Biography

Mouloud Mammeri was born on December 28, 1917, in Ait Yenni, Tizi Ouzou Province, French Algeria. He attended primary school in his village before moving to Morocco to live with his uncle in Rabat. Four years later, he returned to Algiers and studied at Bugeaud College. He later continued his education at Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he planned to join the École Normale Supérieure. In 1939, he was drafted into the military and was discharged in October 1940. Mammeri then enrolled at the Faculté des Lettres d’Alger. He was re-drafted in 1942 after the American landing and participated in Allied campaigns in France, Italy, and Germany.

After the war ended, he earned a degree to become a professor of arts and returned to Algeria in September 1947. He taught in Médéa and later in Ben Aknoun. In 1952, he published his first novel, The Forgotten Hill. In 1957, he was forced to leave Algiers due to the Algerian War. Mammeri returned to Algeria shortly after its independence in 1962.

From 1965 to 1972, he taught Berber at a university in the department of ethnology. Although teaching Berber was banned in 1962, he was allowed to teach Berber courses until 1973, when courses in ethnology and anthropology were closed because they were considered "colonial sciences." In 1969, Mammeri collected and published texts by the Berber poet Si Mohand. In 1972, he published a grammar of Tamazight written in Tamazight using a Latin-based alphabet, which became the standard for writing in Tamazight today. From 1969 to 1980, he led the Anthropological, Prehistoric, and Ethnographic Research Center in Algiers (CRAPE). He also led the first national Union of Algerian Writers but left due to disagreements about the role of writers in society. In 1980, a ban on one of his conferences in Tizi Ouzou about Kabyle poetry led to riots and the Berber Spring in Kabylie.

In 1982, Mammeri founded the Center of Amazigh Studies and Research (CERAM) and a journal called Awal (The Word) with scholars Pierre Bourdieu and Tassadit Yacine in Paris. He also organized seminars on the Amazigh language and literature at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). These efforts helped gather important information about Berber language and literature. In 1988, he received an honorary doctorate from Sorbonne.

Mammeri died on February 26, 1989, in a car accident near Ain-Defla on his way back from a symposium in Oujda, Morocco. His funeral was attended by more than 200,000 people, and no government officials were present. The crowd gathered to protest against the government.

Everything began with the dominoes argument, which upset Arezki. His younger brother, Sliman, explained, "This war is the salvation of the unfortunate. When everything burns, when everything is destroyed, when the storm, the avalanche, and the hurricane have taken everything away, the earth will be new again. Everything will be questioned. It will be like dominoes: a new arrangement will be made." Arezki replied, "No, my brother, we’ve suffered enough. It’s time for the poor to be fortunate."

— Mouloud Mammeri, Extracted from The Sleep of the Just (1940)

Legacy

The Mouloud Mammeri University in Tizi-Ouzou is named after him. The culture hall in the city of Tizi Ouzou is also named after him.