How to Become White When You're a Muslim: Messaoud Djebari and the Internal Boundaries of the French Empire, 1881–1900

This paper looks at a man who was at once an interpreter, an activist, an explorer and a scammer. His life spanned a triangle between the Maghreb, West Africa and metropolitan France, profiting from the internal boundaries of the French Empire. Constrained in Algeria, Djebari thought he could move up in the world by moving around. His trajectory allows us to reconsider the opportunities available to an Algerian colonized subject at the turn of the 20th century.

Messaoud Djebari was born to a modest family in Eastern Algeria in the latter half of the 19th century. Educated but unable to find a job suitable to his ambitions in his native land, he started roaming, desperate to gain the attention of French officials. His path first took him to Tunis at the time of the French invasion in 1881. There, he developed a technique to spread his political opinions by fabricating stories which would be of interest to powerful French men. Though this met with limited success in 1881, he then re-used this pattern to much greater effect ten years later. At a time of French expansion in West Africa, Djebari was sent on an intelligence mission to the region of lake Chad. His mission was a failure as he never made it past central Nigeria, but he turned this to his advantage in a dramatic way. Through cunning, adventure, and a good deal of lies he was able to briefly become a celebrity in 1890s Paris, organizing press conferences and his own book tour. In particular, Djebari traded off his whiteness as a North African to a metropolitan audience, positioning himself as an explorer among the backwards sub-Saharan Africans.