Casablanca played host to an exceptional intellectual encounter on Thursday, October 29, 2026. As part of Le360’s “Le Grand Témoin” conference series, Morocco’s economic capital welcomed writer Boualem Sansal, newly elected to the Académie française in January 2026, for a wide-ranging conversation.
Before a packed audience, Sansal spoke movingly of his return to Morocco, a country he had been unable to visit for more than a decade because of closed borders and geopolitical tensions. “You cannot imagine how emotional I felt when I arrived in Morocco. I have some Moroccan ancestry. I had been dreaming of coming here for a very long time,” he said at the outset.
Little in Sansal’s early career suggested that this rigorous mind, trained in advanced mathematics and computer science, with a doctorate in economics and a background as a senior civil servant who had worked with NASA on rocket launch systems, would become one of the most incisive voices in contemporary literature.
Accustomed to a world governed by reason, Sansal found himself confronted with the madness of his native country. “It is very difficult to live under mad rulers. Either you play along and become mad yourself, or you resist and become dangerous.” The turning point came with the tragedy of Algeria’s Black Decade in the 1990s, an eruption of extraordinary violence that claimed more than 300,000 lives and drove hundreds of thousands of Algerians into exile.
“A civil war is a war against oneself, even if it means sacrificing your children, your family, your values. It begins within families,” Sansal observed. As the country collapsed morally and physically, conventional ways of understanding events proved inadequate. Together with a group of Algerian intellectuals and writers, threatened by both radical Islamists and the authorities, he set about reclaiming the meaning of words in the face of horror.
“We found ourselves confronting the oldest question in the world: what do words mean? What is peace? What is war? Who is the other? What is justice? Until we can answer those questions, we remain at the mercy of events,” he recalled.
Drawing on the books that shaped his thinking—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and the legacy of Albert Camus, who had lived in the same Belcourt neighborhood and whose mother had been cared for by Sansal’s mother—he came to understand that survival depended on breaking free from fear.
The tyranny of the official lie
Driven by that refusal to be afraid, Sansal published his first novel, Le Serment des barbares, in 1999. Rather than retreat into the safety of allegory, he chose to confront the ruling system directly, guided by Camus’s conviction that to name things wrongly is to add to the world’s misery. “You have to call things by their names. In my first novel, I made a point of doing exactly that. I named the president, and I named the generals. Clarity has a way of making everything fall naturally into place. It is remarkably effective against stupidity,” the academician remarked with irony.
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He also recalled, with amusement, the reaction of his publisher, Antoine Gallimard, who feared for his safety and suggested that he write under a pseudonym. “Everything was decided in that five-minute conversation. That was when my character was settled once and for all: I decided to remain myself.”
Boualem Sansal at “Le Grand Témoin,” an event organized by Le360 at the Hyatt Regency in Casablanca on October 29, 2026. (A. Gadrouz/Le360)
That uncompromising rejection of a falsified national narrative—which Sansal describes as a “reservoir of violence” fuelled by resentment—cost him his place in the establishment and his senior government post. More recently, it brought him into direct confrontation with Algeria’s judicial system and landed him in prison. But for Sansal, compromise has never been an option.
When historical truth becomes a crime
Beyond his literary work, Sansal’s life has now been marked by imprisonment and persecution at the hands of the Algerian regime. His detention was no accident. It followed his outspoken, unequivocal positions, particularly his remarks about the Moroccan identity of historically Moroccan territories in western Algeria—taboo truths that those in power categorically refuse to confront.
Challenging the official narrative and the founding myths of the ruling caste brought the full force of censorship and judicial repression down on the writer. Asked about the heavy price he had paid for speaking freely, Sansal stood firmly by every word, true to his deep-seated refusal to compromise. “When you choose clarity and call things what they are, you know what to expect from a regime whose only language is force and censorship. I regret nothing. To surrender to fear or silence is already to surrender your humanity,” he insisted.
“Waging war... without fighting one”
Turning to relations between Morocco and Algeria, and Algiers’ recurring hostility, Sansal held up Morocco as a model of geopolitical maturity. “Morocco’s response to Algerian aggression points to a new way of resolving disputes between states in the future. There is a philosophy behind it, a school of thought,” he said approvingly.
Contrasting brute force with strategic intelligence, he drew a striking comparison. “Algeria has resorted to the traditional methods of power: identify the enemy and announce what you intend to do. It is extremely violent, and it leads only to war, enormous loss of life, and then nothing. Morocco, by contrast, has invented a new way of waging war without actually fighting one. It is judo: agility, projection. Morocco is an adversary you cannot get a grip on.”
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He also praised Morocco’s ability to outmanoeuvre political opponents through democracy and the strength of its institutions. “Morocco ultimately tripped up Islamism by putting democracy under its feet. The Islamists won power through elections, and they lost it through elections. It is remarkable,” the writer said.
Unflinching in his criticism of the Algerian system, Sansal described a country paralyzed by a profound crisis and trapped in an outdated military mindset. “The Algerian regime has embarked on a military adventure against Morocco. It is looking for a war. It needs one for all sorts of reasons: an independence war that has never really ended, scores to settle, an attempt to legitimize itself... It is trapped in this mystique that holds that a state can only fulfill itself through violence,” he explained. Turning to the structure of power, he summed up the gulf between Algeria’s civilian façade and its military reality with a cutting remark: “Abdelmadjid Tebboune is nothing more than a puppet.”
And there should be no illusions: the Algerian regime’s provocations against Morocco are unlikely to end any time soon. For Sansal, further escalation is inevitable as long as those invested in the status quo remain in power in Algiers. The prospect of brotherly relations between the two neighboring peoples therefore hinges on a historic political transition. “A change in relations between the two countries will inevitably require a change of regime in Algeria. As long as this system, sustained by the myth of violence, remains in power, tensions will persist. But truth and freedom always triumph over darkness in the end.”
