Hamza Hamouchene

[The Pan-African Festival of Algiers 1969 was scheduled for screening on Thursday 6 November at Genesis Cinema as part of Film Africa.">

Whenever we talk about the African continent, images of famine, ethnic cleansing and brutal corrupt dictatorships usually come first to mind.

Algeria's next presidential elections will be held on 17 April 2014 and for the last few months; this important electoral rendezvous showed all the hallmarks of a masquerade, consistent with almost all the elections in the history of the Algerian state since independence in 1962.

In the last two years, several articles and analyses have attempted to decrypt Algeria’s ambiguous position toward Western imperialist interventions in Libya and Mali.

It seems that the African continent's name is so much associated with wars, famine, ethnic cleansing and brutal corrupt dictatorships. That's what we keep hearing in the Western mainstream media and that's what we get from the Western political discourse.

A year ago, waves of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa swept away western-backed tyrants one after the other - first Tunisia’s Ben Ali, then Egypt’s Mubarak... It seemed the list of toppled dictators was bound to go on and on.