Saha Ramdhankoum

أدخله الله عليكم بالصحة و العافية و جعله مغفرة للذنوب. تقبل الله من الجميع

Book Review: Chants de Guerre des Femmes Kabyles

Unwritten languages face many threats. They could of course disappear, and when they have people trying to save them, as it is the case with Kabyle, they still face the threat of losing all or part of the cultural patrimony they carry.

Some Kabyles nowadays speak in French or Algerian dardja, and many do speak Kabyle but mixed with so many Arabic or French words that you wouldn’t recognise it. Several Kabyle words are therefore not used any more.

But it is not just words that disappear. Poems and proverbs tend to be forgotten as well. A great-aunt of mine, aged 103, lost her 16 yo and 18 yo sons who died as martyrs in the early days of the Algerian Revolution. I think she never recovered from her loss and she used to sing many poems dedicated to them and to the war in general. Unfortunately nobody did learn or record them, and they will probably disappear the time she will leave us.

Rais Hamidou

Rais Hamidou is one of the most famous corsairs of the Regency of Algiers. He was and still is very popular among Algerians mainly because he was a very powerful corsair who won many battles (and captured many ships and prisoners), because he was the last great Rais before Algeria’s invasion, and because he was a local (tawa3na) unlike the other major corsairs who came from Europe.

Albert Devoulx, who wrote a lot about the Regency of Algiers, could retrieve many documents related to Rais Hamidou and wrote therefore a book about his life. You can download it from the second link I provided here.

Rais Hamidou ben Ali was born in El Casbah of Algiers in the 1770s. His ancestors being Kabyles from the Isser district in Boumerdes. He started training to become a tailor like his father, but the stories he hears on Algeria’s corsairs ignited his thirst for adventure and pushed him to leave the training and sail in a Regency’s ship at the age of 10 or 11.

Links: Algerian Blogs In English

PoF already links to some Algerian blogs. Those among them which I added are there because I like them, without necessarily agreeing with them, and also because their scopes are related to our preferred topics. Another condition is that they must be relatively active.
In this post I am adding a list of the Algerian blogs in English which I have in my reader.

Rouiched

He is known as Rouiched (as in little Rachid, big Rachid being great Rachid Ksentini) but his real name was Ahmed Ayad. He was born in 1921 in El Casbah, Algiers. He left school at the age of 13 and started working. He sold vegetables and fruits among other jobs.

Mahmoud Stambouli discovered him and helped him get a small role in Abdelhamid Ababsa‘s “estardje3 ya assi” play, and the public liked one scene where Rouiched punched the judge.

Joint Celebration Of 5 July

Today I happened to be in a French city where a joint celebration of Algeria’s fiftieth year of independence was organized. The celebration took place in the town hall in presence of the mayor, the Algerian consul, a representative of the French state, some diplomats and many other guests. I decided to attend so I could see how things go.

I was going to write something else today but I decided to share what I saw as somebody already wrote something like my original post.

So the ceremony started with a speech of the mayor followed by the consul and then the French state representative.