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20 Along this line, his critics suggest that such brutal tactics ended any pretense of democratic Building a postcolonial state | 21 reform in Algeria for decades, and therefore opened the country up to mercurial internal challengers that separated Algeria from the seeming stability of its North African neighbors in the 1990s. Boumediene, the economy, and society In terms of basic economic and sociocultural questions, most commentators consider Algeria’s rapid transformation after the 1965 coup astonishing.

8 This pattern of abuse corres­ponded with similar suppositions of European superiority and native ­inferiority 14 | One throughout the continent, from Kenya, to the Federation of ­Rhodesia and Nyasaland, to South Africa. In short, French oppression in ­Algeria, like other nations’ racist colonial violence, became a way of life, part physical, part ideological, until the quasi-colonial system imploded after sustained armed resistance took definitive shape on November 1, 1954, with the FLN’s first attacks on French targets in Algeria.

With this he now controlled all reins of power, as commander in chief of the armed forces, secretary general of the FLN, and president of the republic. Ben Bella’s Algeria exercised the heavy hand of state control, and he expelled political opponents, arrested others, and used the Algerian police to crush political dissent. Houari Boumediene and the planned state Discontentment soon reached new heights when one of Ben Bella’s inside supporters, Houari Boumediene, successfully carried out Algeria’s first postcolonial coup d’état in 1965.