Remembering Hugh Roberts

Hugh Roberts has died from cancer at the age of 76. Among his books were a collection of penetrating articles on Algerian politics, The Battlefield; a meticulous historical study of Kabyle society, Berber Government; and a monograph on the Arab Spring, based on pieces he’d published in the LRB. To read Hugh’s writing – whether in his books, his articles or the analyses he wrote for the International Crisis Group – is to encounter a thinker of unusual rigour, seriousness and daring.

Hugh did not suffer fools, and had little patience for intellectual laziness. He cut through the platitude that Algeria was a ‘one-party state’. As he pointed out, the wartime Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN, had never been cohesive enough to constitute a party. It was a front, an umbrella organisation encompassing various tendencies in Algerian politics, from liberal-republican to Arab nationalist, from leftist to Islamist. After independence, a party calling itself the FLN appeared to govern, but the real power lay not with any political party but with the military-security apparatus, which had emerged out of the intelligence services established during the war of liberation from France. Hugh had a talent for making you rethink what you thought you knew about Algeria, whether he was discussing the intricacies of Berberist politics or the impact of the Gulf War on the opposition Front Islamique du Salut in the early 1990s.

A Kabyle friend of mine and her mother once travelled with Hugh to the mountains of Kabylia, where he had taught in the early 1970s. He could rattle off the names of every battle that had been fought there during the war of independence, and of every local FLN commander who had died fighting there. ‘Who is this man?’ her mother asked. It was a question many of us asked.

Well before I met him, in the early 2000s, I had learned an immense amount from Hugh’s writing, though his thinking sometimes struck me as conspiratorial. He revered the ‘historic’, wartime FLN and had a tendency to justify its most ruthless decisions, such as the murder of Abane Ramdane (the ‘architect of the revolution’) by his comrades in 1957 in Morocco, a turning point in the war that contributed to the country’s ultimate slide into authoritarian rule. I was shocked by Hugh’s defence of the killing, and asked if he really thought it was necessary. He did: the FLN opposed cults of personality, and a cult was gathering around Abane in Tunis.

In the pieces he wrote for the LRB, as elsewhere, he was inclined to be too generous to other despotic regimes loathed by their people, in Syria and Libya especially. For all his scathing (and justifiable) criticisms of the US, the West and the Gulf states, he was reluctant to address the imperialism of Russia or Iran. His best piece for the paper was his essay on what had gone wrong in Egypt after the 2011 uprising. Hugh had lived in Cairo for more than a decade, raised his Egyptian daughter there. ‘The Revolution That Wasn’t’, published in 2013, is a powerful anatomy of how the military gained the upper hand and – along with his remarkably acute ICG briefing ‘Understanding Islamism’, published in 2005 – a superb example of Hugh’s gifts as a thinker, his lucidity and critical spirit.

Hugh was a Marxist but he belonged to no group and was out of sync with virtually everyone. Although he published two books with Verso, he made no secret of his disagreements with Perry Anderson and Tariq Ali. When Hugh spoke – he was a tireless talker, at once invigorating and exhausting – you had the feeling that you were listening to the imperious leader of a Marxist sect whose line was not to be crossed. But he was always chivalrous, and had reserves of generosity and warmth, especially with children. Living among his books and recordings of British folk music, he gave the impression of a 20th-century man who had never entirely adjusted to life in the 21st century.

Being Hugh’s friend was difficult at the best of times, and sometimes impossible. He stopped talking to me a few years ago after a piece he’d written for the LRB didn’t work out. Last year I heard that he didn’t have long to live. He had stopped teaching at Tufts, moved back to the UK and settled in a flat in Stoke Newington. On a visit to London, I contacted him and he invited me to come by. When he opened the door, I was shocked by his appearance. His hair – once a dashing white mane – had thinned dramatically; he was hunched over and walked very slowly. As usual we spoke at length about Algeria. He told me of his daughter’s accomplishments with great pride.

He was still angry that the LRB hadn’t published his piece, and suggested it was because we’d been under pressure from the Foreign Office. It was an outlandish theory, but it made me realise that Hugh’s anger grew out of one of the qualities that made him so exciting to read: his fierce belief in the geopolitical significance and urgency of his work. A grandiose conviction, certainly, but it inspired writing on the Arab world, and especially on Algeria, that will outlast the work of most of his peers. Hugh was not an easy man, but he was an admirable thinker, and a brave one, and I will miss him.