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Living in Colonial Algeria
"It was a kind of South Africa without the legal system of apartheid"
"It was a kind of South Africa without the legal system of apartheid."
Jean Leca, Professor of Political Science at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, was born and brought up in Algeria, a member of the community known as the pieds noirs. They were the original colonial settlers that the French relied on to govern when they ousted the Turks and took control of Algeria in 1830.
In 1954, Algerian nationalists began their bitter struggle for independence against their French colonial masters and by the time independence came in 1962, most of the pieds noirs had fled the country.
