Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
High above Algiers Bay, the Casbah — UNESCO’s official English spelling is “Kasbah”, while “Casbah” remains common in English-language writing, and القصبة in Arabic — climbs the hillside in a tangle of whitewashed houses, stepped lanes and covered passages. It…
In Algeria, navigating employment, healthcare or administrative procedures can sometimes involve a familiar question: ʿandek maârifa? — “Do you have connections?” The concept that captures this reality is maârifa (also rendered el-maârifa), loosely translated as “knowing someone,” and it is…
There is a particular kind of writer who becomes inseparable from the history that made them, and Kateb Yacine is one of Algeria’s clearest examples. Best known for his 1956 novel Nedjma, he spent four decades moving between poetry, prose,…
High in the Saharan Atlas of north-eastern Algeria, where rugged cliffs give way to the fertile valleys of the Oued Abiod and Oued Abdi, a musical tradition has been carrying the voice of a people for well over a century.…
There is a French word that many people in France recognise, that no census has ever counted, and that many of the people it describes increasingly decline to use. The word is beur. It belongs less to demography than to…
Few national sporting cultures are as musically layered as Algeria’s. The songs that accompany Les Verts — Algeria’s men’s national football team — are not the disposable anthems that many countries commission before a tournament and forget the moment the…