SOCCER WAR - (Algeria Hides its Face pgs 95-119)

The Soccer War is a strange book up till now. I bought the copy and started reading over the very end of the summer, I was not able to reach much. I do remeber I started from the beggining, page 3 I believe. It talked about a hotel Metropol and about some men who lived in 8 rooms. This was quite confusing and I was not anxious to keep on reading. In class, however we began in the middle and I am getting to understand why. This is much more of an introduction to a topic than the first chapter.
Algeria is a country that has been dominated throughout its history. It had never actually been free until 1962 when Ahmed Ben Bella took over and freed the country from a French rule of 132 years. I believe it weren't for Charles de Gaulle, the revolutionary fight for freedom would have lasted longer. I cannot help but seeing a major reference to Colombia with this story. In Colombia we also have revolutionaries forming guerrillas supposedly to get their freedom. Although their views have changed drastically and are not supposed to be those of revolutionaries, the thought of guerrillas makes me make the connection. With Colombia, there are some people from the outside like some Europeans who think the guerrillas are fighting for a right cause and Alvaro Uribe Velez is a dictator and we are prisoners. This is not true but it its the conception for outsiders. I think this is what was really happening in Algeria with the French. The Algerians were tired of being slaves to others, of being chained to people who weren't from around. They really needed the guerrillas while we really need to stop de guerrillas. It is the exact opposite also because maybe the French, the outsiders, thought they were saving the country and the people and viewed the guerrillas as terrorists, which is what we think of our own guerrillas. When you think about it, the French coloners were the ones maintaining the country: they ran everything and owned every single company. When they left, nothing was actually left for Algerians but things they couldn't hold on to. They were in control of the money and the property when they were there so everything was a bit shaky when independence was achieved. I know from history that Boumedienne's government was much better and he got Algeria to become a little more stable economically. Something that may have ruined or not the book is the fact that I already know that Ben Bella was inprisoned during his opponent's reign. I don't really know how this will affect me but I will just have to read on and see what Kapuscinski, a journalist from the time, wrote.
Kapuscinski has a terrific way of writing because not only does he get your attention but he changes things and appears with news ones in such a subtle way. First he introduces the main event which is the coup. I thought that Ben Bella was a terrific leader, the man who got Algeria its independence, a simple man with a simple life, a simple attire and a very simple car. This is great in a leader I belive because they are not wasting time on material stuff and on how they look. I also thought of Boumedienne as a bad person and friend for having betrayed his friend with the coup. This is when we don't know much about the characters. Afterwards we learn a little bit about Algeria and its severe crisis, something unknown to the world because of Ben Bella's great words and actions. The country is actually suffering and bleeding to death. When we least expect it, we learn that Ben Bella is a power monger who may not care about his physical looks but wants everybody to like him and to look as a good man to others. He would lie by the minute to every person who encountered him and thought he could run the government of such a complicated nation on his own. This is a dictator and a country who is just a small baby in the world needs a strong leader but not this kind of strong. The country needed a person down to earth, who knew what he was doing. This is when we pivot completely our perspective on Boumedienne because he is actually a hero for taking Ben Bella away and freeing a wholle country. This man, who does not care about his look also, actually does not care what others think of him. He knows what is best and this is what he does, obviously with the army. This man was a 33 year old teacher when he threw the coup! He was a man of few words who did not have much of a social life. This was not at all like Ben Bella who was all about the "friends" and was elocuent and a tremendous liar. I prefer people of few, concise words because these are the ones who are actually listening. People who talk all the time do not listen because when you talk, they are only thinking what are THEY going to say next. I cannot believe the reaction of the people. Maybe they knew the public Ben Bella, the talkative, international man who saved them. They felt they were too cult to have a coup; that it only happened in other Arab countries. The confusion may be normal but the fear and the weird ideas of what was going to happen is not normal. This may be the reader's opinion because we don't know what it was to live there in that time. This is what journalists can never tell us, and less when they are not from around. Maybe it was because of the silence in which the country entered and the lack of organization and planning it all had. They were tired of Ben Bella but they didn't really know what to do inmediately. A plan would have worked just fine. I really hope there is not another coup, although I already know that. Anything can come up and I trust Kapuscinski as a journalist but in Africa anything can happen. It is the land of unstability and this probably makes it so interesting.