Starting from a historical experience of colonization the author is posing the question of writing history in the context of a (de)colonized society. This historical fact does not only define the object of the fistorian, the past, but also his present, his practice of writing history. The categories he operates with are not neutral, but they entered the colonized society with colonization, while within the discipline of history they are sustained by the institutions of knowledge that belong to the colonizer. Building on the example of Algeria the author maintains that if the historian wants to fulfil the conditions of this question, he needs to acknowledge that there are two separate histories: besides the official history of the colonizer, there exists also a history of the colonized. The latter does not only concern other and hidden objects of history, but also different categories of knowledge, a different epistemology, which needs yet to be developed in the practice of historiography of the (de)colonized society.
