MAKE IT HURT

Amid the ebbing of empire, Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming agreed on one thing.

- DANIEL IMMERWAHR

More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.

Looking back, Drif felt little regret about the three who died and the twelve—including children—who lost limbs from her bomb and from a second that detonated in another café minutes later. The European cafégoers weren’t civilians, in her view, but colonizers. Their “offensive carefree attitudes” made a painful contrast to those of the eighty thousand Muslims, herself included, penned by barbed wire and checkpoints within what she described as the “open-air prison” of Algiers’s Casbah. The month before, European settlers had bombed an apartment building in the Casbah, killing seventy.

Algerians had been waging an independence war for nearly two years, and the French had been fighting back fiercely, including with widespread torture and indiscriminate killings. The September 30th bombings, however, marked what Drif called a “turning point,” bringing the war “to the heart of the enemy districts.” Yet even the Communist who had built the rebels’ explosives laboratory balked at bombing crowded public places. The philosopher Albert Camus, an Algerian-born Frenchman, sympathized with the Algerians but could no longer support them. Their attacks, he noted, might kill his mother: “If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.”