Algeria and Tunis

Romania was practically closed during communist times, we had no right to posses a passport and foreign currency. The only possibility was to travel to other socialist countries, with which Romania had an agreement. My mother got in the middle of the 1970s a job as a teacher in Alger and she stayed there for 3 years, before I was born. The Algerian War of Independence from the French colonial regime ended in 1962. In the 1960s and 1970s under President Houari Boumediene, Algeria turned into a state-controlled, authoritarian socialist economy.

These slides, which my mother projected very often during my childhood, greatly influenced my imaginary. They show my mother, monuments, places and scenes in her travels in Algeria and Tunis. I think this was her first travel outside Romania and surprisingly her view is not at all exotizing these places. That has probably to do with the familiarity of Romania with the Islamic world through the Ottoman culture, which was present in Romania during many centuries and in Algeria too, preceding the French colonization.

Marta Jecu