My neighbourhood,
the cradle of my childhood
In nursery school, a tiny thing only a few years old, our teacher told us this story as she took us on our very first outing to the foot of this column.
And so she told us the story:
In 1834, General De Voirol had just been appointed commander-in-chief. He chose this precise spot to fix the mileage of the towns and to open the first road, which the troops of Algiers cut through as far as Birmandreis.
Then she raised her arm and pointed her finger towards the street facing us:
“You see that street? It is the rue de Brazza — do you know why?”…
All the children stood around her, listening to the story of Mademoiselle Doriot, our schoolmistress. How could I forget this story, which years later set me thinking about certain notions that have governed the world.
“Well, it was from there that the road towards the colonisation of Congo-Brazzaville began.”
These details stayed engraved in my memory for life. That is how I learned the meaning of the word “colonisation” at the age of six.
The Colonne Voirol — the zero point of Algeria 
The neighbourhood today Some twenty years later, the appearance of “Voyage au Congo”, a work by André Gide, struck me, and then Terre d’ébène by Albert Londres… How could one forget the past upon which the story of a life is built, the history of continents, the history of the world.
Today, I find my neighbourhood again on Google.
https://www.google.com/maps/@36.7536044,3.0410005,394m/data=!3m1!1e3
The Colonne Voirol is called today “Place Salvador Allendé”, but I also see that the rue Colbert no longer exists, and that the name of this hero of French colonisation in central Africa, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, has taken the name of the street of my childhood…
My childhood… Marked by French colonisation, to be sure, but was it not Kateb Yacine who spoke of it as “our spoils of war”?
The strength of my childhood was the family world in which I grew up. A world imbued with an ideal shaped by love, built upon Honour, upon respect for the human being in the truest sense of the word.
The Colonne Voirol was defined as the Zero point of the whole of Algeria. It is from this point that all the distances on the map of Algeria were to be measured.
It is striking all the same, and it moves me even more deeply when I retrace the course of my life.
Years later I find myself a professor at the university, teaching the module of “Electrical and Electronic Measurements”. The first lesson of that module is the definition of the notion of measurement, founded on the MKSA system (Metre, Kilogram, Second, Ampere).
Follow my story and you will see how much our life is a tangle of events, of facts, of circumstances that come to pass in the course of one’s existence, and I can assure you that “Nothing is made for nothing”… everything has a cause and everything has an effect.
… I continue my story…
Neighbourhood memories
Colonne Voirol school, 1958 
CE1–CE2, 1959 
The neighbourhood, 2020 Notes :
https://georepository.com/datum_6304/Voirol-1875.html
Fundamental point: Voirol. Latitude: 36°45’07.927″N, longitude: 3°02’49.435″E of Greenwich. Uses RGS (and old IGN) value of 2°20’13.95″for Greenwich-Paris meridian difference.
Voirol 1875 is a geographic 2D CRS last revised on 30 March 2020 and is suitable for use in Algeria – onshore north of 32°N. Voirol 1875 uses the Voirol 1875 as its datum. Voirol 1875 is a CRS for Geodetic survey. It was defined by information from IGN Paris. The appropriate usage of CRSs using the Voirol 1875 and 1879 datums is lost in antiquity. They differ by about 9 metres. Oil industry references to one could in reality be to either. All replaced by Nord Sahara 1959 (CRS code 4307).