- One of the forgotten references of the anti-colonialism of 1960 just died at the age of 99: Albert Memmi, Tunisian of French origin. Memmi, Franz Fanon, Ernesto Che Guevara, etc., was one of the references of the young generation that in 1960 brought a new breath to nationalism from the left. Txillardegi translated to the Basque his most famous work, "Portrait du colonisé".
In Euskal Herria, the death of Albert Memmi has gone unnoticed, probably because almost nobody remembers that it was him and less imagining that at 99 years old man could live. Beñat Oihartzabal, with a clear memory of the 1960s and 1970s, has made the news known to us with the obituary 'Albert Memmi gogoan' which he wrote in Enbata.
Oihartzabal (translated from French) says: "At that time of the anti-colonialist struggle, some of Memmi's books, in particular The Recognizable of the Colonized", published in 1957, studied the psychological mechanisms conditioned by the social, political, ethno-religious or rational elements of a colonial situation as Fanon's mechanisms in the year after the outbreak of the rebellion in Algeria.
This influence was not limited to the geopolitical contexts of the liberation struggles in Africa and especially in the Maghreb. It was also explained in other political contexts very different from those in Africa, such as the liberation struggles in Euskal Herria or, in North America, in Quebec.
As for Euskal Herria, I witnessed the impression given by the portrait he made of the colonization of this sociologist by many of my fellow militants, like me. It was made of the psychological and cultural rigour that the young Euskaldunes at the time could think that their portrait represented the 'alienated' or 'unconscious' generation of our parents and grandparents (so we called it then with a point of pride)."
Then he used the pseudonym 'Larresoro' (to pass the Francoist censorship) Jose Luis Alvarez Enparantza Txillardegi translated to the Basque Country Memmi's best-known work and published in Jakin in 1974, which today can be read in full on the Internet: "Recognizable from the colonized."
Echoes have given us two possible reasons for Memmi to have fallen into oblivion during these years or those who have participated in anti-colonial struggles (the third, the most obvious, is the gap in the chain of historical memory between generations). On the one hand, for one part of the family, it was Jewish that Albert Memmi never refused Zionism, despite regretting the disagreements with the Palestinians. On the other hand, Tunisia had not been interested in returning to Tunisia after independence, while it had taken over French nationality and written in colonial language the honours of academic institutions in the metropolis.