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The May 1945 tragedy is a subject that speaks to Gilles Manceron. Author of a sum of publications of which “From one shore to the other: the war in Algeria, from memory to history” (With Hassan Remaoun, Syros 1993), this specialist in French colonial ideology went frequently to Guelma between 2005 and 2018. Speaker to the conferences organized by the university “May 8, 1945”, he shared his time between academic activities and moment dedicated to anti -colonial activism.
Before meeting Sabrina Abda whose book he prefaced, Gilles Manceron had two family members. It was around 2007 not in Guelma, but in Algiers. Manceron was there in the company of Mohammed Harbi for the purposes of a conference organized by the daily El Watan on the “War of Memories”. Mabrouk Abda, uncle of Sabrina, and one of his sons moved to Blida where they resided. Objective: to seize the opportunity of the presence of French and Algerian historians living in France to ask them to take advantage of their proximity to the centers of the French archives and to work on the drama of the Abda family ”.
Meanwhile, the names of Amor, Smaïl and Ali Abda and the tragic conditions of their death had arose in the book of Jean-Pierre Peyroulou “Guelma, 1945. A French subversion in colonial Algeria” (La Découverte, 2009) and in the posthumous testimony of Marcel Reggui published the same year and in the same publisher: “The massacres of Guelma. Algeria, May 1945: an unprecedented investigation into the fury of colonial militias » (Preface by JP Peyroulou). The historian and Marcel Reggui evoke the assassination of the ABDA, their political parentage – of the PPA activists engaged in the spring of 1945 in the ranks of the AML – and the circumstances of their death. Born Mahmoud, Marcel Reggui (1905-1996), a Muslim French ” converted to Catholicism upon his arrival in France in 1947. Marcel Reggui experienced a drama similar to the drama of the father of Sabrina. His sister and two of his brothers were murdered by militias of French settlers set up on the initiative of the sub-prefect Achiary.
The circumstances made the paths of Gilles Manceron and Mabrouk Abda are not crossed again. It was thanks to two thematic events on colonial history that in Nanterre and then in Paris that the historian met Sabrina Abda. She taught him that his uncle had bowed out. If he could not grant the uncle’s request, Gilles Manceron accompanied with his aura as a historian the niece. In addition to advice and orientations over the meetings, he prefaced his manuscript. “This book by Sabrina which seems eighty years after this terrible drama of” the other May 8, 1945 “realizes the hope which was that of this uncle and all his family ”. Thanks to her tenacious effort, Sabrina concretizes the hope of her uncle and allows, underlines Manceron, to make known ” terrible violence and the great injustice ” that the Abda family had suffered. Violence and injustice “deeply emblematic of the colonial fact”.
In its preface, Gilles Manceron recalls the particularity of the massive repression perpetrated in Guelma throughout the weeks after May 8, 1945. ” We know better ” the repression which occurred in Sétif and in its region in western Constantine than that which fell on Guelma and its surroundings. “In this city, however, the course of the facts was particular since the violence was largely the fact of the militia made up of European civilians which was formed in the months preceding on May 8, 1945 and which expected only a pretext to fall on the Aboriginal population of the city and its surroundings ”. This particular course, explains the historian, ” is an emblematic and paroxysmal case of colonial violence ”. And this course “appears in the story that Sabrina Abda makes of murderous violence which fell on her family ”.