Colonial collaboration trapped Algerian fathers in a web they could not escape

Evidence

At no time do we find a really painful clash. The father stood back before the new world and followed in his son’s footsteps. It was the young Algerian who swept the family into the vast national liberation movement. Sometimes, however, the situation was more difficult. The father might be a notorious collaborationist with the colonialist administration. In the very exercise of his profession, this man would find himself cornered into making an irrevocable choice: being a caïd (a police agent), a bachagha (an official holding office by virtue of a rigged election), he would be both rejected and condemned by the new Algeria that his son embodied. Very often he would resign. However, it might happen that the contamination was such that he was no longer able to free himself from the colonialist embrace. The long succession of compromises was so imposing that there could be no turning back. Several Algerian families have experienced those atrocious tragedies in which the son, present at a meeting that had to decide the fate of his father who was a traitor to his fatherland, had no other choice but to support the majority and accept the most irrevocable judgments. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 359

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how sons were forced to condemn their own collaborator fathers as a social cost of anticolonial liberation.
• XREF: Connects to discussions of the psychic cost of decolonization on family structure in Fanon’s other works. — connects to: Colonial war fragmented the Algerian family and individualized its members; France’s incorporation of Algeria into the Republic created an inescapable colonial trap.; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”

Related

• Colonial war fragmented the Algerian family and individualized its members (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial violence against families forged Algerian national unity through shared suffering (similarity 0.82)
• France’s incorporation of Algeria into the Republic created an inescapable colonial trap. (similarity 0.81)
• Revolutionary authority in Algeria replaced the elder brother’s automatic precedence (similarity 0.78)
• Pre-war Algerian brothers deliberately avoided working together before the Revolution (similarity 0.78)