L’école coloniale et la « littérature-monde »: L’Ami fidele de Mouloud Feraoun

Mouloud Feraoun’s Journal shows that by the time of the Algerian war of independence, his political position was anti-colonial, and pro-independence, and that he was keen to express this position publicly. He was embraced posthumously as a war-time martyr by the Ministère des Moudjahidines. Yet throughout the war, he not only kept his distance from the FLN, and continued to write fiction that some of his compatriots considered insufficiently nationalist, but also continued to work in colonial education, a decision that put his life at risk from Algerian nationalists as well as from their opponents, and that finally led to his assassination by the OAS. This article proposes that we can better understand his decision if we consider his work on L’Ami fidèle, a series of French textbooks for Algerian schools that he co-wrote between 1960 and 1962. Incorporating many extracts from his novels, the project casts light on his conception of literature, of education, and of the relationship between the two.