Culture, Society & Diaspora
Culture, Society & Diaspora
Our signature section that explores the historical and cultural links between Algeria and the wider world, highlighting figures or events with global significance.
When Frantz Fanon arrived at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in November 1953, he was not yet the canonical voice of decolonisation. He was a young Martinican psychiatrist entering one of colonial Algeria’s most overburdened and unequal institutions. What happened in…
Albert Camus was made by Algeria. Born in a small farming town, raised in a cramped flat in working-class Algiers, he carried Algerian light, poverty, and heat into everything he ever wrote. He also spent much of his career insisting…
In the summer of 430, as Vandal forces laid siege to a North African port city, one of antiquity’s most influential thinkers lay dying inside its walls. Augustine, bishop of Hippo Regius for more than three decades, had spent the…
In the winter of 1377, in a hilltop fortress in what is now western Algeria, a scholar put the finishing touches on one of the most ambitious works of intellectual history ever attempted. The text was the Muqaddimah — the…
In the autumn of 1575, a Spanish soldier named Miguel de Cervantes was sailing from Naples toward home when corsairs seized his ship in the western Mediterranean. He would not see Spain again for five years. The city where he…
A second-century writer born at Madauros — modern M’Daourouch in Souk Ahras Province — not only called himself “half Numidian, half Gaetulian” in his own defence speech, but smuggled his hometown into the closing pages of his novel when a…