Mouloud Mammeri

Mouloud Mammeri (in Amazigh: Mulud At Mɛemmeṛ), born December 28, 1917 in Taourirt Mimoun, Kabylie (Algeria) and died February 26, 1989 in a car accident in Aïn Defla in Algeria, is a writer, anthropologist, linguist specializing in Berber (Amazigh) language and culture. His most famous works are The Forgotten Hill (1952), The Sleep of the Just (1955) and L'Opium et le Bâton (1965). He did his primary education in his native village. In 1928, he went to his uncle living in Rabat (Morocco), where the latter was then the head of the private secretariat of Sultan Sidi Mohammed (future King Mohammed V) and the general intendant of the Royal Palace. Four years later, he returned to Algiers and continued his studies at the Lycée Bugeaud (current Lycée Émir Abdelkader, in Bab El Oued, Algiers). He then left for the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris with the intention of entering the École Normale Supérieure. Mobilized in 1939 and released in October 1940, he enrolled at the Faculty of Letters in Algiers. Mobilized again in 1942 after the American landings, he participated in the campaigns in Italy, France and Germany. At the end of the war, he prepared in Paris for a competition for professorship of Letters and returned to Algeria in September 1947. He taught in Médéa, then at Ben Aknoun and published his first novel, The Forgotten Hill in 1952. He participated in the Algerian war of independence under the nom de guerre of Si Bouakaz, under the pressure of events, he left Algeria for Morocco in 1957 to avoid arrest.