The Colonialism of Human Rights by Colin Samson

Author:Colin Samson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-05-27T18:30:00+00:00

Women as a Colonial Bone of Contention

One means of ‘breaking in’ the Natives was to alter the role of women in Algerian society. If colonialism is to be effective, as Tocqueville had earlier hinted, colonized peoples must be made not only to see the superiority of the colonizer’s ways of life, but to embrace them. Perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects of any society is the way in which gender operates, how men and women relate to each other, and what rights, obligations and duties each has, including the many overlaps there might be in such roles. One of the premises of this is that the traditions of dress, fashion and costume define a society’s distinctiveness, and one of those in Algerian society is the wearing of the veil by women. Indeed, the veil is one of the signs of the distinctiveness of the Arab world. In Algeria, this is generally a white veil, which in his essay ‘Unveiling Algeria’, Fanon says was a ‘bone of contention in a grandiose battle’.83

According to Fanon’s observations, French plans to maintain control were focused upon dismantling the integrity and uniqueness of Arab society. It was, in effect, ‘destroying the people’s originality’.84 The French did this by singling out women as channels for undermining social cohesion and making the population less capable of resistance and more receptive to becoming like the French. Hence, the veil was attacked as a symbol of ‘sadism’ and ‘barbarism’. Through various discourses, the colonial institutions heaped judgements upon Arab society and Islam, and upon Algerian men for perpetuating the wearing of the veil and women for accepting it. The instilling of guilt was a major dynamic of these attacks. French social workers, charity workers and housewives descended into the ‘Arab quarters’ to assist.85 This was expressed through military feminism, as Marnia Lazreg calls the policy whereby French armed forces attempted to spread a kind of European feminist ideology among Algerian women by constantly asserting that their roles in Muslim society were inferior to the roles French women attained.86

The French-controlled schools reinforced military feminism by teaching that the veil was inconsistent with democratic ideals. Teachers, as ‘technicians for the advancement of retarded societies’,87 were to be engineers for cultural change. There were some ‘successes’, and some women were symbolically unveiled in French military-organized ceremonies before the international press.88 Later, many of the same women, after being exposed to the ‘liberation’ touted by the French, placed the veil back on. To the Algerian woman, Fanon argued, this unveiling was a kind of rape. It was a parallel unveiling of her secrets and mystery, and it made her available for adventure and fantasy.89 Literal rape was also a French tactic of colonial war. According to Lazreg, the French used it as a way of destabilizing the family, and, as well as violating women, it was designed to wound the dignity of Arab men and weaken resistance to colonialism.90

‘The woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer’,91 and one could add that it also upsets normative Western ways of seeing gender.

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