THE MAGHREB

Black Africa's struggle for Independence did, in the main and with certain tragic exceptions, avoid violence and bloodshed. Algeria, on the other hand, had a long and terrible war, 1954–62. When this came to an end with an ‘Algerian Algeria’, this historical change was due to the leadership of an extraordinary personality, with extraordinary courage and extraordinary determination, Charles de Gaulle. About 800,000 French men and women left Algeria, returning to France, leaving behind some 200,000 Europeans, a figure soon to be reduced to about 25,000.

Since the beginning of the century the Church had obviously been a foreign body consisting almost totally of foreigners. The contacts between an Algerian-dominated majority and a French dominating minority were very much limited. What there was of contacts between the two religious communities could be experienced in the countryside rather than in the cities: only in the countryside, the Cardinal said, one saw those ‘simple, easy and human contacts’. The Catholic Sisters – Charles de Foucauld's Little Sisters of Jesus – devoted almost all of their time to Muslim families. In the Catholic schools Muslim and Catholic children were taught together: ‘A school open only to Christians would not be a Catholic school’, the Cardinal declared.

Appointed to the diocese of Constantine in 1947 – Archbishop in 1954 and Cardinal in 1965 – Léon-Etienne Duval concentrated on problems of poverty and unemployment and the insecurity of life for the proletariat.