in the second year of the school curriculum, but in later years it will be the main language for teaching science and technology. Arabic will be confined to literary matters and English will be introduced into the curriculum at a much later stage. The idea is to marginalise both Arabic and English. However, no one is willing to explain to the Algerians why the French language did not perform its claimed miracles during more than one century of French colonialism and a few decades of independence since French has really never been abandoned in administration, industry and commerce.

The enthusiastic Algerian Benzaghou, a latter-day Joan of Arc, is now doing just that. However, in the radical reforms he is proposing in order to reshape the education system, no recourse to evidence-based argumentation is made. Benzaghou is using a new paradigm, the force of passion and belief, which transcends the rigours of scientific research. His mission is not to inform policy-makers but to impose the ’truth’ on them. Simply, the missionary Benzaghou is too passionate for the language of Racine to provide empirical or rational justification for his claims, and what is more has no time for that. After all Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Jean-Francois Kahn, Alexandre Adler and countless other ’intellos’ are not bound by evidence or proofs when it comes to absolving the Algerian generals from war crimes and crimes against humanity. The opinions of Benzaghou and his likes, the ’French intellectual’ eradicationists, are taken to be evidence in themselves, however fashionable nonsense – to use the words of Alan Sokal and Jean Brickmont – they may be. Benzaghou is too busy battling the ’barbarians’ in Algeria who speak a ’weird’ tongue and write in an ’ugly’ script. The adversaries of Benzaghou propose Arabic as the main language of instruction and English as a second language. So the cunning ’barbarians’ are even looking to the mighty Shakespierre juggernaut for help. The battle is assuming gigantic proportions and the stakes are high. The language of Racine is under attack and this is no time for prevarication. A war is to be waged to save the French language from extinction in the shores of Algeria, the country of Lavigerie and Massu.

The ’barbarian’ Arabic which Benzaghou and his likes accuse of breeding ’fundamentalists’, ’closed minds’, ’social misfits’, and ’terrorists’ is bracing itself against imminent attacks by the ’enlightened’ Francophonie legion. A new impetus must be expended to revive the fortunes of la mission civilisatrice .

We call on the Académie Française to make immediately Benzaghou a general, grant him full powers to court-martial and execute the French ’traitors’ who dare, in France not Algeria, opt for English as a medium for the publication of their research. The ’delinquent’ artists and information technology ’thugs’ who use English should be taken, at dead of night, to concentration camps and re-educated. In Algeria, the problem is under control thanks to eradicationism. It is France, the country of Joan of Arc, which is the problem and which is frustrating the work of Benzaghou and his legion. Whereas in Algeria the question of ’who speaks what’ is solved because the ’Algerian intellectuals’ have made ’inquiries’ – of the ideological witch-hunt kind – and found Arabic-based education in the schools to be the cause of the national catastrophe, in France some ’intellectuals’ are sceptical and are therefore hindering the fight against the ’barbarian’ Arabic.

General Lamari and his scribes are doing their best in this epic battle. In his recent ’ordre du jour’, an expression which could not be found in the treacherous modern dictionaries which translate it into agenda, Lamari even used the French past subjunctive tense which the ’coward’ French have deserted. Oh Racine bless them, the scribes of Lamari are really custodians of those gems of circumflexes. This former soldier in the colonial army still appreciates a literary text when he sees one although of late his language skills are somewhat stale. This is understandable since, over the last ten years, he has been very busy expanding the Algerian cemeteries and sending hundreds of thousands of people to meet their Maker. However, he remains very concerned about the standards of French usage. Never mind the human heads on his desk and the atrocities committed by his generals, what seems to worry him and his scribes about the book of Souaidia on the dirty war of Algeria is its literary quality.

Thanks to Benzaghou we now believe in spontaneous generation. One does not need to be a linguist, an eminent researcher, or a famous philosopher to make recommendations on language policy. All one needs is a commitment to eradicationist ideology, a mastery of the French past subjunctive and a passionate belief in the prevention of young Algerians from learning their mother tongue and then moving to English in order to surf the internet.