Our fighting sisters

Nation, memory and gender in Algeria, 1954–2012

Natalya Vince

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780719098826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

Between 1954 and 1962, Algerian women played a major role in the struggle to end French rule in one of the twentieth century's most violent wars of decolonisation. This is the first in-depth exploration of what happened to these women after independence in 1962. Based on new oral history interviews with women who participated in the war in a wide range of roles, from urban bombers to members of the rural guerrilla support network, it explores how female veterans viewed the post-independence state and its multiple discourses on 'the Algerian woman' in the fifty years following 1962. It also examines how these former combatants' memories of the anti-colonial conflict intertwine with, contradict or coexist alongside the state-sponsored narrative of the war constructed after independence. Making an original contribution to debates about gender, nationalism and memory, this book will appeal to students and scholars of history and politics.

1

Nationalist genealogies

Men in hooded cloaks

On 1 November 1954, a series of co-ordinated bomb attacks, assassinations and acts of sabotage took place in locations across Algeria. The targets were symbols of colonial repression – barracks and police stations – and its economic infrastructure – power stations, telecommunications and transport links. These seventy incidents were accompanied by a statement from a newly formed organisation calling itself the Front de Libération Nationale which demanded ‘The restoration of a sovereign, democratic and social Algerian State within the framework of Islamic principles’ and ‘The respect of all fundamental freedoms without distinction of race or confession’. Achieving independence must have been difficult to imagine in 1954. Algeria was not just a colony, but, from 1848 onwards, three departments of France (Oran, Algiers and Constantine), from 1881 placed under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior. This was a unique feature in the French empire, as was the large number of settlers in Algeria. These settlers came from across the Mediterranean basin, and included people of Spanish, Italian and Maltese, as well as French, origin. In 1954, there were around one million ‘Europeans’ for 8.5 million ‘French Muslims’. Political, economic and social domination by settlers was entrenched through legal frameworks which excluded the autochthonous Muslim population from full citizenship rights.

The FLN’s most successful attacks on 1 November 1954 were in the mountainous regions of Kabylia, to the east of Algiers, and further south eastward in the Aurès massif. Here, steep terrain and dense Mediterranean vegetation provided cover for a few hundred armed men (maquisards) who formed a rural guerrilla movement (the maquis). The FLN’s numbers and access to weapons, however, remained small and the French government and press were quick to minimise the incidents of ‘bloody All Saints’ Day’ as a law and order problem which would be dealt with internally, with foreign influence from Tunisia or Egypt possibly to blame. In the Algerian nationalist calendar, 1 November 1954 has acquired enormous retrospective significance: it is depicted as both the culmination of more than a century of unceasing resistance to French rule and the beginning of the final collective struggle to overthrow the colonial oppressor.

Yet in the village of Agraradj, near the small town of Azazga in Kabylia, Fatima Benmohand Berci’s war began with the visit of an aunt looking for her son:

My cousins had gone underground. Amar Ouamrane, he had left [i.e. had joined the maquis]. My aunt Hassina, Allah yarahma [may God accord her paradise], came to see my husband saying ‘I no longer see my son’. My husband said to her ‘Your son is a man, don’t go looking for him’. Krim Belkacem came and he gave an outfit to everyone. They all had a burnus [a long hooded cloak made out of coarse fabric]. Nobody knew. They forbade tobacco and chewing tobacco. Only people they trusted knew. Very few women knew, apart from those who were in on the secret, the ones who they really trusted. During the night, they came in the houses, they took all the shotguns of civilians.¹

This wayward son and the man distributing hooded cloaks were in fact two of the key military and political figures in the War of Independence. Both Krim Belkacem (born in 1922 in the village of Aït Yahia Moussa, Kabylia) and Amar Ouamrane (born in 1919 in the village of Frikat, Kabylia) had been soldiers in the French army during the Second World War. On their return to Algeria, both had become involved in nationalist parties, notably the Parti du Peuple Algérien (Algerian People’s Party, PPA), created in 1937, and its later incarnation, the Mouvement pour le Triomphe des Libertés Démocratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties, MTLD), created in 1946. The legalistic MTLD participated in elections in the post-Second World War period, but also had a clandestine wing, the Organisation Spéciale (Special Organisation, OS), which advocated revolutionary insurrection. Members of the OS would go on to form the Comité Revolutionnaire pour l’Unité et l’Action (Revolutionary Committee for Unity and Action, CRUA) in March 1954. Five members of the CRUA – Mohamed Boudiaf, Larbi Ben M’Hidi, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Mourad Didouche and Rabah Bitat – were given the task of co-ordinating the move to armed action. In summer 1954, Krim Belkacem joined them and in October the CRUA adopted the name ‘FLN’. Until early 1957, Krim was military leader of the wilaya III (the region of Kabylia) in the FLN’s Armée de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Army, ALN). For much of the war, he would be one of the most powerful figures in the FLN–ALN. Within the wilaya III, Ouamrane had responsibility for the area around Mirabeau (today Draâ Ben Khedda) and then the area of Azazga before taking command of the wilaya IV (Algiers region) in August 1956.

Fatima Benmohand Berci, however, is talking about a period before the creation of the FLN. Krim and Ouamrane had been living clandestinely in the mountains of Kabylia since 1947 when, in separate incidents, both were condemned to death in absentia for shooting agents of law and order. Fatima Benmohand Berci is not describing her first contact with the FLN–ALN, but rather her first meeting with a two-man, or at most few-men, maquis unit before the FLN came into existence. Between 1947 and 1954, these ‘bandits of honour’, loosely held together by the belief that independence would be fought for through armed struggle, were moving about the isolated rural areas surrounding their home villages, gradually gathering men, arms and support.²

The contact which these clusters of resisters built with the local population initially remained firmly anchored in extended family networks. The bonds of blood guaranteed loyalty before political adhesion was concretised. Local populations accepted them as relatives. The message of rejecting colonial rule could also be located in the experiences of their day-to-day lives and, in many cases, past anti-colonial uprisings which ancestors had participated in. Fatima Benmohand Berci was a few months old when she first came back to Kabylia and the village of Agraradj. She was born in Tunisia in 1926. Two generations previously, her family had fled across the border following the failed insurrection against French colonialism led by El Mokrani in 1871.

The directives of this latest uprising were nevertheless viewed with circumspection even by those let in on the secret: Fatima Benmohand Berci’s brother-in-law was initially reluctant to part with his shotgun. The ban on cigarettes and tobacco plug – initially motivated by a desire to deny the colonial state tax revenues, and later seen as part of a purifying religious zeal – found few adherents: ‘people didn’t follow it that much’.³ If there was a transmitted memory of anti-colonial resistance, there was also a memory of its failure and ensuing repression which tempered hasty commitment to the latest clandestine cause. A turning point in Fatima Benmohand Berci’s account was, even if she does not use the date, 1 November 1954: ‘The action really started when they burned down a cork factory in Azazga’.⁴ This act of arson was one of the All Saints’ Day attacks.

Yet this real action in fact started over a number of months following 1 November. Fatma Yermeche is Fatima Benmohand Berci’s neighbour in Agraradj. According to her, the war began when she was twelve years old – that is to say, in 1955:

We didn’t see the mujahidin at first, they came in secret, because they were scared that someone in the population would sell them out […] Those that worked with the caïds, with the French [i.e. autochthonous men working for the local colonial administration], they started by eliminating them. Once they’d got rid of everyone who could denounce them, who were of course imposed by the French, we saw them.⁵

Chérifa Akache, from the village of Aït Abderrahmane in the Ouacifs, also emphasises the initially mysterious nature of the rural guerrillas’ presence: ‘At the start I didn’t know anything. In general in Kabylia, women don’t get involved in what men do. They spoke amongst themselves, but I didn’t get involved. The women started to get involved the day French soldiers came to the village.’⁶ Both Chérifa Akache and her husband were eighteen years old at the time. When he first joined the maquis, he did not say anything to his wife. Chérifa began to have what she describes as her ‘woman’s suspicions’ – and pushed her husband to explain his suspect behaviour. He then began bringing men back to eat.

Ferroudja Amarouche also remembers the burning of the cork firm in Azazga. In 1954, she was living in the neighbouring village of Bouzeguene, with her husband and three children. But for her too, the start of the war happened a number of months later:

It was the day that the French soldiers came to the village of Bouzeguene, in 1955, it was during the month of Ramadan [this began mid-April in 1955]. The maquisards had burnt down the cork firm, to show their rejection of the French. My father-in-law had fought in the war with France [the First World War], and when they announced this fire, he said ‘It’s a declaration of war’. My father-in-law died just after, at Azazga, he had a café there.⁷

Ferroudja’s father-in-law, like Krim and Ouamrane, was a veteran of the French army. From India to French West Africa, colonised men who had fought in the British and French armies in the First and Second World Wars could be problematic demobbed subjects for the colonial authorities. Having come into close contact with political ideologies such as communism and nationalism on their travels, they often returned to their villages deeply dissatisfied with the colonial status quo. Ferroudja’s father-in-law, who was wounded in the 1914–18 conflict, had immediately seized upon the symbolic importance of the FLN’s attacks and explained this to his family. At this point in the interview, Ferroudja’s husband Tahar joined in, to explain how the death of his father accelerated his and his wife’s adhesion to the FLN–ALN. The French administration in Azazga refused to allow Tahar to inherit the café, claiming that he was an enemy element. Excluded from his business, he was then named – according to him, without consultation – head of a group of maquisards in the region. He was initially reluctant, worried about who would look after his wife as he had no brothers and only one sister. Considering nevertheless that ‘France’ had attacked him first by taking the café off him, he accepted the role.

A long history, going back into the previous century, of resistance and repression in the region, as well as more recent events, such as the two world wars, provided a framework through which villagers could locate events unfolding around them – ‘even’ women, who would not usually be part of political discussion. Women’s active involvement in the struggle began, however, with a straightforward set of practical instructions rather than a political discourse. Fatima Benmohand Berci describes the first time she was asked to cook for the maquisards. A group of men came to the house, including Amirouche, Si Haoues⁸ and ‘an old man called Si Ali, with rosary beads’:

They asked my husband to buy meat, bread and couscous. [They said] ‘In two, three days you will make food, twelve men are going to come and eat here’. My husband did the buying and me and another woman prepared the food. Around nine in the evening a group of mujahidin came and ate at the house.⁹

Thus began the wartime activities of rural women. They washed the mujahidin’s clothes, cooked for them, gathered medicinal plants to heal their injuries and, crucially, informed them of the movements of the French army. The logistical support provided by these women was crucial to the survival of the rural maquis. The FLN was inspired by the methods of Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, and in direct contact with both by 1959.¹⁰ The organisation took to heart Mao’s much-quoted revolutionary dictum: the guerrillas’ relationship to the rural population is that of the fish to water – the latter is crucial to the survival of the former.

As the rural guerrilla movement grew and women became increasingly implicated, they were targeted by male maquisards with a generic (as opposed to gendered) discourse, aimed at reinforcing the patriotic dimension of their actions. Fatma Yermeche describes local meetings for men and women during which, she says, the mujahidin told them: ‘This is our country, we want independence, we want to run our country, not foreigners, you need to be brave, you need to stay strong’.¹¹ Ferroudja Amarouche says: ‘We knew that we were going to war for Algeria. Even the children knew. The little ones, when they [the French soldiers] said to them “Have you seen the fellagas [pejorative term for rural guerrillas]?,” they knew, they said “No, we haven’t seen them.”’¹² For Fatima Benmohand Berci the message was just as straightforward and clear: ‘They grouped us together, they said “You have to work with us” and we said “OK” […] We knew what we were doing, they’d explained it to us, it was for the liberation of the country. We accepted giving our lives and our strength.’¹³

Alongside this straightforward and accessible message of freedom from colonial rule, these rural interviewees also imply that they caught a glimpse of an egalitarian post-independence state. Fatima Benmohand Berci recalls one incident in which the mujahidin came to eat and there was no food to give them: ‘One day Si Abdallah¹⁴ came to my house with twelve people. There were only six dates [to eat]. Si Abdallah cut each date in two and said, “In sha’allah [God willing], I hope that our strug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of maps and figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary of commonly used terms
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Nationalist genealogies
• 2 Heroines and victims, brothers and sisters
• 3 1962: Continuities and discontinuities
• 4 Embodying the nation
• 5 From national construction to new battles
• 6 Being remembered and forgotten
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Brief biographies of interviewees
• Select bibliography
• Index