Mohamed Saïl

Mohamed Saïl
Muḥend Sayl
Saïl in Spain, 1936
Born	Muḥend Amezian At Amezian Sayl (1894-10-14)14 October 1894 Taourirt, Kabylia, French Algeria
Died	27 April 1953(1953-04-27) (aged 58) Bobigny, Île-de-France, France
Resting place	Bobigny cemetery
Nationality	Algerian
Citizenship	French
Occupation(s)	Mechanic, writer
Years active	1910–1953
Organisations	Anarchist Union (1920–1939) Revolutionary Syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (1929–1939) Anarchist Federation (1945–1953)
Movement	Anarchism, Algerian independence
Opponent	French colonial empire
Military career
Allegiance	Spanish Republic (1936) Free France (1940–1944)
Service	Confederal militias (1936) French Resistance (1940–1944)
Years of service	1936; 1940–1944
Unit	Durruti Column (1936)
Commands	Sébastien Faure Century (1936)
Battles / wars	Spanish Civil War World War II

Mohand Amezian ben Ameziane Saïl (1894–1953) was an Algerian anarchist and anti-colonial activist. Born in Kabylia, he was largely self-taught and became an atheist and an anarchist after moving to Metropolitan France. After World War I, he joined the French anarchist movement and began agitating for Algerian independence. He was arrested and imprisoned several times during the 1930s, due to his anti-colonialist, anti-militarist and anti-fascist activism. He volunteered to fight in Spanish Civil War and served in the Durruti Column until he was wounded and forced to return to France. He then joined the French Resistance during World War II and afterwards resumed his agitation for Algerian independence, calling for a social revolution to overthrow the French colonial empire. He continued his activism up until his death, one year before the Algerian War of Independence broke out.

Biography

Early life

Mohand Saïl was born on 14 October 1894 in Taourirt, a small Amazigh village in the mountains of Kabylia, in the east of French Algeria. Raised Muslim, he later became an atheist He was largely self-educated and worked as a mechanic. At a young age, he moved to Metropolitan France, where he joined the individualist tendency of the French anarchist movement in 1910. Following the French entry into World War I, he was conscripted into the French Colonial Army and later imprisoned on charges of desertion and insubordination. After the war, he moved to Paris, where he joined the Anarchist Union (UA).

Anti-colonial activism

In the early 1920s, he began agitating against the French colonial empire and organised to defend the rights of Algerians in France. In 1923, he established the Indigenous Algerian Defense Committee, within which he organised against French colonialism alongside Sliman Kiouane. In the 17th arrondissement of Paris, he held anti-colonial meetings in the Arabic and French languages, and in the neighbourhood of Aulnay-sous-Bois, he established an anarchist group.

In 1929, he joined the Revolutionary Syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT-SR), within which he organised a separate Algerian section. The following year, he organised an Algerian Defense Committee to oppose celebrations of the centenary of the French conquest of Algeria. He brought together all French anarchist organisations to sign a joint statement denouncing the colonial occupation.

Throughout the 1930s, he was arrested and imprisoned on multiple occassions over his radical activism; each time he was released, he immediately returned to agitation and organisation. In 1932, he was prosecuted for publishing anti-militarist articles in his magazine L'Eveil Social . He received support from International Red Aid, but rejected it due to his anti-Stalinism. Following the 6 February 1934 crisis, he began collecting weapons in preparation for a potential fascist coup. He was arrested on 3 March, charged with illegal possession of weapons and imprisoned for four months; during his trial, the French Communist Party accused him of being an agent provocateur.

Later that year, he began publishing a North African edition of the anarchist magazine Terra Libre, in collaboration with André Prudhommeaux. He also established the Anarchist Group of Indigenous Algerians.

War and after

In 1936, Saïl volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, joining up with the International Group of the Durruti Column. He became commander of the Sébastien Faure Century, the Column's French-speaking section. In November 1936, he was wounded while fighting on the Aragon front, near Zaragoza, and hospitalised in Barcelona.

In December 1936, he returned to France; where he rallied French anarchist support for the Republican war effort. He and Louis Berthomieux would later be accused of desertion by the Spanish Republican Army. He also resumed his anti-colonial activism, protesting against the French government's repression of Messali Hadj's North African Star. In December 1938, he was arrested again for anti-militarist provocations and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.

Following the Nazi occupation of France, Saïl was captured and interned in a concentration camp in Riom. He managed to escape and join up with the French Resistance, within which he forged fake passports to help Algerians escape the country. After the Liberation of France, he joined the newly-established Anarchist Federation (FA) and returned to anti-colonial agitation against the French empire.

He attempted to re-establish his Algerian anarchist group and wrote a series of anti-colonial articles for the FA's magazine Le Libertaire. In the articles he wrote during the late 1940s, Sail began to appeal for Algerians to rise up in a social revolution against French colonialism. He remained active in the French anarchist movement until his death, on 30 April 1953. Georges Fontenis gave the eulogy at his funeral.

Political thought

Saïl developed a version of anarchism and anti-authoritarianism for the Algerian context, rejecting the Eurocentric approach to anarchism. Saïl believed that his own people, the Kabyles, already practiced forms of autonomy, decentralisation and mutual aid without calling them anarchism. He depicted Kabyles as "fundamentally libertarians", who rejected militarism, practiced free trade and emphasised solidarity such as the right to asylum; he said they were instinctively drawn towards liberation, in spite of the political repression by French colonial authorities. He argued that these libertarian and egalitarian traditions would move Algerian society towards a social revolution and independence. He also believed that indigenous Algerians were natural allies of the French working-class, as they both had a shared enemy in the French state, and called for working-class unity in support of Algerian independence.

He believed that the independence of Algeria ought to involve the creation of a non-hierarchical and secular system. He criticised Algerian nationalists for what he perceived as opportunism, declaring that Algerians would continue to resist any new ruling class that took power from the French colonisers. He also denounced the clericalism of the Marabouts; as an atheist, Saïl was suspicious of Islamism and considered Algerian culture to be inherently non-religious.

Legacy

After Saïl's death, the Algerian War of Independence broke out in 1954; the North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA) joined the fight for independence, but was repressed by 1957. The struggle for Kabyle self-determination continued after the independence of Algeria in 1962, with the anti-authoritarian Berber Spring breaking out in 1980. But the Algerian anarchist movement waned, with no specifically anarchist organisations forming in the country, although individual Algerians identified themeslves as anarchists. By the 21st century, interest in Saïl's life and philosophy had begun to grow, although no full biography or analysis of his influence on the Algerian independence movement has been written. In 1994, the Anarchist Federation published a book of Saïl's collected works. In 2009, one of Saïl's articles, "The Kabyle Mindset", was translated into English by Paul Sharkey and published by Robert Graham in the second volume of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.

Selected works

Articles

• "Le calvaire des indigènes algériens" (Le Libertaire, 16 August 1924)
• "L'idéal du Parti communiste" (Le Libertaire, 24 November 1924)
• "Le centenaire de la conquête de l’Algérie" (La voix libertaire, 21 September 1929)
• "A l'opinion publique" (La voix libertaire, 15 March 1930)
• "Peuple algérien, debout!" (La voix libertaire, February 1932)
• "Réponse au Secours rouge" (L'Éveil social, February 1933)
• "Le cynisme des administrateurs" (L'Éveil social, August 1933)
• "Un appel du groupe anarchiste aux indigènes algériens" (La voix libertaire, 23 March 1935)
• "La “civilisation française” en Algérie" (Terre Libre, 20 December 1935)
• "A bas le code de l'indigénat! Egalité totale des droits!" (Le Libertaire, 24 July 1936)
• "Letrre du front" (L'Espagne antifasciste, 4 November 1936)
• "Réponse a Terre Libre" (Terre Libre, 25 February 1938)
• "Aux travailleurs algériens" (Le Libertaire, 25 March 1946)
• "La mentalité kabyle" ["The Kabyle Mindset"] (Le Libertaire, 16 February 1951)
• "Valets du bourreau" (Le Libertaire, 5 October 1951)

Columns

• "Le calvaire des travailleurs nord-africains" (Le Libertaire, 15 June 1951)
• "Le calvaire des travailleurs nord-africains" (Le Libertaire, 29 June 1951)
• "Le calvaire des travailleurs nord-africains" (Le Libertaire, 6 July 1951)
• "Le calvaire des travailleurs nord-africains" (Le Libertaire, 26 July 1951)
• "Le calvaire des travailleurs nord-africains" (Le Libertaire, 17 August 1951)

Books

• Appels aux travailleurs algériens (Anarchist Federation, 1994)
• L’étrange étranger: Écrits d'un anarchiste kabyle (Lux, 2020)

Bibliography

• Berry, David (2016). "Anarchists and anarchisms in France since 1945: introduction and sources". Modern & Contemporary France. 24 (2): 115–126. doi:10.1080/09639489.2016.1154307. ISSN 1469-9869.
• Boulouque, Sylvain (1994). "Saïl Mohamed: Ou la vie et la Révolte d'un anarchiste Algérien". Appels aux travailleurs algériens. Volonté Anarchiste (in French). Vol. 43. Groupe Fresnes-Antony. pp. 1–4. OCLC 466607851.
• Brodie, Morris (2020). "Volunteers for Anarchy: The International Group of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War". Journal of Contemporary History. 56 (1): 28–54. doi:10.1177/0022009420949926. ISSN 0022-0094.
• Drew, Allison (2014). "'This land is not for sale': Communists, nationalists and the popular front". We are no longer in France: Communists in Colonial Algeria. Manchester University Press. doi:10.7765/9781847799210.00013. ISBN 9781847799210.
• Galián, Laura (25 July 2020). Colonialism, Transnationalism, and Anarchism in the South of the Mediterranean. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-030-45448-7.
• Graham, Robert (2009). "Mohamed Saïl: The Kabyle Mind-Set (1951)". Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Vol. 2. Black Rose Books. pp. 157–160. ISBN 978-1-55164-311-3.
• Laursen, Ole Birk (2019). "Anti-imperialism". The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 149–167. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_8. ISBN 978-3-319-75619-6.
• Mugnai, Bruno (2019). Foreign volunteers and International Brigades in the Spanish civil war (1936-39). Soldiershop. ISBN 9788893274524.
• Porter, David (2011). Eyes to the South: French Anarchists & Algeria. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-84935-076-1.
• Porter, David (2020). "André Prudhommeaux, Algeria and National Liberation". Anarchist Studies. 29 (1): 39–56. ISSN 0967-3393.
• Ramnath, Maia (2019). "Non-Western Anarchisms and Postcolonialism". In Adams, Matthew S.; Levy, Carl (eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 677–695. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-75620-2_38. ISBN 978-3319756196. S2CID 150357033.
• van der Walt, Lucien; Schmidt, Michael (2009). Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. AK Press. ISBN 978-1-904859-16-1.
• Woller, Almut (2018). "Self-Mediation Practices of Arab Anarchists". In Richter, C.; Antonakis, A.; Harders, C. (eds.). Digital Media and the Politics of Transformation in the Arab World and Asia. Studies in International, Transnational and Global Communications. Springer VS. pp. 35–60. doi:10.1007/978-3-658-20700-7_3. ISBN 978-3-658-20700-7.

Further reading

• Bouba, Philippe (2014). L'Anarchisme en situation coloniale: le cas de l'Algérie. Organisations, militants et presse (1887-1962) (PhD thesis) (in French). University of Perpignan Via Domitia.
• Boulouque, Sylvain (2 March 2021). "Mohamed Saïl (1894-1953)". Partage Noir (in French). Retrieved 28 November 2024.
• Carme, Émile (2015). "Mohamed Saïl Pour un communisme libertaire". Ballast (in French). 2 (1): 98–113. doi:10.3917/ball.002.0098.
• Carme, Émile (14 October 2016). "Mohamed Saïl, ni maître ni valet". Revue Ballast (in French). Retrieved 28 November 2024.
• Le Foll Luciani, Pierre-Jean (2019). "Anarchisme et décolonisation en Algérie. Le Mouvement libertaire nord-africain (1950-1956)". Histoire Politique (in French). 39. doi:10.4000/histoirepolitique.3268.
• Maitron, Jean; Bouba, Philippe; Davranche, Guillaume; Dupuy, Rolf (18 June 2024) [2014-04-11]. "SAÏL Mohamed (Saïl Mohand Ameziane, dit)". Dictionnaire des anarchistes (in French).
• Pelletier, Philippe (2024). "Mohand Ameziane Saïl (1894-1953): Jugurtha libertaire". Figures de l'anarchisme: Femmes et hommes de liberté (in French). Le Cavalier Bleu. pp. 203–214. ISBN 9791031806778.