Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
In the 1790s, the United States did not defeat Algiers. It paid Algiers — handsomely, repeatedly, and with a warship added to the bargain. Long before America became a global power, it was a cash-strapped young republic negotiating from weakness…
In Algeria’s north-east, close to the Tunisian border, sits a city that rarely gets the attention its stones deserve. Tébessa carries a Numidian past, the Roman name Theveste, a major role in early Christian North Africa, a Byzantine fortress phase,…
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.…